It is highly likely that Erdoğan will prevail next Sunday. Neither the dire state of the economy nor his responsibility for the extent of the damage caused by the Feb. 6 earthquake and his government’s failed rescue-and-relief assistance seemed to matter. Instead, his divisive, negative, and identity-driven politics carried the day against his opponent’s call for a more democratic and accountable Turkey. The country has now moved further to the right and away from democratic ideals, as well as from its traditional Western orientation defined by the founder of the Turkish republic, Atatürk, exactly a century ago this year. Autocrats around the world are sure to be relieved to see that it is, after all, possible to prevail through the ballot box.

What Happened?

As much as the results from the May 14  election caught many Turkish and international commentators off guard, with hindsight, they are not that terribly surprising. The polls, apart from two, were significantly off the mark, especially those that predicted Kılıçdaroğlu winning the contest in the first round.  Furthermore, many observers also were misled by Kılıçdaroğlu’s well-attended and jubilant rallies in Erdoğan strongholds, as well as his positive and inclusive campaign narrative symbolized by the heart symbol that he and his supporters adopted. This atmosphere suggested an electorate tired of Erdoğan’s 20-year-long reign and his deeply divisive and aggressive language.

Additionally, echo-chamber dynamics blinded sober analysis of Turkey’s sociopolitical realities and the benefits of public resources and partisan bureaucracy that accrued to Erdoğan as the incumbent. Hence, it is not surprising that numerous commentators boldly predicted that Erdoğan was losing and his reign was coming to an end. They were terribly mistaken. One such commentator, a veteran journalist, in an act of self-criticism, suspended his column until further notice. Even the Turkish stock market appears to have been under the spell of the expectation that Erdoğan was on the way out. It rallied as traders priced in this expectation before falling after the election.

Contrary to widespread concerns, the actual voting process appears to have been free from any major fraud, though there are still some allegations of electoral irregularities. As the OSCE election observation mission preliminarily concluded, the elections fell short of being contested fairly and were marked by practices that “tilted the playing field” against the opposition, giving the incumbent president and ruling parties “unjustified advantage.” This was most conspicuous in the case of media access, so critical to ensuring a fair and informed election process. The state-run and taxpayer-funded TV channel TRT, for example, gave Erdoğan coverage time amounting to almost 49 hours during the course of 41 days, compared with only 32 minutes and 23 seconds to his opponent.

This imbalance in access to the media enabled Erdoğan systematically to bombard the public with inflammatory language, such as saying that the opposition will be “buried in the upcoming elections as politically dead” and using a deep fake video to accuse them of receiving instructions from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is designated a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union. He also employed discriminatory language against the LGBTQ community, associating the opposition with this community and labeling Kılıçdaroğlu as a member of it to galvanize conservative voters. Additionally, he argued that the opposition lacked the competence and unity to govern, presenting himself as the only savior of Turkey.

Such language was critical to tightening the edges of his conservative and nationalist electoral coalition, and to mobilizing a broader electorate keen on continuity and strong leadership at a time of crisis. It also helped deflect attention away from the dire state of the economy, which has been marked by persistent high inflation, ever-growing current-accounts deficits, and collapsing foreign currency reserves, as well as from the government’s conspicuous failure to provide effective post-earthquake rescue and relief.

Erdoğan’s control of the media enabled him to skillfully attribute the massive destruction caused by the earthquake to fate and to the impossibility of preparing for what he termed a “once in a century disaster.” The role of shoddy construction due to corruption and mismanagement, extensively highlighted by the opposition and covered in the international media, made little impression on the electorate, including in the affected provinces. In these areas, Erdoğan lost few votes compared with 2018 and even managed to increase his votes in two of them.

His control over state resources — together with financial favors from “friendly countries” in the form of foreign currency deposits, swap arrangements and postponement of natural gas payments coming from autocratic allies — facilitated his hand in sustaining an unprecedented populist spending spree. He extended generous early retirement benefits to more than 2 million people, enabled another half million government employees on temporary contracts to be moved into permanent positions with generous social benefits, raised pension payments for retirees significantly, increased minimum wages, provided cheap credits for small businesses, and kept interest rates at incomprehensibly low levels to stimulate consumption on credit. Shortly before the elections, he crowned his generosity with billboards across the country publicizing his policy to provide free natural gas to households for a month. As a former Treasury official and commentator pointed out, such largesse aligned well with the public’s poor understanding of the terrible state of the Turkish economy. Ironically, he adds, Kılıçdaroğlu, by making unrealistic promises to match Erdoğan, inadvertently reinforced this misperception and the notion that the state has limitless resources. Additionally, Kılıçdaroğlu and his team’s promises for accountable, effective, and merit-based economic governance did not make much of an impression on Erdoğan’s supporters.

Lastly, Erdoğan pursued much more successful alliance politics than Kılıçdaroğlu did. He was able to sustain his coalition with the nationalist Devlet Bahçeli, whose Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) received a solid 10 percent of the votes, well above poll predictions. He also was able to bring on board two Islamist parties, Yeniden Refah Partisi and the Kurdish HUDA-Par, both known for their conservative demands such as curtailing women rights. Those voters of Erdoğan’s AKP who were disappointed by the government’s mismanagement of the economy seem to have switched their support to other parties in the ruling alliance but remained loyal to Erdoğan. This enabled him to compensate for his declining electoral performance in 73 of Turkey’s 81 provinces, compared with  2018; AKP received support from only 35.6 percent of voters, its lowest level by far compared with five previous elections. In Sunday’s election, Erdoğan’s vote share surpassed that of his party by a record 14 percent.

In contrast, Kılıçdaroğlu, who has been credited for having patiently woven into place the Nation’s Alliance, an electoral alliance involving six political parties spanning a wide range of political inclinations, does not appear to have enjoyed much support from the voters of these parties. The glue of the coalition was undoubtedly the common desire to end Erdoğan’s rule. However, the commitment within this coalition to getting Kılıçdaroğlu elected remained half-hearted. Four smaller, right-wing political parties of the Nation’s Alliance ran under the electoral list of Kılıçdaroğlu’s Republican People’s Party (CHP) and obtained a disproportionate 38 out of this list’s 169 winning candidates for the 600-member Grand National Assembly. Yet, the leadership of these parties failed to mobilize their base in support of Kılıçdaroğlu in the presidential election. So they effectively got a free ride into the parliament while CHP saw its number of seats fall from 146 in 2018 to 131.

Kılıçdaroğlu also had trouble in reaching out to some voters of the nationalist İyi (Good) Party due to intra-alliance disagreements between CHP and İYİP leadership. Meanwhile, strong electoral support appears to have come from the supporters of the Kurdish Peoples’ Democracy Party (renamed as New Left Party to avoid being banned by a closure case) and the Turkish Workers Party. Both had called on their followers to support Erdoğan’s opponent and in total received 10.5 percent of the votes cast in the parliamentary elections.

Ahead: The Culture Clash Persists in Turkish Politics

Kılıçdaroğlu’s task during the runoff is going to be a tough one. It is difficult to see from where he could attract additional votes to defeat Erdoğan, while retaining his diverse electoral base. There are the votes of the third presidential candidate, the Turkish nationalist Sinan Oğan, who is touted as a potential kingmaker. In recent days, Kılıçdaroğlu has stepped up his national rhetoric and pledged to return  refugees back to their countries. Meanwhile, Oğan’s supporters are recognized for their dislike of both Erdoğan and Kılıçdaroğlu. Whether they would lend their support to whoever Oğan ultimately advises them to support in the runoff is not evident. Many are protest voters who may simply not vote in the second round. In any event, current indications are that Oğan, as a vocal Turkish nationalist, considers Kılıçdaroğlu’s close ties with the Kurdish political party a “red line.” It will be challenging for Kılıçdaroğlu to receive Oğan’s endorsement without alienating the Kurdish voters who cast their ballots for him in overwhelming numbers. There are reports that Oğan is more likely to support Erdoğan, though that too is not certain.

Kılıçdaroğlu’s defeat next Sunday would be a reminder of how an authoritarian populist who controls the media, has access to state resources, and enjoys the financial solidarity of other autocrats such as Russian President Vladimir Putin can win in a country trapped in what Turkish political scientist Ersin Kalaycıoğlu in 2011 called a “kulturkampf,” or culture clash. EU officials highlighted the high level of participation in the elections as a “clear sign of strength of the Turkish democracy.” Erdoğan seized on  that to call the elections a ”great feast of democracy” and undoubtedly sees them as a massive source of legitimacy.

However, the real lesson to be learned from this recent electoral success is to recognize that, in an era of authoritarian consolidation around the world, it is exceedingly difficult to defeat populist autocrats who capture the key checks-and-balances of the democratic system. It is not evident that the opposition’s agenda for a pluralist democracy at ease with Turkey’s ethnic, social, and religious diversity was adopted wholeheartedly by the voters. Yet, the election results also suggest that Turkey is a deeply divided society holding or adhering to two different conceptions of democracy, and that Erdoğan no longer enjoys the support of an electoral majority.

Should Erdoğan prevail in the runoff, as appears likely, it will be interesting to see how he will address the wreckage his last term has left behind — economic, institutional, infrastructural (especially in the earthquake-hit region), and in foreign policy. Time will tell whether he will be able to stabilize the Turkish economy and restore relations with the West, if he is even interested in doing so. There are already alarming signs that the economic crisis will worsen after the election. Daron Acemoğlu, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), notes that it is not evident that Erdoğan will be able to address such a crisis, having to choose between two politically difficult options: returning to orthodox policies or imposing capital controls.

Either way, Erdoğan will soon need to prepare for the March 2024 local elections, when the country’s largest municipalities, currently controlled by the opposition, will be up for grabs. This electoral defeat in the presidential and parliamentary elections will weaken the opposition parties, but not knock them out entirely. The CHP still controls some of the major metropolitan governments, such as İstanbul, Ankara, and İzmir, and has popular leaders with national appeal such as İstanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu and Ankara Mayor Mansur Yavaş.

Turkish democracy appears set to experience another round of heavy bruising on May 28. After that, the next opportunity to stop Erdoğan’s authoritarian juggernaut will be the local elections in 2024, especially if he fails to salvage the economy and if he allows those elections to take place at all rather than ending what is left of Turkey’s electoral institutions.

