“Muslims around the world express broad support for democracy and for people of other faiths being able to practice their religion freely,” according to a major new survey. “At the same time, many Muslims say religious leaders should influence political matters and see Islamic political parties as just as good or better than other political parties.”

Slight majorities favor democracy in key Middle Eastern states – 54 percent in Iraq, 55 percent in Egypt – but only 29 percent in Pakistan, says a study from the Washington-based Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. By contrast, it enjoys the robust support of 81 percent in Lebanon, 75 percent in Tunisia and 70 percent in Bangladesh.

Large majorities want to see Islamic legal and moral code of sharia as the official law, but there is little consensus on its definition and purview.  Over three-quarters of Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia want sharia courts to decide family law issues such as divorce and property disputes, with support highest in Afghanistan, where 99 percent of respondents support sharia, followed by the Palestinian territories, Malaysia, Niger and Pakistan.

“While the vast majority of Muslims in most countries say suicide bombing is rarely or never justified to defend Islam against its enemies, substantial minorities in a few countries consider such violence justifiable in at least some circumstances,” says the report – 40 percent in the Palestinian territories, 39 percent in Afghanistan, 29 percent in Egypt and 26 percent in Bangladesh.

“With the notable exception of Afghanistan, fewer than half of Muslims in any country surveyed say religious leaders should have a large influence in politics,” says the report:

Democracy

In 31 of the 37 countries where the question was asked at least half of Muslims believe a democratic government, rather than a leader with a strong hand, is best able to address their country’s problems.

Support for democracy tends to be highest among Muslims in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. In 12 of the 16 countries surveyed in sub-Saharan Africa, roughly two-thirds or more prefer a democratic government, including nearly nine-in-ten (87%) in Ghana. Fewer, though still a majority, prefer democracy over a strong leader in Guinea Bissau (61%), Niger (57%) and Tanzania (57%). In Southeast Asia, more than six-in-ten Muslims in Malaysia (67%), Thailand (64%) and Indonesia (61%) also prefer democracy.

In the Middle East and North Africa, at least three-quarters of Muslims support democracy in Lebanon (81%) and Tunisia (75%). At least half in Egypt (55%), the Palestinian territories (55%) and Iraq (54%) do so as well.

In South Asia, the percentage of Muslims who say a democratic government is better able to solve their country’s problems ranges from 70% in Bangladesh to 29% in Pakistan. In Central Asia, at least half of Muslims in Tajikistan (76%), Turkey (67%), Kazakhstan (52%) and Azerbaijan (51%) prefer democracy over a leader with a strong hand, while far fewer in Kyrgyzstan (32%) say the same.

Religious Leaders’ Role in Politics

Compared with support for democracy, sharper regional differences emerge over the question of the role of religious leaders in politics. The prevailing view among Muslims in Southeast Asia, South Asia and the Middle East-North Africa region is that religious leaders should have at least some influence in political matters. By contrast, this is the minority view in most of the countries surveyed in Central Asia and Southern and Eastern Europe. With the notable exception of Afghanistan, fewer than half of Muslims in any country surveyed say religious leaders should have a large influence in politics.

Support for religious leaders having a say in political matters is particularly high in Southeast Asia. At least three-quarters of Muslims in Malaysia (82%) and Indonesia (75%) believe religious leaders should influence political matters, including substantial percentages who say they should play a large role (41% and 30%, respectively).

In South Asia, a large majority in Afghanistan (82%) and Bangladesh (69%) believe religious leaders ought to influence political matters, while 54% of Pakistani Muslims agree. Afghan Muslims are the most likely among the populations surveyed to say religious leaders should have a largeinfluence on politics (53%), while roughly a quarter of Muslims in Pakistan (27%) and Bangladesh (25%) express this view.

In the Middle East-North Africa region, a majority of Muslims in most countries surveyed say religious leaders should play a role in politics. Support is highest among Muslims in Jordan (80%), Egypt (75%) and the Palestinian territories (72%). Roughly six-in-ten in Tunisia (58%) and Iraq (57%) agree. Lebanese Muslims are significantly less supportive; 37% think religious leaders should have at least some role in political matters, while 62% disagree. In each country in the region except Lebanon, about a quarter or more say religious leaders should have a large influence on politics, including 37% in Jordan.

RTWT

The United States should give a higher priority to advancing global religious freedom as a matter of national security, says a major new survey. The persecution of people of faith is inherently dangerous because it has the effect of empowering extremists at the expense of moderate religious believers, according to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.

“The state of international religious freedom is increasingly dire due to the presence of forces that fuel instability.  These forces include the rise of violent religious extremism coupled with the actions and inactions of governments,” said Dr. Katrina Lantos Swett (left), USCIRF’s Chair.

“Extremists target religious minorities and dissenters from majority religious communities for violence, including physical assaults and even murder,” she said. “Authoritarian governments also repress religious freedom through intricate webs of discriminatory rules, arbitrary requirements and draconian edicts.”

The Boston bombings highlighted the implications of religious intolerance, she said. The report is notably scathing about religious repression in the former Soviet bloc states of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Russia, including the north Caucasus.

Pakistan and Afghanistan are among the worst violators of religious liberty, but the Commission has also expressed concern about the recent kidnapping of two Christian bishops in Syria. The commission reserves the right to name Syria a “country of particular concern,” said Lantos Swett.

“Helping create and protect civic space for diverse religious opinions on matters of religion and society can help counter the rise of violent religious extremism,” its 2013 annual report (excerpted below) suggests.

The U.S. and its allies should “increase and strengthen diplomatic, development and military engagement to promote human rights, especially religious freedom,” it concludes.

But the Syrian case highlights a difficulty with the Commission’s mandate, laid out by the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998,” says The Economist:

The system assumes that most religious repression is practiced by state authorities, and can be corrected by putting pressure on governments. But some of the world’s worst persecution is practiced by what political scientists call “non-state actors” who may be relatively immune to diplomatic pressure. Nobody knows for certain who kidnapped those Syrian bishops but it happened in a rebel-controlled area, so calling the government names might not help very much.

IRFA requires the administration to designate as “countries of particular concern” (CPCs) those regimes that engage in or tolerate “particularly severe” violations of religious liberty, with “particularly severe” defined as violations that are “systematic, ongoing, and egregious,” including torture, prolonged detention without charge, disappearances, or “other flagrant denial[s] of the right to life, liberty, or the security of persons.” After a country is designated a CPC, the President is legally required to take action.

The 2013 recommends that eight countries – Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Uzbekistan – be re-designated as CPCs, and proposes that seven other countries – Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Vietnam – should also be designated as such.

A country is included on USCIRF’s Tier 2 list, on the threshold of CPC status, when the violations are particularly severe and meet at least one of the three elements of the “systematic, ongoing, egregious” standard. USCIRF deems that eight countries – Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Cuba, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Laos, and Russia – meet the Tier 2 standard, which designation provides advance notice of negative trends that could become severe violations of religious freedom, giving policymakers an opportunity to pre-empt, prevent or diminish the violations.

An extract from the report:

Justifications for Tier 1 CPC Designation

Burma: Ongoing and important political reforms in Burma have yet to significantly improve the situation for freedom of religion and belief. During the reporting period, most religious freedom violations occurred against ethnic minority Christian and Muslim communities, with serious abuses against mainly Christian civilians during military interventions in Kachin State and sectarian violence by societal actors targeting Muslims in Rakhine (Arakan) State. In addition, Buddhist monks suspected of anti-government activities were detained or removed from their pagodas, and at least eight monks remain imprisoned for participating in peaceful demonstrations.

China: The Chinese government continues to perpetrate particularly severe violations of the freedom of thought, conscience, and religion or belief. Religious groups and individuals considered to threaten national security or social harmony, or whose practices are deemed beyond the vague legal definition of “normal religious activities,” are illegal and face severe restrictions, harassment, detention, imprisonment, and other abuses. Religious freedom conditions for Tibetan Buddhists and Uighur Muslims remain particularly acute, as the government broadened its efforts to discredit and imprison religious leaders, control the selection of clergy, ban certain religious gatherings, and control the distribution of religious literature by members of these groups.

