“Together, the EU and the US account for around half of global GDP and almost two-thirds of global military spending,” say two leading rights advocates. “A coordinated, transatlantic approach to human rights would mean the world’s rising authoritarian powers could no longer act with impunity.”

Some 52 years after Amnesty International founder Peter Benenson initiated the global human rights movement with an article in the London Observer, “the world has undergone profound changes,” Edward McMillan-Scott and Chen Guangcheng write for The Guardian:

The iron curtain has fallen, democracy has taken root in eastern Europe, Latin America and much of Africa, and rapid advances in technology have made us more globally interconnected than ever before. Nonetheless, arbitrary imprisonment, torture and execution on political grounds remain commonplace. China, the world’s rising superpower, continues to systematically engage in the political repression and torture of its citizens, with an estimated 7 to 8 million Chinese currently being held in prison or labour camps.

This week, at the European parliament, they launched a transatlantic pact between the EU and US to highlight human rights violations around the world:

The Defending Freedoms Project, in association with Amnesty International and ChinaAid [a National Endowment for Democracy grantee], calls on members of the European parliament and US congressmen and women to adopt and advocate on behalf of prisoners of conscience from around the world. Examples include Gao Zhisheng, the prominent Chinese human rights activist who has been repeatedly imprisoned and severely tortured for the last seven years. Or Nabeel Rajab, the Bahraini pro-democracy campaigner who has been beaten, jailed and denied medical treatment.

“By generating attention and support to these individual cases, it is hoped that combined pressure from the US and EU will help to secure their release,” they suggest.

“As we saw most recently during the Arab spring, all people around the world instinctively crave the same basic freedoms: the right to speak your mind without fear of torture or imprisonment, to be free from extra-judicial execution and disappearance and to criticise your government without putting yourself or your loved ones in danger,” they write.

But the advanced democracies must be consistent if they want to avoid accusations of double standards.

“It often appears there is one rule for small, insignificant countries and another for rising superpowers seen as ‘strategic partners’,” says McMillan-Scottand Chen, a recipient in absentia of the National Endowment for Democracy‘s 2008 Democracy Award:

For too long, western governments have stood by as authoritarian regimes around the world engage in systematic repression with impunity. The EU-China human rights dialogue, established 14 years ago, has yielded no tangible results, serving instead as a fig leaf for European leaders’ general reluctance to challenge China robustly on its human rights record.

RTWT

China, Russia and Egypt impose restrictive conditions on private philanthropy that helps cultivate civil society development, while democracies tend to enjoy more conducive arrangements, according to a new analysis.

In a 13 country pilot study, the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Prosperity examined barriers to and incentives for philanthropic freedom – the ability of individuals and organizations (both profit and non-profit) to donate time and money to social causes. The researchers scored and compared countries on their ease of giving by collecting information on three main indicators: the ease of registering and operating civil society organizations (CSOs); domestic tax policies for deductions, credits, and exemptions; and the ease of sending and receiving cash and in-kind goods across borders.

Egypt is joined by Russia and China with the most restrictions on philanthropic activity due to the governments’ interference in civil society activities and cross-border flows.

“The analysis showed that of all financial flows to the developing world, some 80 percent are private and only 20 percent are official, the reverse of 40 years ago,” said Carol C. Adelman (left), the center’s Senior Fellow and Director.

“As international philanthropy increases, there is growing interest in how philanthropy can be encouraged for humanitarian causes, economic growth, and community development,” she told a meeting at the National Endowment for Democracy.

The report’s findings will be discussed at a Washington forum on Thursday May 16, featuring Tomicah Tillemann, Senior Advisor for Civil Society and Emerging Democracies, U.S. Department of State; Douglas Rutzen, President and CEO, the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law; Yulya Spantchak, Research Fellow and Deputy Director, Center for Global Prosperity; and moderated by Dr. Adelman (details below).

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Philanthropy does not stand on its own, but is dependent on a vibrant civil society. Even a nation of the wealthiest donors cannot exhibit generosity without a civil society to help identify, organize, and implement activities that help people in need.

Furthermore, philanthropy’s role in creating civil society organizations (CSOs) and other sources of wealth and power outside of central government control helps democracies flourish by strengthening freedom of assembly and freedom of speech. This integral role of philanthropy in strengthening civil society can be best demonstrated by current political events in Egypt and Russia.

The post-revolutionary transition in Egypt has resulted in a governmental tightening of civil society rules. To ensure control of non-profit organizations’ activities, the Egyptian government has proposed restrictive legislation to prohibit philanthropic flows to organizations working in Egypt. Similarly, in Russia the government has enacted new regulations on cross-border financial flows to limit the activities of non-profit organizations. Thus, the existence of philanthropic freedom in a nation can strongly impact the health of that nation’s civil society and vice versa

Philanthropy is defined by the distinguished scholar, Dr. Helmut Anheier, as the “voluntary use of private assets for the benefit of public causes.” It can take on many forms such as individuals giving to non-profit organizations; diaspora communities funding relief and development projects; foundations and charities supporting community projects; corporations undertaking cause-related marketing campaigns; religious organizations’ missions to help orphanages in Africa; individuals using SMS to transfer funds to disaster victims, donating to overseas projects through internet websites; and, entirely new financial tools to transfer funds for social impact investing.

