It’s Diosdado Cabello’s world, the rest of Venezuela is just living in it

June 4, 2013 Kevin Lees 7 Comments

Venezuela, just over a month after its still-contested presidential election, has made global headlines in the past couple of weeks for its chronic shortages of everything from toilet paper to church wine, with rationing soon to begin in the large western state of Zulia.

That means that the country’s economic collapse is proceeding more or less as depressingly predicted — with oil prices stagnating, and with the state-owned Venezuelan oil industry’s production reducing, it means that the country has fewer and fewer dollars to fuel its increasing dependency on imported goods, a shortage that’s been exacerbated by the government’s somewhat inefficient system of auctioning off the dollars to importers and the fact that the Venezuelan bolívar is fixed at an artificially high rate.

That’s one of the reasons that Nicolás Maduro, even with the full force of a government that has excelled at blurring the line between the Venezuelan state and chavismo, only barely won election follow Hugo Chávez’s death and why his challenger Henrique Capriles is still waging a campaign in the court system, however quixotic, to expose voting fraud in April’s election that could well reveal that Capriles won the election instead.

Maduro’s loss weakened his already tenuous position within the ranks of chavismo, and the key power brokers under Chávez have largely retained their roles under Maduro, including Rafael Ramírez, the energy minister and the president of the state-run oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), and Jorge Giordani, the former finance minister who remains the planning minister under Maduro. Forget the fact that new policymakers could potentially reverse course on Venezuela’s economy or that Giordani, Ramírez and Maduro appear to be doubling down on the same policies that have led to Venezuela’s precarious situation — it shows that Maduro lacks the power to replace his rivals with ministers who owe their loyalty to Maduro.

But as the economy melts down, it isn’t surprising to see chavismo itself breaking down. The first major breach came a couple of weeks ago, when a purported recording of a conversation emerged between Mario Silva, who hosts the popular, massively pro-chavista ‘La Hojilla’ television program, and Aramis Palacios, a Cuban lieutenant colonel in G2, the Cuban intelligence agency. Silva is as much of a true believer in chavismo as anyone in the top circle of Venezuela’s ruling elite, so if Silva has such wide doubts about Maduro (at one point he says, ‘we are in a sea of shit’), imagine what the rest of the government thinks.

It’s also, of course, somewhat of an international scandal as well — though Cuban intelligence long worked hand-in-hand with Chávez and the Venezuelan government, what exactly was a pro-Chávez talk show host doing talking to a Cuban spook? The link between the two countries became an issue during the campaign, with Capriles attacking the generous oil subsidies to Cuba that Chávez initiated a decade ago, and Maduro is widely believed to have been Havana’s top choice to succeed Chávez.

But the recording was most tantalizing with respect to Diosdado Cabello (pictured above) and his role in Venezuela’s future — no one has more power in post-Chávez than Cabello, including even Maduro. Continue reading It’s Diosdado Cabello’s world, the rest of Venezuela is just living in it →

Bhutan

Bhutan holds only its second election in history with initial round of parliamentary vote

June 3, 2013 Kevin Lees 1 Comment

No country on the planet has quite tried to tip-toe so selectively into the modern world like the Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan, a landlocked nation at the foothills of the Himalayas between northeastern India and Chinese Tibet.

For a country that permitted television and internet only for the first time in 1999, Bhutan has gently turned from an absolute monarchy to a form of constitutional monarchy, beginning in 2008 with the enactment of a formal constitution and the first-ever elections in the country’s history.

Voters in the small country, with around one million residents, voted for a new parliament for just the second time in Bhutanese history on Friday in the first round of a two-part vote — and with results back by mid-day Saturday, Bhutan’s election commission proved that it could tally election results faster than the Italian authorities counted last week’s Rome municipal election. That’s measurable progress for Bhutan — despite the country’s notoriety for measuring ‘Gross National Happiness,’ its reputation as a high-end tourism destination and, all too often, a one-dimensional international image as a ‘Buddhist Shangri-La,’ it’s hardly without its challenges.

Following the first of two rounds of parliamentary elections on May 31, the top two parties will advance to a second round later on July 13 to determine the composition of the country’s Gyelyong Tshogdu (National Assembly), a 47-member body that comprises the lower house of the Bhutanese parliament. Members of the 25-seat Gyelyong Tshogde (National Council), the upper house, were determined earlier in April.

