The country could serve as a new beacon of democracy in the region, Stanford University’s Larry Diamond told The Jakarta Post on the sidelines of the World Movement for Democracy’s 6^th assembly.

But corruption remains the principal threat to the integrity of the fledgling democracy’s institutions, said Diamond, head of Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.

The Corruption Eradication Commission [KPK] is trying to develop momentum, Diamond noted, but change will be a long-term process, requiring a partnership between political actors and civil society.

“Indonesia needs to improve the rule of law, independence of the judiciary and establish an anticorruption body with far-reaching authority. There should also be public education on democracy, especially on the issue of obligations and rights,” he said. “Democracy can only be on track when political leaders and civil society continue the process.”

With U.S. President Barack Obama due to visit the country in June in a rescheduled trip, Indonesia may be about to shed its profile as the world’s most important and least known country.

Citizens of the world’s largest democracy often refer to the struggle for BiPaSa – bijli – electricity, pani- water, and sadak – roads, one Indian participant noted. Democracy must address people’s material needs and concerns if it is to retain its legitimacy and citizens’ allegiance, delegates heard.

Democracy assistance too often benefits favored clients, some complained, disproportionately benefiting metropolitan-based NGOs run by well-educated elites, at the expense of rural activists or otherwise marginalized groups. Groups like the American Center for International Labor Solidarity and the Center for International Private Enterprise have gone out of their way to engage with non-traditional democratic actors, including domestic workers and young entrepreneurs, often through multi-stakeholder coalitions that leverage the skills and resources of otherwise disparate groups.

Want to make a point? Ridicule a regime. Governments know how to handle most forms of dissent, but they are less comfortable when citizen activists simply make fun of them, delegates heard.

Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is reportedly seething over open letters to his daughters imploring them to stop their father being such a jerk, said Consorcio’s Carlos Ponce, urging activists to overcome their “fear of innovation.”

But satire has its drawbacks and dangers too, cautioned Leyla Yunosova of Azerbaijan’s Institute of Peace and Democracy. Delegates watched a film poking fun at the government that landed two pro-democracy activists in jail.

The bloggers were assaulted and arrested after their youth group, Ol, posted a video in which a donkey holds a press conference detailing the wonderful life donkeys have in Azerbaijan. The video was a satire of the government which local media had reported as paying exorbitant prices to import donkeys.

The authoritarian backlash has gone into overdrive since the last assembly, said Doug Rutzen of the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, listing 14 states which had enacted legislation restricting civil society. Globalization had facilitated authoritarian learning, he suggested, decrying a “new forms of political protectionism” as governments moved “from trade barriers to aid barriers.”

An examination of anti-NGO laws across Central Asia, the Middle East and Latin America reveals “precisely the same provisions” in legislation.

Given this evident mutual learning and assistance amongst authoritarians and, sadly, some democratic states, he said, “it is incumbent upon us to support groups like the World Movement for Democracy and the Community of Democracies.”

The assembly has a practical orientation and a political focus that other civil society gatherings lack, said a prominent not-for-profit activist and analyst. While events like the annual CIVICUS conference provide a useful discussion forum, their catch-all approach and absence of clear political objectives can be a turn-off for hard-pressed activists.

By contrast, the World Movement‘s assemblies have not only acquired maturity and continuity, delegates suggested, but also spawned networks that keep activists in touch and in action. The work and commitment of the youth and African networks in particular were evident throughout the Jakarta assembly.

The majority of delegates who stayed for the closing session witnessed a stirring example in Venezuelan student Roberto Patino. Receiving the Democracy Courage Tribute on behalf of his country’s student movement, he twice brought delegates to their feet – although, to be accurate, Iranian student leader Ali Afshari forcefully demanded the first ovation – with a passionate insistence on youth’s leading role in current democratic struggles.

Pointing out that he was only 11-years-old when Venezuela’s increasingly autocratic caudillo Hugo Chavez came to power in 1998, he noted that opinion polls confirmed that the student movement was now the most trusted political actor in the country. This is at least partly due to the movement’s avoidance of partisan posturing, and its cross-class character, bringing together students from elite private college and the mass public universities through a common insistence on democratic principles and integrity.