Countries with Low Barriers

The top scoring countries, Japan, Netherlands, Sweden, and the U.S. all have low barriers to entry for civil society organizations. The Netherlands, Sweden, and the U.S. have all had long histories of active civil societies, and the non-profit sector in all countries continues to grow. Although the non-profit sector is rarely scandal free, generally the populations in these countries have trust in CSOs. While Japan has a shorter history with civil society, its laws governing the establishment and operations of CSOs are currently conducive for the sector to grow in the future.

Countries with Low to Medium Barriers

While the countries that scored the highest are all high income, some emerging economies scored well above a four on this indicator. Besides Australia, Mexico also provides an easy entry for civil society organizations to register, obtain status, and operate. In Brazil, South Africa and India, the right to associate is freely granted and setting up a nonprofit organization is relatively easy and inexpensive. Nevertheless, government bureaucracies can hinder the process by creating delays. Thus the laws on the books may not vary significantly from higher scoring countries, however, the implementation of the laws is hindered by inefficiencies, causing delays and impediments.

Countries with Medium Barriers

Of the 13 nations reviewed, Turkey has some significant barriers to civil society operations. Individuals are not allowed to act collectively, unless they register for legal status as an association. Some CSOs, depending on their activities, encounter more operating constraints than others. Furthermore, involuntary termination of CSOs is possible under a process that is not transparent.

In Russia, registering a CSO can be a highly bureaucratic and political process. Organizations may face restrictions on the types of communication technologies they can use, and organizations can be terminated involuntarily. Russia has recently implemented and proposed a number of new regulations regarding civil society operations. Newly proposed laws in 2012 have created stringent requirements for any nonprofit that receives funding from abroad.

Countries with Medium to High Barriers

The countries with the lowest scores on the Civil Society Regulation indicator have some of the highest barriers. China and Egypt both create heavy obstacles to registering a CSO. Organizations in these countries often choose to register as businesses or remain unregistered to avoid the complex and political process.

In China, while a CSO registered as a business is technically illegal and can be shut down, most continue to operate anyway. Interestingly, although the laws on the books for CSO registration are highly restrictive, the implementation of these regulations is inefficient, allowing for a larger space for CSOs off the books than what is available legally. Furthermore, some Chinese provinces are beginning to implement local laws that would ease registration barriers for CSOs.

Civil society in China is composed of grassroots NGOs which are private and more regulated than government-organized NGOs (GONGOs). NGOs that are active in sensitive activities, which are unclearly defined, can be shut down at the discretion of the government, while organizations that work on democracy-related issues are not allowed to operate in China. The process for receiving donations from abroad is highly bureaucratic, while GONGOs are exempt from the heavy regulation that non-governmental CSOs have to follow.

In Egypt, any incoming foreign funding must go through the Egyptian government, which can refuse the transfer of such funds without reason. In 2013, the Egyptian government proposed a new law which will further restrict foreign funding to Egyptian CSOs. Already the process to receive funding has increased to nearly 15 months. The law is especially burdensome for organizations working on human rights issues.

Registering a CSO in Egypt is met with many barriers and involves cumbersome procedures. Organizations with activities that are viewed as out of line with national unity are denied registration. Moreover, once an organization is registered, it is subject to rigid structural regulations, including instructions on how to hold meetings and select board members. The government is able to remove any members from the board of directors whom it does not see as qualified. Additionally, government representatives can attend the general assembly or board meetings of organizations. Egyptian CSOs can be involuntarily terminated for a number of reasons, many of which are at the discretion of the government.

Regardless of what form private giving and social investing take, the presence of philanthropic activities in a country is encouraged by fundamental liberties such as the ability of individuals and organizations to assemble, own property, and engage in free speech and voluntary transactions.

This brief extract is taken from a longer analysis available here.

Philanthropic Freedom: “If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Improve It.”

May 16, 2013, 12:00 – 1:30 PM - Hudson Institute, Washington, D.C. Headquarters

Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Prosperity (CGP) invites you to a luncheon

Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Prosperity (CGP) is pleased to announce the publication of its pilot study on Philanthropic Freedom, the first time that ease of giving has been fully measured in 13 countries across the globe. The pilot study and each of the detailed country reports can be downloaded for free from www.hudson.org/philanthropicfreedom. The new study fills a major gap in development policy and philanthropic research by surveying barriers and incentives to philanthropic giving in three main areas: the ease of registering and operating civil society organizations (CSOs); domestic tax policies for individual and corporate deductions, credits, and exemptions; and, the ease of sending and receiving cash and in-kind goods across borders.

Like the World Bank’s Doing Business report and Freedom House’s Freedom in the World report, this research is intended to help governments remove barriers and create incentives for growing philanthropy.

Please join a distinguished panel in a conversation on the key factors that encourage and inhibit philanthropy and the important policy implications of this pilot study. 