Egypt: During the reporting period, the Egyptian transitional and newly elected governments have made some improvements related to freedom of religion or belief and there was positive societal progress between religious communities. Nevertheless, during a February 2013 visit to Egypt, USCIRF found that the Egyptian government continued to engage in and tolerate systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of freedom of thought, conscience and religion or belief. Despite a significant decrease in the number of fatalities and injuries from sectarian violence during the reporting period, Coptic Orthodox Christians, and their property, continued to experience sustained attacks.

Eritrea: Systematic, ongoing, and egregious religious freedom violations continue in Eritrea. These violations include: thousands of religious prisoners; arbitrary arrests and detentions without charges of members of unregistered religious groups; a prolonged ban on public religious activities; revocation of citizenship rights of Jehovah’s Witnesses; interference in the internal affairs of registered religious groups; and inordinate delays in responding to registration applications from religious groups.

Iran: The government of Iran continues to engage in systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom, including prolonged detention, torture, and executions based primarily or entirely upon the religion of the accused. Iran is a constitutional, theocratic republic that discriminates against its citizens on the basis of religion or belief. During the past year, the already poor religious freedom conditions continued to deteriorate, especially for religious minorities, in particular for Baha’is as well as Christians and Sufi Muslims. …………

Iraq: Over the last several years the Iraqi government has made efforts to increase security for religious sites and worshippers, provide a stronger voice for Iraq’s smallest minorities in parliament, and revise secondary school textbooks to portray minorities in a more positive light. Nevertheless, the government of Iraq continues to tolerate systematic, ongoing, and egregious religious freedom violations, including violent religiously-motivated attacks.

Nigeria: The government of Nigeria continues to tolerate systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom that lead to particularly severe violations affecting all Nigerians, both Christian and Muslim. For many years, the government has failed to bring those responsible for sectarian violence to justice, prevent and contain acts of such violence, or prevent reprisal attacks. As a result since 1999, more than 14,000 Nigerians have been killed in sectarian violence between Muslims and Christians. Boko Haram, a militant group that espouses an extreme and violent interpretation of Islam, benefits from this culture of impunity and lawlessness.

North Korea: The recent leadership transition in the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea (DPRK or North Korea) has not improved human rights or religious freedom conditions. North Korea remains one of the world’s most repressive regimes, where severe religious freedom abuses continue. In the past year, refugees and defectors reported discrimination and harassment of both authorized and unauthorized religious activity; the arrest, torture, and possible execution of those conducting clandestine religious activity or engaging in “fortune-telling;” and the mistreatment and imprisonment of asylum-seekers repatriated from China.

Pakistan: The government of Pakistan continues to engage in and tolerate systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of freedom of religion or belief. Sectarian and religiously-motivated violence is chronic, especially against Shi’i Muslims, and the government has failed to protect members of religious minority communities, as well as the majority faith. Pakistan’s repressive blasphemy laws and other religiously discriminatory legislation, such as the anti-Ahmadi laws, have fostered an atmosphere of violent extremism and vigilantism.

Saudi Arabia: During the reporting period, the Saudi government made improvements in policies and practices related to freedom of religion or belief, but remains a “country of particular concern,” or CPC, for violations of freedom of religion or belief. The Saudi government continues to ban most forms of public religious expression other than that of the government’s own interpretation of one school of Sunni Islam; prohibits any public non-Muslim places of worship; and periodically interferes with the private religious practice of non-Muslim expatriate workers in the country.

Sudan: Systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of freedom of religion or belief continue in Sudan. While religious freedom conditions greatly improved in South Sudan and improved in Sudan during the Interim Period of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended the civil war in January 2005, conditions in Sudan have deteriorated since South Sudan’s independence. ……………

Tajikistan: Tajikistan’s restrictions on religious freedom remained in place during the reporting period, and systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of freedom of religion or belief continue. The government suppresses and punishes all religious activity independent of state control, and imprisons individuals on unproven criminal allegations linked to religious activity or affiliation. These restrictions and abuses primarily affect the country’s majority Muslim community, but also target minority communities, particularly Protestants and Jehovah’s Witnesses……..

Turkmenistan: Severe religious freedom violations persist in Turkmenistan. Despite a few limited reforms undertaken by President Berdimuhamedov after he took office in 2007, the country’s laws, policies, and practices continue to violate international human rights norms, including those on freedom of religion or belief. Police raids and other harassment of registered and unregistered religious groups continue. The repressive 2003 religion law remains in force, causing major difficulties for religious groups to function legally.

Uzbekistan: Since Uzbekistan gained independence in 1991, its government has systematically and egregiously violated freedom of religion or belief, as well as other human rights. The Uzbek government harshly penalizes individuals for independent religious activity regardless of their religious affiliation. A restrictive religion law facilitates state control over all religious communities, particularly the majority Muslim community. The government arrests Muslims and represses individuals, groups, and mosques that do not conform to officially-prescribed practices or that it claims are associated with extremist political programs. ………….

Vietnam: The government of Vietnam continues to expand control over all religious activities, severely restrict independent religious practice, and repress individuals and religious groups it views as challenging its authority. Religious activity continues to grow in Vietnam and the government has made some important changes in the past decade in response to international attention, including from its designation as a “country of particular concern” (CPC). Nevertheless, authorities continue to imprison or detain individuals for reasons related to their religious activity or religious freedom advocacy………..

Justification of Placement on Tier 2

Afghanistan: Conditions for religious freedom are exceedingly poor for dissenting members of the majority faith and minority religious communities. Individuals who dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy regarding Islamic beliefs and practices are subject to legal actions that violate international standards. The threat of violence by the Taliban and other armed groups is an increasing reality……

Azerbaijan: Despite the government’s claims of official tolerance, religious freedom conditions in Azerbaijan deteriorated over the past few years. During the reporting period, religious organizations were closed and non-violent religious activity was punished with detentions, fines and other penalties.

Cuba: Serious religious freedom violations continue in Cuba, despite some improvements for government-approved religious groups. Reports indicate a tripling in the number of violations, such as detentions and sporadic arrests of clergy and religious leaders; harassment of religious leaders and laity; interference in religious groups’ internal affairs, and pressure to prevent democracy and human rights activists from participating in religious activities.

India: There has been no large-scale communal violence against religious minorities in India since 2008, and in recent years the Indian government has created special investigative and judicial structures in an effort to address previous such attacks. Nevertheless, in the past year, progress in achieving justice through these structures for the victims of past incidents continued to be slow and ineffective. …

Indonesia: Indonesia is a stable and robust democracy with political institutions able to advance and protect human rights. In recent years, however, the country’s traditions of religious tolerance and pluralism have been strained by ongoing sectarian tensions, societal violence, and the arrest of individuals considered religiously “deviant.” While the government has addressed past sectarian violence and effectively curtailed terrorist networks, religious minorities continue to experience intimidation, discrimination, and violence. ……

Kazakhstan: Religious freedom conditions in Kazakhstan deteriorated in 2012. In late 2011, the Kazakh government adopted a repressive new religion law, which resulted in a sharp drop in the number of registered religious groups in 2012. Unregistered religious activity is illegal, and the activities of registered groups are strictly regulated. ………..

Laos: Serious religious freedom abuses continue in Laos. The Lao legal code restricts religious practice, and the government is either unable or unwilling to curtail ongoing religious freedom abuses in some provincial areas. In the past year, provincial officials violated the freedom of religion or belief of ethnic minority Protestants through detentions, surveillance, harassment, property confiscations, forced relocations, and forced renunciations of faith. …..

Russia: During the reporting period, religious freedom conditions in Russia deteriorated further and major problems discussed in previous USCIRF reports continue. These include the application of laws on religious and non-governmental organizations to violate the rights of allegedly “non-traditional” religious groups and Muslims; the use of the extremism law against religious groups and individuals not known to use or advocate violence, particularly Jehovah’s Witnesses and readers of Turkish Muslim theologian Said Nursi…………In addition, an arsenal of restrictive new laws against civil society was passed in 2012, and a draft blasphemy bill before the Duma, would, if passed, further curtail the freedoms of religion, belief and expression.