IMAGE: Turkish opposition presidential candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu (bottom right) and Mansur Yavaş, the mayor of the capital Ankara, visit Anıtkabir, a complex in the city that contains the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, during Youth and Sports Day on May 19, 2023 . (Photo by Yavuz Ozden/ dia images via Getty Images)

The post Erdoğan Appears Poised to Win Runoff: Why, and What’s Next for Turkey? appeared first on Just Security.

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IMAGES (left to right): Natural disaster and its consequences (via Getty Images); In this picture taken on September 28, 2022, an internally displaced flood-affected family sits outside their tent at a makeshift tent camp in Jamshoro district of Sindh province (Photo by Rizwan Tabassum/AFP via Getty Images; Trees smolder and burn during the Dixie fire near Greenville, California on August 3, 2021. – Numerous fires are raging through the state’s northern forests, as climate change makes wildfire season longer, hotter and more devastating. (Photo by JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images)

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Hybrid regimes, also known as “electoral autocracies,” are governments that endeavor to be seen as democracies but lack the fundamentals to warrant such a label. They hold elections but the playing field is rarely level, as ruling parties utilize a diversified portfolio of election manipulation tactics to secure power, including corrupted voter registration systems, intentional logistical delays, targeted violence, strategic results tampering, and compromised electoral management bodies.

Hybrid regimes pose a thorny policy challenge to the United States. In 2022, almost one-half of countries globally (72 in total) met the definition of “hybrid” or “electoral autocracy” and were present in every geographic region. Examples include Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Nigeria, Mexico, El Salvador, Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Philippines.

Unfortunately, since these governments hold elections and display other trappings of democracy, some policymakers give them a pass on their democratic track record -– especially if the country is relevant to other American interests.

This is short-sighted and counterproductive, even –- and especially — for U.S. national security. Consider the case of Egypt: despite receiving billions in U.S. security assistance, the Egyptian government has been offering to sell arms to Russia to aid the Kremlin’s illegal war in Ukraine, in direct conflict with American policies. It is also exceedingly difficult, if not dangerous, for U.S. companies to invest in or access the markets of hybrid regimes. The opaque and compromised nature of institutions common to these States often results in unclear or biased regulation. For example, while Nigeria has the fastest-growing population in Africa and a market ripe for U.S. exports, corruption and biased regulation make it difficult for U.S. companies to operate there.

Failing to address the democratic deficiencies of hybrid regimes sets up the United States for long-term strategic failure and hinders American economic prosperity. To avoid these outcomes, the United States must carve out a new path forward that preserves near-term U.S. interests while also pressing these States to make democratic progress. After all, there is hope for hybrid regimes. As a recent study notes, “In the face of the global wave of autocratization, data shows that no less than eight countries are bouncing back and making U-turns … Cases like these raise some hope for a future reversal of the last 20 years’ downward trend towards autocratization.”

Thwarting US Interests

Hybrid regimes are less likely to uphold the interests of the United States and its democratic allies on the world stage. Of the 72 hybrid regimes, only 20 voted to remove Russia from the U.N. Human Rights Council in April 2022 over the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Of the countries who joined with the United States in a U.N. General Assembly committee to condemn China’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang in October 2022, only four were hybrid regimes.

Hybrid regimes also are more prone to internal conflict and instability because they often lack legitimacy among politically marginalized groups (and sometimes large swaths of the population). They are ill-equipped to effectively handle security challenges –- often resorting to heavy-handed tactics that inflame violence –- and have weak institutions that are unable to challenge abuses of executive power.

The susceptibility of hybrid regimes to political violence and instability is perhaps most acute in sub-Saharan Africa. According to an analysis of 2022 data, hybrid regimes experienced almost three times as many conflict incidents and five times as many conflict fatalities compared to stronger democracies. Analysis of data for the past decade shows that hybrid regimes in sub-Saharan Africa are seven times as likely to experience a coup or attempted coup compared to democracies.

The Flawed Approach to Hybrid Regimes

As the United States increasingly engages in strategic competition with China and its authoritarian model, it must remember that it is free people and democratic societies who are its most valuable allies on the global stage. Premature acceptance of sub-standard elections and willful ignorance of democratic backsliding may provide short-term bilateral gains, but in the long term serves to further separate the people in these countries from the United States, eroding affinity between our peoples, and increasing risks of conflict and instability that weaken current and future allies.

It’s important to note the distinctions between hybrid regimes and authoritarian regimes, which do not hold plausibly competitive elections (if they hold elections at all) for the chief executive and the legislature and where institutions have little-to-no ability to check the power of the executive. This distinction enables the international community to minimize the democratic failures of hybrid regimes.

An example is the tendency to judge elections in hybrid regimes as “good enough” unless the fraud and violence are egregiously obvious. In February, the U.S. State Department rushed to congratulate the declared winner of Nigeria’s 2023 presidential election, even though the election was widely criticized by observers for targeted violence, lack of transparency, significant voter disenfranchisement, and outright vote manipulation in some states.

The United States has applied this low bar in other recent elections. Angola’s August 2022 presidential election saw the half-century rule of the MPLA party extended by another five years, in an election where the ruling party controlled the media and courts, imposed worrying changes to the vote-tabulation process, and heavily obstructed efforts to observe the election. Despite these red flags, the U.S. Embassy quickly congratulated the declared winner and commended “the millions of Angolan voters who cast their ballots in this election, and in doing so demonstrated their commitment to strengthening democracy.” Following Tunisia’s December 2022 parliamentary elections, which some international observers labeled a “sham,” the State Department issued a vanilla statement, noting low turnout and the need for greater political inclusion, but failing to cite any other major issues that impeded the credibility of the process, such as barriers to political party participation and egregious restrictions on the press.

Such omissions have immediate and direct consequences for U.S. security and economic interests. For instance, in Nigeria, the widely disputed election results and the high levels of regional disenfranchisement of voters will likely compound regional and sectarian grievances, fueling increased conflict and destabilization, and diverting even more resources and attention of the United States and like-minded partners to combat instability. And in Angola, the extension of MPLA rule under questionable circumstances could lead to continued democratic backsliding and undermine prospects for economic reform, harming U.S. economic interests, including trade (already in significant decline), and could make the country more vulnerable to the malign influence of Russia and China.

Sadly, hybrid regimes most often result from democratic backsliding, rather than autocracies moving toward democratic reform. Of today’s 72 hybrid regimes, 20 were considered stronger democracies 20 years ago, while eight were considered closed autocracies.

Democratic backsliding is usually a gradual process. The international community’s muted response to closing space in hybrid regimes tends to facilitate continued backsliding. Over the past five years, there has been a worrying global increase in the number of authoritarian regimes.  This suggests that early action to address the democratic deficiencies of hybrid regimes is critical to forestalling autocratic consolidation.

Failing to make the distinction between hybrid regimes and democracies, and failure to comprehend trajectories of democratic backsliding, undermines the intent of democratic initiatives like the Biden administration’s Summit for Democracy. At the most recent summit, countries that have been experiencing years of democratic backsliding and refuse to publicize their commitments to democracy (such as Nigeria and Philippines) are given equal standing with countries that are actively and transparently consolidating democracy. Of the 120 countries invited to participate in the 2023 Summit for Democracy, 25 were hybrid regimes. Only about half of these countries publicized their commitments from the summit. And of the stronger democracies invited, almost 40 are countries that experienced notable democratic backsliding over the past five years and are at increasing risk of becoming hybrid regimes this decade.

Democracies are not only more stable than hybrid regimes, but they also enjoy better economic growth, equality, and educational achievement. The failure to adequately differentiate hybrid regimes from stronger democracies fuels the counterproductive perception that “democracy fails to deliver,” when it is in fact the failure to achieve meaningful democracy that prevents so much of the world from enjoying its dividends. 

Walking and Chewing Gum at the Same Time 

The United States and allies must balance their cooperation with hybrid regimes, when it is necessary at all, with a push for those governments to reform and realize broader democratic progress. These aims are not contradictory, but complementary and central to advancing U.S. objectives. Achieving this balance will require prioritizing respect for democratic practices, institutions, and norms when determining how to engage hybrid regimes. Democracy will not always trump other factors, but it should be moved up the rank order of priorities.

There are practical steps the United States and like-minded allies can take -– using diplomacy and foreign assistance -– to advance near-term pressing issues while targeting democratic deficiencies that make hybrid regimes problematic for American interests.

For instance, the United States and G7 allies should make clear they will not welcome with open arms leaders chosen through dubious, sub-standard elections. From Washington to London, leaders should get serious about issuing public sanctions, including asset freezes and visa bans, for malfeasance during elections. On the flip side, the U.S. and allies should make better use of high-level diplomatic engagement, such as leveraging the legitimacy conferred by Cabinet-level visits, to incentivize governments to make changes and adhere to international democratic best practices.

These steps can be impactful while not undercutting cooperation on pressing matters. In Nigeria, for instance, the United States can engage the government to achieve priorities via the U.S. Ambassador and U.S.-Nigeria Binational Commission (BNC), a forum established in 2010 to discuss a range of interests. The Secretary of State need not make plans to visit Abuja to meet newly elected President Bola Tinubu while key court decisions -– and a potential independent audit -– are pending on the results of the recent election.

The United States and G7 allies should pay more rigorous attention to elections in general. Rather than accepting elections as a continuation of the status quo, the West should view electoral processes as critical moments to correct or continue countries’ democratic trajectories, and apply commensurate attention, pressure, and incentives. One step in the right direction would be to more explicitly and publicly link future foreign aid funding used to support elections in such countries to recipient governments agreeing to abide by established electoral standards, including enforcement of election law, equitable access to voting, and transparency in reporting election results and election data. Failure to link foreign assistance to meaningful reforms results not only in sub-par elections and wasted U.S. taxpayer dollars, but also provides diplomatic cover for election malpractice and malfeasance.

