Government control of key media outlets and interference in editorial decisions is diluting Georgian journalism’s democratic function, observers suggest. Democracy cannot exist without the kind of scrutiny and accountability that independent investigative journalism provides, says Sozar Subari, Georgia’s ombudsman for human rights.
President Mikheil Saakashvili’s government has come under fire for its opaque decision-making. Even after the recent government reshuffle, an event conspicuously under-reported on state media, “power is still confined to a small, closed circle,” notes an RFE-RL report.
“Praising your own team instead of holding them responsible is a long way from seeking to establish the truth,” it continues. “The media response — to omit from the main news programs one of the day’s most important developments — is tantamount to riding roughshod over the facts.”
“The reality is that the Saakashvili government is the fourth one-party state that Georgia has had during the last 20 years, going back to the Soviet period,” said Lincoln A. Mitchell, formerly with the National Democratic Institute. “And nowhere has this been more apparent than in the restrictions on media freedom.”
Journalistic TV investigations were one of the catalysts of the Rose Revolution. Investigative television programs are as necessary as news programs, says Vakho Komakhidze, a journalist and founder of the Reporter studio, financed by the National Endowment for Democracy.
“The focus of discussion on media in Georgia should not be what government channels will or will not broadcast but whether private ownership of national TV stations will be transparent and independent,” says Miriam Lanskoy, NED’s Senior Program Officer for Central Asia and the Caucasus. She cites two current cases in Georgian courts where former station owners allege that they were coerced by government agents to give up shares.
Saakashvili’s New Year resolution should perhaps be to curb his erratic behavior and focus on democratic reform. “The advice of people like me is: To whatever degree possible, forget about the Russians,” said Ronald D. Asmus, executive director of the Transatlantic Center at the German Marshall Fund. “Accelerate reform and regain the moral high ground you had, and lost.”
But his commitment to democratic institutions seems wobbly, judging by his recent record and comments. “If I had been in the opposition, I would have destroyed this government in three months,” especially given the economic crisis, he told the New York Times. “I know how to do it,” he said, “but I don’t want to teach them how to do it.”
Following Georgia’s 2003 Rose Revolution, Saakashvili took advantage of enhanced state capacity to promote economic development and counter-corruption initiatives. But the “laudable achievements of Saakashvili’s state-building program have come at the high price of a superpresidential political system,”, according to Lanskoy, and Giorgi Areshidze, director of the Partnership for Social Initiatives (PSI), a Tbilisi-based NGO, write in the Journal of Democracy.
Former NDI staffer Mitchell detects two competing personalities at work. “I’ve seen him do things right out of Giuliani’s playbook, and I’ve seen him do things that are right out of Putin’s,” he told the New Yorker.
Others suggest time is running out for him to recapture his credibility. “What is the future for Saakashvili?” said Sozar Subari, a longtime critic of the president. “He started the war, he lost the war, he lost the territories. There is a crisis. There is no investment in Georgia. The situation is getting worse and worse. If there is no change, he will leave Georgia as the president who lost everything.”
Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev yesterday signed a law extending presidential terms from four years to six, apparently expediting Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency. The move fed speculation that Putin, eager to act before the financial crisis further erodes his popularity, is unlikely to wait until scheduled elections in 2012 to return to the office.
The Kremlin acted unusually quickly, pushing the amendment through both houses of the Duma and all of the nation’s 83 regional assemblies in less than 50 days. The liberal Yabloko party objected, highlighting a clause in the 1998 law which requires that regions be given a year to consider proposed constitutional amendments.
“They’re completely ignoring the law,” said Sergei Mitrokhin, Yabloko’s chairman. “Unfortunately, this happens quite often, but this is the first time the process has been ignored for such a significant issue as a constitutional amendment.”
The amendment coincides with another proposal to expand the definition of treason, a move that democrats fear “could mean a return to Soviet-style prosecutions of government critics as traitors, making crimes even of conversations with foreign reporters and nongovernmental organizations.”
