Laws on blasphemy and apostasy are being used to silence political dissent and suppress government critics, according to the U.S. State Department’s annual report, which documents a pronounced decline in religious liberty that has generated growing religious intolerance and sectarian violence.

“These laws are frequently used to repress dissent, to harass political opponents and to settle personal vendettas,” Secretary of State John Kerry said in comments introducing the report.

“When countries undermine or attack religious freedom, they not only unjustly threaten those whom they target; they also threaten their countries’ own stability, and we see that in so many places,” he said.  “Attacks on religious freedom are therefore both a moral and strategic national security concern for the United States.”

China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Central Asia’s authoritarian regimes are among the world’s most difficult places to worship freely, said the 2012 International Religious Freedom Report which also details  “a continued global increase in anti-Semitism.”

Positive developments were found in Turkey, said U.S. Ambassador-at-large Suzan Johnson Cook, citing relaxed restrictions on religious clothing, and in Vietnam, where the regime now allows religious meetings.

But Vietnam deserves a tougher assessment, said U.S. Rep. Ed Royce, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

“Religious freedom remains under attack in Vietnam,” he said, noting that “the Communist government has denied its people the most basic freedoms.”

The report echoes many of the findings of a recent report from the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.

“Extremists target religious minorities and dissenters from majority religious communities for violence, including physical assaults and even murder,” USCIRF chief Dr. Katrina Lantos Swett told a recent meeting at the National Endowment for Democracy (above). “Authoritarian governments also repress religious freedom through intricate webs of discriminatory rules, arbitrary requirements and draconian edicts.”

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.

For the Obama administration, “the costs of inaction have started to outweigh the costs of action”, says a leading analyst, warning that Syria’s civil war is “metastasizing” into a wider regional conflict.

“It is spreading to other states in the region”, says Michelle Dunne, Director of the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East.

A US military intervention to prevent the regime’s chemical weapons stocks falling into the hands of Al-Qaeda-linked jihadists is unrealistic, she believes.

“That would have to be done either by the Syrian rebels who are there on the ground, perhaps after the overthrow of the al-Assad regime, or by some fairly large-scale foreign intervention”, says Dunne, a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy. “So I think that the administration, the U.S. administration is now seeing that the costs of inaction have started to outweigh the costs of action.”

“The key would be to get the Syrians trained to use the weapons to defect to Nusra”, says Bruce Riedel, a terrorism expert with the Brookings Institution.

Geostrategic rivalry

The conflict has “not only spread into Syria’s neighbors, like Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Turkey — but has also become a battlefield wherein Israel and Iran are challenging each other”, writes Fawaz A. Gerges, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics where he directs the Middle East Centre. “There is also a fierce geostrategic rivalry unfolding in Syria between Sunni-dominant Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran, a rivalry invested and fuelled with sectarianism.”

The decision whether to provide lethal assistance to the Syrian opposition is unlikely to be linked to the recent Israeli airstrikes, says Steven Simon, a former senior official on Mr. Obama’s National Security Council. 

“The U.S. and Israel have overlapping but not identical interests at stake in the conflict”, he tells The New York Times.

“On chemical weapons, assuming that the regime did use them, the U.S. is looking for options to deter further use that don’t undercut — or, in the best case — don’t foreclose a political resolution”, said Simon, who heads the Washington office of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “It’s not clear that arming the opposition meets either objective.”

The Israeli air strikes complicate President Obama’s efforts “to coordinate the response to the Syrian conflict among several players, including Europeans, Turkey and Arab states from Jordan to Saudi Arabia, the Times’ Mark Landler and Eric Schmitt write.

“The Israelis’ being assertive, while Obama is not, doesn’t play in his favor”, said Andrew J. Tabler, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy. “You need to have the Arabs onside.”

Mr. Tabler said Ms. Del Ponte’s charge that the rebels might have used chemical weapons raised questions about the unity of the United Nations in dealing with Syria.

“It struck me as political”, he said. “They’re trying to blur the situation to stave off some kind of intervention.”

The administration is preoccupied with “the alarming prospect that radical Islamists could acquire Syrian chemical weapons and try to use them beyond Syria’s borders, perhaps even within the United States.” writes Time magazine’s Michael Crowley:

Syria is believed to have tons of chemical weapons, including the nerve agents sarin and VX, as well as cyanide and mustard gas, which are stored at as many as 20 different sites around the country. The good news is that those sites are some of the most secure in the country.

