The future of democracy (-support)

Wirepullers: come sarà il futuro della democrazia? O piuttosto, come è il suo presente? I messaggi di Obama su You Tube e la copertura delle elezioni iraniane tramite Twitter hanno già mostrato le potenzialità del rapporto internet-democrazia, ma quanto il primo influisce sull'affermarsi della seconda? Le nuove tecnologie e le nuove forme di comunicazione che da esse scaturiscono stanno cambiando il panorama politico mondiale? E' la rete il grande nemico dei regimi totalitari? (3)

The global landscape of democracy is changing amid geopolitical shifts and new critical assessments. The financial crisis and the election of Barack Obama have further transformed the context in which democracy-assistance functions. In this emerging era, what do democracy-support practitioners need to do to keep their projects and ideas fresh, relevant and effective? Vidar Helgesen, secretary-general of International IDEA, reflects.

The online discussion about the future of democracy-support, jointly initiated and undertaken by International IDEA and openDemocracy in 2008-09, has been impelled by a particular, even unique, moment in the evolution of this phenomenon and the ideas that underlie it. The time has seemed propitious for harvesting views and perspectives about the future of an ambitious project that both carries the scars of a tormented recent history and continues to raise controversies among its protagonists and intended beneficiaries alike. The second International Day of Democracy - 15 September 2009 - seems an appropriate moment to take stock and look ahead.

It has indeed been a tumultuous two decades. Democracy-support's highpoint in the mid-1990s was succeeded by a sobering turn of the millennium. What followed soon after, however, was to overshadow almost the entire decade that has followed: the tragedy of 11 September 2001, which had the potential of creating new unity of purpose in the international community but instead resulted in a deeply divisive backlash.

It also became clear in these years that the waves of democratisation that had washed over central-east Europe and Latin America in the late 1980s and after would not simply spill over to the rest of the world; and that the 21st century would not be a straightforward runway from which democracy would serenely launch itself out into the "end of history" and beyond. On the contrary, it became increasingly apparent that deep global fractures - between the north and south, the west and the Muslim/Arab worlds, and (not least) at the multilateral level, between the development and the democracy-building agendas - required urgent attention.

Amid these unfolding processes, two political earthquakes centred on the United States shook the world, each of which continues to have a major impact on the subject-matter of this debate: the implosion of the Wall Street financial system and the election as president of Barack Obama. It is evident that a new political and financial landscape is being shaped that will necessarily influence the debate on the future of democracy-support.Moreover - and as many of the excellent articles published in our debate have clearly shown - this emerging landscape provides a compelling incentive to broaden the debate beyond the standardised mental frameworks, templates and agendas of democracy-assistance; and in particular, the unhealthy division between "donors" and "beneficiaries".

There can be no meaningful debate about democracy-support without two things:

* A continuous questioning of the concept of democracy itself

* A keen awareness of changes in citizens' perception of democracy.

These are essential if ideas and arguments are to keep pace with democracy‘s evolution and the expression of fresh and critical perspectives on the phenomenon. Some of their elements have been induced - and others merely highlighted - by the financial meltdown and the shifting balance of interdependence and power in global politics.

The next sections of this article look at the possible impacts on democracy of financial turmoil and geopolitical reorientation, before drawing some conclusions about the overall future of democracy-support.

The financial crisis and democracy
The financial crisis first became unmistakeably apparent on "debtonation day", 9 August 2008, but was most spectacularly heralded by the collapse of Lehman Brothers on 14 September. Indeed, the very coincidence of the onset of the crisis and the first International Democracy Day is a potent indicator of the need to consider these phenomena within a single frame (see "Democracy beyond the crisis", International IDEA, 14 September 2009). A year on, some attempt can be made to discern the mixture of threats and opportunities this new period of economic turmoil may carry - both for the democracy-building agenda and for democracy itself in different countries and regions.

The field of observation is vast, not least as the current financial crisis appears to be both global and systemic: even emerging economies that at first seemed immune from the turmoil will be affected, though with many variations between countries and regions.

The absence of specific studies on the implications of the recession for democratic politics is striking. The economic and social implications of the crisis are being extensively analysed, but its impact on democracy - and the capacity of democratic governments to cope with its fallout - have been much less thoroughly investigated.

It is clear that the social costs of the downturn will affect democratic and authoritarian regimes alike. The former may find it more difficult to maintain high democratic standards while coping with social tensions induced by the crisis; the latter may find their capacity to provide prosperity as a substitute for democracy starting to wither.

The potential for rising levels of unemployment to feed political polarisation, extremism and violent xenophobia has already been demonstrated even in some "established" European democracies. In addition, the governments involved have not always found the political courage to condemn unequivocally these potent reminders of the darker corners of Europe's past.

Democratic governments in poorer countries face much harsher challenges. A combination of circumstances - falling revenues from exports of commodities, shrinking remittances, meagre or non-existent social safety-nets to shelter the new unemployed and migrant workers returning from the north - increases the likelihood that these countries will face greater levels of discontent. The same conditions make it very difficult for these governments to manage internal conflict peacefully, and within a democratic framework.

A number of projections highlight significant regional differences in the capacity of countries to cope with the global recession. Many Africans, for example, face abrupt and unsettling difficulties as a result of the crisis; the almost inevitable result is increased protest and political pressure on governments from citizens and voters. By contrast, there is little expectation of threats to democracy in Latin America, even if the financial crisis offers regimes with populist inclinations (such as those in Venezuela and Ecuador) an opportunity further to entrench their rhetoric. Meanwhile the unconstitutional takeover of power in Honduras is worrying on its own account, though it is difficult reasonably to link this to the financial turmoil.

China, with its fifth of the world's population, presents more questions than easy answers. The Communist Party has built considerable political capital on the back of its vigorous promotion of competitive yet authoritarian capitalism; economic growth-rates have somewhat contracted, yet the Chinese economy shows signs of an earlier bounce-back than those of major western countries. Will China's expanding role in the global economy and financial system render its political model more attractive to the rest of the world? Will it undermine western-supported democracy-building programmes in, for example, Africa?

These questions assume that the Chinese model is static: an assumption that may seem justified if the authorities' stubborn refusal to acknowledge what happened on Tiananmen Square in June 1989 is a guide. But if the country's millions of new unemployed, bubbling social discontent and estimated 50,000 local demonstrations a year are taken into account, a more sobering vision of the future takes shape in which such phenomena could at some stage acquire real political significance.

In any event, forecasting developments in the field of democracy is always a risky endeavour; for several less quantifiable factors - among them democratic culture, traditions, and levels of acceptance of diversity - also play important roles.

In this respect, the financial turmoil may do serious harm to the already sluggish progress being made towards greater gender equity and women's participation - a key dimension of democracy. Women already constitute the majority of the poor, and in an economic downturn they tend to lose their jobs before men. The crisis may make women's active engagement in politics an even less affordable luxury. Thus, the gender dimension of economic dislocation should be part of any dialogue about policy measures; and this is true both at national level (stimulus-packages, social-infrastructure spending, gender-responsive budgeting) and at the international level (for example, in the reform of the international financial institutions).

Beyond this, there are many uncertainties. All crises occur in a particular political and institutional vacuum; every one is in certain ways unique, part of its own historical and geopolitical context. To try to read the future from the effects of past financial crises may be useful, but nonetheless has its limits.