Activists and lawyers suggest that the law is being pushed through in anticipation of increased political dissent and social unrest prompted by the financial crisis and the Kremlin’s economic mismanagement.
The financial crisis is testing the viability of the Putin-Medvedev “tandemocracy,” notes one observer. “The two centers of power promised a gradual evolution of Russia’s political system toward more pluralism and public accountability,” Vladimir Frolov writes in the Moscow Times. But Medvedev’s modernization agenda has given way to crisis management and Putin’s White House is “the political center of gravity.”
The declining price of oil - from $140-plus to $40 a barrel - is hurting authoritarian “petrocrats” like Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Hugo Chavez as well as Putin. The Wall Street Journal suggests that the Russian premier is particularly vulnerable, noting that the authorities have banned state media from using the word “crisis,” although the Public Opinion Foundation reports that 42% of Russians believe the country is in one.
The closure of political space and emasculation of democratic institutions may backfire against the regime as discontented citizens take to the streets:
As the state is unable to tolerate or channel public anger into democratic debate, hostility can erupt in unpredictable ways. Earlier this month, some 30 Russian cities held demonstrations against a high new tariff on imported second-hand cars. … Riot police were sent from Moscow 3,750 miles east to Vladivostok, the epicenter of the movement. So far, the anti-tariff demonstrations aren’t overtly political, but the Kremlin seems to believe that can change and isn’t taking chances.
Robert Amsterdam’s blog features a rare document of dissent from within the security services, highlighting a posting on the Interior Ministry’s website from a disaffected police officer:
The power knows that actions of people’s protest are possible, and that the consequences could be unpredictable. A question. On whom is the power relying? Who can save it from the people’s wrath? Who will help hold on to what has been pillaged? That would be you and me, colleagues. The Russian police. We are going to disperse the protesters, like we did on 1 May of 1993 and in October of that same year, like we dispersed the Russian March in 2008. So, in everything that has taken place with our Motherland since the year 1993, there is our guilt…. A question. Are we going to be the dogs-on-a-chain of this regime?
As RFE/RL’s excellent Power Vertical notes, the posting has since been removed and replaced with a message apologizing for the “inconvenience.”
Using international leverage to arrest Nicaragua’s downward spiral toward authoritarian rule could prevent President Daniel Ortega from “morphing” into another Robert Mugabe, argues Kevin Casas-Zamora, senior fellow in foreign policy at Washington’s Brookings Institution.
Ortega’s Sandinista movement has reacted violently to the alleged rigging of last month’s elections, cancelling the registration of two opposition parties, and harassing its critics - including former Sandinista poet Ernesto Cardenal - as well as domestic and international civil society groups.
“Our democracy is in grave danger,” said Carlos Tunnermann, a former Sandinista ambassador. “There are dictatorial tendencies taking away Nicaraguans’ right to choose.”
As the largest bilateral provider of aid, the U.S. should follow the lead of European states, and reconsider cooperation links with the Ortega regime, Casas-Zamora argues, “prudently, but firmly” using as leverage the $175 million five-year Millennium Challenge agreement signed in 2005.
With the lowest approval rating of all six Central American heads of state at just 22 percent, Ortega has been courting unsavory international allies, including Iran and Libya. “Ortega has become a deeply unpopular president after a series of scandals,” the U.S.-based Stratfor consulting firm notes. “Making grand gestures in the international system is one way for Ortega to step into the spotlight and perhaps attract an international sponsor.”
Demonstrations against Egypt's authoritarian government are unlikely to spark regime change, a new study suggests (Credit: globalvoicesonline)
Egypt’s political evolution will “shape the timing, character, and success of democratization throughout the Arab world”, claims a new study. The country provides a particularly insightful case for understanding regional prospects for democracy, writes Bruce Rutherford, because of the relatively open and historically rooted rivalry between the “liberal, Islamic, and statist conceptions of political order that compete for preeminence in the Arab world.”
