The Complete Archive of the San Francisco Freedom Forum Online

First Session

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Second Session

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Third Session

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Aung San Suu Kyi on the success of sanctions in Burma

Sanctions and boycotts would be tied to serious political dialogue. - Daw Aung San Suu Kyi 

Aung San Suu Kyi at the San Francisco Freedom Forum (Photo by the author)

The debate on Cuba often degenerates into a conversation of sanctions versus dialogue. It is at best a failure of imagination. A more useful conversation would be one that combines strong sanctions and boycotts while pursuing dialogue to obtain a democratic opening with concrete measures. In a meeting with reporters and editors of The New York Times on September 26, 2012 Aung San Suu Kyi responded to the following two questions concerning sanctions in Burma and on whether or not they have been and how it has impacted the Burmese:

Q: Is it fair to say the sanctions worked?
A: Yes, I always say that sanctions work. Not in the way people think it did. Now the emphasis is on the economic effect of the sanctions, but I always quote the IMF by saying that for years IMF reports have consistently made the point that the sanctions have affected Burma’s economy very little and it was mismanagement that put us in a terrible mess. But partly, the regime started believing their own propaganda that sanctions are responsible for the ills of the country. This always happens. I think the eagerness to go ahead economically, I think the perception was that if you improve the economy, everything else would improve. I don’t subscribe to that view, I think you need political reforms as well as economic reforms. So the sanctions needed to be removed, because a lot of people saw them as an obstacle to progress.

Q: So the sanctions hurt ordinary Burmese but they helped evoke change?
A: I do not think sanctions hurt ordinary Burmese, as much as the IMF has gone into this and they have concluded that they did not hurt ordinary Burmese. If you remember, the garment industry had a setback after 2007 [when the U.S. prohibited imports] but it picked up very quickly… I think it had picked up within a little over a year.

The full transcript of the meeting is available here.

San Francisco Freedom Forum: “Many Paths, One Goal”

In her first trip to the United States in more than 20 years, Burmese opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi will travel to San Francisco on September 28, to accept the Václav Havel Award for Creative Dissent and join a range of leaders from advocacy, business, media, policy, and technology at the first U.S. Freedom Forum. The event will begin at 12:00pm PDT.

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Those speaking alongside her include: Russian democracy activist Garry Kasparov; Saudi women’s rights pioneer Manal al-Sharif; Pussy Riot spokesman Pyotr Verzilov; Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy; Slate editor William J. Dobson; Ghanaian economist George Ayittey; drug policy reformer Ethan Nadelmann; anti-genocide artist Naomi Natale; conflict psychologist Justine Hardy; Iranian author and former prisoner of conscience Marina Nemat; and Venezuelan journalist Marcel Granier.

Amnesty International issues Urgent Action for Ladies in White Detained and Missing in Cuba

UA: 276/12 Index: AMR 25/022/2012 Cuba

Date: 25 September 2012

URGENT ACTION
DOZENS OF CUBAN OPPOSITION ACTIVISTS DETAINED

Members of the Ladies in White have been detained in Havana and several other places in Cuba. Some remain in detention and the authorities have failed to provide reasons for their detention or information on their whereabouts.

From 21 to 24 September the Ladies in White (Damas de Blanco) held several activities, including masses and marches in Havana, to celebrate the feast day of Our Lady of Mercy (Virgin de la Merced) and in memory of former political activists. Since 20 September, various members of the Ladies in White have received intimidating notes aimed at preventing them from taking part in activities. Reports from the group state that the headquarters in Neptuno Street, Havana have been surrounded by police officers.

Around 50 members of the group, who travelled from different provinces of Cuba to attend the activities, were arrested on their way to Havana. The majority of them were released and deported back to their provinces, however 19 remain detained and their whereabouts are unknown. On 24 September as the Ladies in White planned to attend mass, an act of repudiation (acto de repudio see background information) took place at their headquarters. Government supporters and state agents gathered in the street chanting pro-government slogans and intimidating the women. In the early morning of 25 September 18 members of the Ladies in White were arrested at the headquarters.

Amnesty International believes that the repeated use of short term detentions of members of the Ladies in White and other activists in Cuba is a tactic used to silence dissident voices in the country and prevent peaceful activities.

Furthermore the systematic arrest of activists travelling from the provinces to Havana represents an excessive limitation to freedom of movement and represents excessive control and harassments of dissidents.

