To Watch this Weekend: Americans on Trial

AFP/Getty Images: Egyptian soldiers stand guard in front of NDI's office on December 29, 2011

This Sunday, 43 people, at least 16 of which are Americans, will be put to trial in Egypt for allegedly operating democracy programs without a license and transferring foreign funds to opposition groups.

The funny thing is that the groups these people work for, including DC-based IRI, NDI and Freedom House, were largely left alone during the Mubarak regime. Only now, after the dictator was ousted, are they under siege _ “a very disturbing sign”, in the words of Thomas Friedman, that “tells you how incomplete the ‘revolution’ in Egypt has been and how vigorously the counter-revolutionary forces are fighting back”.

Many say that it is the US-Egypt relationship that will be on trial. The situation has certainly strained their ties. A delegation of politicians, headed by senator John McCain, will arrive in Cairo on Monday to put some pressure on Egypt.

Although from most accounts it seems that the push for the trial comes from a handful of old Mubarak cronies, from the outside it appears that the government as a whole is adamant on pursuing the workers. According to Bloomberg, “Egyptian officials have increasingly gone public with their accusations, garnering particular praise from the Islamist parties that control Parliament [Muslim Brotherhood included] and the state-owned media. An editorial in one such publication, Al-Gomhuria , opined that now is the right time ‘to correct the course of Egyptian-American relations so that they are based on parity, a respect for sovereignty and the achievement of joint interests’”.

Other newspapers in the region are joining in that opinion, for example in Kuwait.

Some disagree. In a different Egyptian newspaper, columnist Amro az-Zanat, aiming at the Muslim Brotherhood, wondered “from where did the groups operating in the area of political Islam get their money” and why weren’t these funds, presumably supplied by foreign countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, subject to similar ‘NGO’ investigations.”

Meanwhile, some surveys offer interesting perspectives on the impact this discussion might have on the public of both countries. One such survey conducted by Zogby in Egypt last September shows that when asked about their political priorities, Egyptians ranked first employment, education, health care, and ending corruption at the top tier; democracy- related concerns appeared lower on the list. That is not surprising at all, given that most people in any country are primarily worried about bread-and-butter issues, but it is worth mentioning that the list of priorities is the same as it was before the revolution.

Another survey was conducted by ZRS last summer and showed that only 5 percent of Egyptians held a favorable view of the U.S., while with 89 percent said that American policies do not “contribute to peace and stability in the Arab World.” Americans are then an easy prey.

The last survey I wanted to mention was conducted in the US this January by jzanalytics for NYU Abu Dhabi. It shows a dramatic turn for the worse in American views of Egypt. “Now only 32 percent of Americans have a favorable attitude toward Egypt, with 34 percent holding a negative view (and 33 percent saying they are ‘not sure’)”, notes James Zogby at the Huffington Post.

I shall want to see what happens to those numbers if the American democracy workers are convicted.

Even if that happens, I will be surprised if Washington really freezes the US$ 1.3 billion in aid per year to Egypt. Assured by the Camp David Accord, Cairo is betting that it won’t. But it will not come as a shock if all of this leads to a rebalancing of the ties between the two countries. Perhaps that was inevitable anyway.

The Media Spring

New outlet in Benghazi. Picture by the Executive Magazine- http://bit.ly/yuBjMd

After toppling dictators, flocks of Arab Spring revolutionaries are channeling their residual energy into journalism, which might seem at first a natural environment for those who want to stay in the “business of change”. But big media is a tricky business, and sometimes rebels can make the road even more slippery when trading guns for stories.

“The Atlantic” this month brings an account of a media training program in Libya that exemplifies the challenge. Correspondent Graeme Wood, who conducted the program in Benghazi, characterizes the about a hundred independent newspaper and magazines now being published in the city as “execrable”. Are the initiatives commendable? Of course. Does the effort deserve applause? No doubt. Is it a good start? Excellent. But how about what comes out of them? Humm.

The 50 young journalists trained by Wood seemed too close to the political flame to not get burned. On one occasion, nearly all said they would not publish a story that tainted in any way the image of the transition government. On another, while doing a (fictional) exercise on how to gather information from sources, the entire group preferred to run a false rumor than to go with the true story behind it, which was less appealing. The rumor was about the presence of Saif al Islam in the city; the trainees “wanted to find and execute” him “more than they wanted the story”, concluded the correspondent.

It seems that the closer the new journalist was to revolutionary action, the harder it will be for he or she to adhere to some of the tenets of the profession.