Dokka Itslaev, director of the Urus-Martan (Chechnya) branch of the Russian human rights group Memorial, also received a standing ovation as he received a Courage Tribute on behalf of the human rights activists in the North Caucasus. He paid tribute to those like Natalia Estemirova, his colleague at Memorial, who gave their lives for a cause they knew to be potentially lethal, but to which they made the ultimate commitment.

Syria’s beleaguered democrats are less well-known but equally deserving of the Tribute they also received. Many activists have been detained since December 2007 and January 2008, after organizing a meeting in support of the Damascus Declaration for Democratic National Change.

Accepting the award on behalf of those incarcerated advocates like Riad Seif, exiled human rights activist Radwan Ziadeh lamented the fact that Syria’s potentially pivotal role in securing Middle East peace is prompting Western politicians to turn a blind eye to the oppressive nature of the regime.

The achievements of the Iranian women’s movement and its Million Signatures campaign have partly been obscured by the emergence of the Green opposition. But the campaign both facilitated the Green movement’s emergence and remains a vital building block as its extensive network of activists will be vital to consolidating a sustainable Green alternative to the Islamic Republic’s authoritarian regime.

Forced to leave the conference due to a family bereavement, Iranian democracy activist Mehnaz Afkami was unable to accept the award on behalf of the movement. But in a statement delivered on her behalf by a colleague from her Women’s Learning Partnership, she stressed the movement’s resilience, flexibility and stamina, due in part to its rejection of traditional formal hierarchies and the ability of women to vary their level of activism to suit their personal needs and commitments.

The assembly ended on a musical note, as the National Endowment for Democracy’s Carl Gershman gave a stirring rendition of the Civil Rights anthem ‘Oh Freedom’.

“And before I be your slave, I’ll be buried in my grave,” the lyrics insist, and this assembly’s Democracy Courage Tributes provided a poignant reminder that activists continue to pay the ultimate price for their commitment to democracy and human rights.

But who are these people? Well, most of the respondents to an online survey of democracy activists were well-educated urban elites, working in organizations that are highly financially dependent on foreign funders and who possess a realistic view on what democracy assistance can and can’t do.

That’s what Joel Barkan told a World Movement workshop, outlining provisional findings of a survey supported by several leading democracy groups.

The single “most potent message” to have emerged from some 600 interviews with activists across 15 country-based case studies is that democracy assistance needs a more holistic approach, FRIDE’s Richard Youngs told the workshop. Funding is great, they say, but it needs to be buttressed by other foreign policy instruments like aid, trade and diplomacy.

There is no crisis in donor-grantee relations, he assured delegates. But alongside traditional concerns of short-term funding horizons, poor coordination, rigid funding requirements and donor bias towards favored CSOs, deeper issues emerged.

Donors are missing the best access points to promote democratic reform because they are reluctant to cede control of the agenda, activists claim.

But they are realistic about the capacity of external actors to make a difference, Barkan’s online survey of 1000+ activists suggests. Assistance can facilitate change by enabling local actors and organizations, but it is ultimately local factors and forces that will determine prospects for democratization.

Ukraine’s experience was one of donor sensitivity to local ownership, said Inna Pidluska of the Europe XXI Foundation. The amount of funds is less important than the quality and strategic focus of a donor-recipient partnership, she said.

For IDASA’s Paul Graham, the key is to create incentives for local actors to choose a democratic path and ensure a robust legacy of democratic institutions and entrenched values. The ultimate aim must be to establish politically-rooted partnerships rather than financial transactions, to “find friends, not financiers, companions, not contractors.”

Recommendations arising from the discussion included:

Disaggregating the online data by region, country and regime-types would be instructive;

Encourage strategic, long-term approaches so that consolidating but still-fragile democracies (like Mongolia) aren’t left in the lurch;

Factor in the issue of timing: at what points in a democratic struggle or transition is assistance most effective?

How to guard against the data’s suggestion that some groups are overly dependent on foreign funding because they do not have local support or constituencies?

The European Union and its democracy assistance flagship – the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights – have been criticized for opaque and onerous regulations that deter activist groups from applying for funds.