“The identification of Tamerlan and Dzhokar Tsarnaev (right) as suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings focuses attention on the troubled history of Chechnya and the legacy of its recent wars with Russia,” writes Miriam Lanskoy, the co-author of The Chechen Struggle: Independence Won and Lost:

The Tsarnaev brothers were born in Kyrgyzstan, a country in Central Asia that, like Chechnya, had been part of the Soviet Union. In 1944, Joseph Stalin ordered the deportation of the entire Chechen nation — almost 1 million people — from the North Caucasus to Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. The Chechens had been falsely accused of collaborating with the Nazis, and were branded an enemy nation. About one third of the deportees died of cold, hunger and disease in Central Asia, where they lived in detainment camps similar to those of the Soviet gulag.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, former republics like Georgia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, amongst others, took the opportunity to form independent states. When the Chechens tried to do likewise, Lanskoy notes, Russia tried to re-establish control through a brutal war in 1994-1996, which ended when its forces withdrew, but Moscow refused to recognize Chechnya’s independence.

“The second war started in 1999 and endures as a disjointed Islamic insurgency across the North Caucasus,” says Lanskoy, Director for Russia and Eurasia at the National Endowment for Democracy:

In the 1990s, the Chechen resistance was a secular national liberation movement that had broad support. But during the second war, the moderates were killed or marginalized and Islamic radicals became dominant. Aslan Maskhadov, Chechnya’s moderate president who was elected in 2007 and sought negotiations with Russia, was unable to restrain more radical commanders, who eventually took over the resistance movement.

When the war started, “the Chechen struggle was overwhelmingly nationalist, not Islamist,” writes Anatol Lieven, the author of Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power, who covered the 1994-96 war as a journalist:

Both Chechen President Dzhokar Dudayev and his chief of staff, Colonel Aslan Maskhadov, were former Soviet officers. A large majority of Chechens voted for Maskhadov and against Islamist candidates in the presidential elections of 1997. But in a development with close parallels in the modern history of Afghanistan and elsewhere, the 1994-96 war drew in international Islamist militants, with agendas that went far beyond Chechnya.

These developments were an especially personal tragedy for Ilyas Akhmadov (left), Lanskoy’s co-author. A former sergeant-major in the Soviet military, he fought in the First Chechen War in 1994, motivated by a vision of an independent and secular democracy for his homeland.

After the ceasefire, he counseled Maskhadov, Chechnya’s elected president, and was appointed foreign minister in 1999. In February 2003, he co-authored a comprehensive peace plan which stated that the Chechen conflict could only be resolved through democratization across the Caucasus and the region’s integration into the international community. But that democratic vision fell victim to Russia’s violent irredentism and the radical Islamist turn in the Chechen resistance.

In her dispatches from Chechnya, said NED president Carl Gershman, the late Anna Politkovskaya described Maskhadov as the head of the Westernizers who looked toward Europe, while his rival Shamil Basayev led the Easternizers, inspired by militant Islam, who instigated the atrocities at a Moscow theater in 2002 and at the Beslan school in September 2004.

Maskhadov called for Basayev to be tried before an international tribunal and announced a unilateral ceasefire, a gesture ignored by the international community but welcomed by Russia’s human rights activists. The Kremlin’s response was to kill Maskhadov on March 8, 2005, even as the ceasefire held, ending any chance of a negotiated end to the conflict.

Although Chechnya has been pacified, “neighboring Dagestan, which probably had more of an influence on Tamerlan Tsarnaev, remains a hotbed of insurgency.” says Lanskoy. In 2012, more than 400 people were killed in Dagestan as a result of attacks by Islamist insurgents and reprisals against civilians by Russian forces.

At least 124 people were killed and 75 wounded in the first three months of this year across predominantly Muslim-Russian provinces of the Caucasus, including Dagestan and Chechnya, according to Caucasian Knot, a website dedicated monitoring the violence.

“Dagestan today, is the acutest hotspot in Russia,” Grigory Shvedov, chief editor of the web-based newspaper told AFP.

“This development of terrorism and dissent is due to the high level of religiousness, the high level of corruption and the low level of control on the part of the federal center,” he said. “All these factors flourished in post-Soviet times.”

The radical Islamist insurgents seeking to establish a Caucasus Emirate “claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport in January 2011 that killed 37 people and for suicide bombings on the Moscow subway that killed 40 people in 2010,” Reuters reports: Although 124 people have died in the North Caucasus since the beginning of this year, according to website Caucasian Knot, which tracks the violence, the vast majority of deaths have been militants and security officers. A combination of religious fervor and anger over corruption and strong arm tactics by local Kremlin-backed rulers against suspected militants are mostly responsible for driving youth into the ranks of the insurgency.

During the two wars in Chechnya, more than 200,000 people – mostly civilians – were killed.

“Those who remain continue to suffer the ruin and trauma of the war and the abuses of an authoritarian government,” Lanskoy writes.

“If you compare 1999 to today it is by far worse,” she told a 2010 meeting on the region.

But some observers argue that the attack on the Boston marathon is a “vindication” of Russia’s hardline policies.

“One can only speculate what Russian president Vladimir Putin is thinking as he sees Chechen terrorists wreaking havoc in a major American city,” says Jacob Heilbrunn, writing in The National Interest.

The Boston bombings are a “gift to the Kremlin and Putin,” Chechnya’s opposition prime minister, Akhmed Zakayev says with a sigh.

“They will say, ‘This is the Chechen,’” in an attempt to politicize the suspects’ ethnic background. “Three years ago Putin said that Western nations granting political asylum to Chechens will have problems with these Chechens.”

But the Kremlin’s policies – “waging a war, co-opting local elites, public works, manipulating the boundaries of federal districts, replacing governors, and killing extremists – have not worked,” Lanskoy said.

“Could it be that a moment has arrived for a discussion about governance, transparency, accountability?” she reflected. “Reforms that can satisfy the legitimate public demand for justice, security, good governance – -and thereby marginalize the extremists?”

“As we look for answers after last week’s atrocity,” says Lanskoy, “we must ensure that the Chechens who managed to escape the bloodshed of their homeland don’t suffer for the crimes of a few of their co-nationals, as they did for so long.”

“After more than two weeks of sustained attack from China’s biggest state media outlets, Apple finally genuflected this week and issued a humble apology for its “perceived” arrogance and disregard for Chinese customers,” says a leading observer.

“The lesson was clear: the world’s most powerful brand is no match for the Chinese Communist party in a head-to-head battle because the party ultimately controls access to the world’s most promising consumer market,” writes the FT’s Jamil Anderlini:

But there was another important lesson that came out of the skirmish between the iPad maker and the propaganda apparatus. On the internet, which the party can corral with the “Great Firewall” but cannot really control, and particularly on Twitter-like Weibo, the backlash against the state and the cheering for Apple was devastating.

US President Bill Clinton famously said that attempting to control the internet in China would be like trying to “nail Jell-O to the wall,” notes a prominent analyst:

Just as earlier communications technologies may have helped topple dictatorships in the past (for example, the telegraph in Russia’s Bolshevik revolutions in 1917 and short-wave radio in the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991), the internet would surely erode China’s authoritarian state. Vastly increased access to information and the ability to communicate easily with like-minded people round the globe would endow its users with asymmetric power, diluting the might of the state and acting as a force for democracy.

But rather than facilitating China’s democratization, the internet has allowed the ruling Communist Party to consolidate its power, Gady Epstein writes in a Special Report for The Economist:

Not only has Chinese authoritarian rule survived the internet, but the state has shown great skill in bending the technology to its own purposes, enabling it to exercise better control of its own society and setting an example for other repressive regimes. China’s party-state has deployed an army of cyber-police, hardware engineers, software developers, web monitors and paid online propagandists to watch, filter, censor and guide Chinese internet users. Chinese private internet companies, many of them clones of Western ones, have been allowed to flourish so long as they do not deviate from the party line.

