Pressure Points

The desperate human rights situation in Nicaragua is now very clear, and a Washington Post story today makes for grim reading. Just as the Castro regime in Cuba has long used paramilitaries for unofficial police violence against dissidents and the regime in Iran uses the “Basij” forces, the Ortega regime in Nicaragua uses “turbas divinas” or “divine mobs.” The Post story tells of the armed attack by such groups this past weekend against protesters holed up at the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua and then in a Catholic church. Nicaragua is rebelling against the repression, venality, and personalized rule of Daniel Ortega, who is president, and his wife, who is Vice President. Human Rights Watch, certainly an organization of the Left, said this on July 10: High-level Nicaraguan officials bear responsibility for grave, pervasive abuses being committed on their watch, Human Rights Watch said today. These officials have failed to take meaningful steps to prevent or punish human rights violations by their subordinates. Since protests broke out on April 18, 2018, at least 270 people have been killed and over 1,500 have been injured, in most cases at the hands of police officers and pro-government armed gangs.  The facts are fully set out in a lengthy special report of the Inter American Commission on Human Rights issued in June and entitled “Gross Human Rights Violations in the Context of Social Protests in Nicaragua.” Here is one paragraph: The Commission concludes that the State of Nicaragua violated the rights to life, humane treatment, health, personal liberty, assembly, freedom of expression, and access to justice. The Commission finds especially worrisome the assassinations, extrajudicial executions, abusive treatment, possible acts of torture and arbitrary detentions committed against the country’s majority young population. Similarly, the IACHR states its concern over the violation of the right to health and medical care, the reprisals against public servants for refusing to carrying out orders contrary to human rights, acts of press censorship and violence against the press, acts harassing human rights defenders, irregularities in beginning investigations with respect to the assassinations and injuries that have occurred in this context, as well as other serious events verified by the Commission. So there is no confusion about the events in Nicaragua, and human rights defenders are condemning the regime. But from the regime’s great fans there is silence. I have in mind the mayor of New York, Bill di Blasio, and Sen. Bernie Sanders. Di Blasio travelled to Nicaragua in 1988 (this was prior to his 1990 honeymoon in Cuba) in solidarity with the Sandinistas. He worked in Masaya, a town near Managua that was a center of revolutionary fervor, and has long said the visit affected him deeply. But this year, the Ortega regime has attacked Masaya because it is—once again—a center of anti-regime activity. As The Guardian put it, “Today, Masaya is once again in full revolt – this time against the Sandinistas themselves.” The regime’s attacks on Masaya and other rebel strongholds have been so fierce that the Nicaraguan Army has actually complained about them and sought to distance itself from them. But I’ve found no evidence that Mayor di Blasio has done so. As for Sanders, a 2015 story in BuzzFeed recounted an interview in which he called Ortega "an impressive guy.” BuzzFeed reports that “According to his book, Outsider in the House, Sanders traveled to Nicaragua on the invitation of the Sandinista government, to witness the celebration of the Seventh Anniversary of the Revolution. By his own account, he was the ‘highest ranking American official present’ at the event. Upon his return, Sanders said that he was ‘impressed’ with the ‘intelligence and sincerity’ of Sandinista leaders....” Perhaps I’ve missed their statements but it seems di Blasio and Sanders have suddenly become silent about Nicaragua—just when their silence is most damaging and their voices most needed. They have credibility as former Sandinista supporters to lead the criticisms of the Ortega regime today and pressure it to stop the abuses. This is not a political point: their voices might actually reduce the killing and help end the repression. Their silence helps Ortega and is in effect an act of solidarity with dictatorship. It’s time for them, and others who long defended the Ortega regime, to speak up on behalf of the people of Nicaragua.     