The financial crisis of the early 1990s, for example, unfolded against the backdrop of the recent fall of the Berlin wall. An almost unlimited faith in democracy was matched by an equally unlimited belief in the free market, privatisation and entrepreneurship. It could appear that these were partners destined for an enduring and happy marriage. At the time, good government began to be viewed as synonymous with small and non-intrusive government; and regulation as negative, or at best a necessary evil. These trends no longer apply. The recession of 2008-09 is widely perceived as connected to - perhaps even stemming from - the unrestrained and speculative behaviour of financial dealers in ultra-liberalised capital markets.

Indeed, the pendulum appears to be swinging back. The state is increasingly being again called upon to assume broader responsibilities; taxpayers/citizens want to hold the state accountable for what happens to their jobs, their savings and their pension-funds. Yet the political forces demanding increased accountability from the state are not necessarily the same today as two decades ago. It is notable that centre-right governments (or contenders for government) are among those arguing in favour of a strengthened role for the state - and in many European countries, centre-right parties are in the wake of the crisis doing well in elections. These shifts of emphasis may in turn be ushering in a different understanding of the basic relationship between citizens, the state and the private sector. The nature of this relationship is certainly becoming a core issue in current democratic debate.

The geopolitical shift and democracy
The impact of the second earthquake, the political one that brought the first African-American to the presidency of the global superpower, is a vital complement to the first. Barack Obama definitely speaks a different language from his predecessor. He is not persuaded of any "clash-of-civilisations' theory; and having candidly admitted his country's own share of responsibility for the current global predicament, he is moving to address some deep-rooted sources of conflict.

Obama's words are starting to influence seemingly intractable realities in the middle east and beyond. It is a matter of speculation as to how far his policy pronouncements have boosted the pro-democracy movement in Iran or influenced the elections in Lebanon, but this is certain: the new administration wants to change the US's image in the world, and is doing its best to make its approach here appear credible.

Europe, for its part, is not faced with the challenge of making an equivalently big leap. It already enjoys a better image; it is rather freer of the heavy legacy of the Iraq war; and it is less widely suspected of harbouring other, less admissible agendas behind the rhetoric of democracy-support. These findings are clearly reflected in the results of recent IDEA-led consultations, carried out with regional actors from all continents; they are among the resources for a review of European Union democracy-support policies during Sweden's presidency of the EU (July-December 2009).

Yet the international consultations also show that European support for democracy is not altogether convincing. Europe's regional partners from the global south are almost unanimous in stating that Europe has important and extensive experience of democracy-building to share; but it also lacks consistency in its policies, and its voice is weak. The main demands addressed to Europe in this arena are: consistency, long-term engagement, real partnership and "walking the talk".

The future for democracy-building
What do these global changes in the financial and the political landscape entail for democracy-support in the longer term; and, more generally, for understanding of the fundamentals of democracy?

A key analytical assumption underlying International IDEA's work in recent years has been that democracy is alive and strong as an ideal, but endangered by the low performance and declining credibility of some of the key institutional actors supposed to translate the values of democracy into reality: political parties, legislators, elected office-holders.

This assumption has only been reinforced by the demonstrable impact of the financial crisis. The recession has sounded an alarm by shedding light on democratic deficits, both institutional and functional; these have allowed financial markets to bypass transparent procedures, and powerful lobbies to extract disproportionate privileges from the system. The bill for kick-starting the system's recovery, however, will be paid by citizens at large.

The developed democracies are finding ways to alleviate the impact of the crisis on their citizens through exceptional social-protection measures and appropriate corrections of these systemic deficits; but developing and less consolidated democracies lack either the financial reserves or trusted and effective institutional mechanisms to do the same.

The leading developed democracies have an obligation to help developing democracies sail safely through this storm, as the winds are indeed blowing from the north. At the same time, there is a need for changes in the ways in which democracy-support and consolidation policies are negotiated, agreed, designed and implemented.

These processes need to free themselves from the mental straitjacket of donor-recipient relationships. They themselves need to become more effective and democratic, in a triple sense:

* They need to evolve towards real partnerships in which each side has something to share and to learn

* They must move beyond the narrow field of democracy-assistance as such and begin to account for the developmental and democracy-building impact of other policies in the fields of (for example) security, trade, energy, natural resources, and agriculture.

* They must engage with (rather than bypass) the democratic institutions - such as parliaments and political parties - of partner countries, and avoid remaining a subject discussed behind closed doors between officers of the executive branch.

A recent World Bank study says that there is no difference in the probability that countries either with or without competitive elections will experience financial crises. "However...politicians exposed to elections are more likely to address them in a way that serves public interest in their crisis response" (see Lessons from World Bank Research on Financial Crises [Development Research Group, November 2008]). These findings are equally encouraging for those engaged in pro-democracy advocacy in their countries and for international actors wanting to support them. They also point to the need to pay utmost attention to the defence and preservation of democratic achievements and institutions in periods of crisis, when they are at their most vulnerable.

The global economic difficulties are indeed feeding a broader debate on democracy. Making democracy more sustainable and more resilient in the face of such crises also means bringing it closer to citizens, and reducing the gap between institutions and delivery, between formal mechanisms and practice. In that sense the crisis can indeed be an immense opportunity for democracy-building practitioners and institutions - an opportunity for action to revitalise democratic institutions and bring the values and the reality of democracy closer to each other.

There will always be a gap between ideals and reality. This gap is what fuels political engagement and maintains the vitality of people's commitment to democracy. But when the gap becomes a precipice, when concept and reality lose any connection with each other, the disenchantment is no longer with the government in place but with the institutions it occupies and the very architecture of the system. Eventually, the values of the system are no longer judged against what the system claims to be, but against what it is perceived to deliver.

An analogy may be useful here, with all the usual caveats. In the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to bridge the division between the stated objectives of the system and the reality in which people lived. It became increasingly apparent that glasnost and perestroïka were a case of "too little, too late". A centralised command economy and a fossilised top-down political system were unable to deliver equality or choice - even less, prosperity. The gap had grown into a precipice and there was no longer any faith in the system. It simply imploded.

Democracy, as a system of governance, is far from that fate - not least because it exists in a myriad of models; because it functions with highly varying degrees of effectiveness and delivery; and above all, because it does not claim to be perfect. We will always need more of it.

In June 2009, the women and men marching en masse in Tehran provided a vivid reminder of democracy's mobilising force. But for democracy-support, the major challenge is perhaps not how to support people marching against a non-democratic regime. They will topple it themselves, sooner or later. The major challenge starts when new or reformed institutions need to prove that they can deliver and be accountable. Political parties need to be credible as interpreters of citizens' interests; parliaments need to prove themselves capable of (and empowered to) overseeing budget expenditure and denouncing corruption; and election-management bodies need to be seen to function genuinely independently, above the realm of party politics.

International IDEA will continue to contribute its share to the strengthening of democratic institutions through its work on effective electoral and political-party assistance; through participatory and inclusive constitution-building efforts; through the pursuit of gender equity in all its programmes; and through the empowerment of national stakeholders to assess their own democracy - its deficits and its opportunities alike.

"Will freedom be able to sing the way the oppressed used to sing about it?" runs a verse in a poem by the late Belgrade poet Branko Miljković Indeed, the democracy-support community should always seek to help democracy not only to function - but to sing.

Autore: Vidar Hegesen

Fonte: http://www.opendemocracy.net/

The Internet: A Room of Our Own?