“You’ve seen the regime consolidating forces around these facilities”, says Elizabeth O’Bagy, a Syria analyst at the Institute for the Study of War.

“I think we should be worried”, says Jeffrey White, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former military intelligence officer. “As the war progresses and the rebels gain territory, assuming they do, inevitably they’re going to close in on some of the regime’s chemical facilities.”

‘No negotiated settlement’

More than two years after the conflict began, “there does not seem to be a military solution”, says the LSE’s Gerges.  “It is a long war of attrition with no end in sight. Neither internal camp seems to have the means to deliver a decisive blow.”

“Only a political solution will put an end to the shedding of Syrian blood and prevent the unthinkable: a region-wide conflict that would have catastrophic consequences”, he contends.

That will never happen, says a prominent regional analyst.

“There’s not going to be a negotiated settlement”, argues Rami Khouri, director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut.

‘Existential battle’

The conflict is the “mother of all proxy wars…. the biggest proxy war over the last century in the entire world”, he believes:

You’ve got every single major player in the region – Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel, Jordan. All of the players in the Middle East are involved in this directly or indirectly. You’ve got the two greats – biggest powers, the Russians and the Americans and then the Chinese in a more quiet way. And you have these lingering Cold War – regional Cold War issues of Saudis versus monarchists, conservative monarchists versus nationalist republics…..You’ve got Iranians versus Arabs, Shiites versus Sunnis. Now, you’ve got Kurd versus everybody else.

“I don’t think it’s going to happen where there will be stabilization, where they’ll eventually agree on how to resolve this through a negotiated transition to a new government”, he tells NPR:

Proxy wars end usually by one side beating up the other, as happened in Vietnam and other places. So I think this is an existential battle. The Iranians and Hezbollah has a lot to lose if Syria falls. They’re going to put everything they can into this. The Saudis and others on the other side, the Turks, they’re all doing what they can. The Israelis are now getting involved. So this is a bunch of gladiators now, and some of them are going to win, and some of them are going to die.

His sentiments are partly echoed by Tabler, author of “In the Lion’s Den: An Eyewitness Account of Washington’s Battle with Syria.”

“Where you have the Syrian regime trying to shoot the Syrian opposition into submission, over 76,000 killed, I believe, or thereabout…. When you start launching SCUD missiles on your largest city, Aleppo, it’s hard to know how politically you come back from that”, he says.

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.

“His bookshelves are filled with the collected works of Marx, Engels and Ho Chi Minh, the hallmarks of a loyal career in the Communist Party, but Nguyen Phuoc Tuong, 77, says he is no longer a believer,” The New York Times’ Thomas Fuller reports from Ho Chi Minh City:

A former adviser to two prime ministers, Mr. Tuong, like so many people in Vietnam today, is speaking out forcefully against the government.

“Our system now is the totalitarian rule of one party,” he said in an interview at his apartment on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City. “I come from within the system — I understand all its flaws, all its shortcomings, all its degradation,” he said. “If the system is not fixed, it will collapse on its own.”

Fear of such a collapse is one reason why the ruling Communist authorities have imprisoned at least 40 dissidents so far this year, matching the 2012 total, Human Rights Watch’s Asia advocacy director John Sifton told a recent Congressional hearing.

“The fact is that a growing number of dissidents—including religious leaders, bloggers, and politically active people—are being convicted and sent to jail for violations of Vietnam’s authoritarian penal code,” he said.

The US needs to raise such cases “assertively” with Hanoi, said Vo Van Ai, international spokesman for the church and president of the Paris-based Vietnam Committee on Human Rights.

Addressing the hearing, he called on Congress and the State Department “to look behind Hanoi’s mask, beyond the veneer of state-sponsored freedom of worship, and recognize the full extent of religious repression.”

The latest crackdown on dissidents indicated that the Communist authorities are especially anxious to prevent the politicization of recent rural protests that could arise from an alliance with largely urban-based dissidents such as Buddhist youth leader Le Cong Cau or human rights activist Le Quoc Quan (right).

“Since unifying the country 38 years ago, the Communist Party has been tested by conflicts with China and Cambodia, financial crises and internal rifts” Fuller notes:

The difference today, according to Carlyle A. Thayer, one of the leading foreign scholars of Vietnam, is that criticism of the leadership “has exploded across the society.”

In an otherwise authoritarian environment, divisions in the party have actually helped encourage free speech because factions are eager to tarnish one another, Dr. Thayer said.