Panelists: 

Tomicah Tillemann, Senior Advisor for Civil Society and Emerging Democracies, U.S. Department of State

Douglas Rutzen, President and CEO, the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law

Yulya Spantchak, Research Fellow and Deputy Director, Center for Global Prosperity

Moderator:Carol C. Adelman, Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Global Prosperity

After more than two years in hiding, Ali Abdulemam (right), a globally renowned blogger and free-speech advocate, has been freed from the Kingdom of Bahrain, writes Thor Halvorssen, president of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation. Abdulemam is now safely in Europe, after a dramatic escape in a secret compartment of a car, and will make his first public appearance in more than two years on Wednesday at the Oslo Freedom Forum (OFF).

In 1999, Abdulemam created the pro-democracy news website Bahrain Online. Because of this, and his related efforts to promote human rights in his country, he was eventually imprisoned in September 2010 along with 25 other human-rights activists for “spreading false information” and defaming the king — and subjected to interrogation, beatings, and torture. Despite being blocked by regime censors, Bahrain Online still regularly gets more than 100,000 hits a day.

In February of 2011 Abdulemam accepted an invitation from the Human Rights Foundation to give a talk on dissent in Bahrain. Two weeks later, amid massive anti-government protests, he sent a cryptic tweet and abruptly disappeared. In June of 2011, Abdulemam was tried in absentia by a military court and sentenced to 15 years in prison for “plotting” an anti-government “coup.”

On a number of previous occasions, Human Rights Foundation personnel had gone to extensive lengths to obtain testimony for OFF from people who try to challenge arbitrary power and dictatorship. In 2010, HRF representatives traveled to Cuba with hidden camera equipment and were able to obtain the testimony of celebrated blogger Yoani Sanchez and the Ladies in White dissident movement. OFF personnel also traveled to Vietnam to visit persecuted Buddhist monk Thich Quang Do. The Vietnamese authorities intercepted one HRF staff member, who was arrested and severely beaten by their intelligence police, but the digital recording of the monk’s testimony made it safely to Oslo.

If Chen Guancheng’s escape from house arrest in China worked, why not in Bahrain?

Here’s how we hatched a scheme to get Ali Abdulemam out of Bahrain — and learned again how even the best laid-plans can be overtaken by random luck, Halvorssen writes for The Atlantic.

Read the rest.

Ali Abdulemam was a recipient of the World Movement for Democracy’s Courage Tributes.

….asks Kerry Brown, executive director of the China Studies Center at the University of Sydney.

China’s Communist authorities recently picked fights with Britain and Norway over values and human rights, namely British Prime Minister David Cameron’s meeting with the Dalai Lama in London last May, and Norway’s mere hosting of the Nobel Peace Prize award to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo (right) in late 2010.

So how to respond to China’s displeasure?

“The U.K., for a start, might well now want to see questions about the acceptability of its treatment raised more aggressively through the European Union. After all, it is clear from so much of China’s own diplomatic behavior that there is safety in numbers,” Brown writes for CNN’s Public Square:

But there is a final lesson from these two cases – it is clear that other governments have yet to find a constructive way of engaging on sensitive issues that really irritate Beijing, whether it be minority border areas, the treatment of certain dissidents or the whole discussion of human rights……It’s true that upsetting China might not always have an impact on trade, but perhaps we can think of smarter and better ways of getting our point across to key groups within China on the political and social value issues that matter most to us.

Another way of “getting our point across” would be to follow China’s precedent and play hardball when the West enjoys appropriate leverage. A case in point is the May 15th meeting in Kiruna, Sweden, at which the Arctic Council will consider China’s application for membership.

“Council decisions are made by consensus, and the Wall Street Journal reports that the Obama administration has not yet decided whether it will support or oppose Beijing’s drive for observer status,” writes Ellen Bork, Director of Democracy and Human Rights at the Foreign Policy Initiative.

“Norway has apparently sold itself-and Liu Xiaobo-short by accepting Chinese promises to end its bullying in exchange for Oslo changing its position on the observer application,” she contends.

“It would be irresponsible to reward Beijing’s tactic of behaving aggressively to win concessions and then gain credit for ending its bad behavior. Other members of the Council should also use the leverage Beijing’s application provides to press for Liu Xiaobo’s release.”

Beijing’s application should prompt the Arctic Council’s members to consider what kind of organization they want, Bork argues:

Although the Ottawa Declaration, the Arctic Council’s founding document, makes no express reference to democracy and the rule of law as criteria for membership or observer status, all of the Council’s founding member countries were democracies at the time. Russia, an original member of the Arctic Council, has seen political regression under Vladimir Putin, and is designated “not free” by Freedom House. That is no reason to compromise standards to approve China’s observer status. Indeed, all of the other current observer states-namely, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom-are democracies. This standard will become more important as the Council’s responsibilities and influence expand.

RTWT

Photo: GlobalVoicesOnline

Last month’s deadly earthquake in China’s Sichuan Province may have generated political as well as geological seismic shocks that could ultimately present a “fundamental threat” to the ruling Communist party, analysts suggest.