Wirepullers: come sarà il futuro della democrazia? O piuttosto, come è il suo presente? I messaggi di Obama su You Tube e la copertura delle elezioni iraniane tramite Twitter hanno già mostrato le potenzialità del rapporto internet-democrazia, ma quanto il primo influisce sull'affermarsi della seconda? Le nuove tecnologie e le nuove forme di comunicazione che da esse scaturiscono stanno cambiando il panorama politico mondiale? E' la rete il grande nemico dei regimi totalitari? (2)

THE DEBATE ABOUT the impact of the Internet on democracy is barely a decade old, but it has already sowed great confusion in the minds of academics and practitioners alike. It doesn’t help that both of these concepts represent complex, multilayered, and abstract ideas that do not lend themselves to easy or precise measurement. We have little choice but to reach for the best readily quantifiable proxy, which usually only obfuscates the relationship further.

The Internet part of the equation is relatively easy to grasp; the rate of Internet diffusion has been one reliable indicator. Other tangible proxies--the number of Internet or mobile phone users per capita or more complex indicators like the density of a national blogosphere--are also quite straightforward, if not conclusive. Measuring democracy, on the other hand, requires us to substitute something more tangible: human rights, freedom of expression, transparency and corruption, civic engagement, media concentration, and even more esoteric indicators such as the diversity of the public sphere (itself often requiring another host of proxies to be measured properly). Factor in the vast economic, technological, and political differences across countries in transition, dictatorships, and established democracies, and it’s clear why the study of the Internet’s impact on democracy won’t earn anyone the Nobel Peace Prize in the foreseeable future.

For all these reasons, the grand debate of the last decade has by now split into numerous nano-discourses that have acquired a life of their own: the role of mobile phones in economic development, the role of blogs in increasing media diversity, the role of social networking in political mobilization, and so forth. It’s easy to overestimate the obscurity of such seemingly arcane discussions; after all, it’s not the first time that academics or bloggers can’t make up their minds about a subject with dubious relevance to the real world. And yet, many of the assumptions underpinning our thinking about the impact of the Internet on democracy shape policymaking inside the world’s most powerful institutions preoccupied with promoting democracy, human rights, or an open society (my own host institution--the Open Society Institute--is on this list and is not innocent of relying on similar assumptions).

One could say that the Internet has acquired a cult following among such institutions. While the U.S. State Department wraps its own efforts to use the Internet to promote democracy around the globe in the dry rhetoric of “Public Diplomacy 2.0,” other agencies closely associated with and funded by the U.S. government--Internews and the National Endowment for Democracy being the two most visible--are actively recalibrating their toolkits to fit the age of new media. European governments and foundations are also not far behind, with the Dutch and Danish governments at the forefront of supporting the use of new media and the Internet for digital activism.

One particular assumption made by many of us early in this game was that cyberspace would provide the breathing room that civil society (and especially civil society in authoritarian countries) needed to operate. Armed with cheap and easy-to-use tools for fundraising, accessible ways of self-publishing, and effective platforms of mobilization (first MySpace, now Facebook and MeetUp), civil society organizations could transcend the resource gap and institutional inefficiencies that had plagued their work in the past; they would be leaner, faster, and stronger. It’s only now that we discover that leaner doesn’t always mean louder, particularly for civil society organizations with controversial (at least by local standards) agendas. Although the Internet may have made many of their peripheral activities easier, it has often made their core activities--such as advocacy and awareness-raising--more difficult and less effective.

This unexpected outcome is easier to explain than it seems. Cyberspace politics is a zero-sum game; although Internet technology has certainly decreased the power of the nation-state—much as gunpowder or the printing press did in earlier stages of history—it has also empowered those whom we wouldn’t necessarily list as “friends of civil society” (once again, analogies with gunpowder and the printing press, and their heavy use by extremist and militaristic organizations, are worth reflecting on). So, if we are ultimately concerned with limiting the power of the state—and when it comes to countries like China and Russia, our concerns are well justified—the Internet’s impact has been very positive. However, this is only one part of a much larger picture; the pernicious influence of the nation-state has often been replaced in cyberspace by a host of decentralized, uncontrollable, and ultimately more dangerous elements. They have not only survived into the cyber age; they seem to prosper in it.

FOR EXAMPLE, nationalists in Russia (as well as in many other countries) rely on the Internet for fundraising, propaganda, and mobilization and recruitment of new supporters. Most disturbingly, DPNI (which is the Russian abbreviation for the Movement Against Illegal Immigration), the most active of such organizations, is on the cutting edge of Web innovation, going so far as to create visually appealing “mash-ups”--combinations of different data streams--that “mash” census data about the location of various ethnic minorities living in Russian towns with actual online maps of the neighborhoods where they live (curiously, a host of NGOs and activists rely on the same mash-up technology--usually in less effective ways--to showcase illegal logging, pollution, and even ethnic attacks). Russians are not alone here; nationalist groups in many other countries, from Turkey to India, are exploiting cyberspace to publish previously unavailable nationalistic materials and add to their ranks.

Similarly, pseudoscience has found a second home on the Internet. Banned from the classroom, it’s making a comeback on Facebook and YouTube. For example, aggressive anti-vaccination communities have eagerly embraced the Web to spread their antiscientific statements on a scale that was probably never available to them in the pre-Internet age. A 2007 study by a group of academics from Canada analyzed all unique English-language YouTube videos (at that time, all 153 of them) that contained any messages about human immunization; the researchers found that a third of them were outright negative about its value and another fifth were ambiguous, with negative videos usually receiving much higher ratings by YouTube users. Of the negative videos, almost half contradicted existing reference standards on immunization (the anti-vaccination movement is also extremely active in the developing world; UNICEF reports that its recent awareness-raising campaign ran into powerful online opposition from vaccination-denialists). In addition to illustrating the appeal of cyberspace to advocates of pseudoscience, this case raises an interesting question about whether a technology company such as YouTube (and ultimately its parent company, Google) should verify scientific claims made in the videos uploaded to the site; if yes, how should they go about it? (Google faced a similar set of problems when it erroneously classified a video documenting prison abuse in Egypt as too violent, overlooking its social role.) The editorial and fact-checking layers of traditional media organizations would make it unlikely that such videos would ever be aired, for there is usually someone on staff to distinguish facts from opinions; how user-generated sites will cope with this challenge is not yet clear.

Much has been made of bloggers’ ability to take on corporations and hold them accountable. Consumerist.com, a popular consumer-oriented blog has emerged as, perhaps, the most notable of such sites, attracting complaints from dissatisfied customers all over the world and advising them on how to fight back. A typical blog post from The Consumerist--entitled “How to Launch an Executive Email Carpet Bomb”—offers tips for “rattling the corporate monkey tree to make sure your complaint gets shoved under the nose of someone with decision-making powers.” However, corporations themselves have not been slow to exploit cyberspace for their own purposes, with many of them relying on “search engine optimization” (SEO)—a set of online techniques to boost their Google ranking--to make themselves easier to find. Now, they have stepped up their efforts, hiring the services of dedicated SEO firms that can ensure that any online complaints about corporate misbehavior posted by the likes of The Consumerist will be almost impossible to find on Google. ComplaintRemover.com, the most visible of such companies, advertises “Do you need negative information removed? We are masters at knocking bad links off the front pages of search engines!” boasts its front page. In some sense, cyberspace has made life relatively easy for companies: they don’t need to beat up journalists anymore; they just need to beat up Google. The latter can be done quietly, privately, and at little expense--to their finances or their reputations. The buck doesn’t stop with consumer-oriented blogs: Western governments are also quite eager to beat Google’s search algorithms: Britain’s Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism is planning to coach moderate Islamic groups in SEO, so that they can “flood the Internet” with positive interpretations of Islam. There are many other reasons why the Internet has failed to amplify the voices of civil society. The most obvious one is that governments have mastered the tricks of Internet censorship; this has been the most accessible and often the most reliable way to neutralize the dissemination of critical information on the Internet. To the great disappointment of free-speech advocates, global backlash against Internet censorship has been extremely limited, with several American companies feeling bold enough to supply governments such as China’s with technology that is being actively used for censorship. It’s too early to tell whether nascent international efforts to draw more attention to this issue--such as the Global Network Initiative, a consortium of, corporations, human rights groups, and individual activists aiming to thwart the censorship attempts of governments--will be successful, but the early signs are not encouraging.