Please write immediately in Spanish or your own language:

• Calling on the authorities to reveal immediately the identity and whereabouts of all members of the Ladies in White arrested between 21-25 September;
• Urging them to immediately release the detained members, unless there is sufficient evidence to charge them with an internationally recognizable criminal offence;
• Urging them to immediately cease the harassment and intimidation of members of the Ladies in White and all other citizens who seek to peacefully exercise their rights to freedom of expression and association, and immediately stop arbitrary restrictions on freedom of movement of Cubans inside Cuba.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Acts of repudiation (actos de repudio) are government coordinated demonstrations, usually carried out in front of the homes of political opponents, attended by government supporters, state officials and law enforcement agencies aimed at harassing and intimidating opponents and are often used to prevent them from travelling to participate in activities. During an act of repudiation, political opponents and human rights activists are subjected to verbal and physical abuse by groups of people
chanting pro-government slogans. Police are usually present but fail to intervene to stop the assaults. Such incidents frequently involve the Rapid Response Brigades (Brigadas de Respuesta Rápida), a structure set up in 1991 and composed of Communist Party volunteers whose task is to deal with any sign of ‘counter-revolution’.

Local human rights activists and others believe these incidents are orchestrated by Cuba's security services to intimidate any opposition.

The Ladies in White was formed by a group of female relatives of the 75 prisoners of conscience who were imprisoned in March 2003 for their peaceful expression of critical opinions of the government. The group would attend mass every Sunday in the capital, Havana, dressed in white, to pray for the release of their relatives. Afterwards they would take part in a procession from the church to a nearby park, carrying white flowers.

A solidarity group called the Ladies in Support (Damas de Apoyo) subsequently emerged to support and participate in activities organized by the Ladies in White. In early 2012 the two groups merged and all members are now considered to be Ladies in White. After the release of all the prisoners of conscience from the March 2003 crackdown, the Ladies in White have been campaigning for the release of political prisoners and for the lifting of restrictions on fundamental civil and political freedoms in Cuba.

The Ladies in White have repeatedly suffered harassment and intimidation as they have attempted to carry out their peaceful activities. They are frequently subject to acts of repudiation by government supporters and members of the security forces, and also to short-term arbitrary detentions in order to disrupt their activities.

Name: Members of The Ladies in White (Damas de Blanco) and other opposition activists in Cuba
Gender m/f: both
UA: 276/12 Index: AMR 25/022/2012 Issue Date: 25 September 2012

PLEASE SEND APPEALS BEFORE 6 NOVEMBER 2012 TO:

President
Raúl Castro Ruz
Presidente de la República de Cuba
La Habana,
Cuba
Fax: +53 7 83 33 085 (via Foreign
Ministry); +1 212 779 1697 (via Cuban
Mission to UN)
Email: cuba@un.int (c/o Cuban
Mission to UN)
Salutation: Your Excellency

Interior Minister
General Abelardo Coloma Ibarra
Ministro del Interior y Prisiones
Ministerio del Interior,
Plaza de la Revolución,
La Habana, Cuba
Fax: +537 85 56 621; +1 212 779 1697
(via Cuban Mission to UN)
Email: correominint@mn.mn.co.cu
Salutation: Your Excellency

And copies to:

Attorney General
Dr Darío Delgado Cura
Fiscal General de la República,
Fiscalía General de la República,
Amistad 552, e/Monte y Estrella, Centro
Habana, La Habana, Cuba
Salutation: Dear Attorney General

Also send copies to diplomatic representatives accredited to your country.
Please check with your section office if sending appeals after the above date.

http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR25/022/2012/en

Deja Vu at The Miami Herald?

The media circus returns to town and the question arises who benefits?

The Miami Herald has had some unfortunate episodes that have damaged its reputation as the newspaper of record. It appears that it maybe in the midst of suffering the indignity once again in the 2012 election cycle in which the stakes are a congressional seat.  The feeding frenzy over Congressman David Rivera, political consultant Ana Alliegro and candidate of Lamar Sternad in the August 2012 democratic primary had a certain troubling deja vu in terms of reporting quality. At the same time the bomb shell that the democratic nominee Joe Garcia has received thousands of dollars from pro-Castro figures is only mentioned in a few lines of a Herald story dealing with Cuba related donations being down in the 2012 elections:

The FEC reports show [Francisco Aruca of Marazul] also donated $5,000 to the current campaign of Garcia, a Miami Democrat who is running against Rep. David Rivera, R-Fl., an anti-Castro hardliner. [Maria Aral of ABC] gave $2,000 to Garcia and $10,000 to the Obama reelection campaign.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/09/16/v-fullstory/3006301/cuba-related-donations-are-down.html#storylink=cpy

The current controversy all over the news generates a number of questions. Lamar Sternad, one of the candidates in the democratic primary filed to run on November 4, 2011. In the 9/25/12 article the campaign consultant is quoted at what appears to be their first meeting in the Spring of 2012: “I asked a million times. Why are you running for Congress? Why don’t you run for something local?”