“The rapid grass-roots response to the disaster reveals just how far China’s nascent civil society movement has come since 2008, when a 7.9-magnitude earthquake in Wenchuan, not far from Lushan, prompted a wave of volunteerism and philanthropy,” writes The New York Times’ Dan Levin:

That quake, which claimed about 90,000 lives, provoked criticism of the government for its ham-handed relief efforts. Outrage mounted in the months that followed over allegations of corruption and reports that the parents of dead children had been detained after protesting what many saw as a cover-up of shoddy school construction. Thousands of students died in school collapses during the quake.

Like the government, which honed its rescue and relief efforts after the Wenchuan earthquake, the volunteers and civil society groups that first appeared in 2008 gained valuable skills for working in disaster zones. Their ability to coordinate — and, in some instances, outsmart a government intent on keeping them away — were enhanced by Sina Weibo (left), the Twitter-like microblog that did not exist in 2008 but now has more than 500 million users.

“Civil society is much more capable today compared to 2008,” said Ran Yunfei, a prominent democracy activist and blogger, who describes Weibo as a revolutionary tool for social change. “It’s far easier now for volunteers to share information on what kind of help is needed.”

The ruling authorities’ ban on volunteers and civic groups from entering the disaster area without accreditation indicates officials’ wariness that their inept response to such disasters is prompting the emergence of independent civil society groups that are “encroaching on territory that was traditionally the preserve of the state,” notes one analyst.

“For the government, these volunteer groups represent not just aid, but also a subtle political challenge,” the FT’s Lesley Hook writes from Beijing. “Civil society and civic involvement – from philanthropy and volunteering to activist campaigns – have been on the rise in China, despite Beijing’s efforts at control.”

Fundamental threat to the party

“Faced with a groundswell of social activism it feared could turn into government opposition, the Communist Party has sought to turn the Lushan disaster into a rallying cry for political solidarity,” writes The Times’ Levin

Critics, however, consider the ubiquitous propaganda part of a well-honed crisis script used by the government to guide public opinion. According to a directive issued by the Central Propaganda Department last month, Chinese newspapers and Web sites were “forbidden to carry negative news, analysis or commentary” about the earthquake. The directive was obtained by the Web site China Digital Times (right), based in Berkeley, Calif.

Analysts say the legions of volunteers and aid workers that descended on Sichuan threatened the government’s carefully constructed narrative about the earthquake. Indeed, some Chinese suspect such fears were at least partly behind official efforts to discourage altruistic citizens from coming to the region.

“The Ya’an earthquake shows how easy it is for these civic groups to organize and how quickly they can tap a powerful groundswell of support thanks to social media,” Hook notes:

Once unleashed, that force is hard to put back in the bottle, as authorities have been finding out. Some of the charity groups became a thorn in the side of local government because they would uncover facts that local officials preferred to keep under wraps.

Wang Liwei, founder of Charitarian, a charity media group, says authorities in Beijing are keen to prevent another NGO “boom” from happening like it did in 2008. One reason for this is that the government does not want its relief efforts to look bad next to those of other groups, he adds.

“Earthquakes and natural disasters are often a propaganda opportunity for the Communist party,” Hook writes. “But the rise in civic activity is a fundamental threat to the party’s grip on power because it shows how much individuals can accomplish – even without an omnipotent Communist party to guide them.”

There is a fundamental reason why earthquakes tend to be less catastrophic in democracies than in authoritarian states, according to recent research.

“In a democracy, leaders must maintain the confidence of large portions of the population in order to stay in power,” analysts Alastair Smith and Alejandro Quiroz Flores wrote in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs. “To do so, they need to protect the people from natural disasters by enforcing building codes and ensuring that bureaucracies are run by competent administrators.”

By contrast, “a lack of political will to confront disasters plagues nondemocratic regimes, which, unlike democratic governments, do not rely on popular support.”

China Digital Times is a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group.

Former allies now at odds

“An adviser to Iran‘s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei joined the presidential race on Friday, with powerful conservatives keen to make the June vote a peaceful contrast to the upheaval that followed the disputed 2009 poll,” Reuters reports:

Former parliament speaker Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel registered to run, state news agency IRNA reported, becoming the first of a trio of Khamenei loyalists expected to do so.

Khamenei has the final say on all matters in Iran and in theory stands above the political fray, but it is thought he wants a reliable follower in the presidency after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s two turbulent terms in office. Reformist groups have been suppressed or sidelined since 2009 and the next president is likely to be picked from among a handful of politicians known for fealty to Khamenei, minimizing the chances of political rifts leading to post-election chaos.

“While Iran’s theocracy holds many levers in the election, including vetting all candidates and deciding who appears on the final ballot, public opinion remains a legitimate force in Iran,” Associated Press reports:

It gave pro-reform President Mohammad Khatami a landslide re-election in 2001 and unleashed its fury after claims that vote fraud brought Ahmadinejad back for a second term four years ago.

Now, it’s Ahmadinejad’s backers who could rattle the system. No previous Iranian president has left office on such bad terms with the ruling clerics. A cozy landing for the 56-year-old leader in the inner circle or as an elder statesman is highly unlikely. This leaves Ahmadinejad with his big political ego and his still-significant political base.

