Democratic Rites – All the Best Intentions

Democratic Rites: All the Best Intentions

About

Democratic Rites: All the best intentions recounts the author’s twenty three plus years of working with the UN and other agencies supporting elections and democratic development in many of the world’s trouble spots. The highs, the incredible lows, the death of staff, the racism entrenched within systems including the UN, the lack of support for field staff – it’s all there – alongside the the amazing travel, adventure, friendships and many massive achievements in this challenged world. As one prospective publisher put it:
“This is Emergency Sex – for grown-ups.”

The book

In October 2009 five UN staff were killed in Kabul when their guesthouse was attacked at dawn and burned down. The election was called off and Karzai declared the winner.

This followed an election in Kenya where more than a thousand people died.

Despite all the best intentions, both were bloody and ignominious ends to thoroughly flawed processes.

Tracing her personal journey in elections from Nigeria to Tanzania, Kenya to Afghanistan and Zimbabwe, this first-hand, behind-the scenes account of UN and internationally-sponsored elections paints a picture of increasing institutional dysfunction, betrayed staff and shattered dreams with the occasional blinding good example shining through.

Democratic Rites is crammed with extraordinary scandals, institutional flaws, blind-eyes turned and hair-raising adventures. It’s a window to the billion-dollar world of international development: at once well-intentioned, bureaucratically kafkaesque, horrifyingly dangerous and darkly bizarre.

It is an increasingly tense, explosive and personally costly tale of shambolic, often inept, racist and broken leadership, the struggles faced in helping to run multi-million-dollar elections in some of the world’s toughest places and the corporate blindness of the UN to life-threatening situations.

Democratic Rites: All the Best Intentions not only recounts a personal journey but forensically picks apart processes that could – and should – have been different. There are compelling reasons why such work should continue. As one of the writer’s staff in Afghanistan said: “I am proud that I am working for bringing bright future of my country in spite of high risk.’”

That dream failed. This book argues why that dream should not be forfeited and for a continued commitment to the promotion of democratic processes for the sake of those whose hopes and futures depend on it.

This book tells my story and those of many others who have worked in democratic development in many in the harshest if places. – often while the UN and the international community looked away.

We all remember Emergency Sex. As one publisher commented: This is Emergency Sex – for grownups.

The author: Margie Cook AO

Margie Cook is an eminently qualified author. She has spent the last twenty three years in the world’s toughest trouble spots working, as one of the few women in such positions, in senior leadership roles for the UN and donors including the UK and US on projects supporting elections, human rights and development. She was UN’s Chief Electoral Adviser in Afghanistan from 2008-10, which saw the election cancelled after her staff were murdered in a targeted terrorist attack. Her criticism of the UN in Afghanistan led to a long-term but un-stated black-listing.

After nearly eleven years with the UN, working across Nigeria, Tanzania, Cambodia, Kenya and Afghanistan, Margie joined a UK/US private development advisory firm and spent the next decade in in Kenya and Zimbabwe. She has advised the UN and donor entities including the FCDO in Malawi, Ethiopia, Iraq, Yemen, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Fiji, Zambia, Jordan, Nepal, and elsewhere. Her current role in Pakistan is supported by the EU.

Before joining the UN Margie was the Director of Public Affairs in the Australian Human Rights Commission. The wildly successful media strategies for major inquiries including those on Mental Illness and The Stolen Children were her work. She is the co-author, with barrister Dr Robert Cavanagh, of Maralinga, a dramatised documentary about the nuclear weapons testing program in Australia which was directed, for its inaugural performance, by Baz Luhrmann. She previously ran her own Public Affairs business with major clients being AusAID, World Vision and the Human Rights Commission. She travelled extensively writing stories for Australian newspapers and current affairs television.

She has worked with the National Nine Network in Australia providing electoral expertise for every state and federal election since 1987.

Margie was awarded an AO (Officer in the Order of Australia) in the Australia Day honours in January 2019 for services to the international community in the promotion of democracy and human rights.

Margie is a founder member of The Platinum Partnership, a consultancy collective of global senior electoral and governance experts.

Why?

2024 set a record for the number of elections worldwide. Many were supported with millions of dollars of donor aid in an effort to bring more transparency, fairness and inclusivity to the process. The UN does great things, but it also gets away with way too much and hurts way too many people. When the going gets tough, they look the other way. Critics are threatened. Stories need to be told.