Paradoxically, Western governments, which like to be seen as the biggest advocates of free speech in the world, deserve a fair share of blame here. Governments in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and in much of Scandinavia (to mention just a few) are currently debating or enacting draconian Internet laws to target Internet pirates and child predators. The very act of lumping of these two groups together illustrates the governments’ profound misunderstanding of the Internet. A glimpse at any recent report--like the one that found that 95 percent of music downloads are illegal--would make any discussion of criminalization of Internet piracy impractical, if not outright silly.

A MUCH BIGGER problem about these laws is that they add legitimacy to Internet censorship campaigns in China, Thailand, Vietnam, Turkey, and Russia, with the only difference being that in the latter case these laws are used primarily to crack down on political speech under the banner of a war on “online vulgarity.” But note that some of the pornographic sites blocked in the much discussed Chinese crackdown at the beginning of this year are now back online, this time with even more pornographic content, while some of the political sites that were shut down during the same crackdown are still silent.

Some governments are combining aggressive Internet laws with truly innovative measures aimed at identifying and barring undesired content early on in the publishing cycle. The Thai government, for example, uses the country’s severe lèse majesté laws, prohibiting any offensive material aimed at the reigning sovereign, to go after administrators of critical Web sites. The most recent case is that of Cheeranuch Premchaiphorn, the Web administrator of Prachatai, the most influential Thai political Web site, who was recently detained because a comment critical of the king was discovered on the site. The Thai authorities also “crowdsource” the process of gathering URLs of sites to be blocked by encouraging their loyalists to submit such sites for review (a site named ProtectTheKing.net is a primary collection point of the offensive URLs). Predictably, it’s a one-way street: there is no similar invitation to submit sites to unblock.

However, censorship is not the only way to silence critical opinions and unwanted information online. Cyber attacks are increasingly becoming a weapon of choice, not only for governments but for anyone else with a grudge against particular ethnic, political, or sexual minorities. Distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks--whereby servers of a given Web site are overloaded with bogus requests to “serve” a page--don’t only make important content temporarily inaccessible, they also put a huge drain on staff and physical resources. While the media tend to focus almost exclusively on cyber attacks against military and government targets--the overblown coverage of “cyberwars” in Estonia and Georgia have brought such dramatic terms as “cyber-Katrina” and “electronic Pearl Harbor” into public use--civil society organizations are hit the hardest. If left unchecked, DDOS attacks, which are increasingly cheap to organize and can be rented on the black market, may erase all the social capital that NGOs and even bloggers have cultivated online.

The oft-quoted story of CYXYMU, a popular blogger from Georgia, is a case in point. A refugee from the earlier war in Abkhazia, CYXYMU emerged as one of the most visible and consistent critics of how both the Russian and Georgian governments handled last year’s war in South Ossetia. Blogging in Russian, he has cultivated a relatively large following in both countries, particularly among the users of LiveJournal, one of the most popular blogging platforms in post-Soviet cyberspace. However, in October 2008, somebody got angry at his writings, and his blog--also hosted by LiveJournal--fell victim to a massive wave of cyber attacks, so severe that millions of other LiveJournal blogs became inaccessible for more than an hour. The only way to reduce the damage was temporarily to delete CYXYMU’s account from LiveJournal, which its administrators did. Cyber attacks followed the blogger even after he set up a new blog on WordPress.com, another popular blogging platform (his account was quickly deleted from there as well). DDOS attacks against his new and old URLs continued unabated for more than six months. We should recognize CYXYMU for what he is--a “digital refugee” and a victim of geopolitics playing out in cyberspace, where free speech is possible in theory, but increasingly unavailable in practice.

CYXYMU is not an isolated case. On the first anniversary of the monks’ uprising in Burma, a similar fate befell the three major Web sites of the Burmese exiled media--Irrawady, Mizzima, and the Democratic Voice of Burma. Administrators of the Web sites speculated that the attacks were launched by the junta to limit expected demonstrations. Oppositional Web sites in Kazakhstan and Mauritania have recently experienced similar problems, quite possibly at the hands of their own governments or agents affiliated with them. Nonpolitical Web sites are becoming regular targets of cyber attacks as well: in February 2009, virtually all major gay Web sites were unavailable for more than a week, as a result of a massive wave of denial-of-service attacks. This trend is not limited to countries like Russia or Burma; many of the Web sites raising money to oppose Proposition 8 in California last November were attacked as well, most likely to make them unavailable for those who wanted to donate money to gay-friendly causes. That is one of the cases where neither the “leaner” nor the “louder” benefits that the Internet was supposed to bestow on civil society are obvious.

TO UNDERSTAND HOW cyberspace may fail to empower civil society, there is no better case to study than that of Russia. Both the title and subtitle of “The Web that Failed: How opposition politics and independent initiatives are failing on the Internet in Russia,” a recent study of the Russian Internet published by the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford, are right on target (disclosure: it was funded by the Open Society Institute, where I am a fellow). One of its conclusions is worth quoting here:

In the Russian context, new communications developments are not yet breaking down well-established patterns of power. The state remains the main mobilising agent in Russia. It [the Internet] does operate as a platform which the state uses increasingly successfully to consolidate its power and spread messages of stability and utility among the growing number of Russians regularly accessing websites and blogs.

This points to a broader trend where Kremlin-affiliated public relations technologists increasingly turn to cyberspace to generate fresh ideas on how to keep the current regime in power. Virtually all the political technologists of yesteryear--those who were instrumental in getting Boris Yeltsin re-elected in 1996 and Vladimir Putin elected in 2000--are now actively experimenting with cyberspace. Gleb Pavlovsky, perhaps the most famous of that cohort, has paved the way; his think tank--the Fund for Effective Politics (FEP)--has arguably been the most effective player in shaping Russian ideology during the Putin era. Sensing a tremendous opportunity on the Internet, FEP has ventured into what can only be called “social networking with a Kremlin twist.” By launching liberty.ru--half social network and half group blog (think Huffington Post meets the DailyKos meets Facebook), Pavlovsky managed to tap into the creativity of Russian Internet users for his own ideological projects--while also giving his online community the impression that they have influence over the Kremlin’s agenda.When asked recently about his motives for launching a Web2.0-friendly project like liberty.ru (not to mention giving it such an un-Kremlin-like name), Pavlovsky answered with atypical frankness.