But that is not only true for transitioning countries: they merely display it more openly, and it goes without saying that many are just at the beginning of the process. No one expects perfection, there or anywhere else. It is obvious that no journalist checks his or her political preferences at the door before going to work. Even in the most democratic of societies, impartiality is an elusive concept that is sometimes best understood within a range than as something you either have or not. Just ask Fox News, or The New York Times for that matter. Standards vary from place to place: where I come from, it would be unthinkable to have a newspaper openly endorsing a presidential candidate like some do in the US.

But there are sound rules to keep journalists from straying too much from the road. Certain practices are, or should be, universal: sticking to veracity, crossing information through different and numerous sources, opening space for the other side to comment, investigating government and opposition alike, differentiating a news story from an opinion piece etc. There are things we can ask for and expect, in a full democracy as well as in a new one.

Libya is a particular case for new journalists. The new generation lived their entire lives under Gaddafi rule, which prevented any real journalism to be practiced and kept the country fairly closed to the outside media –much more so, for example, than it was the case of Tunisia, where from the ouster of Ben Ali until last December at least 20 newspapers were launched and 12 radio stations and five television stations applied for licenses. There are several media programs running there as well, but I have the impression that they begin at a different chapter, specially considering new technology.

For all those dilemmas, the fury of activity around journalism in these countries cannot be interpreted as anything but good news. It only means that there is great work to be done. And, as Graeme Wood wrote at the end of his tale at “The Atlantic”, there is at least one huge advantage of having as a journalist someone who was once a rebel: you can be sure he has the killer instinct.

Cameras in Russian polling stations

From the WSJ comes this story about Russia’s plan to install web cameras in polling stations for the March presidential election.

Russia Friday launched the presidential election website, www.webvybory2012.ru, that will allow web users to access video recorded at any of the approximately 92,000 polling stations across the country. One camera will give a full panorama view of each polling station and a second camera will be directed at the ballot box.

[...]

The website allows users to select as many polling stations for monitoring as they wish, although only until Election Day. Users will be able to monitor the election from 12 a.m. to 8 p.m. Moscow time. For an hour, recording will continue but nothing will be shown to observe the secrecy of the ballot. Starting at 9 p.m., when voting closes in Kaliningrad, Russia’s westernmost province, the service will show ballot counting and viewers will be able to see video from 8 p.m. local time.

Webcams in polling stations aren’t a bad idea by themselves, but I have a lot of problems with the way this is being implemented. My first concern is that it may contribute to the common development practitioner practice of assuming impact from an output. As with all transparency initiatives (making public records available, etc..) it’s not enough to simply produce the information and assume civil society will use it.  Often times they won’t. There are many similar “citizen monitoring” projects being done through the Ushahidi platform, which produce neat maps. Often the assumption is that people will actually do something with that map. I don’t want to bash Ushahidi too hard as I think it can do interesting things, but producing data should not be viewed as a behavior-changing impact of an intervention. It’s just an output that we hope will lead to the behavior change.

The webcams do, however, remind me of an innovative experiment done in Afghanistan: In 2010, local election monitors took photographs of the final tally sheets in local Afghan polling stations, which was shown to reduce fraud by 60%. The Afghanistan experiment was done through a Randomized Control Trial (RCT), which brings me to my next problem with this experiment.

It’s always difficult to determine if election monitoring actually reduces fraud (although Susan Hyde has done great work showing that it can). This is for the simple reason that we don’t know the counterfactual level of fraud if the observation wasn’t there. Because of this, I think it would be much smarter if  - instead of trying to put webcams in nearly every polling station – they randomly assigned the web cameras to certain stations. This would  allow us to measure if the intevention was actually effective or not. Aside from the fact that so many webcams will make monitoring of any of them less effective, not randomizing the cameras will make it impossible to actually determine impact.  Of course this assumes the actual goal of the project is to reduce fraud and not just give the appearance of transparency.

Cross posted at Ahwatalk.

Citizen Media Sharing at a Crossroads

Pinterest! It’s all the rage, right? I’m doing it. He’s doing it. She’s doing it. Everybody, it seems from the media coverage over the past few weeks, has signed up for the photo-sharing website where users curate a “virtual pinboard.” It’s a simple concept, really: a combination of the Facebook “like” feature and Tumblr. Delightful to look at and easy to use.

“New media” certainly keeps delivering interesting products. That much is for sure. But wasn’t it just yesterday when we were fawning over Tumblr itself? When it was just becoming en vogue for politicians and companies to adopt a Twitter handle? When you just had to secure an invitation to Google+?