“There’s a contradiction in Vietnam,” he said. “Dissent is flourishing, but at the same time, so is repression.”

RTWT

Vo Van Ai, second left, addresses a Congressional hearing on Vietnam’s rights violations. (Photo credit: RFA)

The European Union has a real opportunity to pressure Vietnam’s leaderson human rights, say activists, when the European Parliament discusses the Communist authorities’ rights violations on April 18. The United States this week expressed concern after Vietnamese officials barred two activists from meeting a US representative in Hanoi for talks on human rights.

US officials had invited pro-democracy campaigner Pham Hong Son and human rights lawyer Nguyen Van Dai, both former political prisoners, to talks with State Department official Dan Baer.

But Baer was able to meet in prison with one of Vietnam’s most prominent dissidents, the outspoken Catholic priest Nguyen Van Ly, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell told reporters.

The Communist authorities are also stepping up intimidation of the Unified Buddhist Church, which was outlawed in the early 1980s for refusing to join the state-sanctioned Vietnam Buddhist Church, a US Congressional hearing (above) was told last week.

The US needs to raise such cases “assertively” with Hanoi, said Vo Van Ai, international spokesman for the church and president of the Paris-based Vietnam Committee on Human Rights.

“I call upon Congress and the State Department to look behind Hanoi’s mask, beyond the veneer of state-sponsored freedom of worship, and recognize the full extent of religious repression,” he told the hearing in the U.S. Congress on “Highlighting Vietnamese Government Human Rights Violations in Advance of the U.S.-Vietnam Dialogue.”

Other witnesses testified on issues of human trafficking and abuses against Christian Montagnards, Catholics and other religious communities.

Vietnam has imprisoned at least 40 dissidents so far this year, matching the 2012 total, Human Rights Watch’s Asia advocacy director John Sifton told the hearing.

“The fact is that a growing number of dissidents—including religious leaders, bloggers, and politically active people—are being convicted and sent to jail for violations of Vietnam’s authoritarian penal code,” he said.

The latest crackdown on dissidents indicated that the Communist authorities are especially anxious to prevent the politicization of recent rural protests that could arise from an alliance with largely urban-based dissidents such as Buddhist youth leader Le Cong Cau (below) or human rights activist Le Quoc Quan (right).

Front Line Defenders reports that on 24 April 2013, the appeal trial of Messrs Ho Duc Hoa, Thai Van Dung, Paulus Le Son, Nguyen Xuan Anh, Tran Minh Nhat, Nguyen Dinh Cuong, Ho Van Oanh and Nguyen Van Duyet will start in Vinh city, in the province of Nghe An on the north central Vietnamese coast. The human rights defenders are part of a larger group of seventeen human rights defenders who were arrested between 30 July and 16 August 2011.

In a further blow to dissident voices, the anti-censorship NGO Article 19 warns that proposed amendments to the 1992 Constitution for the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (Draft Constitution) fail to protect fundamental human rights, in particular the right to freedom of expression and information.

Freedom of expression will be at the top of the agenda on Thursday, April 18, when the European Parliament discusses Vietnam’s human rights in a plenary session, writes Bob Dietz, Asia Program Coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Over the weekend, CPJ’s Brussels-based Senior Adviser Jean-Paul Marthoz blogged about the issues the parliament must confront in Le Soir [citing Democracy Digest coverage of the issue]:

Marthoz argues that because Vietnam has met with economic success and because its prolonged fight for independence drew international empathy, the country’s human rights policies have not been subject to appropriate criticism and scrutiny from European Union members.

He frequently cites Shawn Crispin’s September 2012 special report for CPJ, “Vietnam’s press freedom shrinks despite open economy.” Crispin has been writing consistently on Vietnam (and the rest of Southeast Asia) for almost a decade for CPJ. His most recent work includes a chapterin the 2013 edition of Attacks on the Press focused on Internet censorship in three Asia countries, particularly Vietnam, and news alerts on the case of Le Anh Hung as well as on the harsh sentencing in January of five bloggers.

The European Parliament has a real opportunity to pressure Vietnam’s leaders into stepping back from their harsh anti-media stance–one that has hardened since 2009, Crispin says. Like China, Vietnam in its drive to modernize has invested heavily in developing its digital communications network. Yet CPJ ranked Vietnam as the 6th worst place to be a blogger in 2009.