“The party has achieved something few had thought possible: the construction of a distinct national internet,” Epstein adds.

“The Chinese internet resembles a fenced-off playground with paternalistic guards. Like the internet that much of the rest of the world enjoys, it is messy and unruly, offering diversions such as games, shopping and much more. Allowing a distinctly Chinese internet to flourish has been an important part of building a better cage.”

The regime’s screening of online material from abroad is ever more sophisticated, the report notes.

“To most Chinese internet users, though, exactly who is responsible for what in the machinery of censorship matters much less than the idea of censorship itself,” it says. “The term GFW [Great Firewall] has become a hated archetype…..shorthand for the restriction on their experience of the internet and for the increasing number of Chinese words that have become too sensitive to use, including many innocuous ones that happen to be homophones for sensitive ones.”

“I’m a grass-mud horse.”

China Digital Times produces a helpful Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon, an online glossary of terms created by Chinese netizens frequently encountered in online political discussions. “The history of the internet in China is one of give and take, of punch and counterpunch, where the authorities are often surprised by the force and speed of online interactions but determined to keep them under control,” the report adds:

The result has been a costly and diverse industrial complex of monitoring and censorship. Central-government ministries have invested in two pillars of control: the Great Firewall, a Western name for a system of blocking foreign websites, starting in the late 1990s, which some believe has cost as much as $160m (the details are state secrets); and Golden Shield for domestic surveillance and filtering, begun in 1998 by the Ministry of Public Security and estimated to have cost more than $1.6 billion so far.

But the party is neither omniscient nor omnipotent when it comes to internet censorship. The failure to cover up the spread of the SARS virus in 2003, the 2007 protest “strolls” against a proposed chemical plant in Xiamen, ethnic rioting in Tibet and Xinjiang, and many other cases of unrest confirms that the authorities are engaged in a Sisyphean labor.

“Each of these incidents, and many more, prompted new efforts at control. But until the system changes, it will be a never-ending task,” The Economist suggests:

Small victories …. are becoming increasingly common, to the dismay of millions of Communist Party cadres. Many web users believe that the balance of power has shifted: in a survey conducted in 2010 by a magazine affiliated to the People’s Daily, the party mouthpiece, more than 70% of respondents agreed that local Chinese officials suffered from “internet terror”.

The emergence of microblogging services like Sina Weibo made the authorities “even more concerned about the threat of ‘hostile foreign forces’ online,’” the report notes, citing a 2010 white paper on the internet, which claimed: “Foreign social-networking sites have become a tool for political subversion used by Western nations.”

The internet has forced the ruling party “to be more efficient at being authoritarian …..this is the online blueprint for what scholars call “adaptive authoritarianism”, and there is an international market for it,” says The Economist:

China sells its technological know-how abroad, including tools for monitoring and filtering the internet. Huawei and ZTE, two big Chinese companies, are leading suppliers of internet and telecoms hardware to a number of states in Central and South-East Asia, eastern Europe and Africa, including Kazakhstan, Vietnam, Belarus, Ethiopia and Zambia. Many of these would like to increase online access while retaining tight political and technological control. China has aligned itself with these countries and dozens of others, including Russia, in a global dispute with Western democracies over how the internet should be governed.

But historical precedents are not comforting for China’s ruling party.

“For people who lived through the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, scathing political humor was a tell-tale sign that the old order would eventually fall,” writes the FT’s Anderlini:

Another sign of bankruptcy during Soviet times was the popularity of blue jeans and American rock music – what used to be referred to in China as “spiritual pollution”. Twitter, Facebook and iPads are the blue jeans of modern China and that is one reason the party has completely blocked the first two and may be planning an assault on the third.

“Dissidents in China say that freedom is knowing how big your cage is,” Epstein writes:

It could be argued that with their internet the Chinese authorities have built one of the world’s largest, best-appointed cages. It could equally be said that they have constructed an expensive, unwieldy monstrosity, a desperate grab for control to buy time for the party. Either way, a careful look at their edifice should throw light on the question whether the internet is an inherently democratising force.

RTWT

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

Newly emerging popular movements for reform were the driving force behind the Middle East’s major gains in democratic rights last year, according to Freedom in the World 2013, Freedom House’s annual report. But other regions experienced setbacks due to growing authoritarian resilience and resourcefulness.

“Our findings point to the growing sophistication of modern authoritarians,” said Arch Puddington, Freedom House vice president for research. “They are flexible; they distort and abuse the legal framework; they are adept at the techniques of modern propaganda.”

“But especially since the Arab Spring, they are nervous, which accounts for their intensified persecution of popular movements for change,” he said.

The dramatic increase in freedom in Libya was the most surprising finding of the survey, he told a meeting at the National Endowment for Democracy.

Authoritarian regimes moved to weaken “the elements of democratic governance that pose the most serious threats to repressive and corrupt rule: independent civil society groups, a free press, and the rule of law,” the report said.

While authoritarians have gone on the offensive, the report notes, the United States and other democracies have yet to demonstrate comparable assertiveness and leadership in defending or advancing democracy.

“Leaders of democratic countries should confer directly with leading regime critics and activists and speak out on behalf of the targets of persecution,” according to Puddington and Freedom House president David J. Kramer. “But by far the most important point is for world leaders, Obama in particular, to declare their determination to support people who aspire to democracy — anywhere.”

The U.S. administration has an “uneven” record on democratic solidarity, they write for Foreign Policy:

A program of support for civic movements would be one aspect of a comprehensive effort by the major democracies to reassert global leadership. But even by itself, support for civil society would have the practical benefit of directing attention

to those who are committed to making freedom a reality in the world’s dark corners. And it would send a critical message to the agents of repression that, no matter what our various domestic woes, the spread of freedom is still very much on the agenda. 

The findings for Freedom in the World 2013 reflect a complex picture for the state of global freedom, according to Puddington and Jennifer Dunham, research analyst for Freedom in the World:

On one hand, the number of countries ranked in the Free category increased to 90, an impressive share of the world’s 195 sovereign states. At the same time, more countries, 27, suffered significant setbacks in their freedom indicators than showed notable gains, 16, marking the seventh consecutive year in which declines outnumbered improvements.

Ordinarily, Freedom in the World scores for individual countries move up or down in small increments. For example, over the past decade, Russia has declined from Partly Free status to a well-earned slot in the Not Free category. But its fall was not sudden or precipitous. The bottom-level scores for Freedom in the World range from 0 to 100, and in most years Russia suffered declines of between 1 and 4 points. Only the cumulative impact of those annual declines has made Russia one of the lowest-scoring countries among the world’s major powers. In any particular year, a country that registers a gain or decline of between 3 and 5 points can be said to have undergone a fairly large change.

Yet for the year 2012, several countries registered across-the-board gains or declines that break the pattern of incremental changes. Mali’s decline of 48 points is possibly the most severe one-year drop in the history of the report. Reductions for Guinea-Bissau and the Maldives were also sizeable. On the other side of the ledger, Libya’s gain of 26 points ranks among the most substantial one-year improvements in the report’s history.

The following table shows several of the important declines and gains for political rights and civil liberties over the past year.

While the number of countries ranked as Free for 2012 was 90, a gain of 3 over the previous year, 27 countries showed significant declines, compared with 16 that showed notable gains. This is the seventh consecutive year that Freedom in the World has shown more declines than gains worldwide. Furthermore, the report data reflected a stepped-up campaign of persecution by dictators that specifically targeted civil society organizations and independent media.

Among the most striking gains for freedom was that of Libya, which advanced from Not Free to Partly Free and registered one of the most substantial one-year numerical improvements in the report’s nearly 40-year history. Burma and a number of African countries, including Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Lesotho, Senegal, and Sierra Leone, also saw major advances.

Noteworthy declines were recorded for Kazakhstan, Kenya, Mali, Nigeria, Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine.

The Middle East showed ambiguous results for the year. In addition to major gains for Libya, and Tunisia’s retention of sharp improvements from 2011, Egypt experienced relatively modest progress. The country held a flawed but competitive presidential election and direct military rule came to an end, yet the elected parliament was dissolved and President Morsi pushed through a new constitution under deeply problematic circumstances.