What are democratic rites?

Democratics rites are those processes, rituals, procedures, actions and efforts taken to protect, defend and promote democratic institutions: the efforts to bring stability and offer hope of a better life. Elections are one such democratic rite. Most of us over age 18 have experienced them. In fact in 2024, half the world’s population was invited to participate in an election. For some, as in in my country, Australia, voting is mandatory and failure to do so punishable by a fine. Compulsory voting represents inclusive democracy. Elected legislators are accountable to all citizens, not just those who bother to or are permitted – often grudgingly and again daunting odds – to vote. In most of the world, voting is an option – with the result that billions of dollars is spent trying to woo voters to get to first base – by actually registering to vote – before the campaigning and promising even begins. In an optional voting system, politicians only have to pander to those who vote, making something of a joke of the concept of representation and accountability, and many go to extreme lengths to exclude entire communities of citizens they don’t like from registering, and therefore from voting. While the purpose of a democratic election is to install leadership representative of and elected by the population, the road between the purpose and the outcome is strewn with peril. It is subject to all kinds of abuse and attempts to cling to power. With his colleague, Brian Klaas, my friend Professor Nic Cheeseman outlined some of these obstacles in their book How To Rig An Election. Elections have been proud, joyous, momentous and historic, like that of 1994 in South Africa that ended the formal policy of apartheid and installed Nelson Mandela as President. They have been milestones in steps towards stronger democracies. There have been farces, like the Kenya election of 2007 when over a thousand died in post election violence after faked results were declared. Countless numbers have been martyred on the road to democracy, like Benazhir Bhutto in Pakistan, assassinated while campaigning in DATE, or the five UN staff killed by the Taliban in Kabul in 2009 to force the electoral process to an early end. Democratic Rites: All the nest intentions recounts this story in detail, Since the mid 1990s, western countries have offered billions in technical assistance and support to countries emerging from colonial pasts, military dictatorships, civil war and other strife. This is channelled through countless agencies like the UN, through governments with the US, the UK generally the most generous donors but sometimes with up to 40 or so others chipping in. The money is spent on election support projects – at the request of governments – and managed again by the UN and by many other institutions.

Preface

CHAPTER ONE The Big Picture

In the silence of the pre-dawn of 28 October 2009, a white government plated vehicle filled with heavily armed men dressed in Afghan police uniforms, some wearing suicide vests strapped to their bodies, snaked its way through the rings of steel supposedly protecting central Kabul. It was a week before the bitterly challenged run-off to the presidential elections. Hamid Karzai had been hailed the winner by the government-appointed Electoral Commission, but a UN-sponsored review and audit of ballot boxes found otherwise. Karzai had been forced, humiliatingly, to agree to a negotiated result putting him behind the minimum fifty per cent plus one needed for a confirmed win and persuaded to agree to a run-off with his contender, Abdullah Abdullah. Ashraf Ghani had run a miserably poor third. Karzai was livid. At around ten to six in the morning a bomb blew open the gate of the Bakhtar guesthouse where many of the UN’s election staff resided.