The Vietnam Committee on Human Rights is supported by the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group

“Why would Cuban security agents choose to kill the island’s leading dissident while he was in the company of two Europeans who might bear witness to the crime?” asks The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt:

To outside observers, it’s an intriguing mystery. For those directly affected, even to ask the question is, in some sense, to surrender to the malign influence of authoritarian control. That was one message this week from two inspiring young women, daughters of courageous democracy activists from opposite sides of the world, who happened to be in Washington at the same time.

“I’m not so anxious to understand the perverse logic of repression,” Rosa Maria Payá, 24, (above, with her father) replied when I asked why agents might have targeted her father that way.

“I don’t think there is a reason to kill anyone,” she added. “And I shouldn’t have to be having to answer that. This is a question to put to the people who threatened his life on a daily basis,” she told a forum at the National Endowment for Democracy.

Her “quiet dignity … was unmistakable as she asked the international community to pressure Cuba’s government into allowing a plebiscite on democracy and for an investigation into the murder of her father,” writes The Heritage Foundation’s Mike Gonzalez. “Her poise also offered a sharp contrast to the spectacle unfolding in her country with a visit there by celebrity Beyonce and rapper Jay-Z.”

Payá told the NED forum that she decided to call for the inquiry after the vehicle’s driver revealed to the Washington Post that it was rammed from behind by a car bearing official license plates.

“Violence, censorship and imprisonment are the obvious weapons of dictators, from Cuba to China. But the tools of repression also include caprice,” Hiatt writes:

If no one can be sure who will be targeted and who will not — when rule by whim replaces rule of law — then everyone must live in fear.

That is the dictator’s hope. Payá and Ti-Anna Wang, 23, decline to play along.

Wang’s father, Wang Bingzhang (right), is a democracy activist who was living in exile in North America 11 years ago when he traveled to Vietnam for a meeting with Chinese labor activists. He was kidnapped, bundled across the Chinese border, held incommunicado for six months and then, after a closed one-day trial, sentenced to life in prison on spurious charges of terrorism.

Why was Wang targeted and not other exile leaders? For that matter, why has his daughter not been granted a visa to visit her father for the past four years? Each application has been denied — without explanation. Ti-Anna Wang said she refuses to waste time speculating on motivation.

“The arbitrariness is designed to break your spirit,” she said. “We really can’t dwell on wondering why they do what they do, or fear what they might do, because those thoughts are crippling.”

Leaving aside Pyongyang’s current rhetorical bluster, there are four likely scenarios that might trigger a dramatic crisis on the Korean peninsula, writes North Korea expert Andrei Lankov:

The first is an attempt at reforms more or less similar to those undertaken in China and Vietnam. New leaders — including, above all, Kim Jong Un himself — might be seduced by the prospect of opening up the economy, hoping to enrich themselves as Chinese party cadres have. They would thus ensure their own downfall, as increasingly dissatisfied citizens pushed to reunify with the much richer South.

Another possible trigger of unrest would be serious factional infighting within the top leadership — a purge of prominent officials, for instance, or an attempted coup. Alternatively, the loser in a factional clash might decide to go down fighting.

The third possible endgame involves a spontaneous outbreak of popular discontent — a local riot that quickly develops into a nationwide revolutionary movement, somewhat similar to what we saw in 2011 in the Arab world. Nowadays, North Koreans appear to be too terrified, isolated and distrustful of one another to emulate the Tunisians or Egyptians. Nonetheless, the regime’s control is steadily getting weaker, fear is diminishing, and the knowledge of available alternatives is spreading. So in the long run, a “Pyongyang Spring” isn’t impossible.

The fourth scenario would involve the spread of unrest from China — the only country where an outbreak of civilian disobedience or a riot might produce some impact on North Korea.

North Korea has been described as a totalitarian residue of the Cold War, but its own ‘1989’ is far from imminent, most analysts believe.

There is little prospect of regime change driven by domestic discontent, a recent forum at the National Endowment for Democracy heard.

“Pyongyang is often described as the world’s last Stalinist regime, but for all practical purposes, North Korea’s state-run economy of steel mills and coal mines is dead,” Lankov told the NED meeting. The ruling elites feel cornered and understand that unity is a major condition for their survival…[and therefore] “continue to support their leader with little regard for the plight of most North Koreans.”

The NED’s Carl Gershman echoed Lankov’s assertion that “open engagement with the world would expose North Koreans to the modern world and would therefore have the salutary effect of breaking down the isolation that is an integral dimension of the North Korean totalitarian system.”