But that is starting to change, said Vera Rihackova, summarizing a new report produced for the Prague-based PASOS think-tank network. The EU’s new approach puts democracy on an equal footing with development and human rights, while the EIDHR is now prepared to fund activists working within authoritarian states, no longer insisting on the previous requirement for host-government approval.

The study and the EU’s approach raised issues with which practitioners have been struggling for over 25 years, said the National Endowment for Democracy’s Barbara Haig, moderating the panel. How to deliver assistance to democracy activists operating in closed societies? How should donors relate to host-country governments?

The UN Democracy Fund has grappled with many of the dilemmas confronting democracy assistance donors, said its director Roland Rich, including whether to insist on on-line-only applications (it does, due to resource constraints); whether to give small or large grants, to widen or deepen civil society (it opts for the latter); whether to fund local or international NGOS (UNDEF supports grass-roots groups); and how to determine what role governments should play (advisory rather than holding a veto).

Asia currently exhibits a diverse set if challenges to democracy assistance groups, said Peter Manikas, regional director for the National Democratic Institute, from post-conflict reconciliation in Sri Lanka and Nepal to acute security challenges in Af-Pak, from the intimidating prospects for changing closed societies like North Korea and Burma to the highly-polarized polities – and civil societies – of Thaiand and Bangladesh.

But the overriding challenge, he believes, is the threat of the China Model – Asian Values Mk II – which holds out the autocratic promise of economic growth and social stability without democracy. The much-neglected Shanghai Cooperation Organization presents the same threat of an authoritarian axis at the regional geo-strategic level.

Democracy assistance actors have arguably neglected the socio-economic dimensions of democracy at their cost, leaving a vacuum for populist and anti-democratic forces to exploit, feeding off the material insecurity that poverty breeds. The NED-affiliated Solidarity Center and Center for International Private Enterprise address these challenges from the perspective of organized labor and business, respectively.

Labor unions are in the democracy business because workers tend to perceive their interests in the round, says the Solidarity Center’s Tim Ryan said, as it is hard to divorce political concerns from issues of economic security. The plight of Asia’s migrant workers provides a case in point: their social and economic marginalization often leads to political disenfranchisement.

CIPE’s John Sullivan endorsed  Indonesian President Yudhoyono’s call for a democracy that delivers, but insisted that democracy isn’t worth the name without property rights that underpin the distribution of income and pluralist  dispersal of power. He cautioned against subsuming – and thereby diluting – democracy under the development rubric  and insisted that references to good governance be exposed for the euphemistic evasions that they are: democratic governance is the only meaningful way to frame the decision-making and leadership-selection that are central to any genuine concept of democracy.

A sometimes-charged discussion of donor-client roles and responsibilities eventually generated several specific recommendations:

• A regional, geo-strategic and ideological counterweight is needed to confront the China Model and SCO;
• Donor demands for transparency and accountability should also pay heed to the security of activists operating in authoritarian regimes;
• Don’t unduly accentuate the tensions between democracy and development: they are interdependent;
• Democracy assistance isn’t enough: funds matter, but activists and NGOs need the political support of democratic states who should employ other foreign policy instruments – aid, trade, diplomacy – to defend activists and pressure autocrats;
• Insist on property rights as an essential element of democracy and demand democratic governance;
• Don’t underestimate the force of religious sentiment as a factor in political allegiance and mobilization, or focus overmuch on secular elites;
• Donors should help build small, local NGOs’ capacity to meet the demands for auditing and other forms of accountability that donors demand.

"Electricity, water, crime: tas ponchao!" - 3 strikes and you're out, students tell Chavez

Venezuela’s student movement will be one of the recipients of the prestigious democracy award at tonight’s closing ceremony of the World Movement for Democracy’s 6^th assembly. And for good reason, writes former Iranian student leader Ali Afshari.

All students who struggle against non-democratic regimes will share my happiness that the Venezuelan student movement is receiving this award this evening. I am only one of many who find the movement’s struggles to be fascinating, energetic, and inspirational.

Since coming to power in 1998, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez has increasingly closed down political space, undercut the country’s democratic institutions and sought to silence critics and dissident voices.  

A recent report from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an official body of the Organization of American States, detailed Venezuela’s democratic regression under Chávez.