Based on the FEP polls in 2006-2008, we identified three major clusters in Russian society. The biggest one is that of Kremlin loyalists; the smallest one is the politicized opposition; the cluster in the middle—14-20% of the population—is the creative class. They...are part of a new economic system. They are the trend-setters: journalists, advertisers, PR experts, IT specialists, Internet users....These people are able to shape and promote new ideologies... [Liberty.ru] will help political parties tap into their collective wisdom, see what these people are really concerned about; [the parties] would even be able to borrow some major policy points from these online discussions.

Pavlovsky’s activities, which, in essence, allow the Kremlin to tap into the collective unconscious and use it both to identify new ideas and promote old ones, are in line with what political scientists call “authoritarian deliberation”--the practice of authoritarian regimes that provide space for seemingly meaningful deliberation without any intention of engaging in regime-level democratization. Of course, pursuing such a policy requires giving up a modicum of political power, when it comes to selecting participants and prioritizing projects, for example, but it ultimately pays off as an “investment” in the future.

The term “authoritarian deliberation” gained currency when it was used to describe the Chinese public sphere, which does provide the illusion of new models of governance without having any significant impact on the regime itself. “The Deliberative Turn in Chinese Political Development” by He Baogang and Mark Warren, the seminal paper on “authoritarian deliberation” in the Chinese context, explains why:

What they [the Communist Party of China—CCP] gain is the ability to legitimate policies by reference to a relatively inclusive deliberation process rather than to an official ideology or the variable benefits of economic development. These effects in turn can increase the political capacities of the CCP while furthering the careers of party officials. Under this scenario, then, the functional effectiveness of authoritarian deliberation stalls regime-level democratization. The CCP continues to encourage local officials to develop participatory and deliberative institutions to curb rampant corruption, reduce coercion, and promote reason-based persuasion....But ultimate control over agendas as well as outcomes remains with the Party and beyond the reach of democratic processes.

Baogang and Warren point out that in the Chinese case “authoritarian deliberation” predates the Internet: consultative meetings, public hearings, deliberative polls, citizen rights to sue the state, and even some kinds of autonomous civil society organizations started appearing two decades ago. However, what the Internet provides is many more opportunities to make the provision of deliberative elements more effective (and also very cheap). Despite recurring censorship campaigns, civil society is, indeed, provided with more and more space on the Internet, especially after Wikipedia introduced many people to various Wikipedia-like governance processes. And blogs provide a mechanism for self-expression and even harsh criticism of authorities.

What makes the Russian case so peculiar in comparison to the Chinese is that the blogosphere--and cyberspace at large--have not only given the public an opportunity to blow off steam, it has also allowed spin doctors like Pavlovsky to harvest and eventually promote new ideologies that could fill the vacuum in an otherwise spiritually bankrupt regime. The recent economic crisis has only highlighted the fact that with all the attention that Putin and Medvedev--and less visible Kremlin insiders like Vladislav Surkov--have paid to ideology, they have come up with nothing.

AND YET WE cannot say that the Internet offers no ways of transforming regimes like Russia or China. It’s just that change is likely to come from unexpected quarters--from the need for legitimacy and modest respect in the eyes of the international community, for example, along with membership in elite clubs like G-8 or G-20. These are, perhaps, the only sticks that Western democracies can use against the authoritarian rulers in these countries. Given the brutal methods that their rulers employ to stay in power, their legitimacy has traditionally required manipulating international public opinion by preventing the locals from speaking out loud or simply limiting access to sensitive government data on human rights, pollution, or even disease outbreaks. Thanks to the Internet--and many of the phenomena it has begotten (such as crowdsourcing or citizen journalism)--this is one area where we can expect real change, particularly through the use of hybrid models, where nongovernmental organizations partner with ordinary citizens to produce authoritative reports based on crowdsourced methods of data gathering.

To a large extent, this is already happening, as a few dozen NGOs begin tapping into all sorts of previously unavailable data--reports on levels of urban crime and pollution, for example--which are being contributed by regular users, many of them previously unaffiliated with these NGOs. In fact, some of the most exciting projects currently strive to incorporate user-submitted data into traditional old-school data-gathering processes. WikiCrime, a project started in Brazil to allow citizens to map instances of violent crime that often go underreported and thus push governments to do something about it, is a very good example of how techniques like crowdsourcing could be helpful. The same software is now being rolled out in Zimbabwe to allow reporting of cholera outbreaks. The true media darling of user-contributed Web sites is an African initiative called Ushahidi, which has been used (with various degrees of success) to allow user-generated reports (primarily via text-messaging) in a number of recent conflicts--most successfully in the post-electoral turmoil in Kenya, but also in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gaza (where it was deployed by Al Jazeera), and Madagascar. The technology behind Ushahidi is simple: anyone can send a text message reporting a particular incident and then see this report visualized on an online map. This not only provides almost real-time data about dangerous conflict zones, it also helps to create a crowdsourced bank of reports that could then be used for human rights purposes.

However, this revolution in data availability has brought its own problems, chiefly in the realm of data verification. The fundamental and still unanswered question is, How much trust can we place in data that have been sent by unknown third-party sources? If someone wanted to discredit authorities in Kenya or DRC, the easiest way would be to bombard the service with thousands of bogus reports, hoping that they would be picked up by the mainstream media. There is no easy way to validate the authenticity of such reports; nor is there a way to meet the strict criteria for data validity that are often imposed by traditional human rights organizations. Are some data on human rights abuses, some of which may have been fabricated, better than no data at all? This controversial question divides the data community, but I am optimistic that we will be able to improve the algorithms and come up with “electronic lie detector” tests allowing us to make better distinctions between valid and fabricated data. Ultimately the supply side of the data equation will be solved; the demand side, however, will still remain problematic. What should we do with documented evidence of human rights abuses in Zimbabwe or Belarus or anywhere else? Unfortunately, the Internet offers no answers here.

Autore: Evgeny Morozov

Fonte: www.dissentmagazine.org

Does the Internet Change Politics?

Wirepullers: come sarà il futuro della democrazia? O piuttosto, come è il suo presente? I messaggi di Obama su You Tube e la copertura delle elezioni iraniane tramite Twitter hanno già mostrato le potenzialità del rapporto internet-democrazia, ma quanto il primo influisce sull'affermarsi della seconda? Le nuove tecnologie e le nuove forme di comunicazione che da esse scaturiscono stanno cambiando il panorama politico mondiale? E' la rete il grande nemico dei regimi totalitari? (1)

POLITICS IS always a matter of persuasive media images and coordinating communications. For there to be politics, somebody needs to persuade someone else that a certain power is legitimate, that a certain course of action is in their interests, that a certain policy is just, or that a certain leader is worthy. But persuasion is not enough. Political actors and their actions require coordination. People need to be brought together to act in concert. And so the question arises as to what effect changes in media form—the rise of the internet, for example—have on the possibilities for political action.

One way to understand the impact of the internet is to compare it to the relation of previous media regimes with politics. Modern politics takes place in three successive media regimes. The first regime is the postal service and print media. The second regime is telephony and broadcast media (radio, then television). The third regime is the cellphone and the internet. This is of course rather crude. Media and communication cannot be so neatly periodized. New media do not replace but rather displace old media. One could enter many other caveats.

Nevertheless certain tendencies are at work. Take the successive coordinating communication forms: post, telephone, cellphone. The speed increases, as does the “bandwidth.” More can be conveyed faster. But between the telephone and the cellphone is a significant break. Communication is no longer between fixed points but mobile points. It is no longer between households but individuals. It no longer makes any sense to list a “home” phone and an “office” phone. The cellphone is both—and neither. It breaks down the distinction between public and private space.