The current regime exhibits a growing contradiction: on one hand, it is a “classic example of stable authoritarianism“, controlling much of the media and political life, while suppressing opponents with legal and extra-legal instruments and monitoring and manipulating political parties and civil society groups; on the other hand, a vibrant judiciary, an assertive Judges’ Club, and a large and well-organized Islamist opposition are poised to take advantage of “a fundamental change in the character of Egyptian politics since the early 1990s”, namely the declining legitimacy and sustainability of the Nasserite statist order.
Egypt typifies the dilemma facing many of the region’s regimes, namely that a consequence of economic restructuring is that “the massive welfare states that enhanced regime legitimacy in many countries have proven financially unsustainable.” The region’s autocratic institutions are not threatened by color revolution-style transitions even if “the tools of centralized state power are gradually eroding,” Rutherford contends. The result is a hybrid regime that combines autocratic elements - a powerful and largely unchecked executive - and democratic institutions that constrain the state and increase accountability.
He notes the role played by the democracy assistance and human rights community in supporting indigenous demands for democratic reform:
These measures were reinforced by a growing network of transnational civil society groups that promoted democracy and human rights. These organizations included human rights groups, international party foundations, and media advocacy groups. They drew international attention to human rights abuses and lobbied Western governments to monitor and punish autocratic regimes. Some of the groups also sought to protect and strengthen pro-democracy forces through lobbying, funding, and training. In addition, international election observers became an important force for identifying and documenting electoral fraud. Their efforts led to substantial improvements in the fairness and transparency of elections.
Despite the challenges to the regime, Rutherford concludes, Egypt is “likely to remain a hybrid regime that contains some legal and institutional constraints on executive power, but which falls short of Western norms of democracy.”
While the European Union’s gravity model has been an incredibly successful engine of democratization within its borders, the EU is doing a poor job promoting democracy in its near neighborhood, a new report concludes. “Overall trends have been disappointing in most cases,” according to a report from FRIDE’s Richard Youngs.
“Democracy and human rights assistance remains extremely limited, although increased amounts have been allocated for broader governance reform,” Youngs notes. EU support through the European Neighbourhood Partnership “remains heavily state-centered” and even where it has supported media, civil society and opposition figures - as in Belarus - the aid has been has been small scale.
In Morocco, only 4 per cent of ENP funds go towards democracy and human rights, in Lebanon the focus is “overwhelmingly” on economic governance and capacity-building for state institutions, while EU assistance to Jordan stresses economic and poverty alleviation at the expense of public administration reform.
In the EU’s North African periphery, Moroccan modernization has failed to generate democratization; Jordan “remains essentially a ‘security state’”, having curtailed the countervailing powers of parliament, parties, the judiciary and civil society, and NGOs; while
Lebanese stability and confessional power-sharing have been secured at the cost of postponing essential democratic reforms.
To the EU’s east, Ukraine has failed to embed robust democratic institutions and culture; Azerbaijan continues to manipulate elections and restrict the opposition and civil society, although intra-regime divisions hint at prospects for future reform; and in Belarus, the release of political prisoners has yet to lead to meaningful political liberalization.
“The general trend has been towards increasing the share of aid given for direct budgetary support (that is, flowing directly into governments’ coffers) rather than investing significantly in democracy support,” the report states, concluding pessimistically:
In sum, our case studies do much to confirm a relatively pessimistic view of democracy
policies within the EU’s Neighbourhood. Democracy-related challenges are getting harder and political reform processes continue to disappoint despite partner countries having now been in structured partnership with the Union for many years. Within the EU there is an apparent absence of political will fundamentally to revise approaches to democracy support, even if the shortcomings of these policies have been apparent for some time.
A wave of strikes and protests by China’s upwardly mobile working class - factory workers, cab drivers, teachers, and even police officers - is causing concern within the ruling elite, prompting a clampdown on political dissent. Leading dissidents were detained last week after signing Charter 08 calling for greater democracy, an initiative which led President Hu Jintao to reiterate that China “will never copy the model of the Western political system.”
While officially committed to building a “harmonious society” and “putting people first”, China’s leaders have reason to be cautious about a citizen backlash to restructuring, notes The Economist. It quotes the China Labour Bulletin’s recent joint-report with Canada’s Rights and Democracy that millions of laid-off workers have been left near-destitute due to corruption and poor policy.