The governing Bhutan Peace and Prosperity Party (Druk Phuensum Tshogpa, DPT, འབྲུག་ཕུན་སུམ་ཚོགས་པ) and the opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP, མི་སེར་དམངས་གཙོའི་ཚོགས་པ་) will advance to those runoffs after seeing off two new parties in Friday’s first round.

The Bhutanese government serves under the monarchial guidance of Bhutan’s Druk Gyalpo (འབྲུག་རྒྱལ་པོ, its ‘dragon king’), the country’s monarchical head of state, who since 2008 has been the youthful Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck (pictured above, left). Though Bhutan has been a unified and independent country since the 18th century, the current monarchy dates back to only 1907, and prior to the institution of the House of Wangchuck as the hereditary monarchy, Bhutan had a dual system of government between secular and religious authorities. Although the British treated Bhutan as a semi-colonized entity and, from 1949 until 2007, India ostensibly guided Bhutanese foreign relations as a formal matter under the Indo-Bhutan Friendship Treaty, Bhutan has in practice been essentially independent since its unification as a nation in the 1700s.

Bhutan’s previous king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, took steps upon his coronation in 1972 to bring Bhutan into the modern world only a year after it formally joined the United Nations. He’s most well-known perhaps globally for coining the concept of ‘Gross National Happiness,’ a subjective alternative to strict economic measures like gross domestic product growth and other vectors of development. The ‘Gross National Happiness’ standard tries to incorporate economic development alongside spiritual development in line with Buddhist teaching — notably through sustainable development, environmental conservation, the promotion of cultural values and good governance.

Those standards, however, have led to results that might seem incongruent under Western standards of good governance. While Jigme Singye Wangchuck ultimately paved the way to greater democracy through the introduction of constitutional monarchy, he also introduced a national dress code in 1990, mandating that every Bhutanese citizen wear national dress — a gho, a colorful three-quarter robe, for men, and a kira, a full-body version, for women. It’s also led to the government excluding Nepalese minorities (many of whom are Hindu, not Buddhist) in Bhutan, the Lhotshampa, from the country in the 1990s, many of whom still remain in refugee camps in Nepal under United Nations supervision, rejected from citizenship by either Bhutan or Nepal. Finding a lasting solution for the remaining refugees should be one of the next Bhutanese government’s top priorities. In addition, the Lhotshampa who remain in southern Bhutan remain subject to the same laws as the Bhutanese majority, including cultural laws and universal education in the dominant Dzongkha language, despite the fact that the Lhotshampa speak Nepali instead. In many cases, Bhutan’s government continues to deem them illegal immigrants. Continue reading Bhutan holds only its second election in history with initial round of parliamentary vote →

Turkey

Hand-wringing over Erdoğan is alarmist, but Turkey’s still trapped in a perilous standoff

June 3, 2013 Kevin Lees 9 Comments

The images from Taksim Square over the past week, culminating in conflict between protesters and Turkish police authorities, have stunned a global community that’s used to thinking of Turkey — and, in particular, Istanbul — as a relatively tranquil secular meeting point of East and West.

Although I’ve not written much about Turkey through Suffragio, it’s a fascinating country that I was delighted to visit in 2010, at the height of the glory days of the government of its current (and now embattled) prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Ultimately, there are two questions at issue here: how to evaluate Erdoğan’s performance prior to the recent protests, on the one hand, and how to evaluate Erdoğan’s performance during and in response to the protests, on the other hand.

Although Western commentators have increasingly argued of Erdoğan’s move toward increasing Islamization and authoritarianism, I worry that those calls misunderstand the depth of Erdoğan’s support and the nature of what modern Turkey (it is, after all, a country that’s over 98% Muslim) has become today. But it is impossible to watch Erdoğan’s repression of basic political freedoms, such as his government’s recent moves to disrupt a planned May Day protest, and the ongoing brutal police response to the Taksim Square and increasingly, nationwide, protests without admitting that whatever legitimacy Erdoğan once enjoyed is rapidly dissipating, and Erdoğan, his government, Turkey’s president, Turkey’s military, and Turkey’s awakened — and rightfully angry — protest movement, are all trapped in a suddenly perilous standoff.