Foreign aid has an important role to play in advancing U.S. interests in hybrid regimes by helping cultivate and reinforce democratic practices and norms outside a government in power. The United States is therefore smart to invest in civil society-led advocacy campaigns that hold leaders accountable and in efforts to strengthen political parties that can contest elections and offer an alternative to the status quo.  Yet the United States can do more to couple such capacity building via foreign aid with creating the political will for reform. While building democratic capacity can incentivize and enable the will to reform, capacity should not be viewed as an end in itself; this is a convenient, but short-sighted and counterproductive, approach. Diplomacy and foreign assistance can help enable this political will through a combination of incentives, pressure, and advocacy campaigns, as well as identifying and equipping rising political stars unafraid to push for change.

Looking Forward

As the U.S. and allies navigate relations with hybrid regimes, they should approach evaluating a country’s democratic performance as science and not art. Objective third-party evaluations of democratic performance are widely available but largely ignored in U.S. policymaking. Robust and credible civil society organizations proliferate in many hybrid regimes; yet despite many of these organizations receiving assistance from the United States, their warnings about democratic backsliding are regularly disregarded. The United States should pair support to these organizations with listening to their perspectives -– to the extent they reflect the people’s perceptions and expectations of democracy -– and account for their views in the policymaking process.

U.S. officials must resist the convenient but inaccurate narrative that the hybrid regimes of the world are slowly but surely moving in the right direction. Evidence of backsliding in the past 10 years has shown that is far from certain. A narrative of wishful thinking only results in misleading analysis and poorly targeted foreign assistance and diplomacy, serving to reinforce one-party rule and compound public grievances around the world. Using rigorous metrics can help make progress in this area. 

Major policy initiatives like the Summit for Democracy should require concrete commitments from all participants and demonstrable democratic progress against these commitments. These initiatives should include public accountability for democratic backsliding and for failure to achieve reform objectives. At minimum, governments on prior Summit invite lists who go on to enable backsliding should not be included moving forward.

Ideally, the United States should reward allies that make tangible democratic advances with tangible benefits. For example, the United States should consider re-initiating free-trade agreement discussions with Ecuador if President Guillermo Lasso’s government makes progress on anti-corruption and continues to consolidate democracy. Doing so would reward a key ally in the region and one of the remaining democratic bright spots with tangible changes that benefit the Ecuadorian people and U.S. interests. Similar carrots could be held out for progress in a range of other contexts as well. Participants should also commit to stand with democracy against autocracy on the world stage. Mitigating democratic backsliding and combatting authoritarianism requires the concerted efforts of a global community.  

With major elections coming up in several hybrid regimes this year and next — including Turkey’s planned runoff election on May 28, as well as balloting in DRC, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia, Mexico, and El Salvador — the United States must think carefully about how it will assess and react to these elections, and whether perceived short-term bilateral gains will truly be worth the long-term costs.

Going forward, while it is important for the United States to shore up its alliances with the Philippines and other partners to thwart China’s malign influence and kinetic threat, U.S. leaders also must be acutely aware of the democratic backsliding that is occurring in these hybrid regimes and use American leverage to counter it. Without such clear accountability and seriousness in upholding of democratic values, the United States can expect to have “allies” and “partners” that are not only less free and stable, but also distinctly unreliable.

IMAGE: US Vice President Kamala Harris (L) and Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema are seen outside at the State House in Lusaka on March 31, 2023 after a press conference. President Hichilema asked for US help to expedite debt restructuring negotiations with the country’s creditors.  (Photo by SALIM DAWOOD/AFP via Getty Images)

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Common Elements of “Bounce Back” and Their Application in Tunisia

Five elements unite the eight cases of “bounce back” from autocratization. Although not every element was present in all eight cases, and although no single element was responsible for reversing autocratization in any country, together these five factors suggest areas for democracy supporters inside and outside Tunisia to focus on.

The first element is large-scale popular mobilization against the incumbent. For instance, major protests in South Korea in 2016 and Moldova in 2014 – both sparked by corruption scandals – triggered institutional actions that ultimately forced the autocrat out of power. 

In Tunisia, large-scale popular mobilization has been a catalyst for democratization in the past. But today, several barriers hamper such mobilization. Even the Tunisian General Workers’ Union (UGTT), the country’s largest organization, hasn’t managed to organize protests that can pressure the president to initiate a dialogue, due to internal splits and lack of unifying agenda. 

Notably, opposition demonstrations have taken place even though they are legal only with official approval. Protestors have also on occasion defied bans and use of force by authorities. This could potentially represent a tiny window of hope: as long as Saied’s opponents retain this avenue for expression, they might succeed in preventing more damage from being done and in buying themselves time to build new pathways of resistance.

The second element is unified opposition coalescing with civil society. In North Macedonia, for example, a parliamentary boycott in 2015 against the autocratic ruling party of former Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski’s state capture organized by a lead opposition party allowed the latter to deepen its social ties with youth and other activists. This in turn helped enlarge the opposition party’s voter base and ultimately led to the election in 2016 of a new pro-democracy government.

Unfortunately, the potential for opposition political parties and civil society actors to coalesce in Tunisia – despite the country’s experience with such cooperation – remains weak. Saied remains a deeply polarizing figure who has taken advantage of existing political and social divisions to incapacitate his opponents. To date, the UGTT and some opposition political parties refuse to work with the main Islamist party, Ennahda, which has lost support due to its perceived incompetence and corruption while in government. Such underlying divisions remain a key barrier to resisting autocratization.

The third factor is elections. In Ecuador, results of local-level elections demonstrated lack of support for the party of the autocratizing President Rafael Correa and ultimately allowed his vice president, Lenin Moreno to take over and institute a series of democratizing reforms. Moreno’s takeover was facilitated by the ruling party’s attempt to secure power by removing term limits starting after Correa stepped down for a term, in response to the outcome of local elections. Moreno’s moves to reintroduce checks and balances in the interim therefore caught Correa off-guard. 

Recent elections in Tunisia – a constitutional referendum in July 2022 and two rounds of parliamentary elections in December 2022 and January 2023 – produced abysmally low voter turnout. Explanations for these high levels of voter abstinence include an overwhelming preoccupation with economic concerns, a restricted legal framework for elections designed by Saied, and the stakes of the elections (for example, under the new constitution, the powers of parliament are significantly reduced). Widespread disillusionment with politicians and political parties and a boycott by some – but not all – opposition figures also contributed. Clearly, for a decisive election to occur in Tunisia, voters’ faith in democratic politics will need to be restored.

The fourth factor is judiciary reversing executive takeover. In Moldova, for example, constitutional court rulings helped protect the holding of free and fair elections from attempts by the ruling party to block them, ultimately giving the democratic opposition a majority in parliament. 

Judicial independence in Tunisia has historically been weak, but steps taken to address this since the authoritarian overthrow in 2011, along with sustained activism among some magistrates against Saied’s attempts to subordinate the judiciary to the executive, are indicative of the role the judicial sector could play over the long term. While Saied has called on the police to help advance this subordination, it is not clear that he has full support from security forces. Any break within the executive could give momentum to the opposition. Meanwhile, elements of the judiciary continue to resist Saied’s actions, using methods such as a month-long hunger strike by magistrates and an administrative court order in August 2022 to reinstate 49 of the 57 judges whom Saied had fired the previous June.

The Role of International Actors

The fifth uniting element among countries that bounced back from authoritarianism over the past 20 years is international support. 

In Bolivia, the Organization of American States (OAS) was a key player in helping nudge the country towards a democratic path following a series of anti-democratic actions beginning under President Evo Morales (2005-2019) and continuing under President Jeanine Áñez (2019-2020) and current President Luis Arce. While Bolivia still faces several challenges, including polarization and threats to judicial independence, continued attention by the international community has helped the country show marked improvement on democracy indices over the past year. 

Morales undertook several anti-democratic steps in the lead up to the 2019 elections, running for a controversial fourth term after his loyalist-packed constitutional court overrode the Bolivian people’s rejection of a 2016 constitutional referendum that would have prevented him from running. Statements by OAS election observers regarding improprieties and inconsistencies during the 2019 election provided a crucial counterpoint to Morales’ narrative, and ultimately contributed to Morales’ decision to step down and leave Bolivia in the wake of a popular uprising against him. The OAS continued to issue critical statements calling for investigations into the violence and “crimes against humanity” committed under his successor. And despite free and fair elections bringing Arce into office, international actors, including U.S. officials, called out the Arce government’s politicization of the judiciary and vengeful approach towards Áñez and her supporters. These sentiments were echoed in a Washington Post editorial in March 2021. 

The United States has had a less influential role than the OAS, particularly since the Bolivian government expelled the U.S. ambassador in 2008 and kicked USAID out of the country in 2013. However, in FY2018 the United States spent nearly half of its $1.8 million foreign assistance package on support for government and civil society and provided an additional $5 million to support the 2020 elections.  Those numbers fell dramatically in FY2022, when the United States provided only $275,800 in assistance for government and civil society, signaling less of a commitment to this sector. 

In Ecuador, Moreno’s election as president in 2017 was expected to be a continuation of his predecessor’s administration, as Moreno was Correa’s vice president. But Moreno quickly broke with Correa and began rolling back some of his predecessor’s anti-democratic actions by reinstating presidential term limits, taking steps to restore judicial independence, and working to address polarization. 

However, Moreno faced his own corruption allegations in 2019 and did not run for reelection in 2021. While Moreno’s reforms did not fully return Ecuador to a democratic path, and he left office with an extremely low approval rating, his actions were rewarded by the United States with significant financial and diplomatic support. Following the reinstatement of the USAID mission in Quito in 2020, the United States and Ecuador signed an agreement for a $62.5 million grant to support democracy, governance, and environmental projects in Ecuador over five years. And in fiscal year 2021, the United States provided Ecuador with $4.13 million in support for government and civil society. 

The United States also showed its support for Ecuador’s democratic progress with visits by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield in May 2021 to attend the inauguration of Moreno’s successor, President Guillermo Lasso, and by Secretary of State Antony Blinken in October 2021. And in May 2022, First Lady Jill Biden visited Ecuador and met with Lasso, his wife, and various civil society organizations with a specific focus on strengthening democracy in Latin America. During her visit, Biden applauded Ecuador’s progress. 

North Macedonia strayed from the democratic path under Gruevski (2006-2016). Opposition figures accused Gruevski’s government of numerous abuses and corruption, triggering a widespread political crisis in 2015. The United States and the European Union played a key role in returning North Macedonia to a democratic path by brokering the 2015 Przino Agreement, which led to early elections in 2016, and the two international actors intervened repeatedly throughout the following year to help defuse tensions. 

