LAWS: we live by them and die by them. And perhaps nothing can define a country more than its “dos and don’ts”. Don’t smoke in public places; don’t have sex until you are 16; don’t drink alcohol; don’t have more than one wife; don’t be cremated; don’t be homosexual or, if you are living in Turkmenistan, don’t have a beard. Err… don’t have a beard? Are they the world’s biggest manufacturer of razor blades? Is this a true appreciation of the sensitivity of female skin?
Well, we will never know, for President Niyazov gave no reason for his decree and he died on December 21, but his laws remain. Even the ubiquitous goatee so much loved by the Cypriot male is illegal. Of course, it’s not the only strange law in Turkmenistan, where it is forbidden to listen to a car radio and the months of the year were renamed after the President’s family and every timepiece must bear his face on its dial.
This is the danger of totalitarian regimes; the idiosyncrasy of the individual becomes tyranny against the masses. But we are foolish if we think it only happens in one party states. Increasingly, our democratic world is being dominated by the personal crusades of our elected leaders – “their will be done”. We talk of the clash of religious culture as the predominant text in the next century, but in many ways the real core of international conflict is the relationship between state law and the citizen, and between our freedoms and our restrictions, between tolerance and intolerance, between rational and considered laws and arbitrary dogma driven edicts.
The world, as we know, is full of contradictory and confusing rules. It can make international travel very difficult. No gum chewing in Singapore; no sale of tobacco in Bhutan; no divorce in Malta. But the serious side is for those of us who forget the implications of behaviour so perfectly acceptable in one culture yet carrying severe penalties in another. The death penalty is still used for cannabis in Malaysia, China and Indonesia, yet it is legal for personal use in Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands. A cold beer at the end of the day can result in prison in Libya or a public lashing in Saudi. Homosexuality, adultery and sex out side marriage can carry the death penalty in many parts of the world including Nigeria and Iran.
So I began to wonder if I was given the opportunity to make or break world laws, which I would choose. Two came to mind to be universally applied. The first, the abolition of the death penalty: only one miscarriage of justice seems to make this unacceptable and we know that each and every day they happen. If we accept that no person is beyond redemption, which is after all the remit of all world religions, then we have no justification for its use. The second is imprisonment without fair trial; of course, fair trial is arbitrary and dependent on reasonable and rational laws. Which brings us back to where we started. As another President is elected in Turkmenistan this week, maybe new laws will be passed and the shaven will go unshaven.
As for my own private decree, without a doubt I’d like to see those who take their countries into war fight on the front line, like the valiant kings and queens of yesteryear. A lesson from Boudicca’s book. Can’t help but think if Bush and Blair had sent themselves or their loved ones to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq they would not have been quite so enthusiastic: nor Osama so full of rhetoric if it had been him on the United Airlines Flight 175. As Immanuel Kant once wrote. “Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.” Which, of course, may explain the shaving.