His main goal has been to get his chief adviser, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei (left), on the June 14 ballot. But the chances that his protégé, whose daughter is married to Ahmadinejad’s son, would be approved are sharply dimmed because of his messy power struggles with the clerics.

“There is no doubt that an Ahmadinejad loyalist is a tough challenger no matter what,” said prominent political analyst Saeed Leilaz. “Conservatives and reformists would have to fight an Ahmadinejad loyalist, who has strong supporters in small towns and rural areas.”

US call for more open, democratic Iran

Many Iranians look upon the poll as a chance to choose “the least worst of the bad.”

But while the electoral process is tightly managed, “the uncertainty regarding the outcome, coupled with the regime’s repeated claims that nuclear sanctions are intended to hurt the people, gives Washington ample room to criticize the highly controlled electoral process and call for a more open and democratic Iran,” says analyst Mehdi Khalaji, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Some analysts believe that Ahmadinejad “is pursuing a more subtle agenda — namely, portraying himself as a victim of Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,” he notes:

If that tactic succeeds in boosting his faction’s popularity, he would then either introduce another candidate after Mashai’s disqualification or use the momentum to further his own postelection plans. Yet Mashai is probably the only figure in Ahmadinejad’s camp capable of attracting voters, since most Iranians blame the president and his team for years of economic mismanagement, corruption, and international isolation.

Former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani is also “considering one more run for the country’s top elected post, a prospect that has at once energized and unsettled Iran’s political class,” writes The Washington Post’s Jason Rezaian:

Rafsanjani currently heads the Expediency Council, a powerful decision-making body made up of more than 70 senior members of the ruling system, many of them Shiite Muslim clerics. He is considered one of the Islamic Republic’s founding fathers and among its most powerful people.

Rafsanjani, believed to be one of the country’s wealthiest people, is also a symbol of the corruption that has plagued Iranian politics since long before the Islamic Republic was established in 1979. …Others see him as a pragmatic voice in the current political order who could help guide Iran out of its current problems and potentially mend relations with the United States.

“The participation of Rafsanjani in the election as a candidate will alter the electoral landscape, as we have understood it so far, greatly,” said Rouzbeh Parsi, a senior analyst at the European Union Institute for Security Studies.

The Obama administration has “expanded its roster of those violating Iran sanctions, blacklisting four Iranian companies and one individual suspected of helping the country enrich nuclear fuel,” The New York Times reports:

The penalties announced by the Treasury and State Departments came a day after the Senate introduced legislation that could effectively deny the Iran government access to an estimated $100 billion worth of its own money parked in overseas banks, a step that proponents said could significantly damage Iran’s financial stability. That legislation, known as the Iran Sanctions Loophole Elimination Act, is expected to be integrated into a broader House measure introduced in February.

“With Iran’s nuclear program marching steadily forward, we need to work as quickly as possible to eliminate any sources of funding for the regime,” the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Representative Ed Royce, a California Republican, said in a statement issued jointly with the ranking Democrat, Representative Eliot Engel of New York.  

‘Dithering’ reformists

But the election is unlikely to produce a breakthrough for Iran’s beleaguered reformists who “have been at an impasse for the last several years,” according to a prominent analyst.

“They seem to have concluded that they don’t have the power to reform the system, but they’re opposed to trying to overthrow it, says Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“The reformists will continue to dither until they manage to coalesce around some concrete aims and decide what it is that they’re trying to achieve,” he tells a Foreign Policy symposium (right). “I doubt, for example, that (m)any of them privately believe that Iran should be ruled by a ‘Supreme Leader’ who purports to represent God’s will , but few if any of them are willing to offer those views publicly.”

“When I read reformists talking about their strategy,” Sadjadpour says, “I’m often reminded of the adage ‘If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.’”

Supreme Leader Khamenei is finding it hard to find a candidate who embodies the conflicting traits he seeks, says Abbas Milani, the director of Stanford University’s Iranian studies program.

“On the one hand he wants someone who is fully obedient — like a facilitator or even less — at the same time he believes that person should be able to solve people’s economic problems and also carry some minor weight on the international scene,” Milani says. “He wants to be the main figure himself.”

Khamenei wants the best of both worlds: “a hand-kissing revolutionary ideologue who is a good manager and has popular support,” says Carnegie’s Sadjadpour, but “I don’t think there is any individual who checks off all of these boxes.”

Ahmadinejad shows no signs of going quietly, says Geneive Abdo, a fellow in the Middle East Program at the Stimson Center.

The outgoing president has been positioning Mashaei as a successor for years, she writes, noting that they are both “like-minded in their nationalism and shared disdain for the clerical establishment.”

Ahmadinejad is also trying to avoid the political marginalization that was the fate of his predecessors, writes Abdo, a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of the recent paper The New Sectarianism:

Former reformist President Mohammad Khatami and his allies, for example, were deprived of continued national prominence due to Khatami’s calls for political reform and his criticism of the system…… Rafsanjani was for his part ousted from influential assemblies, while Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, former regime members and 2009 presidential election candidates, are still under house arrest.