The Social Democratic Union of Macedonia (SDSM) Party, which ran on a reform platform and pledged to implement a reform agenda that is backed by the EU, prevailed in the parliamentary elections in 2016. While many of the reforms have yet to come to fruition, North Macedonia has shown positive signs at addressing the political instability of the past decade. 

One of the factors that analysts have pointed to as aiding North Macedonia’s bounce-back is the two large carrots of NATO and EU membership. North Macedonia joined NATO in 2020 and began the EU accession process, although the EU accession process has faced several hurdles including vetoes by France and Bulgaria. While the European Union is North Macedonia’s largest donor and partner, the United States has a defense partnership with North Macedonia and contributes significantly to North Macedonia’s political and economic reform efforts. Over one-third of U.S. assistance to North Macedonia is for government and civil society ($7,708,000 million out of $19,670,240 total bilateral assistance in FY22), with the goal of supporting reforms necessary for full EU accession. 

Zambia also experienced a turn toward autocracy following the election of President Edgar Lungu in 2014, as the Lungu government oversaw attacks on opposition figures and freedom of expression. U.S. and European pressure, coupled with a strong pro-democracy civil society movement, helped return Zambia to democratic rule. The 2021 presidential elections were a major turning point for Zambia, with opposition leader Hakainde Hichilema defeating Lungu. While the election was marred by violence and initially contested by Lungu, he eventually stepped down. 

The U.S. government played a key role in pressuring Lungu to abide by the election results, threatening sanctions, travel bans and visa restrictions on those who instigated election violence. The African Union’s election observer mission also made clear that Lungu’s complaints regarding electoral fraud had no bearing. And the European Union called out the election for “abuse of incumbency,” noting “selective application of laws and regulations, misuse of state resources and one-sided media reporting meant that a level playing field was not achieved.”

The United States has continued to applaud and highlight Zambia’s democratic steps. In FY22, the United States provided Zambia with $9.7 million in governance and civil society support. During the 2022 U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington, Hichilema received significant administration attention and signed multiple deals with U.S. public and private sector entities. Zambia was also selected to co-host the 2023 Summit for Democracy and Vice President Kamala Harris visited Zambia in March 2023. 

Conclusions and Recommendations

There is no question that local popular support for democracy is a necessary condition for a return to a democratic path. Without a unified opposition to mobilize against an authoritarian incumbent and an independent elections commission and other such institutions to act as guardrails, no amount of international pressure will be sufficient to reverse the authoritarian drift. 

Moreover, other research on “democratic bright spots” suggests that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to supporting countries at risk of authoritarian backsliding. International support is particularly tricky in Tunisia currently, where the president’s populist rhetoric about “foreign interference” – and even some cases of apparent arrests of individuals for having met with foreign diplomats – has helped create a climate of fear. Nonetheless, targeted international involvement can clearly make a difference in cases of democratization that are at risk, illustrating why abandoning Tunisia at this critical stage is more likely to lead to further backsliding. 

In particular, Tunisians’ fight for judicial independence, as well as media and other freedoms that can help expose corruption, will rely on moral and operational support from the international human rights community. Under former dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, such ties between international and Tunisian human rights activists were critical in fighting for democratic reform. In addition, quiet influence from Tunisia’s international military partners – the U.S. military is close to Tunisian security forces and is thought to be particularly influential and rewarded Tunisia with Major Non-NATO Ally status in 2015– could conceivably discourage other disputed practices such as the use of military courts to try civilians. This in turn would send a signal to Saied that he cannot count on the military to support him as he plows ahead with his project of one-man rule. 

Finally, a growing number of international actors have called for intervention to help prevent Tunisia’s economy from a collapse. The international community has learned the hard way that neglect for Tunisia’s economy will undermine even the most valiant democracy promotion efforts. Going forward, it will be important for the United States and other external actors to balance their support for Tunisia’s most vulnerable, such as through continued economic assistance and support for pro-democracy actors, with diplomatic efforts to isolate Saied to ensure that any assistance does not inadvertently strengthen Saied’s hand.  

A final factor implied in the V-Dem findings important for bouncing back is what some research calls “democratic stock,” or developing strong democratic institutions over time. Tunisia’s experience with democratic rule is extremely limited, putting it at a disadvantage. Additionally, no unifying and democratic alternative ruler behind which Tunisians could rally can emerge overnight to halt autocratization, given Tunisia’s deep economic challenges and societal and political divisions. Until conditions allow for the right combination of elements to help the country reverse course, the United States and the international community must use consistent, behind-the-scenes support to make sure Tunisia does not sink deeper into autocratization. This should be done in coordination with non-Western actors such as the African Union and should be reinforced by rhetoric that condemns anti-democratic actions.

IMAGE: Tunisian demonstrators attend a rally against President Kais Saied, called for by the opposition “National Salvation Front” coalition, in the capital Tunis, on April 9, 2023. (Photo by FETHI BELAID / AFP) (Photo by FETHI BELAID/AFP via Getty Images)

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It was a grim preview of worse that could still be coming, and not only for Turkey. Many democracies are now threatened by autocratic populists like Erdogan who refuse to leave office fairly and peacefully, bringing their countries down with them. This is a historic time for the citizens of Turkey and other backsliding democracies to preserve their freedom, and for the United States and other European and NATO allies to speak rapidly, loudly, forcefully as autocratic efforts unfold.

Erdogan has been in power for 20 years, during which time he has increasingly relied on repression — Turkey ranks among the countries with the greatest numbers of imprisoned politicians, journalists, activists, and other civic actors — and autocratic control over state organs to ensure that elections are highly unfair, even though voters remain free to cast ballots that matter. He uses an autocratic playbook that includes abusing states of emergency to expand his executive power, capturing regulatory bodies to ensure party control over public airwaves, enacting draconian new laws to monitor and regulate speech on the internet, steering public expenditures into the hands of cronies who pour it back into his reelection campaigns, and manipulating polling locations to make voting more difficult and intimidating in heavily-opposition areas. As an example of the latter, in the Kurdish southeast, voters have been forced to pass through security checkpoints where soldiers brandishing machine guns are instructed to check voter IDs, looking for anyone wanted for arrest.

At Freedom’s Edge

The result has been that each successive Turkish election since 2011 has been more unfair than the last, and the country is now on the brink of descending into fully unfree authoritarianism. Whether or not the election this Sunday is free at all, if Erdogan wins, it is likely to be the last free Turkish election of his lifetime. He would probably continue the trend of the past dozen years by doubling down on his dictatorial direction. He may dispense with free elections, on the theory that they have taken him as far as possible — he once likened democracy to a train, a vehicle to reach a destination and then disembark. And if Erdogan wins despite his unpopularity – he currently is weighed down by his abysmal economic policies and failures related to the February earthquake — and despite an uncharacteristically unified opposition, a critical mass of Turks would stop regarding elections as free and meaningful.

With this election presenting the strongest challenge yet to his incumbency, Erdogan has already deployed his usual tactics to tilt the balance in his favor. One opposition party remains under multiple criminal investigations by prosecutors loyal to Erdogan, its leader has been jailed for years, and dozens of its members and party officials have been detained in recent weeks. The candidate who was dodging rocks last Sunday, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, is running for vice president rather than president — even though he was seen by many as the most promising competitor for the job — because he could face obstacles to assuming office, as he’s being prosecuted for allegedly calling the politicized election authorities “fools” after they vacated his first election as mayor.

After Erdogan was down 10 points in the polls less than two months ago, he used his pervasive influence over 90 percent of Turkish media to end public debate about the earthquake and inflation and instead flood the airwaves with glorification of all the ways he has made Turkey great again. Now the race has tightened to a dead heat against the opposition’s presidential candidate, who has enjoyed only 32 minutes of airtime in April compared to Erdogan’s 32 hours.

The tumult on Sunday raises the ominous possibility that if the usual autocratic tactics fail to secure a clear victory, the government could rely on violence and intimidation to stay in power. Several parties in Erdogan’s coalition have ties to nationalist paramilitaries or Islamist groups that have engaged in political violence in the past. The day before that rally, the head of one of those parties said about the opposition, “These traitors will get either aggravated life sentences or bullets in their bodies.” On Sunday, Erdogan held a rally at which he played a deepfake video that depicted leaders of a terrorist organization singing the campaign song of the opposition. Erdogan warned, “My people will not allow drunks and boozers to take the stage … My nation will make the necessary response on May 14. We will not allow [opposition candidate Kemal] Kilicdaroglu, who is hand in hand with terrorists, to divide our homeland.” That same day, a leading Turkish academic was detained for having tweeted about his country sliding into authoritarianism. Sunday also brought multiple reports of parties allied with the regime allegedly perpetrating violent attacks on opposition campaign staffers in their vehicles — tires slashed, windows broken, passengers beaten with clubs — and that was before the stoning attack at the vice presidential candidate’s rally.

Heads Up for Democracy

This violence and manipulation are the modern incarnation of what it looks like when a democracy is in the process of collapsing into dictatorship, a form of government from which there is typically no peaceful return. In 2016, it briefly looked like the classic military coup was back, when a faction within the Turkish Armed Forces tried and failed to depose Erdogan. But the most lasting repercussion of that coup attempt was Erdogan’s repressive crackdown and further concentration of power, autocratic efforts that are culminating in an electoral process that is difficult even to call free, let alone fair.

Voters in other struggling democracies set to hold elections next year — India, Mexico, or Georgia, for example — should not look away, nor should those in countries that are still fully free but in which autocratic candidates in Erdogan’s mold are currently running for the highest office, from Poland to the United States. The lesson from Turkey is that autocrats like Erdogan ultimately have nothing to offer but corruption, repression, and eventually violence. Americans traditionally assume that such unfortunate events only happen overseas. But with the United States having had its own taste of violent challenges to the democratic process on Jan. 6, 2021, they have no excuse not to see repressive autocracy in Turkey as a ghost of U.S. elections yet to come under a future administration of Donald Trump or any other U.S. president insufficiently committed to democratic restraint.