Moreover, the gains for the Arab Spring countries triggered a reaction, sometimes violent, by authoritarian leaders elsewhere in the Middle East, with resulting setbacks for freedom in Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates.

The report’s findings were especially grim for Eurasian countries. Russia took a decided turn for the worse after Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency. Having already marginalized the formal political opposition, he enacted a series of laws meant to squelch a burgeoning societal opposition. The measures imposed severe new penalties on unauthorized demonstrations, restricted the ability of civic groups to raise funds and conduct their work, and placed new controls on the internet.

Key global findings: The number of electoral democracies stood at 117, the same as for 2011. Two countries, Georgia and Libya, achieved electoral democracy status, while two were dropped from the category, Mali and the Maldives.

Four countries moved from Partly Free to Free: Lesotho, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Tonga. Three countries rose from Not Free to Partly Free: Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, and Libya. Mali fell two tiers, from Free to Not Free, and Guinea-Bissau dropped from Partly Free to Not Free.

Some notable trends highlighted in the report include increased Muslim-on-Muslim violence, which reaching horrifying levels in Pakistan and remained a serious problem in Iraq and elsewhere; a serious decline in civil liberties in Turkey; and among the Persian Gulf states, a steady and disturbing decline in democratic institutions and an increase in repressive policies.

Worst of the Worst: Of the 47 countries designated as Not Free, nine have been given the survey’s lowest possible rating of 7 for both political rights and civil liberties: Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Two territories, Tibet and Western Sahara, were also ranked among the worst of the worst.

An additional 5 countries and 1 territory received scores that were slightly above those of the worst-ranked countries, with ratings of 6, 7 or 7, 6 for political rights and civil liberties: Belarus, Chad, China, Cuba, Laos, and South Ossetia.

To view the complete findings, click here.

Supporting democratic transitions requires customized, country-specific approaches which empower local political and civil society actors, says a new review of European Union democratization strategies. The review stresses partnership and incentive-based approaches, the importance of the socio-economic dimension to maintain sustainable transition, and calls on the European Commission to establish a platform or network on democratic transformation issues.

Transition poses challenges which vary widely from one country to another. The process can be peaceful or crisis-driven; it involves uncertainty, risk and sometimes even threats to domestic or regional stability.

Experience shows that transitions can fail. Such failure can cause high political, social and economic costs to societies. A successful transition process means consolidating reforms and making them sustainable in the long-term, in an atmosphere of stability and confidence. In some cases, there will also be a need to prevent conflict while promoting and managing peaceful change.

The EU has considerable experience of supporting democratic transitions, both internally, in its neighborhood and around the world. The EU’s enlargement policy, in particular, has proven to be a powerful tool to foster societal transformation. Countries that have already acceded to the EU, in particular those who joined in 2004 and in 2007, and those on the road to join have undergone impressive changes through accession-driven democratic and economic reforms.

The close inter-linkage of peace, stability, democracy, and prosperity has come to the forefront also in other frameworks, including the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP), development cooperation and EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP).

Mechanisms should be introduced to ensure that the voices of civil society and stakeholders are effectively heard in reform processes. For example, in the aftermath of uprisings resulting from widespread social dissatisfaction in the Arab Spring countries, a Civil Society Facility was created to help strengthen the capacity of civil society organizations both in the Eastern and Southern Neighborhood to promote the needed reforms and increase public accountability in their countries.

In order to further enhance knowledge-sharing and development capacities, the Commission should set up a broader platform or network on democratic transformation issues. Twinning between public institutions of donors and partner countries could be another tool of improving access to knowledge. Full benefit should also be drawn from the European Transition Compendium which compiles the transition experience of EU Member States.

Country-specific reform

As a result of economic and political uncertainties, transition often brings about a short-term deterioration in growth and employment, as well as in public and external accounts. Where this results in increasing unemployment and poverty in particular, it may erode and put at risk the legitimacy of the democratization process and result in increased emigration and brain drain. In the longer term, reforms need to be able to meet citizens’ expectations for decent jobs, economic opportunities and social justice.

Even if, in general, the long-term objectives of the new leaders of these countries were similar, the priorities, sequencing and pace of the reforms differed widely. Some countries (Poland, Czech Republic, Estonia) quickly introduced radical reforms to create conditions for an economic recovery (the so-called “shock therapy”), despite its significant negative impacts in the short term, such as output drop, unemployment and recession.

Other countries (such as Hungary and Slovenia) took a more “gradualist” approach by implementing step-by-step macro-economic, structural and institutional reforms, avoiding thus abrupt changes in economic output, employment and welfare. This allowed time for national enterprises and economic operators to adapt to the new conditions of an open market economy.

Responding to partner societies’ needs

To secure a peaceful and successful transition, the specific reform process of each country should respond to people’s needs, defined by the country itself. While key needs and challenges in transition countries vary considerably, they very often include:  national reconciliation and building a national consensus on fundamental issues; establishing well-functioning democratic institutions and processes; avoiding an unsustainable decline in incomes and employment and restoring or maintaining macroeconomic stability; promoting long-term socio-economic development and inclusion, with decent jobs, economic opportunities, basic social services, including quality healthcare, education, and social justice; establishing a business-friendly environment, (re)defining property rights and the role of the private sector, and reviewing the functioning of the market; and where necessary, restoring security, justice and the rule of law.

As situations vary widely, there is no uniform prescription for a successful transition process or EU response.

In the area of democratic governance, typical examples of areas where such quick wins could be possible include freedom of expression and credible elections (see the example of Tunisia, a representative and legitimate constituent assembly and the adoption of a new constitution through participatory processes.

In the short run, democratic transition may weaken economic activity, employment rates and macroeconomic stability. It is crucial that measures are taken and projects implemented that can help usher in fast improvements in income generation, social safety nets and basic service delivery, and can guard against unsustainable poverty increases.

Applying incentives, constraints and conditionalities 

While incentives, constraints and conditionalities cannot be the main driver of reforms, they can support the process.

Incentive-based approaches under the EU enlargement policy have produced positive results, for instance in the Western Balkans. Progress on the EU accession path is linked to concrete steps in the reform agenda.

The ENP also follows a so-called “more for more” principle. Countries which go further and faster with specific, measurable democratic reforms, will receive greater support from the EU. To reflect this new incentive-based approach, two umbrella programmers were set up to offer additional “more-for-more” resources: Support for Partnership, Reform and Inclusive Growth (SPRING) for the southern neighborhood (see the example of Tunisia) and Eastern Partnership Integration and Cooperation Program (EaPIC) for the Eastern Neighborhood.

Experience from the EU enlargement policy shows that it is important to create an enabling environment (legal framework and rules on funding, inclusion in political consultation procedures) that allows civil society in the country to develop in a sustainable manner.

In supporting transition processes the EU should explore triangular cooperation and other options for cooperating with developing countries that are also emerging as providers of development cooperation and have recent experience with democratic transition.

The EU already has a range of useful policies and tools available to support transition countries worldwide as they embark on the path to democracy, which it has successfully developed and deployed, especially but not  only in its immediate neighbours. The EU can play a key role, in particular, by helping to create an enabling environment for some of the crucial elements of successful democratic and economic transformations, such as for various democratic actors, enterprise, investments, trade and social protection.

While experience shows that transition processes should, first and foremost, be owned by the state and its citizens, experience also shows that the EU does have valuable expertise to offer, adapted of course to the needs and wishes of partner countries anywhere in the world, as part of a wider EU package of political, economic or other support.

RTWT

Is Georgia’s first peaceful transfer of power “a good deal for pretty much everyone,” raising the possibility that the country “could once again punch way above its weight in global affairs”? Will the transition set a precedent “in a region riven by conflict and authoritarianism”?

The electoral victory of billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream coalition over Mikheil Saakashvili’s United National Movement in this week’s parliamentary poll is a triumph for the Georgia people, the United States and even for Russia (at least for its people), according to George Mason University’s Nino Japaridze  and Job C. Henning of the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress.