With the successive forms of persuasive media, there is a different story. Between the print form and the broadcast form is a massive consolidation and centralization of senders and a corresponding expansion of receivers to cover pretty much the whole of the United States. This starts to break down not with the internet but with an intermediate form: cable television. Cable starts a segmentation of audiences that the internet only accelerates. In this respect it is a partial return to the kind of media form of the pre-broadcast era.

The distinction between media (newspaper, television) and communication (post, telephone) becomes less clear in the era of the internet and the cellphone. Both have the flexible point-to-point routing of the post, but can also support the many communication characteristics of mass print or broadcast media. The means of motivating and of mobilizing are no longer quite so separate.

All else being equal, political power will be in the hands of those best able to exploit this distinctive envelope of possibilities. This has always been the case. There is no politics prior to media or outside of communication. All that changes in each media regime is the available strategies. It’s true enough that these days it is hard to get elected if you don’t look good on TV, but in a previous century it would have been impossible to get elected without looking good riding a horse down main street. But if looking good on TV was all there was to it, Mitt Romney would be president.

Using the available media and communication forms to best effect is a mark of political genius. FDR did not resort to the fireside chat via radio very often, but when he did he showed a real understanding of the fact that radio was a domestic and household form. Where most politicians still used radio as if shouting to a crowded hall, FDR knew that to be on radio was to be a guest in people’s homes. Reagan extended this sensibility to television. It sounds obvious, but watch Ted Kennedy shout at you from the screen as if addressing a union hall and try to resist the temptation to turn down the volume.

Reagan had a personal genius for the television medium, honed through his years as pitchman for General Electric. The Reagan-era Republican Party possessed a quite different advantage in computerized direct mail campaigning. It used the old media of the post to good effect by gathering detailed data on the habits of households and tailoring direct-mail campaigns accordingly. Got a subscription to Guns and Ammo? Here’s a message from your friends at the NRA.

It’s possible that recent wins by the Democrats are enabled at least in part by a canny use of the internet and the cellphone. The Dems’ internet strategy dates back to the Howard Dean campaign and its use of meetup.org to bring Democrats together socially as a modest secular alternative to the ability of the Republicans to mobilize via the conservative churches. It is also well known that the Obama campaign took care to harvest cellphone numbers at rallies, so that the cellphone could be used as a broadcast platform. While the Republican robocalls languished unheard on obsolete landline answering machines, Democratic text messages encouraged voters, wherever they happened to be on the day, to go to the polls.

Long before the electoral tide turned in Obama’s run for president, the media tide had turned. The Republican domination of talk radio and the ubiquity of Fox News, obliged the Democrats to take a different tack: blogs. Of course there is a right-wing as well as a left-wing blogosphere. But where the right-wing blogs cannibalized attention for existing right-wing media, the left-wing blogs filled a real vacuum in a way that Al Gore’s cable network and Air America failed to do.

The key rhetorical move has to do with affect. Put simply, the right has a monopoly on angry derision. One can’t compete with Rush and O’Reilly on that terrain. Ironic distance, despite the best efforts of Jon Stewart, never quite worked as counter-affect, nor did parody, although one might plausibly date the endgame for the Bush junta to Stephen Colbert’s scorcher of a roast at the correspondent’s dinner. As my New School colleague Simon Critchley has pointed out, the rhetorical genius of the Obama campaign was to co-opt faith and color it with hope rather than anger. But this strategy required a harnessing of new and old media that, while it had its precedents in Dean’s failed primary bid, was relatively new.

Part of it was a judicious filtering and enabling of more or less spontaneous propaganda efforts. The Shepard Fairey HOPE poster and will.i.am’s “Yes we can” song and video are key examples. While not exactly “roots” media—both are by media professionals—they are not top-down productions blasted into people’s awareness with strategic ad buys. Rather, they were circulated laterally, via email, blogs, Youtube. Of the thousands of media productions, both amateur and professional, official and unofficial, these were selected by popular internet filtering to become the iconic markers of the campaign.

But good media is worthless without the means of communication to mobilize voters. This is where the cellphone and the internet come into play. The Obama campaign was able to mobilize secular people with secular means. The cellphone, in particular, is worth examining in this context. The internet is still something of a household or organization-bound device. It’s as useful to the religious right as to anyone else. But the cellphone is different. It is ideal for mobilizing young voters, or those whose identities are not defined by the home or the authority of church.

Like many other industries, politics has replaced labor with capital where it is cheaper to do so. Digital-era campaigning does away with the need for some of the local knowledge once carefully guarded by local political machines. The votes that carried Obama into the White House came from the exurbs, the edge cities, where the network of social organization is not dense and the megachurch looms as the only solution to this social deficit. You can blast these places with broadcast ads, but what probably had the most effect was the door-to-door “get out the vote” effort, the logistics of which is best handled by internet and cellphone.

All this is expensive. Hence the significance of Howard Dean’s emphasis on the internet as a fundraising tool. It is probably still easier to raise money in big chunks from wealthy donors, but anything that reduces the cost of raising money in small amounts from a wide base is to be welcomed. It changes, if only slightly, the class composition of influence within the party. The internet is the political weapon of choice of the educated, white collar working class.

Every media form creates a space of possibilities for political action. Political actors discover them by trial and error. The effects are often subtle and complicated. The media’s discourse about itself favors stories in which new media forms are always revolutionary, which prompts counter-narratives which conclude that there is nothing new under the sun. The real story is always more interesting. The study of politics is necessarily the study of how it is mediated.

Autore: McKenzie Wark

Fonte: www.dissentmagazine.org

Brazil, the United States and Chile: military ghosts

Wirepullers: il nemico del mio nemico è mio amico. Oggi potremmo dire i ribelli del mio vicino sono miei amici. E' sempre più diffusa infatti tra i governi, la pratica di dare sostegno, copertura e finanziamento a ribelli che, appena oltre i propri confini, combattono contro il governo del proprio vicino. Così Chavez appoggerebbe le FARC, Iran e Siria sosterrebbero Hezbollah e Hamas, l'Arabia Saudita sarebbe stata dietro al ribelle ceceno Basayev. Con gli Stati Uniti non iniziamo neanche, la lista sarebbe troppo lunga. Newsweek propone una carrellata di storiche amicizie nate da una convergenza di interessi: la guerra a un nemico comune. A seguire Open Democracy sulla recente pubblicazione di documeti segreti, relativi ai rapporti USA-Brasile per l'eliminazione di Salvador Allende, in quello che potremmo definire l'11 settembre meno famoso. Era il 1973. (2)

A tranche of newly declassified documents exposes the degree of United States-Brazil collaboration in the early 1970s against Chile's elected president. This valuable historical record also confirms how much Washington's own policies fuel anti-Americanism in Latin America, says Arthur Ituassu.

A set of documents published by George Washington University's National Security Archive on 16 August 2009 contains fresh and vivid evidence of United States actions and attitudes towards Latin America in the early 1970s. The release of this material only a day after Washington announced an increase in its military involvement with Álvaro Uribe's Colombia is an interesting coincidence of timing that also offers a ready-made argument to those in the region, most vocally the Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez, who contend that nothing fundamental has changed in subsequent years - not even with the election of Barack Obama.