The report highlights how the regime has undermined judicial independence, intimidated or silenced opposition media, refused to respect the legitimate authority of elected opposition figures and criminalized dissidents, NGOs and human rights groups.

More than 2,200 people have been indicted on criminal charges arising from political activity.

The commission documents the murder of journalists, opposition protesters and farmers, and reports that 173 labor union leaders and members were killed between 1997 and 2009.

The regime has also encroached upon the private sector, seizing food-processing plants and taking control of harbors, airports and roads, denying resources to cities and provinces governed by the opposition.

Venezuela’s oil industry, the state’s cash-cow, is in a critical condition due to mismanagement, lack of investment and acute skills shortages. Daily production has fallen  from 3.5 million barrels per day in 1998 (when Chávez came to power) to 2.5 million barrels today

But while the regime squanders the country’s resources, ordinary Venezuelans are suffering from an epidemic of crime and violence, and from shortages of food, power and water.

These trends prompted a group of former Chávistas, to publicly denounce the regime’s rule as “autocratic” and “totalitarian”. They insist that Chávez – quote – “has neither moral nor material authority to rule the country, since he cannot meet people’s demands.”

The government has responded to growing public criticism by moving to stifle dissent. Chávez has called for tougher Internet regulations and demanded a crack down on dissident Web sites.

Chávez recently said –quote – “The Internet cannot be something open where anything is said and done.”

Cuban general Ramiro Valdés recently arrived in Caracas, reportedly to advise on the country’s electricity supply crisis. He has been described as “one of the most brutal enforcers of the Castro regime” since the 1960s when he suppressed popular protests over power rationing. He now joins 30,000 fellow Cubans who hold posts in dozens of state bodies.

It is in this context that Venezuela’s student movement has emerged as one of the few vibrant sources of democratic life in the nation.

The movement arose in May 2007 in response to the regime’s closure of RCTV – the nation’s oldest private TV station. Student-organized rallies mobilized tens of thousands of ordinary citizens, including former Chavez supporters, outraged at the government’s blatant censorship and suppression of dissident voices.

In December 2007, the student movement was a leading force in the campaign to defeat a proposed constitutional amendment that would have further centralized political and economic power in the hands of the regime. The student movement was credited with persuading swing voters to vote no.

As opposition political parties failed to mobilize or restricted their opposition to televised press conferences, students were often the only visible opponents of the proposal.

The students’ reaction to the closure and the referendum was motivated not by ideology or partisan politics but by the notion that, in the words of a student leader, “in a democracy, all sides should be welcome.”

Despite government provocation and calls for attacks on the students, the movement remains committed to the non-violent promotion of democracy by encouraging young people to register to vote and training an impressive 50,000 young observers to monitor elections.

Security forces used tear gas, plastic bullets and water cannon to break up student protests against the referendum after Chavez called the students “spoiled brats” and “children of the bourgeoisie”.

But the movement attracts students from all walks of life and even welcomes pro-Chavez students to its meetings and rallies. The movement is active in the huge public universities as well as elite private colleges.

“What happened in 2007 is that the students suddenly discovered they had power,” a prominent Venezuelan professor has said. “One of the things Chavez has tried to do is to promote a citizenship with a political consciousness. He got it. But the paradox is most of them are against him.”

The students have now shifted their focus from constitutional issues to the main concerns of ordinary citizens suffering from rampant crime, power shortages, and cuts in water supply. The movement’s main campaign slogan is now “Electricity, water, crime: tas ponchao!”

The expression, which means “You struck out”, draws on Venezuelans’ obsession with baseball. Students have unfurled banners with the slogan at televised baseball games, reportedly infuriating the president.

The student movement does not describe itself as an opposition or as an anti-Chavista force. Its young leaders have consistently said that they do not want to overthrow the government in any unconstitutional coup, and they have been critical of opposition political parties as well as the regime.

The students insist that both the regime and opposition should respect fundamental democratic principles.

As one prominent student leader said:

“This is not a war of left and right. We believe that Venezuela has to have democracy. Democracy means respect. Democracy means free expression. Democracy means saying what you want without repression.”

These words could also have been uttered by any member of Iran’s opposition Green movement and, as a former student leader, I am encouraged to hear of growing links between Green student activists in Iran and their Venezuelan counterparts, using social media like Twitter and Facebook.