Despite concerns that post-election tensions may yet threaten the transition, the election has demonstrated the Georgian people’s political maturity and the robustness of the country’s democratic process.

“This reassertion of democratic political will is also a victory for the United States [which] ….needs a stable independent democratic model to hold up, as it seeks to avoid the impression within Arab societies that its policies are designed to create new client states,” they contend:

A peaceful transition in Georgia enhances regional stability and sets a valuable precedent. Neighboring autocracies have a lot to learn from Georgia. Democracy is indeed on the march — not through external intervention or revolution but through the patient development of political culture, a product of quiet but deliberate policies of building institutions and of monitoring human rights and elections.

Georgian Dream’s win is “even a victory for the Russian people, if not for President Vladimir Putin,” Japaridze and Henning suggest.

“Without the useful foil of an impetuous Saakashvili as the sole face of Georgia, Putin will have a harder time making Georgia look like a font of post-colonial insolence and a menacing outpost of U.S. interference, and Russian domestic interest in normalization of relations is likely to grow.”

Analysts suggest that the poll, which saw the election of Levan Berdzenishvili (right), a former Reagan-Fascell fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, as a deputy for Georgian Dream, could set a valuable regional precedent.

“Since the collapse of the Soviet Union twenty-one years ago, the fifteen former Soviet Republics have followed mostly bumpy paths toward and away from democracy,” says Council on Foreign Relations analyst Anya Schmemann.

Georgians “stunned the world” by electing the opposition coalition and, despite serious challenges, “a peaceful and orderly transition would be an important success story in a region riven by conflict and authoritarianism,” she argues:

In the Caucasus, Georgia’s neighbors Armenia and Azerbaijan are embroiled in their own frozen conflict and are ruled by hardline leaders …In nearby Central Asia, the nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan are among the most autocratic in the world….To the north of Georgia, Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine have rolled back democracy…. Only the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have overcome the former Soviet curse and have successfully democratized as members of the EU and NATO.

“Given Georgia’s fractious history, its contested election and transfer of power are remarkable and hopeful,” says Schmemann, who was in Georgia during the 2008 war with Russia. “Close Western scrutiny of the election surely mattered, and the United States and others will now need to help both sides navigate the transition to ensure its success.”

Fears that Saakashvili’s defeat represents a victory for Russia are overstated, writes Marta Foresti, head of the Politics and Governance program at the UK’s Overseas Development Institute.

“Focusing too much on the role of Russia would underestimate how much this is actually a Georgian story,” she insists, as many comments posted on articles and blogs make clear.

Saakashvili’s authoritarian style helped create “a toxic political climate” that was only made worse by the 2008 war over the control of the Abkhazia and Ossetia regions.

“But opposition parties in Georgia were weak and governed more by the personality of their leaders than by any ideology or coherent policy plans,” she writes:

If [the election] paves the way to more open, balanced and sober political processes and dialogue, it will be to the credit of Georgians’ themselves, not the Kremlin or Capitol Hill. It would also mark a major step forward in Georgia’s democratic transition, and one that other countries in the region and beyond may wish to study. 

The poll was monitored by hundreds of international observers, including delegations from the National Democratic Institute and International Republican Institute, two of the National Endowment for Democracy’s core institutes.

A prevalent school of thought has held that as Internet access and use grows, the trajectory of freedom in unfree settings would improve, given these technologies’ unique traits of proliferation and diffusion, writes Christopher Walker.* In other words, unlike old media, authoritarian governments would be unable to manage the Internet’s rapid growth and its capacity to enable information sharing, coordination and mobilization.

Over the long haul (depending on how one defines “long haul”), digital media’s influence may still help achieve such positive goals in these repressive settings. What appears to be taking shape in the meantime, however, is the emergence of a growing number of cases in which Internet use is rising and reaching meaningful levels (say, a third or more of the population) but where repressive regimes are developing ways to effectively manage and limit the growth of Internet freedom. Access is growing but freedom is not, it seems.

Data from Freedom House’s just-released “Freedom on the Net” report tells the story.

China heads the list of countries with already high and growing Internet use. China also gets the most public attention for its focus on suppression of politically relevant content. But China’s case, given the country’s resources and the Chinese Communist Party’s forethought and commitment to managing the Internet, could be viewed as sui generis. But China is no longer an isolated case. Freedom House findings indicate that countries such as Belarus, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Vietnam are undergoing copious growth in Internet use but are either stuck in place or becoming less free in terms of Internet freedom. In these cases, the environment for Internet freedom is already assessed as Not Free.

Meanwhile, another subset of politically repressive regimes with partially free Internet environments that have growing levels of Internet use – Jordan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Azerbaijan, and, it is worth noting, Egypt – are moving in the direction of less Internet freedom.

If this trend holds, it suggests that undemocratic regimes whose systems feature large and growing online use are demonstrating the will and capacity to shrink the space for politically consequential use of the Internet. If it continues, it raises more questions for those who have seen the Internet and other digital technologies as the principal tool for bringing greater freedom to unfree societies. Activists continue to innovate and identify ways to defend Internet openness but the data from this report offers a cautionary note on the extent of the challenge.

In this respect, it is worth noting that the two countries that experienced the largest Internet freedom improvement in this year’s assessment are also those that underwent significant political openings: Tunisia and Burma. This is a reminder that achieving greater Internet freedom will be difficult to divorce from the realization of broader democratic change.

*Christopher Walker is executive director of the NED’s International Forum for Democratic Studies. He can be followed on Twitter at @Walker_CT.

The recent backlash against democracy assistance in Russia, Egypt and elsewhere “should prompt Americans to craft new strategies, rather than leading to a retreat,” says a Washington-based observer.

USAID’s expulsion from Russia is also a consequence of President Vladimir Putin’s conviction that the country is engaged in a war of ideas, resorting to Soviet-era propaganda “to suppress the modernized liberals of today,” a leading analyst writes from Moscow.

Presiding over a recent meeting on “patriotic education” in the southern region of Krasnodar, Putin “set the tone by saying that spiritual values, necessary to ‘consolidate the nation,’ were a highly contested realm, and a target of ‘information confrontation,’” writes Masha Lipman.

“This confrontation, he said, was ‘one of the forms of competitive struggle … just as the struggle for mineral resources.’”

The Kremlin’s line is echoed by a prominent pro-Putin commentator who highlights the national security background of certain USAID personnel to suggest that its programs were designed to undermine Russian stability and sovereignty.

Other states should follow Russia’s precedent, says Veronika Krasheninnikova, Director General of the Moscow-based Institute for Foreign Policy Research and Initiatives.

Russia’s closure of USAID operations is “an excellent example for any other country where USAID operatives still work on ‘winning hearts and minds’ of the local population.”

It is significant that the Kremlin backlash against democracy assistance directly preceded the anniversary of the Putin-Medvedev ‘job swap’ that sparked the last year’s emergence of a vibrant new opposition, observers suggest.

“There are no longer any checks and balances,” according to opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta. Russia is suffering from “governance paralysis” since former President Dmitri Medvedev no longer serves to constrain his mentor. By endorsing Putin’s return, the ruling elite made the “most erroneous choice of the past 15 years,” analyst Vladislav Inozemtsev wrote in the mass-circulation Moskovsky Komsomolets.

Russia, had “followed in the footsteps of Spain, Paraguay and the Philippines where only the death or deposition of a ruler would abruptly ‘break off’ a historic epoch.”

“Power is not just a certain person but a system, and right now we are watching how the system is destroying itself,” he said.

By expelling USAID, Putin “has effectively laid to rest the reset policy with the United States” and revealed the Kremlin’s strategic priorities, writes Konstantin von Eggert, a commentator and host at radio Kommersant FM. 

“Priority number one for Putin and his entourage is keeping his regime firmly in power and preventing development of the so-called Orange Scenario, along the lines of the peaceful 2004 revolution in Ukraine, which is widely perceived in Moscow to have been a Western plot to change the pro-Moscow regime there,” he argues. “If reaching this goal means giving the Americans (or the Europeans, for that matter) a little bit of a hard time, then so be it.”