Nor should the official international community look away. The U.S. government and key NATO allies have maintained disciplined silence to avoid giving Erdogan opportunities to drag Western powers into the election. The time to use their voice is probably coming in the days ahead, at the moment when reports emerge about threats to the integrity of the electoral process. They should be on the lookout for incidents that would echo autocratic behaviors perpetrated during past Turkish election days and other national events. That could include, but isn’t limited to, the state electoral authority loyal to Erdogan changing rules for ballot counting, Erdogan’s media mouthpieces prematurely or dubiously calling the election in his favor, Erdogan losing and refusing to concede, the Turkish government shutting down access to the internet or social media platforms, or the government and its thugs violently suppressing pro-democracy protests.

Election observers, the Biden administration, and NATO allies must be prepared to publicly denounce any such autocratic efforts as soon as they occur, and privately convey to Erdogan and his senior officials the severe consequences of standing in the way of a free electoral process. The alliance must deliver timely and vigorous diplomatic pressure to stand by the Turkish people in what could be their last stand for political freedom.

IMAGE: Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the presidential candidate of the Main Opposition alliance, speaks to supporters at a rally while campaigning on April 30, 2023 in Izmir, Turkey, for the presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for May 14, 2023. The Kilicdaroglu-led Nation Alliance represents six opposition parties in next month’s election against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s 20-year rule. (Photo by Burak Kara/Getty Images)

The post Don’t Look Away From What May Be Turkish Democracy’s Last Stand appeared first on Just Security.

The fires scorched more than 13,000 acres of the Indio-Maíz Biosphere Reserve, a tropical preserve in the southeast and home to several Indigenous communities and endangered wildlife. Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo, his wife, responded with total negligence to the point of refusing foreign aid offered by Costa Rica. Small groups of university students took to the streets in protest. To change the conversation, Ortega decreed new reforms to pension plans that would have significantly cut retirees’ pensions. That only stoked the flames of anger. The mobilizations and calls for change got larger. Within days, hundreds of thousands of students, pensioners, farmers, feminists, and businesspeople were marching in the streets of the capital city, flying blue and white national flags, and demanding a more democratic future.

But in the five years since, political, economic, and social conditions have only gotten worse. Nicaragua has become a true dictatorship with no discernible vision beyond keeping the Ortegas and their cronies in power. The United States is one of the only actors positioned to support Nicaragua’s path back to democracy, but to be successful, it must be far more strategic and stay the course over the long term.

So how did things go so wrong in Nicaragua?

In the late 1970s, a left-wing revolutionary guerrilla group emerged in Nicaragua – the Sandinistas – and successfully overthrew the 40-year Somoza family dynastic dictatorship. The Sandinista movement ushered in a new social policy in education, healthcare and land reform intended to benefit the broader Nicaraguan populace. Among the leading luminaries was a charismatic young leader named Daniel Ortega, who would become president in 1985 (he lost his re-election bid in 1990).

The Sandinista revolution was short-lived. Those unhappy with the Sandinista reforms created a rebel movement, the Contras, made up of Somoza sympathizers and reactive counterrevolutionaries. With Ronald Regan’s election in 1980, Nicaragua quickly became a Cold War proxy battleground between Washington, Russia, and Cuba as they vied for influence and power. The Reagan administration prioritized funding the Contras (albeit illegally – the Iran Contra Affair) in a bloody civil war against the Sandinista government that took the lives of an estimated 50,000 Nicaraguans.

Fast forward through a few center-right governments in the 1990s and the natural disasters, political corruption, and repressive monetary policy that marked the early 2000s, and we find a people disillusioned once more. And so, when Ortega, the former revolutionary turned president, runs for office again in 2006, he wins.

This time, however, the socially minded young leader had morphed into something unrecognizable. From 2007 to 2018, Ortega and Murillo used corruption, cronyism, populism, and propaganda to create an authoritarian government without institutional counterweights. They implemented a social policy of partisan patronage and cronyism that utterly failed to reduce the nation’s profound social and economic inequities. And Ortega has been doubling down on repression and violence to keep his tenuous grip on power.

Crimes Against Humanity, a Sham Election, and a Mass Exodus

The regime responded to the peaceful protests in April 2018 with a lethal campaign that left 355 people dead, thousands injured, and hundreds kidnapped and imprisoned without due process. The Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua, established by the United Nations, recently concluded that since those uprisings, the Nicaraguan government has committed and continues to commit crimes against humanity with total impunity.

On top of the ongoing violence against his own people, Ortega has taken no chances with any form of dissent or opposition to his rule at the electoral level either. Ahead of the 2021 presidential elections, Ortega and Murillo imprisoned 40 political opponents, including seven presidential candidates. Political prisoners were tortured, starved, and completely cut off from the outside world. The election itself was a sham and in no way free and fair, but nonetheless placed Ortega back in power for another five years.

The political landscape has deteriorated to the point that Ortega’s governance has destabilized the country and the region. Hundreds of activists, human rights defenders, and journalists have fled into exile in neighboring countries to escape the surveillance and repression of the government. More than 10 percent of Nicaragua’s population of 6 million have also fled the country, many making their way on a perilous journey to the U.S. southern border in search of a safer life (in the first six months of 2022, the number of Nicaraguans taken into custody by U.S. Customs and Border Protection rose 158 percent compared with the same period in 2021).

Whether for good or ill, the United States has long maintained an outsized influence and role in Nicaragua, and the U.S. government under both presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden recognized the need to act against its descent into authoritarianism. Both administrations, to their credit, have taken significant actions against Ortega, albeit for wildly different political reasons. Trump issued sanctions against top political figures, including Murillo, issued Executive Order 13851 in November 2018 declaring Nicaragua a national emergency threat to the United States, and ensured that the United States played a key leadership role in the Organization of American States Working Group on Nicaragua, which was tasked with finding a peaceful and sustainable solution to the ongoing crisis. In December of the same year, Congress passed the Nicaraguan Human Rights and Anticorruption (NICA) Act, imposing restrictions and sanctions on institutions and individuals responsible for the Nicaraguan government’s violence and infringement of the civil rights of protestors.

When Biden took office, his administration continued to take a hard line on Ortega’s actions, issuing more sanctions, and amending the Trump executive order to sanction various sectors of the economy and impose visa restrictions on more than 500 Nicaraguan individuals and their family members connected to the regime. Congress also passed the RENACER Act in November 2021, which holds Ortega’s government accountable for electoral fraud and ongoing human rights violations. What’s more, other countries and blocs – including the United Kingdom, Canada, and the European Union – have followed the U.S. lead on actions against the Ortega government.

These have been important steps to try to keep Ortega’s government accountable, and analysts say that U.S. policy actions have shown some signs of impact, albeit limited due to lack of consistency and proportionality to behaviors of the regime. For example, sanctions appear to have been a contributing factor when in March, the regime released 222 political prisoners and placed them on a plane to the United States. (In a cruel twist, Ortega stripped them of their citizenship mid-flight; though free, they lost their nationality, property, and access to bank accounts in Nicaragua.) Another 66 people remain unjustly imprisoned.

Potential Diplomatic Tools and Long-Term Strategies

On the whole, however, U.S. policy towards Nicaragua under the last several administrations has been largely ad hoc, appears to lack a clear roadmap towards the end goal of a restoration of democracy and regional security, and fails to consistently coordinate with other countries. As Biden seeks to pursue democracy and the fight against authoritarianism as a key tenet of his foreign policy, the United States must use diplomatic tools and employ long-term strategies to arrest Nicaragua’s descent into autocracy.

One potential roadmap that could offer a path to democracy and security is through U.S. leadership in organizing an internationally coordinated and consistent squeeze on Ortega’s pillars of economic, financial, and diplomatic lifelines. This type of international pressure could help to dry up the support systems that both keep the Ortega regime afloat and undergird its ability to perpetrate violence and repression against the Nicaraguan people. Such an approach would include efforts designed to drain off access to international funding, entice defections and generate the real threat of individual criminal responsibility for the crimes committed to date.

Such a path would require the U.S. government to create – and act on — a policy that is commensurate with its designation of Nicaragua as a threat to national security, particularly as the regime strengthens its ties to China and Russia. This means working to develop a coordinated policy towards Nicaragua with other governments in the region and beyond (including allies such as the European Union, the United Kingdom and Canada). Such a policy should include five key elements:

1. The United States should appoint a special envoy tasked with developing a comprehensive strategy to support the restoration of democracy and security over the medium- to long term. The envoy should also coordinate among U.S. government bodies, international allies, and Nicaraguan civil society to find a democratic solution to the crisis. Designating a special envoy will send a clear signal that Nicaragua is a priority for the Biden administration.

2. Any comprehensive strategy also needs to include a more strategic, coordinated, and consistent use of targeted individual sanctions and sector-specific sanctions of businesses tied to the Ortega government. Though Presidents Trump and Biden have already issued high-level sanctions, the U.S. government needs a larger strategic plan on how to more effectively achieve the aims of the NICA ACT, which requires the Executive Branch to “impose restrictions and sanctions on institutions and individuals responsible for the Nicaraguan government’s violence and infringement on civil rights.” This should include the Nicaraguan Armed Forces and the multitude of businesses that the army owns in the country. Sanctions could impact not just the army’s leadership but also rank-and-file members. If, for instance, they impacted the army’s pension funds, that could in turn lead to defections and the weakening of Ortega’s grip on power.

And in terms of sectoral sanctions, Biden’s amendment of Trump’s executive order specifically targets the gold sector, noting that the Ortega-Murillo regime has used it to fund its authoritarian and destabilizing activities. This amended executive order also gives the U.S. Treasury Department the authority to target other sectors of the Nicaraguan economy. Investigative reporting has mapped out how the regime created a network of businesses and figureheads for personal enrichment and money laundering (energy, media outlets, and real estate are clear standouts), and it details how these businesses benefit from such arrangements (such as receiving state-funded contracts). Targeting these businesses and additional economic sectors would effectively hamper the interests that keep the Ortega-Murillo family and their cronies afloat.

3. The Biden administration must strategically utilize all the economic tools at its disposal. The United States should reassess its free-trade agreements with Nicaragua (such as CAFTA-DR), rethink its role in international financial institutions that provide loans to Nicaragua, and reconsider its contributions to regional banks, such as the Central American Bank for Economic Integration. Also, a range of possible policy actions are well within the administration’s power and authority , including forcing Nicaragua to comply with human rights and labor rights guarantees as a condition of any U.S. funding or trade.

