Soldiers In Disguise

A female member of the Basij paramilitary militia aims her rifle. http://t.co/gXrTvkTHmM—
Ebrahim Noroozi (@EbrahimNoroozi1) January 16, 2014

Moisés Naím examines how authoritarian regimes are using ostensibly independent “civil society organizations” to give themselves a gloss of popular support:

We’ve seen the same thing in Tehran, Havana, and Caracas, where people who take to the streets to protest their leaders are often confronted by violent groups of civilians posing as common citizens who support the regime. In Iran, they’re called the Basij, or the Organization for the Mobilization of the Oppressed. In Cuba, they’re known as the Rapid Response Brigades, and they routinely dole out severe beatings to critics who dare to publicly express their opposition to the Castros’ dictatorship. This “political technology” has been successfully exported to Venezuela, where the well-trained and armed “civilians” battling opposition groups are called colectivos. Orwell himself couldn’t have imagined names that better obscure the true nature of these associations.

The reality is that these groups, “movements,” and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are appendices of their governments and draw their “activists” from the armed forces, security services, and government militias. They carry out their repressive deeds disguised as “civil society,” in an attempt to mask the behavior of governments that want to avoid being recognized by the international community for what they really are: autocracies that violate global norms, trample human rights, and brutalize their critics. They have even earned their own acronym—GONGOs—for “Government-Organized Non-Governmental Organizations.” Their rise is forcing us to rethink our benign definitions of NGOs and civil society to accommodate armed groups of civilians and even, most provocatively, terrorists.