It’s all the more fragile given the ongoing civil war in Syria. Not only has the Erdoğan government been unsuccessful in persuading one-time ally Bashar al-Assad to pursue a more moderate course, the growing number of refugees from Syria within Turkey’s borders means that Turkey risks being drawn into a wider regional conflict (though, in one of the few humorous asides to the ongoing protests, Syria has now issued a travel warning for Turkey).

Erdoğan’s initial position was legitimate and democratic

When Steven Cook wrote in The Atlantic earlier this month, that ‘while Turkey is perhaps more democratic than it was 20 years ago, it is less open than it was eight years ago,’ I had two initial reactions. First and foremost, shouldn’t we care more, from a pure governance standard, that Turkey’s government is representative and responsive to its electorate than it hews to some Westernized standard of ‘openness’? What does ‘less open’ even mean? Secondly, when Cook laments Turkey’s ‘less open’ nature, he doesn’t equally lament that the European Union virtually slammed the door in the face of Turkey’s application to join the European Union in 2005, when despite the opening of negotiations for Turkish accession, it became clear any road for Turkey’s EU membership would be long and arduous. It may be difficult to remember today, but it’s a push that Erdoğan’s government made even more passionately than the governments that preceded it.

Turkey, let’s be clear, didn’t leave Europe. Europe left Turkey, which has focused on becoming a more important regional player in the Middle East in recent years.

More importantly, from a day-to-day perspective for most Turks, Erdoğan ushered Turkey into a new era of economic reform and modernity, partly due to his enthusiasm to enter the European Union in his first term. But despite the futility of Erdoğan’s initial rationale, Turkey’s economic gains are real, the country certainly remains under much better economic stewardship than Greece or much of Europe:

But Cook, and similar analysts, I fear, are not placing enough weight on the fact that Erdoğan has delivered Turkey’s most responsive and democratically accountable government since the foundation of the modern Republic of Turkey in 1923. And when I read critiques of Erdoğan that cast him as a modern-day ‘sultan,’ I have to cringe because it’s intellectually lazy for opponents to slap Orientalist labels on Erdoğan simply because they disagree with his policy choices.

The Economist on Sunday trumpeted a foreign diplomat who argues that ‘this is not about secularists versus Islamists—it’s about pluralism versus authoritarianism,’ though the question remains — pluralism compared to what? The governments that came before Erdoğan? Some Western fantasy of what Turkey’s government should be?

Erdoğan is neither a sultan nor a dictator, but the duly elected leader of Turkey’s government for over a decade, enjoying the repeated success of consecutive democratic victories in election after election.

Continue reading Hand-wringing over Erdoğan is alarmist, but Turkey’s still trapped in a perilous standoff →

Iran

In Depth: Iran

June 1, 2013 Kevin Lees Leave a comment

<See below Suffragio’s preview of Iran’s June 2013 presidential election, followed by a real-time listing of all coverage of Iranian politics.>

Citizens in the Islamic Republic of Iran will select a new president on June 14 from among eight pre-vetted candidates.

Under Iran’s unique system, the ultimate authority is the Supreme Leader, who controls the military as well as virtually all other branches of government, including the executive. Upon the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979, grand ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile in Iraq and France to become its first Supreme Leader. Upon his death in 1989, ayatollah Ali Khamenei (pictured above, with Kohmeini in background) was appointed Supreme Leader and has held the office in the ensuing 24 years.

The Supreme Leader is appointed by the Assembly of Experts, an 86-member body of Islamic scholars elected to eight-year terms. The Assembly of Experts also has the power to oversee and even dismiss the Supreme Leader although, in practice, its members are essentially subservient. Its current chair, since 2011, is Mohammad Kani, a conservative loyal to Khamenei.

The Iranian president, elected directly for a four-year term, with a limit of two consecutive terms, remains subservient to the Supreme Leader. Although Iran’s president can set both foreign and domestic policy, in practice, the president can do very little without the consent of the Supreme Leader. Since 1981, Iran has had four presidents, and each of them has served two full terms:

Ali Khamenei, 1981 — 1989. Khamenei, before his elevation to Supreme Leader, served as Iran’s president in the 1980s when the country was focused on a difficult war against Iraq after Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in September 1980 after the Islamic Revolution, in large part due to fears that Iran’s Shi’a majority would embolden the Shi’a minority in his own country. Although Iran regained its territory by 1982, the war lasted for another six years and featured the use of chemical weapons by Iraqi forces against Iranians, and anywhere from 300,000 to 900,000 Iranians were killed.