4. The U.S. government should capitalize on its role in multilateral political spaces, such as the United Nations and the Organization of American States (OAS), to address past and ongoing human rights violations and international crimes. The United States must explore all options within multilateral bodies to provide redress for human rights violations and should work with other countries to initiate national-level investigations and potential prosecutions in a third country under the auspices of universal jurisdiction for international crimes , given domestic prosecutions in Nicaragua seem impossible under the Ortega government.

5. Together with regional and international allies, the United States needs to develop a collective and sustainable plan to meaningfully support Nicaraguans fleeing the Ortega regime, including the 222 former political prisoners. Such a plan should include expedited asylum and services – and the United States should lead by example. The Biden administration should certainly be applauded for its role in helping to secure the release of the 222. However, by granting this group entry to the United States via humanitarian parole, they have no access to state and federal benefits. With their citizenship having been stripped, many also had their properties, bank accounts, and pensions in Nicaragua taken away and have no real income to support their basic needs. Most are still waiting for work permits, and without Medicaid they are forced to pay out of pocket to meet the physical- and mental-health challenges they now suffer after 20 months of torture in prison.

Taken together, these actions will send a powerful message that Nicaragua has become a pariah that is undermining international security. Such measures will limit opportunities for the Ortega regime to use international funding to prop up the state machinery that is oppressing the Nicaraguan people, and provide initial avenues for accountability for government crimes.  And finally, these recommendations will provide much-needed support for those fleeing authoritarianism in search of a safer life while creating the conditions for their eventual return.

IMAGE: Antigovernment protesters hold a Nicaraguan flag over their heads against the sky and yell slogans in front of a riot police line during the 71st International Celebration of Human Rights in Managua on December 10, 2019.  (Photo by INTI OCON/AFP via Getty Images)

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This year marks both the 30^th anniversary of World Press Freedom Day and the 75^th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So, this is a doubly fitting year to be fighting to maintain freedom of expression where it exists, to re-establish freedom of expression where it has been suppressed, and to support freedom of expression across the world. Sadly, 2023 is also a year in which it has become more necessary and important than ever to carry on this fight.

Freedom of expression is protected in international law, because, without it, democracy and the rule of law wither away. A free and uncensored press is a vital aspect of this freedom: independent media hold governments to account, facilitate the enjoyment of other fundamental freedoms, and shed light on matters of public interest. And different parts of the media also monitor each other.

The media have rightly been described as the watchdogs of democracy, because journalists often highlight democratic deficits and demand accountability from elected and unelected officials. This is the fourth estate.

The right to freedom of expression, including the right to seek, receive, and impart information, online and offline, is also an enabling right without which most other fundamental human rights cannot be properly enjoyed. Exercising these interdependent freedoms, without fear or unlawful interference, is part of the bedrock of a modern democratic and civilized society.

States that strive for balanced social progress and democratic stability should not just protect the right to freedom of expression within their laws and constitution; wider and sustained action is required to ensure that freedom of expression is effectively guaranteed through independent and impartial justice systems. That means any interference with freedom of expression must have a legal basis, meet the standards of strict necessity and proportionality to the danger which the restrictions address, and be subject to independent review.

That is the conceptual framework.

Today’s reality is that civil liberties continue to decline. And this is a global problem. Recent data from Freedom House show that infringement on free expression is one of biggest drivers of the democratic recession being experienced across the world. Among the many rights under attack worldwide during the past 17 consecutive years, freedom of expression — and, in particular, media freedom — appears to have declined more than any other right.

The explanation for this is simple: media freedom poses a genuine threat to corrupt and undemocratic regimes, and accordingly, many governments adopt measures which stifle press freedom and encourage censorship. According to UNESCO, more journalists today are killed outside war zones than inside them, with a mere one in ten such murders resulting in prosecution.

Many journalists today operate in fear of reprisals, facing arbitrary deprivations of their liberty or physical attacks – or even murder — simply for doing their jobs. Legitimate reporting by journalists, often in the public interest, is routinely undermined, with many facing intimidation and harassment through vexatious legal action by State and other powerful actors. Further, regulatory and administrative processes are being developed by States to target independent media in the form of economic and commercial regulations. Even in some democracies, journalists and media workers receive inadequate protection from intimidation and violence.

Add to this the increased challenges we face in the digital world. The internet is one of the principal means by which individuals exercise their right to freedom of expression today. Many governments have introduced repressive laws to the online sphere and adopted invasive technologies to monitor digital communication. They have also sought to control the internet, through shutting it down or slowing it down, or simply removing content inconvenient to the government of the day. All the while, journalists are targeted and harassed online with impunity.

In 2019, the Media Freedom Coalition was established as an international partnership of governments working together to advocate for media freedom and for the safety of journalists, pledging also to hold accountable individuals and governments that harm journalists for doing their jobs. The High Level Panel of Legal Experts on Media Freedom, was convened by the Coalition co-chairs to act as the Coalition’s independent legal advisory body. A Consultative Network was also created, constituted of civil society and media organizations. UNESCO is an official observer to the Coalition and administers its Global Media Defence Fund.

The Coalition is now more than 50 States strong. The High Level Panel has been publishing written advice to the Coalition, and the Coalition’s Member States have started to give effect to the High Level Panel’s recommendations by: (i) introducing and issuing emergency visas for journalists at risk; (ii) protecting their own journalists abroad through strengthening diplomatic support; (iii) working on a feasibility study for an international task force that can investigate violence and other abuses against journalists; and (iv) imposing targeted financial and travel sanctions against those who persecute the press.

The fact that some of the Coalition States are matching their words with action must be the cause for some cautious optimism. But much more needs to be done.

For the High Level Panel, that means continuing to provide legal advice to the Coalition States, reviewing draft legislation impacting on media freedom, accepting invitations by international courts to submit opinions, and making legal interventions in cases of wider public interest. It also means tackling the novel legal issues raised by the spread of disinformation, by the practice of arbitrary detention of journalists in state-to-state relations, and by the misuse of commercial spyware against journalists.

The Coalition offers an interesting model for international co-operation in a key area for democracies. Its tri-partite structure – the States, the independent lawyers and jurists, the civil society organizations – offers checks and balances and the prospect of accountability.

But as we celebrate the 30^th anniversary of World Press Freedom Day, we must reflect on this: if the media are silenced and journalists are muzzled, a key pillar of a functioning democracy is crushed. It means that an institution which is vital to a free society, which seeks to ensure accountability, to highlight injustices, to inform the public about matters in their interest, and to serve as a conduit between the people and their representatives, is neutralized. The loss of a free, independent media is essentially the loss of democracy.

IMAGE: Journalists and members of Guatemalan civil society carry a banner reading “Without Journalism There is No Democracy” during a demonstration against the threat to freedom of expression and the criminal prosecution of communicators, outside court in Guatemala City on March 4, 2023. The United States expressed concern on March 2 over Guatemala’s decision to bring legal action against nine journalists from an investigative newspaper, saying the move undermined free speech, and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) accused Guatemalan authorities of trying to “intimidate and harass” journalists at the publication who were investigating government corruption. The journalists from the newspaper El Periodico include its founder Jose Ruben Zamora, who had already spent eight months in pre-trial detention on accusations of money laundering and blackmail. (Photo by JOHAN ORDONEZ/AFP via Getty Images)

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In collecting some of these statements and launching this collection, Just Security is providing an invaluable resource to all Americans, and others beyond, who still seek a more holistic understanding of January 6th, and who want to explore what the sobering conclusions of the Select Committee might mean for the future of our democracy. 

First and foremost, these statements help to place the insurrection as part of a dark, American tradition of mob violence that has repeatedly tried to nullify the electoral triumph of multiracial coalitions and attack governments that support equal rights for Black Americans. Statements such as those from Professors Carol Anderson, Kellie Carter Jackson, Kate Masur, Gregory Downs, and Kathleen Belew, provide historical analysis and specific examples—ranging from Reconstruction to the modern white power movement—that demonstrates the continuity between January 6th and previous vigilante attempts to beat back progress toward a more inclusive and racially equitable America.

Other statements, like those from leaders at prominent, nonpartisan institutes like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Brennan Center, States United Democracy Center, and Campaign Legal Center, explain how this history of racial violence and disenfranchisement is intimately bound up in President Trump’s Big Lie, which singles out largely non-white cities as centers of voter fraud and has since been used as a justification for further restrictions on voting rights that disproportionately impact Black and Brown citizens. Related analyses we received explained how key actors in the insurrection were motivated by a toxic brew of racism, homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, and conspiracy – the same beliefs that continue to motivate acts of mass violence and intimidation across the country. In a statement from the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection (where I now work), Professor Mary McCord explains how January 6th also fits into a yearslong trend of increased mobilization by unlawful private paramilitary groups, which have continued to evolve since the attack. 

Even more broadly, these assorted statements give a global perspective on the anti-democratic coalition that burst forth on January 6th. Leading experts on authoritarianism and fascism, such as Professors Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Jason Stanley, and Federico Finchelstein, remind us of the stakes of January 6th as a moment when vigilante violence and authoritarian schemes converged to assert control over democratic society, as we have seen replicated, in one form or another, throughout history to catastrophic effect. This moment of autocratic consolidation was enabled by a broader acceptance of political violence by mainstream politicians and their supporters, a phenomenon that is elucidated by experts like Rachel Kleinfeld and Professors Liliana Hall Mason and Nathan Kalmoe.

These statements can also help to shine a light on some of the less-examined elements of the broader story of January 6th, such as explanations of the role of Christian Nationalism and anti-government extremism in the attack, the FBI’s persistent failures to adequately address the threat of far-right violence, the crisis of extremist radicalization within the U.S. military, and the proliferation of violent, conspiratorial content on alternative social media platforms like Parler. Taken together, these expert analyses should help us reject narrow explanations for the insurrection, especially the kind that  attempts to whitewash the violent extremism we saw on that day and try to sweep over the true, violent potential of the movements that fueled it.