The ruling Communist party has long feared the rise of an independent labor movement, proscribing unofficial unions and arresting labor rights advocates. With the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations approaching, the regime is also wary of workers and other social protest groups linking up with unemployed graduates to create the kind of alliance that was crushed by the subsequent massacre.
Having recently conceded the legal right to collective bargaining, some observers believe the party will now be pushed to legalize strikes. “It’s increasingly untenable to view strikes as unacceptable, there are simply too many of them and they are everywhere now,” Robin Munro, China Labour Bulletin’s research director. “They’re happening whether they’re legal or not.”
Reducing unemployment among university graduates will be the government’s main priority next year, prime minister Wen Jiabao said at the weekend. “The creation of a huge population of educated unemployed is worrying for the ruling Communist party, which is keenly aware of the historic role disgruntled students have played in inciting rebellion,” the Financial Times reports, noting that “Mao Zedong, who led the Communists to victory in 1949, was himself an educated son of a rich peasant who had his scholarly ambitions thwarted.”
The regime has been eager to claim credit for China’s dramatic economic growth, basing its legitimacy on performance - its ability to deliver jobs and rising living standards - rather than ideology. But that means that citizens are also blaming the government for the current economic downturn and resulting job losses.
“Government leaders portray themselves as the answer to every problem, expressing their willingness to use public resources to help those left behind by the new prosperity, rather than counting on new businesses to create jobs,” notes one observer, highlighting an ideological shift back toward statism.
The Communist party is “struggling to contain economic fallout,” suggests another observer. “They are all too aware that without the promise of wealth, or if that promise crumbles, then their claims to legitimacy crumble as well.”
The regime’s ideological statism and suspicion of independent organizations means that China’s civil society remains small and unable to act as a shock-absorber - delivering services and providing a channel for peaceful protest - as it does in free societies.
Because an NGO is “essentially an assembly that is capable of collective action and powerfully challenging the government politically,” notes Beijing scholar Kang Xiaoguang, the government has been wary, tolerating social service NGOs addressing issues like poverty alleviation, but keeping any remotely political NGOs under tight control.
The government’s strategy has shifted from across-the-board banning of independent groups to one of “control by categories,” notes Kang, cited by the must-read China Digital Times. Many NGOs have become GONGOs as a result of “elite-ification” - with Chinese retired officials and elite offspring taking key jobs - while many other NGOs have been limited by size. The regime tolerates local NGOs but is wary of national-scale independent groups. It is as if a “high-voltage power line” was suspended above them, he writes.
Venezuela may be forced to cut government spending next year after oil prices fell by more than 70 percent, Finance Minister Ali Rodriguez has admitted. After recent electoral setbacks, the Chavista parliament approved a 2009 budget that includes a 22 percent spending increase, and the government will delay any cut until after the proposed referendum on President Hugo Chavez’s controversial constitutional amendment proposals.
After ten years in power, declining oil revenues are undermining Chavez’s efforts to spread his Bolivarian revolution. By some accounts, the Financial Times reports, Venezuela has “either spent or committed itself to spending over $30bn on supporting like-minded governments in the region, either through direct payments, cheap oil financing, buying up debt, or the construction of oil refineries, most of which are still at the planning stage.”
“Chávez wants to be the leader of an important international anti-imperialist alliance,” says Demetrio Boersner, a former Venezuelan diplomat. “But because of the economic difficulties he faces, those hopes are going to collapse.”
The regime and its supporters realize that significant gains in state and local elections were a real political watershed for the opposition, providing “something of an institutional power base” to its hitherto fractious and fragmented forces.
“The strategic victory of the opposition forces can’t be denied or discounted,” Eva Gollinger, a leading Chavista cheerleader, recently conceded. Her assessment suggests that the regimes’ supporters are in denial about the government’s failures, attributing recent setbacks to foreign intervention and obscure conspiracies on the part of “a complex web of different actors, entities, front groups, and agencies” that “penetrates communities and barrios and promotes alternative projects and programs to those proposed by President Chavez.”