Hashemi Rafsanjani, 1989 — 1997. Rafsanjani’s presidency focused on rebuilding Iran after its costly war with Iran and transitioning its role in the Middle East following the breakup of the Soviet Union and the increased building of U.S. forces in the Middle East following the Cold War, notably during the 1990-91 war against Iraq to liberate Kuwait.

Mohammed Khatami, 1997 — 2005. Khatami emerged as a dark-horse candidate to win the 1997 presidential election and remains Iran’s most prominent reformist voice. Under his leadership, he achieved limited gains in relaxing freedoms within Iran, and he continued Rafsanjani’s approach toward conciliation with the United States and Europe, especially with respect to Iran’s nuclear energy program, which emerged as a hot-button issue in the early 2000s in light of U.S. and Israeli fears that a nuclear-powered Iran could easily pursue a nuclear weapons program.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, 2005 — 2013. Ahmadinejad (pictured below) won the presidency in 2005 over Rafsanjani as a conservative populist who focused on Iran’s economic woes. The former mayor of Tehran, Ahmadinejad came to office as a voice of the poorer working class, unlike his predecessors. Unlike Khatami and Rafsanjani, Ahmadinejad’s administration has taken a harder line with respect to the West, especially in defense of Iran’s sovereign right to develop nuclear energy. That’s left Iran subject to U.N. sanctions and other measures that have largely left it isolated diplomatically and struggling economically at the end of Ahmadinejad’s second term.

Iran’s unicameral legislature is called the Islamic Consultative Assembly (Majles), and it’s comprised of 290 directly elected members. It’s not nearly as powerful as the Supreme Leader, the president or even the Guardian Council, but it has significant powers with respect to Iran’s public budget. In the most recent parliamentary elections, conservatives won around 180 seats, of which around 100 were ‘principlists’ loyal to Khamenei and only around 40 of which were conservative loyalists of Ahmadinejad, with around 70 seats going to reformists and moderates of various stripes and around 20 seats going to religious minorities, including Armenian Christians and Jews. Its speaker, since 2008, has been Ali Larijani.

The more powerful Guardian Council is a body of 12 members, six of which are appointed by the Majles and six of which are appointed by the Supreme Leader, which has the power to interpret laws passed by the Majles and other constitutional issues. Its chief role, however, is vetting and approving candidates who run for public office — including candidates for president.

The current presidential election takes place under the backdrop of the fraught 2009 election, in which Ahmadinejad officially defeated former prime minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi by 66.6% to 33.9%, though Mousavi’s supporters launched the ‘Green movement’ protests in response, alleging voter fraud. Although the evidence of actual fraud was not incredibly strong, the Supreme Leader and his supporters responded with vigor to put down the protests, placing Mousavi and key reformist allies under house arrest (they remain so even today) and placing many activists in detention.

Former president Rafsanjani, who registered to run for president in 2013, and was rejected as a candidate by the Guardian Council in May 2013, had hewn a middle road between Khamenei and the protestors throughout the 2009 post-election crisis, supporting the Supreme Leader but also subtly criticizing the heavy-handed response.

The election will come down to eight candidates and, if no single candidate wins a majority of the vote, the two top contenders will face off in a June 21 runoff.

Those candidates are, as announced by the Guardian Council:

Mohammad Reza Aref, the reformist candidate, who served as Khatami’s communications minister and vice president.
Hassan Rowhani, a moderate candidate with ties to Rafsanjani, a former head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and its chief nuclear negotiator from 2003 to 2005.
Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, a ‘principlist’ conservative, who succeeded Ahmadinejad as Tehran’s mayor in 2005 and has been a relatively aggressive Ahmadinejad critic.
Gholam Ali Haddad-Adel, a principlist and the former speaker of the Majles in the mid-2000s, whose daughter is married to the Supreme Leader’s son.
Ali Akbar Velayati, a principlist and currently a top advisor to the Supreme Leader on international affairs and Iran’s foreign minister from 1981 to 1997.
Saeed Jalili, a principlist, and the current head of the Supreme National Security Council and Iran’s current nuclear negotiator, who has strong connections to conservatives tied to both Khamenei and to Ahmadinejad.
Mohsen Rezai, a conservative who formerly headed the Revolutionary Guards and who unsuccessfully ran in 2005 and 2009 as well.
Mohammad Gharazi, a former oil minister and communications minister in the 1980s and the 1990s.