In the absence of a fundamental regime change, “the emergence of a pro-Chinese satellite regime in North Korea would be better than indefinite continuation of the status quo,” says Lankov, a professor of history at Seoul’s Kookmin University, and the author of “North of the DMZ: Essays on Daily Life in North Korea” and “From Stalin to Kim Il Sung: The Formation of North Korea, 1945-1960”.

“But a unification of the Koreas is still the most preferable outcome,” so officials in Washington and Seoul should consider how to persuade Beijing that “a unified Korea is less unacceptable than an intervention,” Lankov writes:

First of all, the Chinese government should be assured that a unified Korea will not become a strategic bridgehead for U.S. military influence in continental Northeast Asia.

Secondly, South Korea’s recurrent support of irredentism in northeastern China and semi-official claims about alleged Korean territorial rights to large chunks of China are counterproductive. They strengthen suspicions that a unified Korea would strive to seed discontent in borderland areas of the mainland itself. The South Korean government should explicitly state that a unified Korea will respect earlier agreements pertaining to Sino-Korean borders.

Since the North Korean population can no longer be kept completely insulated from outside information, the country’s leaders have changed their propaganda tactics.

“Until 2000, the people believed that South Korea was a very poor country,” a refugee reportedly told Lankov. “But then the people saw South Korean films. Now only elementary school students believe that South Korea is poor.”

But Lankov is skeptical as to whether new information will destabilize the regime  or even spark a revolution.

“The spread of knowledge about the outside world will make the North Koreans more distrustful of their government. But that doesn’t mean immediate action against the government.”

On the other hand, he adds: “In 5 to 10 years, the majority of the North Korean population will have learned that they live in a very poor and unusually repressive state.”

“Alas, the widespread hope that reformist groups in Pyongyang will finally emerge and bring about a nonnuclear, non- threatening, and peacefully developing North Korea seems to be wishful thinking,” Lankov writes in an excerpt from his new book, “The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia,” published May 8 by Oxford University Press.

“At the same time, the status quo isn’t sustainable. Sooner or later the current regime will go down. Now is the time for the world to start planning for that moment,” he concludes.

Credit: The Economist

Last December, U.N. member states at the World Conference on International Telecommunications approved a treaty that may open the door to an international organization regulating the Internet. The question of oversight of the Internet is increasingly important. More centralized approaches may provide greater legitimacy for countries like China and Iran to tightly control the flow of information online.

“In Russia, Nigeria, Vietnam and elsewhere the government is paying people to blog and comment in support of government priorities, a tactic China started in 2005 with its “50-Cent Party” of web commentators for hire,” The Economist reports:

Belarus, Ethiopia, Iran and many others are believed to use “deep packet inspection” to look into internet users’ communications for subversive content, aided by hardware from, among others, China’s Huawei and ZTE. Obligingly, internet users who know they are being watched are more likely to exercise self-censorship in the first place…..In addition some authoritarian states selectively block access to foreign websites that carry politically sensitive content, along with shutting down or harassing domestic opposition websites.

A week before World Press Freedom Day, the Center for International Media Assistance at the National Endowment for Democracy and the National Press Club’s Press Freedom Committee will jointly present an in-depth discussion of Internet freedom.

How do the complex power dynamics among governments, corporations and citizens affect online freedom of expression? What is at stake for journalists and media freedom advocates?

April 24 – 9:30-11am. Venue: National Press Club, at 529 14th Street, N.W., 13th floor.

The event is free but space is limited. Register here.

The panel will be moderated by Marguerite Sullivan [right], senior director for the Center for International Media Assistance at the National Endowment for Democracy. The panel features Laura DeNardis, an associate professor in the School of Communication at American University; Ross LaJeunesse, the global head of free expression and international relations at Google; Katherine Maher, director of strategy and communications for Access Now, an organization that advocates for digital freedom; Christopher Painter, the coordinator for cyber issues at the U.S. Department of State; and Carolina Rossini, a Brazilian attorney with expertise in intellectual property, internet governance and law and open innovation strategies, a fellow at the Group for Public Policies on Access to Information at University of São Paulo.

The Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) at the National Endowment for Democracy works to strengthen the support, raise the visibility and improve the effectiveness of independent media development throughout the world. Follow the event @CIMA_Media on Twitter: #cimaevents

“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.