Populism

“Ahmadinejad was the surprise winner in 2005 by portraying himself as a champion of the poor” and he “he has remained true to this identity even as he morphed from loyal foot soldier for the theocracy to an agitator who broke taboos and challenged the authority of Khamenei,” Associated Press reports.

His government “redirected oil revenue into development projects and cash handouts in impoverished areas,” adopting a populist approach, building a considerable constituency of loyal supporters by spreading patronage to poor and marginalized Iranians:

His critics called it demagoguery and evidence of gross fiscal mismanagement…. Yet it also earned Ahmadinejad the devotion of millions outside Tehran and other major cities. In a rare message to his eventual successor, Ahmadinejad said last week that government “subsidies belong to the people” and they should continue despite the shrinking resources under sanctions.

A taxi driver likes to recount a story about a 2005 letter he wrote to Ahmadinejad asking for help to expand his small house.  ”Two months later,” he said, “I got a call from the governor’s office” offering a loan of about $3,400.

“My family and I will vote for anyone who will be supported by Ahmadinejad, no matter if is Mashaei or somebody else,” said Farsi, who is also an active member of the Basij, a paramilitary force allied with the Revolutionary Guard.

Still, there is little sign of reformist activity in Birjand, which reflects the significant gulf between the pockets of liberal-leaning politics in some of Iran’s urban areas and the deep traditionalism in the provinces.

“A pro-Ahmadinejad candidate will have a good number of votes. There are 2,000 villages in South Khorasan province and most people in those villages have benefited from Ahmadinejad’s government,” said Abolfazl Zahei, a pro-reform activist. “People here care about making their ends meet and welfare, not politics.”

Questionable legitimacy

The Obama administration should not ignore the election, “particularly given the regime’s repeated claim that U.S. sanctions aim to hurt the people rather than curb the nuclear program,” says The Washington Institute’s Khalaji.

“To rebut such rhetoric, Washington should show its concern for the people’s democratic demands” by using two clear opportunities to react to the poll:

First, once the final list of approved presidential candidates is announced, Washington should criticize Khamenei for letting the Guardian Council disqualify certain figures and intimidate others into staying out of the race. Second, in the likely event that opposition members inside or outside the country accuse the regime of manipulating the voting process, Washington should express concern about the election’s legitimacy.

“Washington’s relatively muted reaction to the 2009 postelection turmoil failed to improve the regime’s negotiating posture then, so there is little sense in remaining quiet now,” he adds:

In contrast, taking a strong stance against electoral manipulation would show the Iranian people that the target of U.S. pressure is the regime, not them. Supporting their calls for democracy and civil rights is the most effective way to neutralize the government’s anti-American propaganda. Once the election’s trajectory becomes clearer, Washington can turn to the task of assessing how the outcome will affect the nuclear impasse and other crucial issues.

RTWT

“The use of chemical weapons in Syria has increased pressure on President Obama to arm the opposition,” says Zalmay Khalilzad (right), a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Earlier in the conflict, I endorsed such a step. But circumstances have changed. Instead, the United States should focus on working with Russia to disarm Syria,” he writes in The Washington Post:

I have long advocated arming opposition movements that resist dictatorships and aggression. The strategy yielded major gains during the Soviet-Afghan war, in Bosnia, in Afghanistan in 2001 and during the Libyan revolution, all without unduly exposing the United States. There is good reason to believe that Washington erred in withholding more lethal assistance from the Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein. And arming friendly non-state actors may prove prudent in dealing with the fallout of the Arab Spring in some contexts.

“In Syria, however, failure to arm the opposition when the uprisings began two years ago has allowed extremist forces to gain the upper hand,” says Khalilzad, a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy. “Liberal and secular movements have largely gone into exile, leaving a vacuum that extremists are exploiting.”

The Obama administration, “so keen to internalize the lessons of the Iraq war, should have understood that protracted conflict was unlikely to favor moderates,” he writes. “Islamist forces — some with ties to al-Qaeda — have become the key element of the opposition, if not its backbone.”

But the U.S. has no compelling strategic interests that would justify greater intervention, a former National Security Adviser contends.

“The various schemes that have been proposed for a kind of tiddlywinks intervention from around the edges of the conflict—no-fly zones, bombing Damascus and so forth—would simply make the situation worse,” Zbigniew Brzezinski writes for Time magazine:

None of the proposals would result in an outcome strategically beneficial for the U.S. On the contrary, they would produce a more complex, undefined slide into the worst-case scenario. The only solution is to seek Russia’s and China’s support for U.N.-sponsored elections in which, with luck, Assad might be “persuaded” not to participate.

Iran might also be prepared to support a negotiated settlement, says a leading analyst.

Tehran is adopting a cynical “hedging” strategy to ensure that “the Islamic Republic retains influence in Damascus irrespective of the outcome of the civil war,” according to the Brookings Institution’s Suzanne Maloney.

“Iran hopes to preserve at least a vestige of its ally Bashar, but has also sought a seat at the table in shaping post-Assad Syria in any formal regional dialogue,” she argues Tehran also has “a genuine national interest in precluding the expansion of Sunni extremism (left).”

But a negotiated transition is easier said than done, says Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma.