Putin will also have been emboldened by the relatively muted response to USAID’s expulsion from Washington and the democratic West that may adversely affect the morale of Russian democrats, some observers contend.

“Western silence shows Russian civil society organizations that they cannot rely on Western support,” says Anna Borshchevskaya, an assistant director at the Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council, undermining faith in democratic values and traditions, and setting a precedent for other authoritarian regimes.

This represents a potential lost opportunity, she suggests, since the “sustained protests in Russia show that Russians themselves increasingly wish to see a democratic and peaceful Russia that respects its citizens.”

Washington is asking for a “dignified” end to USAID’s programs after the Russian authorities insisted on an Oct. 1 deadline. 

“We are in negotiations with the Russian government about the timing,” said Michael McFaul, the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow. “We would like to do this in an orderly and dignified way. We think it will take at least a year and by next summer we’ll be able to phase out all of our grants and all of our employees.”

McFaul’s insights in his earlier career as an academic help explain why USAID’s “has stunned aid workers, infuriated American diplomats and left many nonprofit groups on the brink of collapse,” the New York Times reports:

[USAID's eviction] .. marks the end of an extraordinary collaboration between the two former cold war enemies, one that was unimpeded, at least initially, by the suspicion that often shadows foreign aid, in part because such programs have historically in many places provided cover for intelligence activities.

“In the fall of 1991 and early in 1992, the door for Western engagement and influence in remaking the Russian economy and polity was wide open,” Michael A. McFaul, the American ambassador, and his co-author, James M. Goldgeier, wrote in “Power and Purpose,” a 2003 history of American policy after the cold war. “Issues of sovereignty that often emerge as major sources of tension between donors and recipients in other countries were simply not an issue.”

They are now.

USAID rejects claims that its operations were politically-driven or designed to foment regime change, and stresses that Russian citizens will be the principal casualties of the move.

“We have always been doing this from the American people to the Russian people,” said Paige Alexander, the agency’s assistant administrator for Europe and Eurasia. “And that’s who is losing out.”

The Kremlin’s claims were also undermined by revelations that United Russia, the pro-Putin ruling party, took part in USAID-funded programs of the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI).

The Kremlin’s attempt to portray both USAID’s programs and the recent upswing in anti-government protests as the result of Western meddling is not registering with Russian citizens, says a leading pollster.

“In the wake of the Russian presidential vote this past spring, a Pew Global Attitudes survey found that 58 percent of Russians believed the election protests were home-grown, rather than the result of Western governments attempting to destabilize Russia,” writes James Bell,  Pew’s director of international survey research, in a New York Times symposium, Should the U.S. Be a Political Player in Russia?:

Only 25 percent thought foreign powers were behind the protests. Moreover, 56 percent supported the protests for free elections, and fully 64 percent agreed that attending demonstrations gave people like themselves an opportunity to express their opinion……Despite his broad popularity, Putin’s publicized suspicions about Western intentions appear to have had little impact on Russian views of the United States. In the spring, 52 percent expressed a favorable opinion of America, essentially unchanged from the previous year. At the same time, though, Russians were very negative about political exports from the United States — just 26 percent said they liked American ideas about democracy.

The government’s attempt to portray the opposition as an instrument of foreign powers “points to a tragic flaw in the current regime,” says a prominent observer.

“Not only do the Kremlin’s policy makers see the world through siege-mentality, cold-war-era glasses, they are also very poorly informed,” writes Masha Gessen, the author of The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. “I was involved in the protest organizing efforts from December through June, and I can say with certainty that the bulk of the money came from private donors inside Russia — and many of those were members of Putin’s own elite.”

“No one has apparently reported to the top the simple truth that U.S. money has little or nothing to do with the protests while the very people on whom Putin relies for much of his authority have been secretly funding the demonstrations,” she writes in The New York Times symposium.

“Which is not to say that U.S. funding has nothing to do with the Russian opposition,” says Gessen, who writes for The Times’ Latitude blog:

One of the organizations that have relied on money from the Agency for International Development is Golos, one of two groups that played a key role in documenting the election fraud that inspired the protests. It stands to reason that it is easier to find private funding for street demonstrations that are immediate and visible than for long-term projects that involve sociological research and statistical analysis — which describes what Golos did. If the organization is unable to find funding to fill in the void left by the A.I.D.’s departure, this will not make the protest movement less numerous — but it will make it less informed.

The recent backlash against democracy assistance in Russia, Egypt and elsewhere “should prompt Americans to craft new strategies, rather than leading to a retreat,” writes Brian Katulis.

It is necessary to “adapt to the complexities of 21st-century geopolitics rather than using methods better suited for previous waves of democratic transitions,” says Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based center-left think-tank.

“The U.S. government’s overlapping bureaucracies working on democracy, governance and human rights are often too slow in response to fast moving transitions — and their efforts are sometimes not synchronized with the other parts of the U.S. government, including the Pentagon,” he argues:

U.S. diplomats and other government officials also need to eventually get out of the business of direct funding of these efforts and focus on what they do best — diplomacy. ….[T]he very visible direct U.S. funding of Egyptian civil society organizations created a nationalist backlash there this year — leading to court trials and unhinged conspiracy theories accusing civil society activists of being spies trying to undermine Egypt. To avoid this, it would be more effective to channel support through multilateral organizations and groups like the National Endowment for Democracy instead of direct U.S. government funding.

Finally, nongovernmental organizations need to step up their efforts to garner private donors and build stronger collaborative efforts with partners in these countries. These people-to-people networks can serve as shock absorbers during rocky periods of relations between governments. RTWT

USAID’s spending on democracy and governance programs in Russia increased from 41 percent of its budget in 2004 to 72 percent in 2007, even though there is “scant evidence that this promotes a viable civil society,” writes Nicolai N. Petro, a professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island.

“Analysts have observed that the typical N.G.O. rarely survives beyond the initial grant period, and throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics, direct foreign assistance had led to weaker ties between civic institutions and society and greater dependence on foreign support,” he argues:

In 2006 the Russian government moved to change this dynamic. That year it held the first national grant competition for N.G.O. projects and distributed $15 million. By 2011 more than $350 million annually was being disbursed for N.G.O. projects in fields as varied as the environment, historical and cultural preservation, welfare assistance, and human rights. This amount now dwarfs total U.S. government assistance to Russia.

Criticism that the Kremlin is primarily motivated to establish tame, regime-friendly GONGOs is “off the mark,” Petro asserts:

In a careful review of N.G.O. studies, Debra Javeline and Sarah Lindemann-Komarova show that there is little evidence of co-optation by the government — even anti-government N.G.O.s, like the Moscow Helsinki Group and the Committee of Soldier’s Mothers, can receive funding. They also found little substance to claims that the government limits what recipients can do with the money or that new legislation has intensified difficulties for N.G.O.s. Indeed, only 2.9 percent of N.G.O. leaders say that pressure from the government is the primary problem for their organization.

“Civil society can flourish only if it is domestically oriented, locally funded and motivated by patriotic sentiments. Dependence on foreign funding undermines each of these objectives,” he concludes. “Even worse, it isolates democracy advocates from their most important constituency, the citizens to whom they should be appealing for support.”

To the contrary, Katulis asserts, foreign-funded democracy assistance plays a valuable role in facilitating home-grown change.

“Investments in civil organizations can pay off substantially,” he writes. “A study examining 67 different political transitions over three decades found that nonviolent civic forces from inside countries produced the most pressure that led to sustainable democratic transitions.”

Closing USAID’s programs in Russia “may deal little more than a short-term setback, at least for the groups that have become political foes of the Kremlin; many of them have other sources of financing,” the Times reports.

“Some groups, including Golos, already receive American aid through channels other than the agency, including the National Endowment for Democracy, a private group that receives financing from Congress,” it notes.

Putin’s attempt to portray USAID’s ejection and the opposition movement’s emergence as manifestations of a new ideological Cold War have led him to rely on appeals to chauvinism and Soviet-style negativity towards Western liberalism, argues Lipman, an analyst with the Moscow-based Carnegie Center.  