• As a vital pillar of civil society, students are engines of change and are often at the forefront of democratic struggles for perhaps obvious reasons:
• Universities and colleges are centers of development and enlightenment, and they cannot function without freedom of expression.
• The diversity of student populations means students must collaborate and work with others across cultural, ideological, social and economic divides;
• And student movements are mutable and dynamic – they change and adapt to changing circumstances.

Chavez has attacked the students’ on-line social networks. He recently declared that “using Twitter, the internet (and) text messaging” to criticize his regime “is terrorism”. His government has copied the tactics of his close friend and ally Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and launched a “cyber army” to crash students’ online networks and to infiltrate the movement.

Just as autocratic leaders like Chavez and Ahmedinejad are forging alliances and trading tactics, so it is imperative that democratic student movements like those in Iran and Venezuela share our successes and failures, learn from each other and support each others’ efforts.

Instead, while the threat of radical Islamist terrorism has not entirely dissipated, the country has evolved into the world’s third-largest democracy and its most populous Muslim nation.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s re-scheduled visit later this year will shine a spotlight on a state which,  the World Bank recently observed, has a ”unique opportunity to rise as a dynamic, inclusive, middle-income country which can be both a leading sophisticated commodity economy like Australia [and] a hub of labor-intensive industry in Asia like China”.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono recently used the occasion of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday to insist on the compatibility of Islam and democracy.

“The democracy we should promote is a democracy with a full mandate of ethics, decency and upholding a noble attitude, not a democracy based on mutual hostility and destruction,” he said.

His call came at a time of growing criticism of politicians’ behavior – the “money politics” he decried at the World Movement’s Assembly – which is contributing to a broader disillusion with democracy. Corruption remains a major constraint on the development of genuinely transparent institutions, as the military continues to exert political influence through extensive business interests.

And Indonesia’s most recent parliamentary elections last year confirmed reinforced the point, according to Ahmad Suaedy, executive director of Jakarta’s Wahid Institute.

Mainstream Islamic forces fared well, but radical Islamist parties failed because “exclusive Islamic ideologies are no longer able to meet the needs of those concerned about the existence of such Islamic parties or of those who still place hopes in the promise that ideological realization can change Indonesian state foundations.”

Yet others remain concerned that as talks to form a governing coalition continue, the mainstream parties may be tempted to strike a deal with the Islamist Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) which, though ostensibly non-violent, espouses an intolerant brand of Islam, informed by Wahhabi ideology, at odds with Indonesia’s syncretic civil Islam. Sadanand Dhume notesa  “pathbreaking” report by the Libforall Foundation which demonstrates that the “PKS continues its effort to infiltrate mainstream Islamic organizations, and to replace Indonesia’s tolerant, homespun Islam with an arid import from the Middle East.”

The Libforall Foundation is one of the rare success stories of an initiative in which moderate and liberal Muslims – too often the silent and disorganized majority – have organized effectively to counter radical Islamist groups by promoting democracy and tolerance.

“Truth, which is not organized, can be readily defeated by evil that is,” former Indonesian President H.E. Kyai Haji Abdurrahman Wahid in the Libforall report, The Illusion of an Islamic State: the Expansion of Transnational Islamist Movements to Indonesia.

The elections confirm the country’s potential as a standard-bearer for liberal democratic ideas in a region where it has recently appeared fragile and in which China represents a significant authoritarian countervailing power.

“If Indonesia was to start investing in the propagation of these ideas, it could contribute to regional peace and security,” notes one observer, citing as a positive sign President Yudho-yono’s launch of the Bali Democracy Forum “aimed at enshrining democracy on the strategic agenda of Asia”.

Participants were still buzzing about the speech some 24 hours later.  

The speech was a forceful and eloquent articulation of the underlying principles and rationale for the country’s striking democratic transition.

“What has happened in Indonesia is the most significant gain for democracy since the great events of 1989,” said Carl Gershman, president of the Washington-based National Endowment for Democracy. The country’s achievement is all the more remarkable when the experience of states like Thailand confirms how difficult and fragile democratic consolidation can be, he told a press conference at Jakarta’s Shangri-La hotel.