My staff

In my Flower Street guesthouse a few streets away, the explosion shook the windows. I leaped out of bed and rushed down to the empty garden. Barefoot, on the damp, cold early-morning grass I noted that the roses in the garden beds, carefully nurtured every year and for which Afghanistan is famous, had started to die away. Plumes of smoke drifted skywards. It only took a minute. The phone shrieked, shattering the silence. ‘Margie, we have a problem.’ The cold grass bit more icily into my feet. It was Costanza, the Italian election operations expert. She lived nearby. One of her housemates was on my security team. ‘Bakhtar has been attacked.’ Working in Afghanistan had already leached most emotion from me. Without even realising it, I switched to response mode. It was to be a year before I started to feel again. In the ensuing gun battle and fire that razed the building, five UN staff died. Five of the guesthouse’s Afghan guards also died including two sets of brothers. The attackers blew themselves up. I still have the photos of their dismembered bodies. The run-off was cancelled when Abdullah Abdullah refused to continue to take part. Karzai was declared President. The Taliban claimed responsibility and informed sources traced the organisation of the attack to the Haqanni network in Pakistan, likely authorised by those the international community was trying to help. The UN boss later wrote that he had been aware of an alleged but unspecific security threat – a fact not communicated to those engaged in the electoral work. A former UK Ambassador later wrote of the disconnected chaos that the Western efforts at the time represented. Suddenly, the whole town looked the other way. A grievously belated inquiry was shut down. The content of an even later one remains secret. Recent histories and contemporary reporting have blotted this entire incident from the record, preferring to believe Karzai won a legitimate election. Only a couple of years previously, in late December 2007, I watched for days from my rooftop apartment in the centre of Nairobi as helmeted, armed riot police swarmed the streets. I had a clear view of the Kenyan International Conference Centre. The tall, iconic circular building was the headquarters of the election tally centre. Inside, tension had been mounting for days as authorities withheld results of the just-held elections that opposition leader Raila Odinga was expected to win. From my front row seat inside the hall, sitting next to a USAID official, I had watched the place erupt as the Electoral Commission announced fake results. Commissioners fled upstairs to a conference room, excluding all but select media. I snuck in with Arthur Mattli, a representative from the Swiss Embassy. There, secreted away in a back room, the Chairman, the late Samuel Kivuitu, announced a win for Mwai Kibaki who was, Kivuitu declared, already on his way to State House to be sworn in. Arthur and I looked at each other in disbelief. As we left the building, Arthur souvenired a bright yellow length of ‘Police, Do Not Cross’ tape. I kicked myself later for not being so quick-witted.

Across Kenya, the killings started.

The violence had been totally predictable since at least the August prior, but the local UNDP[1] leadership turned a deaf ear and the Commission called me a panic merchant when I said a tight election was on its way. ‘You don’t understand, Margie. We’ve never had a close election’ was the refrain. Weeks later, perched on a swinging seat in his leafy garden, a suddenly aged Samuel Kivuitu told me his shocking version of events that ensured the falsification of results.

An inquiry led by international legal experts was established. I spent days giving my evidence. The inquiry failed to find core fault.

A second, Kenyan-led inquiry was more incisive. But charges laid against alleged perpetrators by the International Criminal Court were eventually withdrawn due, in part, to the ‘unavailability of witnesses’ with two of the biggest men involved both going on to Presidential terms.

Again, the town turned the other way.

I’ve been working in this environment of international assistance to elections and development in post-dictatorial, colonial and crisis countries for over twenty years. A tiny molecule in a huge, gig economy, where field workers (those on the ground, rather than in the comfy, capital-based head offices) are predominantly contractors and effectively outside institutional protection be it the UN or private sector, whose head offices are filled by snappily-dressed permanent staff housed in comfortable offices. In the UN especially, sexism, racism and nepotism flourished unchecked as experiences in Kenya and Afghanistan were to prove.

Elections carry the burden of unequalled expectations. Many are done very well. Those less glorious, but nonetheless representing positive steps in the right direction are often dispiritingly pilloried as failures. Despite dossiers of recommendations for future improvement, my experience also shows that a regime (or even an individual), institutionally corrupt or determined to rig an election, or abuse rights and processes will not be deterred from their path to power. Ironically, the wreckage left in the wake of disaster can even have commercial value as ingredients for the next round of support.

United Nations Development Programme

I was one of the few women in leadership positions in the field at the time of the attack. For me, while the Kabul guesthouse attack was deeply shocking and the nadir of my own professional life, the appalling behaviour that followed was reflective of the bewilderingly Kafkaesque political, diplomatic and often personally ambitious manoeuvrings into which too many of these events descend and otherwise respected institutions are embroiled. Where elections are a rite, a concession to local and international demands, but are often absent of rights; where democracy is sacrificed for expediency, and truth for a more comfortable silence.

Where there are often no real winners.

In 2010, I took my concerns to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Ombudsman’s Office. They openly warned me that ‘The only people to suffer from making a complaint are the complainants themselves. The UN looks after its own’.

Afterwards, I was effectively blacklisted by UNDP for allegedly providing information for a code cable I never saw that was sent by the UN Head in Afghanistan deservedly criticising UNDP institutional intransigence in Afghanistan. I’m told Helen Clark[1], the then UNDP Administrator, went ballistic.