The documents reveal that the US president Richard M Nixon (elected in 1968) worked together with the military regime that had ruled Brazil since 1964 to undermine the elected socialist leader of Chile, Salvador Allende, and other leftwing governments in Latin America (see National Security Archive, "Brazil Conspired with U.S. to Overthrow Allende", 16 August 2009).

The value of the material lies in its detail and sense of actuality. Among the many reports is one of a White House meeting on 9 December 1971 between Nixon, his national-security adviser Henry Kissinger (who would also be appointed secretary of state after Nixon's re-election in 1972), and Brazil's hardline president, General Emílio Garrastazu Médici. Medici expressed concern that the United States - in light of Nixon's historic opening to communist China and summit meetings with the Soviets - would modify its position towards Fidel Castro's Cuba. Nixon denied there would be any change in relation to Havana, and went on to ask Médici about the situation in Chile. Kissinger noted:

"The president [Nixon] then asked president Médici for his views on how the situation in Chile would develop. President Médici said that Allende would be overthrown for very much the same reasons that Goulart had been overthrown in Brazil. The president then asked whether president Médici thought that the Chilean Armed Forces were capable of overthrowing Allende. President Médici replied that he felt that they were, adding that Brazil was exchanging many officers with the Chileans, and made clear that Brazil was working towards this end. The president said it was very important that Brazil and the United States work closely in this field. We could not take direction but if the Brazilians felt that there was something we could do to be helpful in this area, he would like president Médici to let him know".

The National Security Archive records Nixon telling Médici in the meeting: "The US and Brazil must try to prevent new Allendes and Castros and try where possible to reverse these trends". The American president also proposed to his Brazilian counterpart that they create a secret communications back-channel; Médici agreed, and named his private adviser and foreign minister, Mário Gibson Barbosa. Nixon himself named Henry Kissinger.

A band of brothers
This material has created great interest in Brazil. Matias Spektor, a professor of international relations associated with the Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV) in Rio de Janeiro,told the newspaper Folha de São Paulo: "The documents are fascinating. They show how large was the ambition of the covert actions conducted by Nixon's administration and the Brazilian military regime in South America, and the range of issues they covered. They reveal how serious was the American expectation that Brazil would assume a more important role in the anti-communist crusade. They also demonstrate that there was a lot of suspicion on the Brazilian side that Washington would normalise its relations with Cuba; and that Médici looked for American support against the Argentineans concerning the construction of the Itaipu hydroelectric dam" (see "Médici e Nixon planejaram derrubar Allende", Folha de São Paulo, 16 August 2009).

The contribution of the United States to the overthrow of Salvador Allende on 11 September 1973 is well established (see the Chile Documentation Project of the National Security Archive). Robert Dallek, in his fine book Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, contains exemplary indications of the depth of Washington's involvement as well as the relationship between these peculiar political characters.

Dallek reveals, for example, the details of a meeting held five days after the Santiago coup d'état, when Nixon and Kissinger discussed the US involvement in the Allende's overthrow:

Kissinger: "In the Eisenhower period, we would be heroes".

Nixon: "Well, we didn't, as you know, our hand doesn't show on this one".

Kissinger: "We didn't do it. I mean we helped them, created the conditions as great as possible".

Nixon: "That is right. And that is the way is going to be played".

The US president and secretary of state had determined to overthrow the Chilean president, ignoring numerous reports from their own state department confirming that Salvador Allende posed no serious threat to the United States in the hemisphere. It is also now clear that both worked closely with General Médici, whose government is widely considered the most violent of all those during Brazil's two decades of military rule (1964-85).

A modern echo
The National Security Archive points out that the only documentary part of this tragic history still unavailable is in Brazil itself. Peter Kornbluh, the director of the NSA's Chile and Brazil projects, is calling on President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to open Brazil's military archives on the period. "The full history of intervention in South America in the 1970s cannot be told without access to Brazilian documents", he says.

The declassification of these documents is also a great opportunity to think about the image of the United States in South America. Washington's past support for violent dictatorships has certainly strengthened the anti-Americanism in the region that fuels Hugo Chávez's political engine. The Venezuelan president is very aware of this fact and seeks every opportunity - the ongoing political crisis over Honduras being just one example - to use it.

In this context, the military agreement between United States and Colombia announced on 15 August 2009 that will make seven Colombian airbases available to the American airforce, is both significant and counterproductive. The agreement may be a bilateral one between Washington and Bogota, and may not (as US secretary of state Hillary Clinton says) represent a great increase in Washington's military presence in Colombia; but its symbolism and timing (it was made public on the eve of the meeting of the Union of the South American Nations [Unasur]) strengthens Hugo Chávez's regional vision and his argument that South American nations need to arm themselves against "American imperialism".

If Barack Obama's United States wishes today to encourage moderate Brazilian rather than radical Venezuelan leadership in the region, it should at least try not to provoke unnecessary irritation among its southern neighbours. The treatment of Chile, and equally the mentalities and secrecies that underlay it, should be an awful warning.

Autore: Arthur Ituassu

Fonte: www.opendemocracy.net

Meddle Nettle. When countries interfere in foreign rebellions.

Wirepullers: il nemico del mio nemico è mio amico. Oggi potremmo dire i ribelli del mio vicino sono miei amici. E' sempre più diffusa infatti tra i governi, la pratica di dare sostegno, copertura e finanziamento a ribelli che, appena oltre i propri confini, combattono contro il governo del proprio vicino. Così Chavez appoggerebbe le FARC, Iran e Siria sosterrebbero Hezbollah e Hamas, l'Arabia Saudita sarebbe stata dietro al ribelle ceceno Basayev. Con gli Stati Uniti non iniziamo neanche, la lista sarebbe troppo lunga. Newsweek propone una carrellata di storiche amicizie nate da una convergenza di interessi: la guerra a un nemico comune. A seguire Open Democracy sulla recente pubblicazione di documeti segreti, relativi ai rapporti USA-Brasile per l'eliminazione di Salvador Allende, in quello che potremmo definire l'11 settembre meno famoso. Era il 1973. (1)

A sovereign state is, by definition, supposed to manage affairs inside its borders. But that's not always the case, especially when it comes to disputes involving guerrilla movements. After all, moral equivalency or not, one nation's terrorists really are another's freedom fighters, and foreign governments sometimes cross international borders to protect antigovernment forces elsewhere, reinforce ethnic movements, or simply to make their presence known. Last week, for example, documents revealed that Venezuela is still supporting the FARC guerrillas in Colombia.
Not surprisingly, this uninvited meddling is not received warmly; intrusions often cause major international crises. By offering military aid, financial support, and political alliances to rebel groups, nations can sour relations with their neighbors (as with Venezuela and Colombia) or even with distant foes (as with Saudi Arabia and Russia). Here is a brief overview of nations that have wreaked havoc by meddling in the business of other countries.

Years: 1964-present

The meddler: Venezuela

The transgression: Caracas provides money and political support for Colombia's FARC guerrillas.

Considered a terrorist organization by a number of countries, including the United States, FARC guerrillas have been fighting to overthrow the government in Colombia since the 1960s. They operate inside the jungles along Venezuela's border and represent the largest Marxist insurgency in Latin America. The group is infamous for its kidnappings of foreign citizens and violent attacks against Colombian targets. Since coming into power in 2002, President Alvaro Uribe, whose own father was killed in a FARC kidnapping attempt, has successfully battled the insurgents; but he still hasn't found a way to cut off the aid that FARC militants receive from abroad.

