Month: August 2012

He’s back! After three months of radio silence, fed-up follower pin-up boy Julian Assange is back to taunt the political and penal establishments across Europe and America. Assange is, of course, the mastermind behind WikiLeaks, who happens also to be wanted in Sweden on charges of rape and sexual molestation.

But now is different. Now Assange has been given asylum by Ecuador – which is why on Sunday he was perched on the balcony of the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, to speak to the crowd below and demand the U. S. “renounce its witch hunt against WikiLeaks.”

The Austrailian-born Assange is something of a genius. Whatever he did or did not do in Sweden (he denies all charges against him), he was able against all odds to post to the web hundreds of thousands of secret documents, most from the U. S. State Department relating to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover he is a self-dramatist. Again, against all odds, he has managed to remain free after a fashion, eluding incarceration by staying one step ahead of the authorities. Think of Assange as an old-fashioned outlaw, scum to some and a hero to others – to those who believe in radical transparency.

But behind Julian Assange is another fed-up follower, an all but invisible man by the name of Bradley Manning. Manning is the young army intelligence analyst who was charged by the U. S. government with feeding Assange those secret Pentagon documents. For his troubles, Manning, who has been hidden from the public since the scandal broke (in 2010), faces a court-martial and possible life sentence.

When he spoke in London a couple of days ago, Assange drew attention to Manning, calling him on the one hand a “hero” and on the other “one of the world’s foremost political prisoners.” Whatever you might think of Assange, or of Wikileaks, or for that matter of Bradley Manning, Assange is right to point to Manning’s plight. Since he was initially arrested, the 22 year-old Army private has been treated harshly, extremely harshly. In fact, for the first nine months of his imprisonment he was put in solitary confinement, despite evidence he was entirely different from Assange, not a cool customer but a troubled youngster. Only after an international protest drew attention to his cruel and unusual punishment, was Manning more conventionally confined, though to this day we hear hardly a word about him or his plight, from any of the authorities.

Americans don’t think of themselves as having political prisoners. And, even if they, we, did, there’s a question whether Manning would qualify. But when Assange accuses the U. S. government of a “witch hunt” against WikiLeaks, it’s not so clear he’s way off base.

OK, fine, no surprise: Vladimir Putin won the battle. The three women of Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years behind bars – not for their incendiary remarks about Putin per se, but, ostensibly, for their blasphemy against the Russian Orthodox Church.

However, the interesting question is not about this particular skirmish, but about the larger war. Will the Russian people continue to tolerate the Kremlin’s persecution of the opposition? Or will they somehow make clear that any leader – including Putin – who harasses his followers risks his own personal and political well-being?

The external reaction to the sentencing was immediate and it was harsh. Governments from around the world, as well as human rights groups, let it be known and in no uncertain terms that however outrageous their behavior, punk rockers were not criminals and ought not to be treated as such.

But the question of course is not what happens outside Russia, but inside. Will this event be galvanizing – will it galvanize the Russian opposition to protests that are ever more expansive and strident?

It’s impossible, of course, to precisely predict. But this much is clear even now. First, Putin is running at least slightly scared. He has already gone on record as opposing punishment for Pussy Riot that is unduly harsh, and in fact the two-year sentence is less draconian than it might have been. (Moreover, it’s likely at some point to be cut shorter.)

Second, the internal opposition will not likely forgive or forget. This episode is yet another arrow in the quiver of prominent protesters such as Aleksei Navalny and Gary Kasparov (who was taken from outside the courtroom in a paddy wagon!), more evidence if any were needed that Putin is an autocrat in the ancient Russian tradition.

Think of Russia early in the 21st century as in the process of evolution – not revolution. What this means is that change is slow. What this does not mean is that there is no change at all.

Whoever said Dominique Strauss-Kahn was good for nothing? Turns out, he was good for something – for women, French women in particular.

You’ll recall Strauss-Kahn is the once highly esteemed former head of the International Monetary Fund. You’ll similarly recall that he was caught in New York in a scandal, resulting from allegations that he had sexually assaulted a maid in a Manhattan hotel. Whatever the truth of these charges, as a result it came to light that his sexual behavior more generally had long been, shall we say, radically other than those of a straight arrow. (No, no pun intended.)

Strauss-Kahn did huge, almost certainly irreparable damage to himself, and he injured the pride of the French, many of whom had planned to vote for him in the next presidential election. But he also ended up a galvanizing force for French women, who had long tolerated male behaviors that, in the U. S., are by now as politically impossible as they are politically incorrect. Hard on the heels of the Strauss-Kahn affair, French women led by French feminists organized and protested, demanding that men shape up or get out, and that a law be enacted to ensure women be protected against sexual harassment.