The legacy of January 6th remains a fiercely contested issue, and it is vitally important that supporters of American democracy still speak loudly and clearly about the realities of that day. This collection will help us do just that, by providing explanations about why the insurrectionist forces have lingered on in our national life, through continued threats of political violence and anti-democratic instability. Over two years after the attack, groups like the Proud Boys continue to menace local governments and LGBTQ+ individuals, while an openly vengeful Trump embraces the insurrectionists and demonizes the same minority communities that are now in their crosshairs. 

Seen in this light, January 6th never ended. 

We are in the midst of the latest retelling of a very old, very dangerous story of authoritarianism and violence that both America and the world has seen before. That makes it all the more important for us to push for accountability whenever and wherever we can, and to guard against the resurgence of political violence as the next national election looms ever closer.

I hope that experts will continue to submit their statements to Just Security (email address) so that it can create as complete a repository as possible. Although they were not all incorporated into the work of the Select Committee, these statements give essential context to complement the factual narrative contained in the committee’s final report and underlying documents. As shocking as that narrative remains, it is even more terrifying when examined in this wider lens. Because of this, I know the collection will foster a deeper understanding of the insurrection and illuminate its most difficult lessons, which is the best way to ensure that January 6th is remembered as a wake-up call to the bipartisan alliance that saved American democracy, and not as the triumphant first chapter of an extreme coalition eager to destroy it.

Editor’s note: The expert statements on this topic are listed below and also available at Just Security’s January 6th Clearinghouse. 

1. Carol Anderson (Charles Howard Candler Professor, African American Studies, Emory University)
   “The Role of White Rage and Voter Suppression in the Insurrection on January 6, 2021″
   Expert Statement
2. Anti Defamation League
   “Extremist Movements and the January 6, 2021 Insurrection”
   Expert Statement 
3. Heidi Beirich (Co-Founder and Executive Vice President, Global Project Against Hate and Extremism)
   “The Role of the Proud Boys in the January 6th Capitol Attack and Beyond”
   Expert Statement
4. Kathleen Belew (Associate Professor of History, University of Chicago)
   Expert Statement
5. Ruth Ben-Ghiat (Professor of History, New York University)
   “Strongmen Don’t Accept Defeat: The January 6th, 2021, Assault on the Capitol as an Outcome of Donald J. Trump’s Authoritarian Presidency”
   Expert Statement
6. Bright Line Watch
   John Carey (John Wentworth Professor in the Social Sciences, Dartmouth College), Gretchen Helmke (Thomas H. Jackson Distinguished University Professor, University of Rochester), Brendan Nyhan (James O. Freedman Presidential Professor, Dartmouth College) and Susan Stokes (Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago)
   “The Destructive Effects of President Trump’s Effort to Overturn the 2020 Election”
   Expert Statement 
7. Anthea Butler (Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought, University of Pennsylvania)
   “What is White Christian Nationalism?”
   Expert Statement
8. Kellie Carter Jackson (Michael and Denise Kellen ‘68 Associate Professor of Africana Studies, Wellesley College)
   “Understanding the Historical Context for White Supremacist Violence in America in Tandem with the Events of January 6, 2021”
   Expert Statement 
9. Katherine Clayton (Ph.D. Candidate, Stanford University), Nicholas T. Davis (Assistant Professor, The University of Alabama), Brendan Nyhan (James O. Freedman Presidential Professor, Dartmouth College), Ethan Porter (Assistant Professor, George Washington University), Timothy J. Ryan (Associate Professor, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and Thomas J. Wood (Assistant Professor, The Ohio State University)
   “President Trump’s Rhetoric Undermined Confidence in Elections Among His Supporters”
   Expert Statement
10. Michael German (Fellow, Brennan Center for Justice, New York University School of Law)
    “Why the FBI Failed to Anticipate Violence at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, and How to Prevent it From Happening Again”
    Expert Statement 
11. Philip Gorski (Frederick and Laura Goff Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies, Yale University)
    “White Christian Nationalism: The What, When, How and Where.”
    Expert Statement 
12. Jared Holt (Resident Fellow, Digital Forensic Research Lab, Atlantic Council)
    Expert Statement
13. Aziz Huq (Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School) and Tom Ginsburg (Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School)
    “Statement on the January 6, 2021 Attacks and the Threat to American Democracy”
    Expert Statement
14. Michael Jensen (Associate Research Scientist, START), Elizabeth Yates (Assistant Research Scientist, START) and Sheehan Kane (Senior Researcher, START)
    “Radicalization in the Ranks: An Assessment of the Scope and Nature of Criminal Extremism in the United States Military”
    Expert Statement 
15. Rachel Kleinfeld (Senior Fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace)
    “The Rise in Political Violence in the United States and Damage to Our Democracy”
    Expert Statement
16. Samantha Kutner (Proud Boys Research Lead, Khalifa Ihler Institute), Bjørn Ihler (Co-Founder, Khalifa Ihler Institute), and C.L. Murray (Khalifa Ihler Institute and Lecturer in Criminology, University of North Carolina Wilmington)
    “Function Over Appearance; Examining the Role of the Proud Boys in American Politics Before and After January 6th”
    Expert Statement
17. Liliana Mason (Associate Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University), Nathan Kalmoe (Associate Professor of Political Communication, Louisiana State University), Julie Wronski (Associate Professor of American Politics, University of Mississippi) and John Kane (Clinical Assistant Professor, Center for Global Affairs, New York University)
    Expert Statement
18. Kate Masur (Professor of History, Northwestern University) and Gregory Downs (Professor of History, University of California, Davis)
    “Our Fragile Democracy: Political Violence, White Supremacy, and Disenfranchisement in American History”
    Expert Statement
19. Mary McCord (Executive Director and Visiting Professor of Law, Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, Georgetown University Law Center)
    Expert Statement
20. Jennifer Mercieca (Professor, Department of Communication, Texas A&M University)
    Expert Statement
21. Suzanne Mettler (John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions, Cornell University) and Robert C. Lieberman (Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University)
    “How Four Historic Threats to Democracy Fueled the January 6, 2021 Attack on the United States Capitol”
    Expert Statement 
22. Janai Nelson (President and Director-Counsel, NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc.)
    Expert Statement
23. Trevor Potter (Founder and President, Campaign Legal Center)
    Expert Statement
24. Candace Rondeaux (Director, Future Frontlines, New America), Ben Dalton (Open Source Fellow, Future Frontlines, New America), Cuong Nguyen (Social Science and Data Analytics Fellow, Future Frontlines, New America), Michael Simeone (Associate Research Professor, School for Complex Adaptive Systems, Arizona State University), Thomas Taylor (Senior Fellow, New America) and Shawn Walker (Senior Research Fellow, Future Frontlines, New America)
    “Investigating Alt-Tech Ties to January 6”
    Expert Statement
25. Mike Rothschild (Journalist and Author)
    “Regarding The Role of QAnon in the Events of January 6th and Beyond”
    Expert Statement
26. Andrew Seidel (Constitutional Attorney, Freedom From Religion Foundation)
    “Events, People, and Networks Leading Up to January 6” and “Attack on the Capitol: Evidence of the Role of White Christian Nationalism”
    Expert Statement
27. Peter Simi (Professor of Sociology, Chapman University)
    “Understanding Far-Right Extremism: The Roots of the January 6th Attack and Why More is Coming”
    Expert Statement
28. Southern Poverty Law Center
    Michael Edison Hayden (Senior Investigative Reporter and Spokesperson, Intelligence Project), Megan Squire (Senior Fellow, Intelligence Project) Hannah Gais (Senior Research Analyst, Intelligence Project) and Susan Corke (Director, Intelligence Project)
    Expert Statement 1
    Cassie Miller (Senior Research Analyst, Intelligence Project) and Susan Corke (Director, Intelligence Project)
    Expert Statement 2
    Michael Edison Hayden (Senior Investigative Reporter and Spokesperson, Intelligence Project) and Megan Squire (Deputy Director for Data Analytics and OSINT, Intelligence Project)
    Expert Statement 3
29. Jason Stanley (Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy, Yale University) and Federico Finchelstein (Professor of History, The New School)
    “The Fascist Danger to Democracy Represented by the Events of January 6, 2021”
    Expert Statement
30. Amanda Tyler et al (Executive Director, Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, and Leader, Christians Against Christian Nationalism Initiative)
    “Christian Nationalism and the January 6, 2021 Insurrection” – Report
    Expert Statement
31. Wendy Weiser (Vice President for Democracy, Brennan Center for Justice, New York University School of Law)
    Expert Statement
32. Andrew Whitehead (Associate Professor of Sociology, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis) and Samuel Perry (Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Oklahoma)
    “What is Christian Nationalism?”
    Expert Statement
33. Christine Whitman (Former Governor, New Jersey), Steve Bullock (Former Governor, Montana), Jim Hood (Former Attorney General, Mississippi), Tom Rath (Former Attorney General, New Hampshire), Trey Grayson (Former Secretary of State, Kentucky) and Frankie Sue Del Papa (Former Secretary of State, Nevada)
    Expert Statement

IMAGE: Pro-Trump protesters gather in front of the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Jon Cherry/Getty Images)

The post Introduction to Expert Statements on Democracy and Political Violence, submitted to January 6th House select committee appeared first on Just Security.

In a similar context, the victims of abuses by U.S. security partners saw a modest win last fall when the State Department reallocated $130 million in foreign military financing that had been slated to go to Egypt. It did so because it could not certify that the Egyptian authorities were “taking sustained and effective steps” toward addressing the human rights-related conditions that Congress had imposed on the funds.

Most of the reassigned funds, though, were sent without similar conditions to the Philippines, another partner of the United States whose security forces have committed serious human rights abuses against their own people.

On the eve of Marcos’s visit, the current mood in Washington around U.S.-Philippine relations is just short of exuberant, as the Marcos administration is proving to be quite committed to the countries’ security alliance. Marcos has offered expanded access to military bases after his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, had flirted with scrapping a key U.S. treaty and realigning his country with China. U.S. counterparts nonetheless need to convey that U.S. security assistance will depend at least in part on progress on human rights.

During the six-year term of Duterte’s administration, which ended in 2022, the brutal “war on drugs” that the Philippine police carried out consumed most of the attention that U.S. officials gave to human rights in the Philippines. But Filipino human rights groups like Karapatan have made clear that the transition to the Marcos administration did not stop extrajudicial killings and other abuses. Such abuses have not been limited to the police, but rather include killings of human rights defenders and other civilians by security forces engaged in an armed conflict with a communist rebel group.