Venezuela is considered to be sympathetic to the FARC. In an effort to legitimize the group's plight, President Hugo Chávez has urged Colombia to recognize it as a "belligerent force" instead of "terrorists." Chávez's ties to FARC are so close that, in August 2007, Uribe asked the Venezuelan president to serve as a mediator in talks over freeing hostages held by the group. When the negotiations fell apart, the two leaders traded public insults (Chávez compared Uribe to a "mafia boss"; Uribe reiterated by calling him a "legitimizer of terrorists"). Chávez has repeatedly denied his government's collaboration with the rebel group.

But in March 2008, when Colombia raided a FARC camp in Ecuador, its analysts discovered intelligence that suggested Venezuela had given $300 million and military support to the FARC. Venezuela responded by sending troops to its Colombian border. Last week new evidence obtained from rebels showed that Venezuelan officials still assist the FARC by securing arms deals and facilitating the rebels' movement inside Venezuela.

Years: 1985-1986

The meddler: The U.S.

The transgression: Washington funded contra rebel group in Nicaragua with arms sales to Iran.

During the Cold War, the United States did its fair share of intervening, under the Reagan Doctrine, to prevent the spread of Soviet-backed communism. One particular case erupted into a scandal involving two otherwise little-related nations, Nicaragua and Iran. The anticommunist opposition in Nicaragua, the contras, was formed in 1979 to fight the socialist regime. They often used violent means, such as rape, torture, and murder, during their struggle. But because they were fighting the Cuban-backed Sandinista government, they were the "moral equal of our Founding Fathers," according to President Reagan, and thus the recipient of large financial and military support from the United States. The U.S. was also influential in strengthening the contras by unifying and training the largely disorganized groups that made up the opposition.

Congress caught wind of the contras' brutal methods in 1984 and restricted the aid Reagan could provide them. So, in secret, administration officials used the profits from covert arms sales to Iran (which had released 52 American Embassy hostages just three years earlier, after 444 days in captivity) to fund the contras. The Iran-contra affair was revealed in 1986 and damaged both Reagan's popularity domestically as well as America's image internationally. Lt. Col. Oliver North, a Marine officer, later took the blame; he was fired from his position as the administration's counterterrorism coordinator and prosecuted. Although he was found guilty on three counts, his convictions were later overturned. Others officials involved in the scandal were later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush.

Years: 1980-1998

The meddler: Syria

The transgression: Damascus housed and trained Turkey's PKK terrorists, among others.

The PKK has been waging an armed guerrilla battle against the Turkish state since the early 1980s, with the aim of creating an ethnically Kurdish state, and it was largely backed by Syria, home to nearly 2 million Kurds. In 1980, the leader of the PKK, Abdullah Ocalan, fled across the border into Syria, where his fighters received arms, military training, and a safe haven for nearly two decades. Their activities were especially concentrated in the Bekaa Valley, a central Lebanese region controlled until recently by Syria. Here, the rebel army not only trained in terrorist tactics, but also cultivated opium to fund its operations.

According to some analysts, the Syrian government harbored the PKK for so long in order to have a bargaining tool in relations with Turkey. The two countries have long bickered over territorial and water claims. In fact, then-president Hafez Assad's support for the PKK increased when Turkey finalized its plans for a massive dam project that would drastically reduce water flow to Syria. By the late 1990s, tensions had risen so much that the two countries were on the brink of war. The crisis was averted in 1998, when Syria, under pressure from Turkey, expelled Ocalan and closed down the PKK camps. Although Ocalan was captured shortly afterward in Kenya, the PKK's influence in Syria has remained strong. Thousands of Syrian Kurds have joined the PKK over the years; Syrian members are thought to represent one third of the group.

Years: 1982-present

The meddler: Iran

The transgression: Tehran masterminds Lebanon's Hizbullah.

Hizbullah, the militant Shiite group in southern Lebanon, has had close ties with Iran since its founding in 1982. Some U.S. and Israeli officials have even suggested that the group operates in accordance with Iran's regional agenda. The deep links between Hizbullah and Iran are rooted in shared religious, ideological, and political beliefs (Iran is one of the world's only Shia-majority nations). In fact, Hizbullah's creation was largely inspired by the Islamic revolution in Iran. Originally, Hizbullah wanted to establish a similar Islamic state in Lebanon. Although it later abandoned this goal, the group has remained loyal to the principles of the Islamic Republic, often turning to the Supreme Leader in Tehran for spiritual guidance.

The true extent of Iran's involvement in Hizbullah's activities is unclear, but it is estimated that Iran covers somewhere between $60 million and $100 million of the group's annual expenses. Many of the weapons Hizbullah has used against Israel are believed to be supplied by Tehran. In 2002, Israel seized a cargo ship named the Karine A and discovered 50 tons of Iranian weapons that were being supplied to the Palestinian Authority through Hizbullah, according to Israel and the United States. (Hizbullah denied this.) The Iranian Revolutionary Guards have been involved in the military training of Hizbullah fighters and commanders, both in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley as well as in Iran proper, where Hizbullah has an office.

Years: 1994-present

The meddler: Saudi Arabia

The transgression: Riyadh is thought to have indoctrinated Chechen rebels with extremism and supported their independence from Russia.

Throughout Chechnya's struggle to gain independence from Russia in the northern Caucusus, Chechen rebels were supported by Turkey and even the United States, but their strongest ally was always Saudi Arabia. During the Chechen wars of 1994-1996 and 1999-2004, the Wahhabi state aided Chechen militants with money, arms, supplies, and training. Russia also blames Saudi missionaries for spreading Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia's fundamentalist version of Sunni Islam, in the region and fueling extremism.

Saudi Arabia was influential in promoting the Chechen cause internationally, especially in the Muslim world. In January 1995, the Saudi government tried to get the U.N. Security Council to bring the war to an end, and, using its influential voice in the Organization of the Islamic Conference, called on Muslim nations to support Chechen separatist aspirations.

But when Chechen militants hijacked a Russian plane and forced it to land in Medina in March 2001, Saudi officials said they condemned terrorism. Yet when Chechen terrorists took hostages in a Moscow theater in 2002, Moscow claimed they had been funded by Riyadh; cell-phone records showed the rebels made calls to Gulf states during the siege. Saudi officials denied the claims, but the accusation frayed relations.

Years: 1976-present

The meddler: Algeria

The transgression: Algiers backs the Polisario Front, which seeks Western Sahara's independence from Morocco.

The Polisario Front is a rebel movement founded in 1973 that calls for the independence of Western Sahara from Morocco. Since Spain's withdrawal from the colony and Morocco's ensuing claim over the territory in the mid-1970s, the group has waged a guerrilla war against Rabat. In 1976, when the Polisario Front declared the sovereignty of the disputed region, Algeria became the first nation to recognize it. Since then, the group has been based in Algeria, which provides it with military, financial, and political backing.

For more than 30 years, nearly 200,000 natives of Western Sahara have been living in Polisario-run camps in western Algeria, in a region the Algerian government has effectively ceded to the guerrilla group. Although Algiers reduced its support for the group in the 1990s, its relations with Morocco are predictably bad: the border between the two countries has been closed since 1994, and, despite efforts by the U.N. and neighboring African nations, relations have yet to be normalized (although last month Moroccan King Mohammed VI suggested he wanted to improve ties and said he would allow for some degree of autonomy in Western Sahara).

Autore: Zeynep Memecan

Fonte: www.newsweek.com