Speaking truth to power is unwelcome and comes with a high price. Twenty plus years is a reasonable length of time in which the best and worst can present itself and in which to make a judgement about one’s own efforts. But even in my darkest moments I have never wavered on the question of why we bother with this work, or on the obligations owed to those with whom we work, who hopefully displace us as they own the positive change to which they contribute, or suffer as efforts fail and democratic backsliding gains pace. In 2021 as Afghanistan retreated from global attention back into the dark ages, this obligation became paramount. But I was unable to help a single individual.

There are too many occasions when the town – be it an individual leader, an institution or the global community – looks the other way.

I was immediately hooked – on the challenges, vibrancy and adventure; on the creative opportunities; the travel; the people; the independence and self-reliant working environment; the sense of being able to contribute to tangible and positive difference; the amazing interactions and the often other-worldliness of the whole exercise. As a working life, it was a world beyond imaginings. I’d found my niche. But there was also the loneliness; the constant sense of not belonging; the need to find familiarity and steadying ritual in unfamiliar places; the need to create some normality out of a strange, peripatetic and almost rootless lifestyle, and to hold on to home. There were also the lessons and recognition that stress either brings people together as family, or drives them apart as enemies. And that revered institutions can be like the emperor, striding naked and oblivious among disbelieving crowds. In such a context, emotions and the desire to succeed are heightened, responsibility for nurturing a cohesive team critical, and risks taken that in a more settled context may seem ill-judged. My image of my great-grandmother Anna was spot on: this world was no place for a nervous lady. In 2011, after Afghanistan, I was back in Kenya. I had a driving need to make sense of the past decade and to exorcize the demons burdening me. The UN had offered nothing but threats. Sessions with a psychiatrist that my wonderful neighbour Hugh Kronenberg had secured after I came home in 2010 to address the ongoing trauma had been settling. After six or so appointments I had to go to Tanzania for ten weeks. When I returned the shrink made an amazing comment: ‘Margie, this is the first time I’ve ever seen you smile.’

But it wasn’t enough.

In Kenya, my laptop sat on the polished dining table in the simple stone house I leased on the grounds of the Nairobi Club. Outside, the equatorial wide blue sky of Kenya emerged into vastness at 6 am, turning black again twelve hours later. The sounds of the thwacking of cricket bats and the happy shouts of players coming from the oval just over the prickly hedge were interspersed with the occasional foray by men in whites rushing in to retrieve balls from the garden. Everything else was silent. I started to write. I sat there from 5 am on workdays. Up to twelve hours at a stretch on weekends, my ankles wrapped and stiffening around the legs of the chair. It was a purging, of sorts.

Two years later I cautiously shared my thoughts with some readers. A journalist, a politician, and a politically-minded agent. They were immensely encouraging and the work was received critically well by those familiar with the issues and people, and emotionally welcomed by co-workers who knew the backstories.

It wasn’t enough. The writing needed a voice and a niche. And I wasn’t a celebrity, an almost mandatory precondition for publication at that time.

In the ten years from when I first sat down at the dining table in Nairobi, assignments took me back to Tanzania and Nigeria, to Rwanda, South Africa, Malawi, Ethiopia, Jordan, Yemen, Nepal, Egypt, Fiji, Iraq, and elsewhere, and included two long, five-year stints in Kenya (again) and Zimbabwe, before landing in Pakistan. That decade was far less bloody but no less challenging.

The writing demanded an ending. My computer folders reflect the many returns I have made to it: Book 2012, Book 2014 ….right through to Book Last Ditch Attempt (which it wasn’t – I was just depressed) and Book 2024.

So here I sit in Islamabad.

Once again I sit at a polished desk but this time it has a glass top. Outside, in the incredible, blazingly oppressive heat, mynas squawk and swirl in great flocks overhead. The ice-cream man’s dinging bell on the handlebars of his bicycle sounds more loudly as he nears, and fades as he moves on. The UN pilots who live in the same guesthouse, sit outside, smoking and laughing between their regular shifts to Kabul. Like the ball hitting the cricket bats of Nairobi, they are comforting, ordinary, encouraging sounds. In talking about his song writing, Leonard Cohen said: ‘You put in your best effort but you can’t command the consequences.’ [1] This sentiment nails both the elusive wish for a sense of achievement and peace that comes from knowing one’s best effort has been made, and the wisdom of allowing that wish to be set free. This book is not a how-to guide for elections. Or even a how-not-to. It’s not a piece of research or a textbook on institutional politics. That I leave to the academics and experts. My colleague and friend Nic Cheeseman co-authored a book called How To Rig an Election. Practically a manual. This book, Democratic Rites, is my experience and perspective of power and disempowerment, and institutional power-playing. It is about the covert enabling of wrongdoing by looking the other way. It is about certainty and doubt, commitment and exploitation, travel, adventure, friendship, love, successes, laughter, failure and death. A working life of incredible interest, unpredictability, and highs and lows I could never have imagined. And about picking up the pieces.