The world of citizen journalism seems to be facing the same trends. Where the iconic conflict-related viral images and videos of “yesteryear” were shared via Twitpic and YouTube (think Egypt’s “girl in the blue bra” from December’s police crackdown), today witnesses to revolution have a plethora of hosting options for their media contributions. Lulu Live, a Pinterest clone curated by the Middle East Voices news site, launched last week to feature videos of Bahraini government violence. CrowdVoice is similar but targeted towards the entire region. Both want to serve as a platform for media exchange during trying times. And these two, thanks to grant monies and tech development initiatives, almost assuredly won’t be the last of their kind.

But is increased competition to YouTube and Facebook-hosted content what Arab Spring-type movements really need? When there are more options for where “groundbreaking” media is reposited, doesn’t that just result in an obfuscation of content discovery? While we may have been all over +1ing things last Fall, how often have we actually heard of videos or images shared on that platform “going viral”? Really, now.

Citizen journalists, of the type much lauded by pretty much everyone, obviously think their content needs to be viewed. It is, after all, the need-to-see video and images from places where few AP crews would dare to go. So why jeopardize it on a site which, even in addition to a second-rate UI, could be easily thrown offline by surges in traffic or hackers? Where people want their images and video to really matter, they need to leave it to the companies with the resources invested in growing traffic to a live site.

How naive of me, defending the for-profit behemoths of YouTube and Facebook and Twitter. The same giants that have proven all too willing to censor themselves at the request of authoritarian regimes. There seems to be no diplomatic answer to this.

Guess who is coming for dinner

Reuters: Red Cross delivers food in Kabul - http://reut.rs/dIv3M4

Weary about bringing the Taliban to the table? If you were a humanitarian worker in Afghanistan, perhaps you would be more worried about not bringing the Taliban to the table. While many discuss what a reduced American presence will mean for Afghanistan’s security from 2014 on, it seems aid workers are already finding it increasingly hard to move around the country and provide their services.

Humanitarian personnel have been talking to the Taliban and other parties in conflict in order to gain access to certain regions of Afghanistan for quite a while. It is interesting -in a bad way- to notice that humanitarian negotiations with armed groups are getting more difficult lately, to the point of making the job impossible.

Elizabeth Ferris, co-director of the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement, has been warning that in the past year UN workers are facing growing limitations on the areas they can deliver assistance. Certain parts of the country that were previously accessible are now off limits. Two years ago they could travel around provinces; six months ago it was only possible to move around a city; now they are lucky to reach some neighborhoods.

This affects not only service delivery but also data collection in Afghanistan.

For Reto Stocker, ICRC head of delegation in Afghanistan, one of the problems is that “armed groups and other parties to conflict seem to be proliferating”. “In our experience, it is easier to reach people in a given place when you have only two or three distinct parties to negotiate access with than when you have a different armed group for each region, district or even village”, said Stocker in an interview a little over a year ago. At the time, however, he believed that a great part of the problem of access for humanitarian agencies was tied to impartiality. When they adopted an approach that integrated humanitarian activities into the overall military and political strategy of stabilization and reconstruction, they were no longer viewed as neutral and lost the trust of the population. The roads closed down.

Whatever the reason for lack of access, humanitarian assistance is ever more needed. Ferris points out to increasing civilian casualties (the UN and NATO disagree on the data collection here) and displacement since last year. The number of refugees returning is declining; from the 6 million who did come back from exile since 2002, the vast majority never went back to their communities and became internally displaced people, adding to problems in larger cities.

“If the signs aren’t good with all this international assistance, what does the future look like when the troops are withdrawn and the Afghan government is faced with its fundamentally responsibility of protecting and assisting its own people? [It is] actually quite troubling when you look at the humanitarian dimension of what’s happening in Afghanistan”, Ferris said in a Brookings panel last week.

The UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) does not hide their fears for the country either, saying loud and clear that “the planned withdrawal of ISAF from Afghanistan over the next three years risks disrupting local economies and adversely affecting humanitarian and development action”.

Afghans do not have many alternatives. Unlike insurgent groups in other countries, the Taliban was never in the business of providing basic services –on the contrary, they let public services deteriorate. Maybe from the outside Afghanistan looks like a black hole for foreign resources, and it probably is. But for now help has to come from the government or from international assistance, and this topic has not been given the attention it deserves so far.

It is a sad day when we hope the Taliban will come for dinner.