“But when it comes to defining the positive, the Soviet experience is not much help. The very pillar of Soviet ideological righteousness—Marxism-Leninism—has been dead for a few decades,” she writes in The New Yorker:

So, while mixing in some things Soviet, Putin and his government tend to improvise and garnish them with other ingredients. The result is an ideological fusion, hardly functional and at times truly bizarre. At the meeting in Krasnodar, Putin called for “fully using the best experience of education and enlightenment that existed in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.” In fact, the very legitimacy of the Soviet Union was built on the annihilation of and subsequent incessant condemnation of Imperial Russia. But Putin appears determined to reconcile the ancien régime with its Bolshevik conqueror (or rather, the latter’s heirs of the nineteen-seventies) and use this tool to suppress the modernized liberals of today.

“Putin’s attempt to define post-Communist Russia’s set of values may be doomed; the ingredients he’s using are stale and discordant and will hardly work to consolidate his nation or help Russia’s development,” Lipman concludes.

“What it can do, however, is unleash all kinds of ugly forces who have their own ideas about patriotic duty.”

The Kremlin’s Americaphobia not only threatens to spark Russophobia in the West, but exposes the fact that Russia “has not yet dealt with adequately reinventing itself as a post-superpower,” says Richard Lourie,?author of?The Autobiography of?Joseph Stalin and?Sakharov: A?Biography.

“Still in flux,’ Russia has five different strategic “choices, possibilities or ways of being,’ he writes in the Moscow Times:

1. It could conceivably make an attempt to create a 21st century of tsarist or Soviet imperial might. It could seize control of Belarus, its Sudetenland. If it got away with that, it could set its sights on eastern and southern Ukraine, which are heavily Russian, then go on to ‘liberate” parts of northern Kazakhstan. This is exceedingly unlikely but not impossible.
2. It can throw in its lot with Europe and the United States in an alliance against China in the coming “resource wars.”
3. On the contrary, Russia could throw in its lot with China. Both countries suffer from a similar strain of Americaphobia, fearful of containment and contamination by nongovernmental organizations. The Chinese worry that radar installations in Japan to be deployed against a North Korean nuclear threat are actually directed against them. The Russians think the same about the anti-missile sites directed against Iran in Poland. Russia has the largest amount of fallow arable land in the world, and China has 1.3 billion people to feed. Agricultural cooperation has already begun in Russia’s under-populated eastern territories. ?
4. Russia can continue on the path of accelerated repression taken since Putin’s inauguration in May. This will result in alienation, brain drain and capital flight. That, coupled with a failure to diversify the economy, will lead to social collapse around the middle of the century, unless postponed by an Arctic oil bonanza.
5. The most hopeful possibility is that Russia will go its own way and find the strength within its rich and resilient culture to fashion a new society that is prosperous and more just and democratic. Some see the recent flurry of volunteer organizations as the first signs of Russia generating a civil society from the bottom up. A grassroots revival is especially important in a society that has known change only from the top down, from violent revolution or from the chaos that follows on collapse.

“Russia’s friends in the West — and it may have more that it sometimes thinks — must do what they can to prevent the Kremlin’s current paranoid style from producing negative foreign policy consequences in the real world,” Lourie concludes.

Regimes across the Eurasian land mass are using a regional grouping supposedly designed for security and economic cooperation to “reinforce” authoritarian rule and coordinate “repressive measures targeting civil society,” according to a new report.

Under the guise of fighting “terrorism, extremism and separatism,” the Shanghai Cooperation Organization has become a vehicle for undermining international standards of human rights and refugee law, says a report from the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH). Rights violations across within SCO member states “indicate a dangerous trend,” notes the 42-page report, produced in cooperation with regional rights groups.

The Al-Qaeda attacks on “9/11 gave the SCO further justification to reinforce authoritarian security policies, leading to repressive measures targeting civil society as well as the perpetration of serious human rights violations,” the report notes:

More than ten years on, human rights defenders from SCO member states have documented numerous serious human rights violations resulting from inter-state cooperation and the national implementation of agreements under the SCO’s security and political framework relating to the fight against the “three evils” of terrorism, extremism and separatism. Basic rights such as the rights to privacy, freedom of expression, freedom of peaceful assembly and association, freedom from torture and the duty of non-refoulment, are increasingly being violated. Meanwhile, victims lack adequate access to effective remedies at the national level. In this context of impunity, victims’ access to international and regional human rights mechanisms and remedies takes on additional significance.

The SCO comprises the People’s Republic of China, the Russian Federation and four Central Asian Republics (Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan). Ostensibly formed to enhance regional security and economic cooperation, it also claims to provide a legal and political framework to combat “terrorism, extremism and separatism”.

SCO member states are mostly authoritarian regimes that “tend to justify the repression of religious, political and human rights activists, as well as political opposition members and the representatives of some national minorities on grounds of national security and stability,” the report notes:

SCO governments often accuse these individuals or groups of extremism, bringing politically-motivated charges against them. “Extremism” is an ill-defined concept and is not an internationally recognized criminal offence. Indeed, the SCO security framework is implemented through national legislation without a common precise definition of terrorism. This results in laws and regulations that are overly broad and pliable to abuses by state officials.

“Human rights NGOs from SCO Member States have highlighted that the SCO framework has enabled Member States to challenge many provisions of international human rights and refugee law,’ the FIDH report states.

“There is little human rights analysis of the consequences of SCO agreements in Member States. The fact that the SCO’s working languages are Chinese and Russian, with not much publicly available documentation in English, makes it difficult for many human rights NGOs to access direct information on its working structure and normative framework.”

This lack of transparency facilitates the general perception that the organization focuses merely on military and economic cooperation, with little or no direct relevance to human rights in SCO Member States. Few human rights organizations within those states study the SCO’s influence on human rights as a whole. Instead, they usually address individual instances of rights violations against deportees, those subject to extradition, or those accused of involvement with terrorist acts or prohibited organizations. In addition, the human rights situation in all SCO Member States is generally characterized by high levels of repression against human rights defenders. This makes it very difficult for them to collect data on state responsibility for human right violations.  

The SCO has been described as “the most dangerous organization that the American people have never heard of,” an authoritarian international for Eurasia’s illiberal regimes, and “one of those international bodies whose proclaimed ideals conceal an often sordid reality.” Other observers have noted that Beijing is using the SCO to ensure that it gets “the thickest piece of cake given to the modern Chinese by the heavens,” granting $10 billion in loans to Central Asian states last year.

The SCO’s approach to counter-terrorism is modeled on China’s Three Evils doctrine for combating terrorism, extremism and separatism, even if, as one study notes, this has “too often acted as cover for suppression of ….legitimate opposition groups and the cutting-off of trans-regional ties between them.” The Beijing/SCO focus on territorial integrity, non-interference in internal affairs, and social stability “contributes to supporting repressive regimes at the expense of national, regional, and global human rights,” according to a recent whitepaper from Human Rights in China.

“The recent agreement in Beijing reflects the shared fear among SCO governments of the kind of popular uprisings still unfolding in the Middle East and North Africa, said Souhayr Belhassen, FIDH President. “The security doctrines of the SCO will add potency to the already expansive and unchecked state power that is often used and abused to criminalize dissent and human rights defenders”, she added.

FIDH and its member and partner organizations from SCO countries have made a number of recommendations to SCO member states. These include the following:

• Comply with obligations under international human rights law and international refugee law, and abide by the decisions of international human rights bodies.
• Develop and implement a SCO mechanism focused exclusively on human rights protection.
• Adopt transparent human rights principles and conduct regular assessments of the human rights consequences of the implementation of SCO principles and agreements by SCO member states.
• Abolish the death penalty.
• Involve civil society representatives, including human rights NGOs, in discussions and considerations regarding SCO member state cooperation.
• Invite the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism to conduct a country visit, and cooperate with him by implementing his recommendations, including those of his 2009 report.

RTWT

FIDH and Human Rights in China are grantees of the National Endowment for Democracy.