Freedom at Issue

Will winds of change sweep Cuba?

by Daniel Calingaert
Vice President for Policy and External Relations

President Raúl Castro introduced market reforms in Cuba earlier this year to preserve, not dismantle, the communist system. He retains a tight grip on power and seems intent on pursuing a Chinese model of market economics combined with political repression. The reforms have, however, brought about a significant change in attitudes in Cuba, according to a recent Freedom House survey. Optimism is growing, expectations are rising, and Cubans want more freedom. Will the Chinese model work in Cuba?

The government shows no intention of opening up the political system.  At the Communist Party congress in April, when Castro welcomed a “new generation” of leaders, they were led by revolution-era geriatrics like himself.  Political repression meanwhile remains intense. The heavy-handed response last week to a gathering of the dissident Ladies in White was typical. Twenty members of the group, which advocates on behalf of political prisoners, were detained on their way to a meeting to discuss the organization’s future following the death of its leader, Laura Pollán.

The Tunisian elections in pictures

by     Sarah Trister                               
         Manager for Congressional Affairs

          Joseph Emru     
          Program Officer, Middle East and North Africa

On Sunday, October 23, millions of Tunisians went to the polls for the country’s first elections since a popular uprising ousted authoritarian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in January. The balloting, held to select a constituent assembly that will serve as a transitional legislature and draft a new constitution, has been widely hailed as free and fair.

Through its “Nchoof” project, Freedom House worked with a group of local nongovernmental organizations to enable ordinary Tunisians to serve as citizen monitors during the elections. Using a system set up by the project, Tunisians could send and receive critical information, including reports of electoral violations, in real time via voice calls, text or multimedia messaging, Twitter, Facebook, or e-mail.

Nchoof employed Ushahidi open-source crowd-sourcing technology to encourage civic awareness and citizen participation. The technology, originally developed in Kenya, has been used to collect citizen reports during elections and crisis situations in countries around the world, including in a previous Freedom House election-monitoring project in Egypt, and in other projects in Haiti, Mexico, and Lebanon.

The following photographs show the Tunisian elections as Freedom House staff experienced them. Click below to see the photos and the full gallery.

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Acting just like a woman: Leadership advice for authoritarians in Central Asia

by Katherin Machalek
Research Analyst and Assistant Editor, Nations in Transit

At the end of this month, national elections will decide who will serve as Kyrgyzstan’s first full-term president since the April 2010 revolution that ousted the increasingly authoritarian Kurmanbek Bakiyev. And at the end of the year, Central Asia’s first and only female president, interim leader Roza Otunbayeva, will also become the first leader in Central Asia to leave her post in a voluntary and peaceful transfer of power.

Democracy advocates, who have regrettably witnessed a great deal of backsliding in the region, have good reason to commend Otunbayeva’s short presidency. Her even-handed approach and personal dedication to pluralism and transparency have allowed Kyrgyzstan to experience possibly the most democratic period in its history. The integrity of Otunbayeva’s leadership has won the interim government a legitimacy that no other regime in Kyrgyzstan’s neighborhood has come close to achieving.

Democracy is not killing the Copts

by Tyler Roylance
Staff Editor, Publications


Photo Credit: rosemarydukelow

In an October 15 opinion piece in the New York Times, provocatively titled “Democracy’s Collateral Damage,” Ross Douthat makes a series of arguments and observations about ethnicity, democracy, and stability. While they touch on a legitimate scholarly debate about the difficulty of establishing new democracies in multiethnic countries, they also seem to posit dubious cause-and-effect relationships and assign blame where it is clearly not due. Because these arguments sometimes contradict one another, they are best addressed one or two at a time.

Little to celebrate in Kadyrov’s Chechnya

by Arch Puddington 
Vice President for Research

One of the most popular items pinging back and forth across the internet is the infamous video report on the glitzy extravaganza sponsored by the president of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, to celebrate both his birthday and the unveiling of a series of lavish new buildings in the Chechen capital, Grozny. What made the spectacle especially notable was the presence of several celebrities from the world’s great democracies, including American actress Hilary Swank and the Belgian-born Hollywood action hero Jean-Claude Van Damme. In her words of appreciation, Swank said she “could feel the spirit of the people, and everyone was so happy.” “Happy birthday, Mr. President,” she added.