The Chavista forces have good reason to be worried. Venezuela’s student movement is also reinvigorated, and could be at the heart of a popular movement against the regime. The students “have the organizational wherewithal necessary to challenge Chavez; now all they need is public support,” suggests Stratfor, the strategic consultancy. “The combination of the referendum campaign plus looming economic troubles could give Venezuela’s student movement just what it is looking for.”
“Alongside every religion lies a political opinion which is linked to it by affinity,” wrote Tocqueville. The religious motivation of political forces, not least in the world’s conflict zones, is one reason why the incoming U.S. administration must integrate issues of religious freedom into foreign policy in the areas of democracy promotion, counter terrorism, and public diplomacy, a new book argues.
“Religion is seldom a purely private matter,” writes Thomas F. Farr, visiting professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, as people “draw on their religious beliefs to shape the laws and policies under which they live their lives.”
The new administration should reinstate the position of Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, created by the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act, and appoint an individual “capable of mainstreaming this issue into democracy promotion, counter-terrorism and public diplomacy”, Farr suggests.
“In the 21st century the challenge for American policy is to help shape the religion-state relationship in key countries — such as Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt, India, Russia, and China — so that religious ideas and actors are accommodated to the public good,” he contends.
The National Endowment for Democracy and its affiliates have done excellent work in seeding democracy, and assisting groups cultivating the “civil society of those voluntary associations and non-governmental organizations that teach citizens the habits and the virtues that democracy needs.” But religious freedom should also figure more largely in the work of democracy assistance groups, he says.
“We have got to include religious freedom in the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, the USAID, and all of our democracy promotion efforts,” he writes. “We’ve got to mandate it, because it’s not going to happen unless it is required. The habits of thought are too entrenched.”
Others appear to share his view. “The National Endowment for Democracy promotes programs largely indifferent to the question of religious freedom,” wrote Joseph Loconte in a recent review of Farr’s book. But the NED’s grantee profile does include many groups that actively promote religious liberty, tolerance and inter-faith dialog.
Sudan’s Inter-Religious Council, for example, publicizes violations of religious liberty, surveys educational institutions to identify religious biases and trains Christian and Muslim youth on issues of religious freedom.
The China Aid Association’s quarterly journal analyzes and documents human rights abuses of religious believers, and maintains an online library of Chinese and English-language laws and regulations governing religious practice in China.
In Pakistan, the Lahore-based Democratic Commission for Human Development runs an educational and advocacy program to counter the influence of religious extremism and to foster principles of religious freedom and tolerance.
Que Me, the leading international advocate of human rights in Vietnam, has worked extensively with the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam and the Paris-based International Buddhist Information Bureau in promoting freedom of worship in the communist state.
The International Forum for Islamic Dialogue supports and assists liberal Muslim democrats in promulgating modern interpretations of Islam and highlighting the compatibility of Islamic values with universal values of human rights, democracy, pluralism, cultural diversity, and women’s rights.
Promoting democracy inevitably requires an appreciation of the fact that freedom of worship is inextricably bound up with basic democratic rights, including freedom of speech, association and conscience. Religious freedom is, to coin a cliché, the canary in the coal mine: where freedom of worship is denied or compromised, other liberties are invariably and equally vulnerable.
Events in Zimbabwe took an ominous turn today as Robert Mugabe’s regime claimed that the air force commander, Air Marshal Perence Shiri, had been the victim of an assassination attempt. With the collapse of mediation talks, the always-fragile power-sharing agreement is effectively dead and indications suggest the regime is preparing an all-out offensive against the democratic opposition.
Tendai Biti, secretary general of the Movement for Democratic Change, fears that the regime will use the incident, in which Shirii was reportedly shot in the hand, as a “Reichstag” excuse to suppress all opposition. “Mugabe can kill two birds with one stone,” Biti said. “He can use it as a way of attacking us, and then attacking whatever faction of ZANU-PF he wants to decimate.”