The U.S. government is well aware of these trends. The State Department noted in its latest human rights report that, for example, the often-deadly practice of “red-tagging” (labeling critics or activists as communists or terrorists) has continued under the Marcos administration. U.S. diplomats stress that they always raise the issue of human rights in meetings with Philippine counterparts, and the readouts of recent high-level meetings do mention it. But the abuses have continued, and impunity still prevails.

Human Rights First (where I work), other civil society organizations, and U.S. members of Congress have urged the U.S. Treasury and State Departments to impose targeted sanctions under the Global Magnitsky program against specific Philippine officials allegedly involved in extrajudicial killings. This would be a more targeted approach to pressing for accountability than cutting security assistance, and one that has produced a measure of behavior change in the context of other U.S. security partnerships. But the two agencies have not acted despite abundant evidence of sanctionable abuses.

For its part, Congress has for several years taken steps – mostly modest ones – to nudge the executive branch into seeking greater accountability in its partner’s armed forces.

Its most serious move was to ban U.S. counternarcotics assistance to the Philippine National Police, which was deeply compromised in Duterte’s war on drugs. But Congress has also required the State Department to submit occasional reports on, for example, Philippine efforts to prosecute armed forces personnel involved in extrajudicial killings, and to stop acts of intimidation and violence by state or paramilitary forces against journalists and human rights activists.

These reports appear not to have been made public, even when Congress has directed that they be posted online. It is thus hard to know whether the U.S. government has claimed to see progress, or felt more pressure to act because of the lack of progress. The increasingly skeptical and prescriptive tone of Congress’s requests – it directed the State Department this year to explain how U.S. security assistance is actually “helping to achieve results in addressing the findings” in its reports – suggests an awareness that these nudges are not working.

There are more tools in the policy toolkit, though, and the executive branch and Congress should use them.

• In the immediate term, one priority we at Human Rights First have heard from local activists for next week’s visit is for Biden to ask Marcos to end the practice of red-tagging, which has so often led to the harassment or even murder of journalists, humanitarian workers, indigenous leaders, and human rights defenders.
• To reinforce such a request, Congress should condition U.S. security assistance on a set of criteria like those it developed for assistance to the Egyptian government, which include taking steps to hold security forces accountable and protect the safety and rights of activists.
• The U.S. government’s handling of its military aid to Egypt has been no model for effective human rights diplomacy, and many Filipino groups support a total cutoff of security assistance until the Philippine government ends impunity and makes reforms. If not enough members of Congress will back that approach, conditioning at least some assistance would convey that the United States will no longer play out an endless cycle of “raising the issue” of human rights from year to year without real stakes.
• The International Criminal Court’s investigation of extrajudicial killings in the war on drugs is a rare and important independent probe into abuses in the Philippines; the State Department has acknowledged the probe’s existence but not publicly taken a position on it. The U.S. government’s own history of hostility toward the court gives it little standing to press for full cooperation, but it should encourage Philippine authorities not to interfere with the family members of victims or others who may wish to cooperate with the investigation themselves.

The United States should know that it cannot successfully pursue its security interests in the Asia-Pacific region at the expense of the basic rights of its partners’ citizens. As we at Human Rights First said in a case study about the Philippines last year, “[w]idespread killings and persistent impunity are not a sustainable foundation for such an alliance, and they portend further democratic backsliding and instability that would drive the two countries apart.”

IMAGE: US President Joe Biden meets with Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York City on September 22, 2022. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN / AFP) (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

The post On Eve of Marcos Visit, US Must Center Human Rights in US-Philippines Security Relationship appeared first on Just Security.

Within hours, fighting raged across the city as forces vied for strategic and symbolic locations — the airport, military headquarters, the presidential palace. SAF air forces bombed RSF positions, while RSF’s anti-aircraft artillery lit up the skies. Ground forces fought in neighborhoods. Snipers occupied rooftops. The apartment building in which I used to live, near downtown Khartoum, was shelled.

At some point that afternoon, three World Food Programme staff were killed in cold blood by militia in Kabkabiya, an ethnically mixed town in North Darfur where the savannah meets the foothills of Darfur’s Jebel Marra mountain range. The same day, shelling killed civilians in El Fasher, where a friend was indoor hiding: “My kids are very scared… my son kept asking, ‘Why is the war inside the town?’” In Nyala, South Darfur, militia forces looted extensively, targeting aid compounds and government offices.

Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the SAF commander and head of the transitional military council ruling the country, and his deputy, Gen. Mohamed Hamdan (“Hemedti”) Dagalo, who heads the RSF — traded insults and threats, digging in their heels. As the former U.S. special envoy for the Horn of Africa observed, “Burhan and Hemedti appear to be engaging in a fight to the death.”

Friends and residents in Khartoum sheltered indoors and under beds, away from windows. “We are sleeping [in] the hall,” wrote one. Their calls and videos, crackling with gun fire, explosions and roaring jets, sounded ever more anxious as supplies and power dwindled.

Armed men attacked foreign diplomats, aid workers, hospitals, and residents. At least one foreign national was sexually assaulted. By day four, the United Nations was reporting that nearly 200 people had been killed and more than 1,800 injured.

Amid these dire conditions, the international community have been hard-pressed to respond.

The U.N. Secretary General, the African Union (which has suspended Sudan), regional bodies (including the G7) and embassies have publicly condemned the hostilities. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has personally appealed to both men for a ceasefire. While both have allowed pauses during iftar evening meals during the holy month of Ramadan, al-Burhan rejected the ceasefire and barred African Union diplomats from entry, saying the climate wasn’t yet suitable for mediation.

Meanwhile, the U.N. and some embassies have begun planning evacuations, although White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Tuesday that U.S. citizens should “make their own arrangements… to stay safe.” Civilians have begun to flee the city by car and by foot, seeking safety in rural areas.

How We Got Here

Many have criticized efforts to broker a political deal reached in the wake of the military coup in October 2021, on the grounds that it legitimized the coup, that neither of the two men at its helm have seen justice for human rights abuses since the beginning of the revolution, and that it failed to reflect the democratic aspirations of the Sudanese people.

The resulting “framework agreement,” signed in December 2022 by the security forces and a handful of political parties, deferred the “sticky” issues of transitional justice and security sector reform, among others, on which agreement was needed for any genuine new deal.  If this setup was already doomed, there were other signs things were not going well.

The relationship between al-Burhan and Hemedti was always opportunistic. The two men came into power as chair and deputy chair, respectively, of the ruling transitional military council in 2019 following the ouster of Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s long-time Islamist autocrat (who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for atrocities in Darfur) after months of popular protests.

The RSF was created by al-Bashir in 2013 to fight rebels in the Nuba Mountains and Darfur, leaving a trail of atrocities in their wake. From the beginning, Hemedti was shrewd in his dealing with the army – whether al-Bashir or al-Burhan. According to research I conducted with Human Rights Watch, the RSF led the violent crackdown on protesters who in June 2019 were seeking to oust al-Bashir and bring civilian rule.

In October 2021, when al-Burhan staged a coup against the civilian component of the transitional government, arresting civilian leaders and sweeping away two plus years of work by civilian technocrats, Hemedti supported the move. He also helped secure the allegiance of former rebels who had signed the Juba Peace Agreement, which had resulted from a year-long negotiation process he helped to oversee.   

For much of the next year and a half, the men sublimated their differences while they consolidated their resources and strengthened their forces through recruitment along ethnic lines and by calling in favors from regional powers. But their pragmatic alliance could not survive competition and shifting alliances. Hemedti, smelling an opportunity, re-cast himself as an ally of democracy efforts, an opponent of Islamist remnants of the al-Bashir regime, and a partner in stemming the tide of migration to the north.

Al-Burhan, for his part, chafed at the rise of Hemedti, a camel trader from Darfur who had leveraged his relations with the army to accumulate vast wealth in family-owned businesses and gold interests, including with Russia. The RSF has grown to at least 70,000, many recruited from Hemedti’s own community and other Darfuri Arabs.

In recent weeks, tensions have risen between Hemedti and al-Burhan around differences in their interpretations of security sector reform. According to the think-tank Sudan Transparency Policy Tracker, “integration of the RSF into the regular army, provided for in Framework Agreement’s security and military reform component, has become a serious, and ever more visible, area of conflict.”

What Could Happen Next

Each side claims to have the upper hand, but in the war of propaganda there’s no telling which of the competing narratives to believe.  Doomsday scenarios run the gamut: if SAF wins, al-Burhan and his colleagues will re-install old regime Islamists, with no regard for international pressure. At best, they could make a flimsy pretense of appointing some allied civilians.

The RSF may be less likely win, say some, but they won’t go down easily, and could draw out the conflict, allying with other armed groups in peripheral areas.

Regional interests threaten to widen the conflict. Egypt, seen as a would-be colonizer, supports the SAF and has an interest in Sudan’s Nile water and agricultural land. Ethiopia, which fought Sudan in 2021 over fertile borderlands at Fashaqa, has its own interests, including to counter Egypt. The United Arab Emirates, which supported Hemedti, has benefited from the RSF’s participation in the Saudi coalition in Yemen, and may have sold weapons to the RSF. And Libya and Chad could easily become more involved in Darfur.

Meanwhile alarms are sounding, not only about the impending humanitarian crisis but also the possibility of brutal crackdowns on democracy leaders in the near future. Many of the civilian leaders have gone into hiding, and there are rumors some are being targeted already.

How can international actors respond most responsibly to help Sudan? For one, they should support calls for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire and insist the parties protect civilians in line with international law. They should task a group of high-level diplomats to coordinate all international efforts.

In time, more nuanced actions will be possible, but they should aim to honor Sudan’s democratic transition, and not resume a cynical power-sharing agreement that will not hold. Finally, they should consider — among other actions — individual sanctions on individuals who promote violence against civilians and undermine Sudanese efforts to pursue true transformation.

IMAGE: Smoke billows above residential buildings in Khartoum on April 16, 2023, as fighting in Sudan raged for a second day in battles between rival generals. (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)

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