Once upon a time, the Socialist International was an extraordinary organization. Founded in 1951 as a successor to various prior socialist groups, it was staunchly democratic and anti-Communist, and played an important role during the Cold War. Members included such luminaries as Felipe Gonzalez of Spain and Mario Soares of Portugal, and the SI helped them and their socialist parties re-establish their countries as democracies. The SI included people like Willy Brandt and Golda Meir. Those were the good old days. More recently, Germany’s socialist party (the SPD) formed a new organization in 2013 called the Progressive Alliance. Among the SPD’s complaints: the SI now includes too many non-democratic parties. The Progressive Alliance now counts well over a hundred member parties and groups. The latest news about the SI is the resignation from its ranks of Israel’s Labor Party. Why? Because the SI has now joined the BDS movement, calling for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel. In late June, the SI adopted a “Declaration on the Palestinian Question” that “Calls all governments and civil society organizations to activate Boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against the Israeli occupation, all the occupation institutions, and the illegal Israeli settlements including the total embargo on all forms of military trade and cooperation with Israel as long as it continues its policies of occupation and Apartheid against the Palestinian people.” And that’s not all.  The Declaration denounces Israel’s actions on the Israel/Gaza border without one single word of comment, much less condemnation, of Hamas. It “calls on the US administration to reconsider its positions that are favouring Israel,” as if favoring Israel were itself against international law. It “reaffirms its commitment…to bringing a complete end to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian state that started in 1967.” Now that’s an interesting formulation, because there was no Palestinian state for Israel to occupy in 1967—just territory governed by Jordan and Egypt. The SI has a long history and will continue in existence, doing good work and bad. But it is sad to see what was once a staunch defender of democracy and human rights collapsing into allowing non-democratic parties to affiliate and into using the usual Leftist canards. The SI Declaration said it wanted to encourage “progressive forces” in Israel, and the secretary general of Israel’s Labor Party, Yehiel Bar, responded forcefully: In the declaration, you reiterate your ‘solidarity with the progressive forces in Israel.’ As the international secretary of the Israeli Labor party, as a leader in the party, and on behalf of the Labor Party leadership, the largest progressive party in the Israeli parliament, let me assure you that until the full and formal cancellation of this poor one-sided and miserable declaration, your ‘solidarity’ is not desirable by us. I note that while Israel’s Labor Party is no longer an SI member, guess which party in that region is? Fatah-- Yasser Arafat’s old party, now led by Mahmoud Abbas. Fatah, whose leadership is never democratically chosen and which rules the West Bank without elections, free speech, or freedom of the press. The SI’s actions, in driving Israel’s Labor Party out and embracing the Fatah Party, tell us all we really need to know about its present state. And that is a sad story.

Everyone knows that since the days of George W. Bush’s “Freedom Agenda”, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the failures in the “Arab Spring,” Americans no longer support the promotion of democracy abroad. It’s too expensive, may mire us in foreign conflicts, and won’t work anyway, so there is no support for promoting democracy and human rights overseas. Everyone knows this, but it isn’t true. That’s the remarkable conclusion of a new poll sponsored jointly by the George W. Bush Institute, Freedom House, and the Penn Biden Center. The poll studies Americans’ views of democracy within the United States, and support for it overseas.  Here are some of the findings: The American public’s allegiance to the concept of democracy carries over into a belief that the United States should do what it can to support democracy and human rights abroad. Overall, 71 percent of respondents favor the U.S. government taking steps to support democracy and human rights in other countries [against 24 percent opposed]. By a 2–1 margin, 36–18 percent, Americans would prefer to increase rather than decrease U.S. government efforts to support democracy and human rights abroad.  Why this support?  Overall, respondents signaled much stronger agreement with arguments in favor of U.S. support for democracy and human rights abroad than with those against. A moral argument generated the most consensus. A 91 percent majority agrees that “we can’t control what happens in the world, but we have a moral obligation to speak up and do what we can when people are victims of genocide, violence, and severe human rights abuses.”  There were other bases for support as well:  Two other arguments received strong endorsements. An 84 percent majority agrees that “when other countries become democratic, it contributes to our own well-being.” And a 67–22 percent majority believes that “when other countries are democratic, rather than dictatorships, it often helps make the U.S. a little safer”—rejecting the alternative statement that “there is no impact on U.S. security when other countries move away from dictatorship and become democracies.”  There is even stronger support among college-educated voters: 80-17 percent rather than 71-24. That’s a narrower gap than many might have anticipated, and a 71-24 margin is very large.  I’ll admit that these results surprised me, but they are not anomalous. A Pew poll from 2009 was entitled “Historically, Public Has Given Low Priority to Promoting Democracy Overseas” but that is not how I would describe its findings. As Pew noted then, “The public does not oppose the goal of attempting to bring democracy to other nations. In July 2005, 60% said the United States should work to promote democracy around the world; 31% said the United States should not do this.” The reason for the headline was that Pew asked what Americans’ “top priorities” were for U.S. foreign policy. Unsurprisingly things like “protect against terror attacks,” “protect jobs of Americans,” and “stop spread of WMD” headed the list.  It was surprising to me that 21 percent of Americans actually called “promoting democracy abroad” a “top priority.”  And in the Pew poll, as noted, 60 percent favored promoting democracy, just as in the 2018 study 71 percent favored it.  What’s the bottom line? These results show that a strong majority of Americans realize promoting democracy is good for the United States—even if they do not think it is our most pressing foreign policy goal. This means the key is leadership. A president can make promoting the spread of democracy a top foreign policy priority for his administration, as George W. Bush did, or he can largely neglect it as President Obama did and the Trump administration is too often doing. The American public has not soured on promoting democracy or forgotten that the United States benefits when there are more democratic countries.