A leading member of the Joint Operations Command, the security service hard-liners currently guiding Mugabe, Shiri is deeply implicated in recent atrocities. He is also Mugabe’s cousin and headed the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade that perpetrated the Ndebele massacres of between 8,000-20,000 civilians from 1982 and 1987.
Opposition forces have faced incrementally growing repression over recent weeks. A march by several hundred civil society activists of the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) was attacked by police using tear gas and dogs. International labor unions condemned the arrests and beatings of more than 48 union activists, including the arrest of Wellington Chibebe, Secretary General of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions.
Other activists have been quietly spirited away or ‘disappeared’ in a manner eerily reminiscent of Latin America’s worst military dictatorships.
Where is Jestina Mukoko? asks Norman Geras, a British blogger who has written consistently and intelligently on the crisis in Zimbabwe. Mukoko resigned from state television to lead the Zimbabwe Peace Project, a human rights monitoring network. He links to this report detailing abductions of Zimbabwean human rights activists and to this story detailing the circumstances of Mukoko’s abduction:
She has collected evidence of tens of thousands of abuses in the past decade. Her monthly reports have detailed the routine tyranny of violence, the shortage of food and the denial of free speech that characterise Zimbabwean life today, particularly in rural areas.
Mukoko pioneered the use of information technology to map Zanu-PF’s attacks on its opponents. Before elections last March she presented her findings publicly in a Harare hotel. She knew her audience included members of the CIO but nevertheless set out patterns of violence in the 2002 and 2005 elections and predicted where trouble would occur in 2008.
The places she identified - such as Manicaland and Masvingo provinces - were indeed subjected to Zanu-PF campaigns of mass eviction, communal beating and murder. Opposition figures believe much of Zimbabwe’s current tragedy might have been avoided if international observers had followed her advice and gone to such trouble spots.
Mukoko has been an outspoken critic of Zimbabwe’s system of supplying food. Her analysis shows food is supplied to those showing loyalty to the ruling party and is denied to opposition supporters.
Russia’s Duma is considering a new law that will expand the definition of treason, a move lawyers and activists fear portends a revival of the punitive Soviet approach to dissent. Activists and lawyers suggest that the law is being pushed through in anticipation of increased political dissent and social unrest prompted by the financial crisis and the Kremlin’s economic mismanagement.
Russian law currently defines treason as “hostile actions intended to damage the security of the Russian Federation against foreign threats.” The amended definition would include “rendering financial, material, consultative, or other assistance to a foreign state, a foreign or international organization, or representatives thereof in activities directed against the security of the Russian Federation, including its constitutional system, its sovereignty, its territorial integrity and statehood.”
The proposed law “threatens to revive the Soviet-era habit of placing under suspicion anyone who has contact with foreigners“, the London Times suggests.
‘It is a hint for people to sit tight and keep quiet,’ said lawyer Anna Stavitskaya, who represents the family of murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Investigators would enjoy wide discretion in interpreting the new law, she said.
Russia’s ruling elite appears jittery, anxious at the political implications of the financial crisis that is “sending tremors through Russia’s fragile social contract“. The proposed bill signals that the Kremlin is planning to tighten its grip on dissent, Cathy Young reports.
“Is it too much of a stretch to think that this law could be directed against an opposition newspaper or website,” Young asks, “or a human rights group critical of the government, which has received assistance from the USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, or the Soros Foundation?”
She quotes the following report in the Moscow Times:
In a rare example of grassroots political power, angry protests by drivers prompted lawmakers in the far eastern Primorye region on Monday to ask the country’s two leaders to delay raising import duties on foreign cars. The Primorye regional legislature, led by United Russia deputies, voted unanimously Monday to ask President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to postpone the tariffs, which take effect on Jan. 11, according to a decree signed by Putin. Thousands of drivers took to the streets in several far eastern cities and towns Sunday to protest the tariffs, blocking traffic, clashing with police, openly insulting Putin and Medvedev and even calling on Putin to resign.
She also links to reports in the Russian daily Kommersant about similar protests in Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk.