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/09/24/v-fullstory/3019360/from-a-shooting-to-shoplifting.html#storylink=cpy

This implies that someone else may have "manufactured" the candidacy of Justin Lamar Sternad if he didn't decide on it himself. Who was it? In 2010 Roly Arrojo , a candidate billed as a Tea Party conservative candidate was a registered democrat that some say Joe Garcia placed into the general election to peel of votes from the Republican nominee because their was a business relationship between Garcia's campaign manager and the Democrat turned Tea Party candidate. Another question is the aggressive reporting on political consultant Ana Alliegro and her family. Why so aggressive?

Back in 2006 The Miami Herald smeared 10 journalists in a flawed story

 Being right in the middle of the current media storm it is difficult to offer a clear analysis of what is going on, in part because all the facts are not in. Therefore it is important to look back at a previous high profile episode that also became national news that was broke by The Miami Herald. In this case extensive and sloppy reporting targeting individuals with hyperbolic accusations and charges that in the end did not pan out was a horrible example of "gotcha journalism" that led to a black eye for the The Miami Herald but it did serve a political agenda.

It was six years ago this past September 8 that The Miami Herald published a story accusing 10 Miami journalists of violating ethical standards , including some who worked at the newspaper because they had freelanced or worked at Radio and TV Marti as reporters. They featured the reporters on the front page of The Miami Herald and the publisher fired two reporters based on the story and then had to hire them back and resigned when it became known that there had been a policy in place at El Nuevo Herald permitting journalists to moonlight at Radio / TV Marti.

One of the targets of the Herald story, Carlos Alberto Montaner offered the following breakdown of the objections raised with regards to the story:

(1) It contained ethnic prejudices. Everyone accused was Hispanic, even though there were Anglo journalists in the Herald's newsroom who collaborated with PBS and other public media, something that, besides, was frequent in American journalism.

(2) The El Nuevo Herald journalists who were accused of breaking the rule had permission from their supervisors, and it was a habitual practice, known for the previous 20 years, that had even been mentioned in the newspaper itself.

(3) The other journalists mentioned in the report, who were not Herald employees, worked in media where that peculiar rule did not exist and, therefore, should not have been included.

(4) The reporters who wrote the report did not bother to phone some of the people they were accusing, thus violating a basic rule of journalism.

(5) They maliciously insinuated that it was a band of corrupt journalists who had violated ethical standards, a message that was conveyed not only in words but also in the use of photographs.

(6) Suspiciously, before the report was published in The Herald, the Cuban government boasted on television of knowing the exact contents of the report that would soon be published. The authors, who had some direct or indirect contact with the Cuban government, didn't have the decency to communicate to their colleagues the type of investigation they were doing, mindless of the consequences of the moral lynching they were carrying out.  

Following the debacle Clark Hoyt conducted a review of the whole affair that was published in Editor & Publisher and arrived at some conclusions partially excerpted below on what he described as a flawed story:

Its placement at the top of Page One, its hard and accusatory tone and the large and breathless headline suggested something more sinister than the story actually reported. The subjects of the story said they felt treated as though they were criminals. Some especially objected to a set of "rogues' gallery'' photographs that appeared on Page 2A with the continuation of the story.

Finally, with more time, the Herald might have broadened the perspective of the story to report, as El Nuevo Herald and then the Herald later did, that journalists in Washington have taken money from other U.S. government broadcasting outlets, such as the Voice of America.

Although it was a flawed and hyperbolic story the Castro regime and its allies are still using it by periodically re-publishing it and further distorting it to serve its own propaganda aims in trying to release five Cuban spies that were convicted of spying and in the case of one of them conspiracy to commit murder in the Brothers to the Rescue case.

Oscar Corral while at The Miami Herald

Incidentally Oscar Corral, the Herald reporter who wrote the story and continued to write similar exposes that coincidentally benefited the dictatorship in Cuba ended up being boycotted by Cuban exile activists. A year later he was arrested trying to solicit sexual favors from an underage prostitute in Flagami. Needless to say his arrest did not receive the substantial coverage his colleagues had gotten a year earlier. Although initially claiming his innocence, and backed by the Editor of  The Miami Herald, he later pled out to a pre-trial diversion. Defending Corral was the official Cuban communist newspaper Granma.

Fast forward six years later and things have not improved at The Miami Herald. Six years ago it was an in house reporter generating the content now one of the main stories was broken on a blog then material used from it in a story published in the The Miami Herald without attribution. Also the author of the blog has his own issues that also go unmentioned.

As in the case of the 2006 story involving ten journalists it will be interesting to look back six years from now and try to understand what was actually going on with the benefit of hindsight. Will another Herald executive be writing about another flawed story?