Prime ministers in the dock

by Arch Puddington 
Vice President for Research
*With  assistance provided by Elizabeth Kagedan
 
About a year ago I attended a meeting whose purpose was to showcase newly elected Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych before an audience consisting mostly of representatives of the world’s largest multinational corporations. Yanukovych’s remarks were carefully crafted to appeal  to these guests. But he devoted the bulk of his presentation to an explanation of his commitment to the strengthening of Ukrainian democracy. Ukraine, he declared, would be Western-oriented under his watch. He promised to protect freedom of the press, minority rights, and—here he was especially emphatic—the rule of law. 

China’s growing army of paid internet commentators

by Sarah Cook
Senior Research Analyst, Freedom on the Net
*With research assistance provided by Maggie Shum

Since 2005, observers of the Chinese blogosphere have noted the presence of users who are paid to support the authorities in online discussions, often referred to as the “50 Cent Party” for the alleged fee they collect for each posted comment. Several incidents in recent weeks have once again drawn domestic and international attention to this effort by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to manipulate public debate. Last month, the Propaganda Department in a small county in Hubei Province accidentally posted online a video showing local officials training progovernment internet commentators. The media quickly took interest in the revelation, which stipulated commentators’ duty to guide public opinion in a “constructive” way and engage the internet as “an important battlefield of ideology.” Meanwhile, at a seminar in Beijing at the end of September, the vice minister of public security said that the police should use microblogs as a communication platform to “release correct information and dispel misunderstandings.”

Azerbaijan’s Latest Bid for Legitimacy

by Paula Schriefer
Vice President for Global Programs

It is an increasingly common occurrence for repressive countries with dismal human rights records to put themselves forward as hosts for major international forums—whether in the sphere of sports and entertainment or in politics.  Think China, who hosted the last summer Olympics, or Russia, who will host the next winter games, or Kazakhstan, who hosted the last Summit of the OSCE.  All are examples of countries whose treatment of both its own citizens and its neighbors belies the spirit of human achievement and international cooperation such venues are intended to foster. The latest addition to this phenomenon is Azerbaijan, an oil-rich country in the South Caucasus region with a particularly dismal record on human rights, which has won its bid to host next year’s annual Internet Governance Forum. 

Having crossed his Rubicon, Putin lands in Central Asia

Photo Credit: www.kremlin.ru

by Tyler Roylance
Staff Editor, Publications

When Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin announced last week that he intended—and had always intended—to return to the presidency, he effectively tore down a flimsy veil of constitutional rectitude that had separated Russia from the autocracies of Central Asia. For over four years, Russians were invited to believe that unlike the perpetual presidents in those countries, their leader would uphold the rule of law and make way for new blood in the form of his chosen successor, Dmitri Medvedev. Now, however, it appears that Medvedev’s entire presidency was an artifice designed to circumvent the ban on more than two consecutive terms.

In this sense, the maneuver was only the most elaborate and circuitous among many similar techniques employed by the rulers of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan, as well as Azerbaijan and Belarus. These presidents have relied on rigged referendums and rubber-stamp legislatures to enact repeated term extensions of one type or another. When it comes to elections, they have methodically suppressed any genuine opposition parties and then won lopsided votes against the nonentities that remained. In 2007, Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan brazenly secured a new term without bothering to remove the constitutional restriction. (For a summary of term-limit manipulation in each country, see the text box on page 5 of the release booklet for Freedom House’s Nations in Transit 2011 survey. Russia’s gradual convergence with Central Asian governance standards is apparent in the Nations in Transit scoring data.)

A new blog for an old but crucial challenge

by David J. Kramer
President of Freedom House

Guided by the findings of our surveys and reports, as well as the experiences of our staff members and partners in the field,
Freedom House has decided to launch a new blog that will offer comment and analysis on the state of, threats to, and prospects for global democracy. We are pleased to welcome you to the inaugural post of Freedom at Issue.