“The more you learn about Syria, the more you realize how intractable the conflict is, and thus the more attractive a political solution appears to be,” he said. “But you also realize the odds of putting one together are very long.”

Other influential voices continue to call for a more assertive approach from the administration, rejecting the ‘realist’ calculus that U.S. security interests should trump humanitarian or idealistic considerations.

“For America, our interests are our values, and our values are our interests,” says Senator John McCain.

“The U.S. does not have to act alone, put boots on the ground or destroy every Syrian air-defense system to make a difference,” he writes for Time magazine:

We could train and arm well-vetted Syrian opposition forces, as recommended last year by President Obama’s national-security team. We could strike Assad’s aircraft and Scud-missile launchers. We could destroy artillery and drive Assad’s forces from their posts. We could station Patriot-missile batteries just outside Syria to create safe zones across the border.

“Taking these steps would save innocent lives, give the moderate opposition (right) a better chance to succeed and eventually provide security and responsible governance in Syria after Assad,” McCain argues. “However, the longer we wait, the worse the situation gets, and the tougher it will be to confront.”

But which factions of the diverse Syrian opposition should be supported?

The rebels are a fractious force with a variety of axes to grind, a leading expert tells RFE/RL’s Heather Maher.

“A number of them are Al-Qaeda linked, especially the Al-Nusra group, and on top of that, we have a number of groups that — perhaps understandably, but still dangerously — are extremely embittered by many years or decades of oppression,” says Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution:

They feel like they — most of them being Sunnis — have been systematically deprived of their rights by the Alawite-[dominated] regime, and they intend to settle scores. Then there are real Syrian patriots, and I like to hope that’s the largest fraction….They’re angry, they’re embittered, they’re not even happy with us anymore because they think we’ve betrayed them. They’re probably nervous about each other. The literature on civil war suggests that groups that fight together against a common enemy may ultimately turn on each other if things don’t work a certain way.

There’s a lot of talk of picking the “right” fighters, but how does the United States do that?

It’s all about relationship building, according to O’Hanlon. Foreign governments looking to tilt the balance in the war need to get “into the trenches” with the rebel fighters and get to know them, he says. Only then can Washington and its allies use incentives like military aid to influence how the various factions work toward their shared goal of regime change.

“I think we have to view this as an ongoing project. We don’t just say, ‘Here are the 17 groups we’ll help and there are the six we won’t, and let’s assume we got it right once and for all and we can otherwise just keep our hands off.’ We’ve got to stay engaged and try to get more groups to try and behave in an acceptable way,” O’Hanlon says.

But “arming the opposition would not serve U.S. interests,” Khalilzad insists:

A military escalation would probably invite chemical attacks by Assad’s forces. Unless the United States can ensure that arms supplies would be transferred only to like-minded factions of the opposition — and it cannot — the risk of sectarian tensions spilling across the region will increase. Disintegration of the Syrian state will threaten its territorial integrity as well as Iraq’s, particularly given each country’s restive Kurdish populations.

Russia will also oppose a total rout of the Assad regime, he contends:

With or without Russian assistance, any realistic plan to stabilize the situation will require far greater U.S. coordination with allies and regional partners. Even a tenuous settlement needs humanitarian relief to prevent refugee flows from destabilizing Jordan. Moderate political-military forces within the Syrian opposition need to be strengthened so they could eventually receive American arms. And regional talks on a settlement should explore the possibility of turning Syria into a federation with Sunni Arab, Kurdish and Alawite autonomous zones.

The policy debate raging in Washington “is ill-served by a discussion that reduces potential options to either costly, large-scale interventions that do not address the pressing problem of the Assad regime’s chemical weapons or simply doing nothing,” writes Peter Juul, a Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress.

“All-or-nothing thinking should be resisted, and a broader conception of the tools at the disposal of the United States should be put forward,” he argues. “Keeping the United States’ response to the Assad regime’s offenses proportional should remain a guiding principle moving forward.”

Is political reform required for Xi Jinping’s Chinese Dream?

The phrase is “the first Chinese political slogan that makes sense in a long time,” says an expert China-watcher.

China Digital Times highlights an Asia Society interview with The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos, who gives his thoughts on the nature and implications of the “Chinese Dream”. He compares it with its American counterpart, and suggests that it may be “a more powerful idea than even Xi Jinping thought”, as some Chinese believe its fulfillment would require political reform.

Another prominent analyst believes that China’s economic miracle disguises an underlying qualitative weakness and vulnerability, which could prove to be the regime’s Achilles Heel.

“If one looks only at the explosive growth of China’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) since the country began to embrace capitalism and global integration more than thirty years ago, it is impossible to deny that China’s rise is both real and breathtaking,” writes Minxin Pei, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and a non-resident senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.  

But “the real issue today is not the size of the Chinese economy and the rate of its growth, but its inner strength and quality,” he argues.

“Without a deeper appreciation of the reality and consequences of China’s low-quality growth, gullible observers will likely be as impressed with China’s rise as Empress Catherine the Great was with Potemkin Village.”