And so it came to pass that late last month the French passed rather a stringent new sexual harassment law, which received a unanimous oui from the National Assembly. It provides that sexual harassment be considered a criminal offense, punishable by two years in jail and a fine of some $37,000.

French women have not exactly been at the cutting edge of the feminist movement. Au contraire! They’ve lagged behind. But, inadvertently obviously, Strauss-Kahn threw down the gauntlet, challenging them finally to create change. To their credit, they did. It’s highly unlikely this particular law would have been unanimously (!) passed at this particular time without Strauss-Kahn’s egregious wrongdoing, and without the national outrage that was the result.

Vive la France.

Who knew it would come to this? Who knew Russia’s president would be first publicly ridiculed and now directly challenged by three women from a feminist punk band – Pussy Riot? Who knew Madonna would raise the stakes by becoming embroiled in the fiasco – voicing her support for the band “as an artist, as a human being, [and] as a woman”? Who knew Russian rockers would come to incarnate the growing opposition to perennial Russian strongman, Vladimir Putin?

Along with anti-Kremlin activist Aleksei Navalny – about whom more another time – Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, all women in their twenties, have been the most visible symbol so far of the anti-Putin opposition. For staging a political protest on the alter of Moscow’s main Russian Orthodox cathedral in February – OK, so maybe taking on the government and the church at one and the same time wasn’t the world’s smartest idea – they have been imprisoned since March, charged with hooliganism.

Some of this is funny – including, arguably, Pussy Riot’s original stunt, some of the subsequent courtroom theatrics, and Madonna’s appearance this week on a Moscow stage, in a black bra with “Pussy Riot” stamped on the back. But most of it is not – not funny in the least. Pussy Riot is only the most visible, risible, symbol of an opposition that is growing not only in size, but in the level of its temerity. Since disputed parliamentary elections in December, and Putin’s election, again, as president in March, there have been more or less regular anti-Kremlin protests, some of them involving tens of thousands taking to the streets.

Putin has always been used to getting his way. And likely as not he still will – or at least he will try as hard as he dare, to shut up and shut out those who threaten his power. But times have changed: bully leaders are less likely now to be tolerated, and intrepid followers are more likely now to risk protesting in public.

Notwithstanding his reelection as president of Russia, it’s not been a good year for Putin. Not only does he face unprecedented opposition at home, he faces widespread opprobrium abroad, for defending, at this rate to the death, Syrian dictator, Bashir al-Assad. So far, Putin’s response to all this has been to hunker down and double down. Whether or not this will prove a viable strategy over the long term remains of course to be seen. I, for one, rather doubt it.

Stay tuned – I will be on Putin Patrol on a regular basis..

For years one of the few ways American diplomats had of protesting repression in Myanmar was to continue to call the country by its colonial name, Burma. Now there are signs this may be changing, along with Myanmar itself, which in the last year was transformed from rigid autocracy to fragile, fledging democracy.

To outsiders this seemingly sudden transformation has been a mystery, for on the surface it was initiated from the top down, not the bottom up. Normally, of course, revolutions, or even really rapid evolutions, are instigated by the powerless against the powerful. But, in this case, it appears it was the authorities themselves that took the lead, which makes one wonder, how did that happen, and why?

Even Osnos, writing on the subject in a recent New Yorker (“The Burmese Spring,” August 6, 2012), himself follows the script: “Burma’s opening has so far defied the narrative logic we’ve come to associate with political transformation: there is, as yet, no crowd picking through a ruined palace, no dictator in the dock.” But then, to his credit, Osnos goes on through his own narrative to make clear that change in Burma was not in fact the product of the powerful, of leaders, but rather of the powerless, of followers.

Consider just this:

• For decades Nobel Peace Price winner Aung San Suu Kyi has stood as largely silent witness to the autocracy that strangled her country. Her long years under house arrest underscored rather than undermined her status as symbol.

• In 2007 tens of thousands of monks took to the streets to protest the government. The so-called Saffron Revolution seemed, at the time, to have failed, a victim of the Army’s brutal repression. But it’s clear in retrospect the monks made a difference – their bravery and martyrdom were imprinted on Burma’s collective consciousness.

• More recently citizen activists began to emerge, some businessmen, journalists, and academics, all of whom seized the day together to organize against stasis, and for change.

What’s been happening in Burma is not, in other words, the result of officials waking up one fine morning and saying, “Gee whiz, time for us to do things differently.” Rather it’s the consequence of context – decay and decline – and of at least some followers brave and bold enough to marshal their forces against their leaders.

It’s possible and even probable that at some early point the U. S. State Department will drop its allegiance to “Burma,” and begin to call the country its preferred name, Myanmar. When this does happen it will not be the product of spontaneous combustion, but rather of long years during which plain people slogged on to take on a regime that was repressive in the extreme.