Ten years after the ‘Reformasi’ elections in 1999, Indonesian democracy is “irreversible and a daily fact of life,” Yudhoyono told the assembled democracy advocates.

Indonesia’s experience confirmed that freedom need not be sacrificed on the altar of economic growth and that in an ethnically diverse society, democracy was vital for resolving conflict and ensuring genuine pluralism.

Under Suharto’s regime, Indonesia’s political development was stymied by “an authoritarian system that sought stability, development and national unity at all costs.”

“Today, our democracy is growing strong,” Yudhoyono said. “While at the same time, Indonesia is registering the third-highest economic growth among G-20 countries, after China and India.”

Yudhoyono did not deny that corruption remains a serious threat to political integrity.  

“Money politics can seriously undermine democracy because it induces elected leaders and politicians to serve their pay masters at the expense of the public good,” he said.

But Indonesian democracy gets its vibrancy and dynamism from the fact that it emerged and developed indigenously, reflecting the aspirations and values of ordinary citizens.

“Our democracy came out of a political crisis that was triggered by the financial crisis in 1997, which originated from outside our borders,” he said. “But the desire to get rid of corruption, collusion and nepotism came wholly from within.”

The speech was notable for affirming that Islam, democracy and modernization are not only compatible, but perhaps even complementary.

“There is no conflict between religious, spiritual and political obligations as citizens in pluralism and the capability to participate in the modern world,” Yudhoyono said.

The only notable omission in the speech was the foreign policy dimension, notably the conspicuous failure to mention the Bali Democracy Forum, and Indonesia’s more assertive role in promoting human rights within the ASEAN bloc. While India has been disappointingly lax in this respect, Indonesia is emerging as a potential force in challenging the region’s authoritarian regimes – not least in Burma, aka Myanmar - if only by the power of its example.

“We are looking so much for Yudhoyono to play a role in bringing a change in Myanmar because he has the capability for this. His military background and experience in Jakarta in its political reform would support that mission,” says the NED’s Gershman.

Jakarta, April 12th 2010

The Honorable Kim Campbell,
Mr. Carl Gershman, President of the National Endowment for Democracy,
Delegates to the World Assembly of World Movement for Democracy,
Ladies and gentlemen,

First of all, on behalf of the Government and people of Indonesia, I am pleased to extend a very warm welcome to all of you to Jakarta, Indonesia.

This is a very impressive gathering of the members of the World Movement for Democracy, who have come from all around the world. I commend you in your tireless dedication in the cause of promoting democracy.

We meet at a challenging time.

On the one hand, we saw a positive trend of significant expansion of democracies, particularly in the second half of the 20th century. Democracies, through different means, expanded in many regions – in Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America. That democratic wave also swept Indonesia in 1997, and changed us for good.

As a result, the political map of the world was significantly changed, with all its strategic, geopolitical, economic and social consequences. In Asia, there was a time several decades ago when Japan was the only democracy in the region. But today, Asia is home to many democracies.

But at the same time, we are also seeing a parallel trend of democracies in distress. Military c’oup. Political instability. Constitutional crisis. Divisive polarization. Violent conflicts. The return to authoritarianism. Failed states.

I do believe that, in most cases, this is temporary. Democracy, as we all know too well in Indonesia from experience, is never easy, never smooth, and never linear. It always involves a painful process of trial and error, with many ups and downs.

So do not despair.

I am convinced that ultimately the 21st century instinct is the democratic instinct. And the democratic instinct in the 21th century is inevitably stronger than the democratic instinct in the 20th century.

This is because the world will be more – not less – swept by the powerful force of globalization. Globalization is bringing greater connectivity – of people, goods, services, information, ideas. Nations, communities, families and individuals will be mutually “exposed”. Prosperity will spread, and the self-esteem that go with it. The middle-class everywhere will grow – it is said that for the first time in history, more than half of world population is now loosely categorized as middle-class.

In that process, as they grow in strength and confidence, sooner or later they are bound to seek greater transparency and accountability in the decisions that affect their lives. No political system can ignore this. Their choice is to adapt and survive, or to resist and crumble.

To read the full speech, go here: http://www.presidensby.info/index.php/eng/pidato/2010/04/12/1374.html.