The most evident signs that China has sacrificed quality in its economic growth are its catastrophic environmental degradation, the deterioration of social cohesion, the absence of a social safety net and a failure to build the institutional basis for sustainable economic development, including rule of law, Pei writes for The Diplomat:  

Instead of producing a “harmonious society,” low-quality growth has spawned high levels of inequality and official corruption. Social mobility has declined. Trust has practically evaporated. The government has lost its credibility. The most worrisome evidence of deterioration of China’s social fabrics is the spread of corruption from the officialdom to the rest of society…..

The ultimate mark of a modern civilization and successful economic development is not measured in aggregate GDP data, but in the extent to which the state protects its citizens against unemployment, sickness, and old age. Compared with the more developed parts of the world, China’s social safety net remains threadbare. The majority of the Chinese population (mainly rural residents and migrants) has no pensions or meaningful healthcare insurance. ….

To further understand why China’s rise has been one-dimensional (in terms of GDP growth only), we need to examine whether economic development has also led to the rise of more sophisticated institutions and organizations that are essential to future economic dynamism. On this measurement, China’s shortfall is astonishingly worrying. Despite more than three decades of rapid GDP growth, China today still does not have a sophisticated market-driven financial system. As a result, capital is misallocated and wasted. Because of the ruling Communist Party’s fear of losing its political monopoly, China continues to lack the rule of law, another guarantee of prosperity and individual rights.

“Of all the potential consequences of China’s Potemkin rise, one that has received the least amount of thought abroad is the durability of the political regime that is responsible for such low-quality growth,” he writes:

At the moment, despite mounting evidence of China’s low-quality growth and lack of sustainability, few are asking the inevitable question: what happens to the Communist Party’s rule when the ill-effects of low-quality growth accumulate and produce a systemic crisis?

Now is the time to ask it.

RTWT

In another take on the China Dream, says China Digital Times, Perry Link and CDT founder Xiao Qiang point out a hollow in Xi Jinping’s “China dream”, between individuals’ material wishes and the “spiritual” goals of the state. What is deliberately missing, they suggest, is the aspiration for personal dignity articulated in January by Southern Weekly’s censored New Year message.

The Obama administration has for the first time explicitly blamed the Chinese military for launching cyber-attacks on the U.S government and various defense contractors.

The cyber-attacks are a “serious concern” as U.S. computer systems “continued to be targeted for intrusions, some of which appear to be attributable directly to the Chinese government and military,” said the Pentagon’s annual report to Congress.

Chinese pro-democracy and human rights groups have also been targeted for cyber assault.

The hacking attacks have unnerved Chinese dissidents, said Columbia University professor Andrew Nathan, a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy.

“There’s a paranoia that sets in,” he said. “That may be one of the functions of this surveillance.”

A non-governmental democracy assistance group was one of over 70 companies, governments and non-profit organizations targeted in a massive cyberspying offensive in 2011 that experts believe was likely conducted by China.

“The presence of political non-profits, such as the a private western organization focused on promotion of democracy around the globe or U.S. national security think tank is also quite illuminating,” said the report from the McAfee security firm. “Hacking the United Nations or the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Secretariat is also not likely a motivation of a group interested only in economic gains.”

Pakistan’s forthcoming elections will be “severely compromised” unless the interim government takes measures to ensure the safety of candidates and party activists threatened by the Taliban and other militant groups, according to a new report.                                                   

On May 11, 2013, for the first time in Pakistan’s history, the country will hold general elections after a legislature has completed its term. While much attention has been paid to security’s effects on the elections, other key factors, such as demography, will also influence the outcome. Of Pakistan’s 90 million voters, 40 million will be voting for the first time. This makes the election seem more open than ever. The event will also provide an opportunity to discuss new Pew Research Center polling on Pakistani public opinion.

Simbal Khan, Malik Siraj Akbar (right), Richard Wike, and Daniel Markey will discuss the key factors, the stakes, and prospects for Pakistan’s elections. Steve Inskeep, host of NPR’s Morning Edition, will moderate.  

12 noon – Venue: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1779 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. Register here.  

Speakers

Simbal Khan is a Pakistan scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, and director for Afghanistan and Central Asia at the Institute of Strategic Studies in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Malik Siraj Akbar is the editor in chief of the Baloch Hal, Balochistan’s first online English newspaper. He is also a regular contributor to the Huffington Post. He was a 2012 Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, DC.

Daniel Markey is senior fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he specializes in security and governance issues in South Asia. From 2003 to 2007, Markey held the South Asia portfolio on the secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State.

Richard Wike is associate director of the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project. He conducts research and writes about international public opinion on a variety of topics, including America’s global image, the rise of China, and views in predominantly Muslim nations. Previously, he was a senior associate for international and corporate clients at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research.
Moderator

Steve Inskeep is host of NPR’s Morning Edition. Since joining Morning Edition in 2004, Inskeep has hosted the program from New Orleans, Detroit, Karachi, Cairo, and Tehran. Inskeep covered the war in Afghanistan, the hunt for al-Qaeda suspects in Pakistan, and the war in Iraq for NPR. Inskeep is the author of Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi (Penguin Press, 2011).