Washington Post op-ed: "The Democracy Backlash"

[DeepModem Mom]

The Democracy Backlash
By Fred Hiatt
Monday, July 10, 2006; Page A17

When communism collapsed in 1991, no one expected democracy to triumph everywhere and instantly. But no one expected the other side to fight back, either....When President Vladimir Putin hosts the first summit of Group of Eight leaders in Russia this week, the most notable thing won't be that his country has failed to become the consolidated democracy that the G-7 countries expected when they invited Russia to join a decade ago. What will be remarkable -- but has been little remarked on -- is that Putin has become a leader and an emblem of an active movement to combat the spread of democracy.

"What seems to be the case," Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told me, "is that governments that are authoritarian have decided to fight back."

Lugar chaired a hearing last month on "The Backlash Against Democracy Assistance," which is the title of a report he commissioned from the National Endowment for Democracy, a private, federally funded organization created in 1983 to promote democratic institutions around the world. The organization found the backlash to be most pronounced in what Carl Gershman, NED's president, calls "hybrid regimes": autocracies that maintain some nominally democratic processes, usually including elections, and that generally claim to be democracies.

Many of these regimes tolerated civic groups promoting freedom and human rights during the 1990s and allowed them to receive help from democracy promoters in the United States and other nations. But after the Rose Revolution swept away the corrupt regime of Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia, followed by the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, Putin and other leaders decided they could no longer take any chances....And so they accelerated their harassment of civic groups, radio stations, political parties and any other independent voices -- with arbitrary detentions, visa bans, impossible funding rules, intrusive registration requirements and more....

***

And the rebounding dictators are learning from each other. In January Putin signed legislation regulating nongovernmental organizations that will give 30,000 bureaucrats the option of revoking the registration of any troublesome group. Now Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe are pushing similar legislation. China reportedly sent researchers to Uzbekistan and other former Soviet states to compare notes on democracy countermeasures; meanwhile, Belarus's dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, "reportedly acquired China's latest internet monitoring and control technology while in Beijing in December 2005," NED reported....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/09/AR2006070900536.html

[jaysunb]

1. Are they fighting democracy ? or is it

greedy capitalism ? Or is it even possible that other societies choose to do things their own way, which does not include American style " democracy ?"

[bobbieinok]

2. Chavez fighting democracy??

[bobbieinok]

3. and shouldn't we add W to the list of those 'fighting democracy'????

[lanlady]

4. they've got to be kidding

"no one expected the other side to fight back, either.... " Well, maybe our crackerjack Russia expert Condi Rice didn't expect the communists to stage a comeback, but other, better informed people, did.

[papau]

5. WP Editorial page editor Fred Hiatt buys into Bush Rhetoric on Foreign Pol

Indeed he complains when Bush does not actually do what he says and acts more responsibly - like say a Senator Kerry suggests.

[cprise]

6. Russia is part of the West (Asia Times)

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/HF08Ag01.html

Interesting review of democratic trends within Russia.


Anyway, the fact that WaPo is calling Venezuela undemocratic and citing NED reports marks it as blatantly false propaganda. And you better believe the US reserves the right to revoke NGO status. Pot-kettle-black par excellence.