My story is one shared with countless others. Many people have stories yet fear the consequences of telling them. I know I speak for many. I have loved – and often doubted – my life of unknowingness, challenge and complexity. I was proud to work for the UN. But inexplicably, while aiming to empower the poor, in making cowards of its own staff, the UN paralyses its own ideals.

Intimidation is a top-down affair, disempowering and frightening, and in my experience was endorsed from the highest levels with the formerly heroic Helen Clark presiding for years over an institution that did not want to know, looked the other way, and from within which, as insiders openly acknowledge, vengeance and threats were wreaked against those who spoke up.

I emerged, but it was not without pain and a deep sense of wretched personal cost, professional despair, and isolation that eventually took its toll in a late-night heart-attack in 2020 soon after being forced from Zimbabwe by COVID.

Working in this field, I’ve been a privileged observer, not really belonging, and in fact obliged to eventually leave. However much we invest professionally, intellectually or emotionally, in the end, it is for those with and for whom we work who have to stay on, with or without change, optimistic or in despair, emboldened, or crushed by oppression. It is a mightily strong incentive not to mess it up. Yet mess it up we do, far too often. Sometimes, we get it right. More often, it’s a depressing mix of lessons that get applied far too rarely, because institutions don’t work that way

[1] Cohen, speaking in the documentary: Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song directed by Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine.

When I left Afghanistan in 2010 a young Afghan colleague, Hamid, to me: ‘Our dream is just to live a bit longer for some time … The risk to myself is that every day I am expecting insurgent will aim at me as they know me and they don’t like me to work … I am fearing every day during my duty and when I am in my home to be killed or to be kidnapped … If we conduct fair and acceptable election for all then bringing of peace is not far away … We need to change the way how to conduct election … if we build trust to people then they will participate honestly.’ He ended that conversation with, ‘By the way I am proud that I am working for bringing bright future of my country in spite of high risk.’ High risk indeed. That ended with a tragic, unforgivable failure. Hamid and his family remain trapped in Afghanistan. I have written this for all the Hamids out there and everyone they represent. In the preface to his book on Afghanistan, The Long Way Back, Chris Alexander, former Deputy Head of the UN in Afghanistan and a former Minister for Immigration in Canada, wrote that: ‘I feel the picture could be made clearer if more of us who have laboured in that country for extended periods would give their account of the events we witnessed.’ This is my account, of Afghanistan and elsewhere, written in the spirit to which Chris exhorted us to contribute.

Reviews and Testimonials

“Found your long preface gripping, Margie, with enormous promise for the book. Recalled to me the ceremony at the airport and the days of pushing Karzai to accept a runoff as well as our detailed information on who was committing what kind of electoral fraud. Delighted to add to your list of blurbers (blubbers?? !). Yours, Tim”

“Margie Cook never disappoints, she’s always got an interesting gig and a compelling yarn. She is the Chief Electoral Advisor here [in Afghanistan] and works atrocious hours trying to keep pace with the politics, inefficiencies and mysteries of this complex and ferocious land. She meets with ISAF Generals and the President, she runs a nine figure budget; she’s a quality lass. We go way back.”

Margie Cook is a committed democrat and, as a matter of principle, was determined that the elections be conducted in a reasonably honest manner. However, she faced enormous—indeed insurmountable—obstacles….. A lesser bureaucrat would not have rocked the boat. But, that wasn’t Margie Cook. She informed her superiors in the UN system of the potential for fraud as well the Kabul diplomatic community, knowing full well that this news wasn’t welcome. Margie Cook and her staff were constantly in physical danger………..In spite of danger, tragedy and failure, Margie Cook never gave up. That is true grit.

Democretic Rites