Sanctions, currency chaos igniting unrest in outcast Iran

Soaring prices at Tehran's cavernous Grand Bazaar have ignited violence this week as money traders and vendors clashed with riot police over the plummeting value of the Iranian currency, which is being gutted by international sanctions and mismanagement by the Islamic regime.

What for most Iranians has been an abstract political dispute between their leaders and Western countries concerned about Tehran's nuclear ambitions has suddenly hit them in their wallets and pushed them to lash out. The rial has lost 80% of its value against the U.S. dollar in the last year, a decline accelerated by tightened U.S. and European Union sanctions now depriving the regime of half the hard currency it was earning from oil exports.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad blamed the deepening economic chaos on foreign enemies, contending there is "no economic justification" for the public scramble to dump rials in favor of dollars, euros and gold. Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei also struck a defiant pose, reasserting Tehran's right to enrich uranium and vowing that Iranians "will never surrender to pressure."

But Iranian exiles and scholars see the angry outbursts in the marketplace as a sign that ordinary Iranians are finally fed up with a regime that has brought them isolation, insecurity and eroding living standards. They see a population, resentful of a crackdown on dissent three years ago, now edging toward rebellion.

The unrest also demonstrates that the U.S. policy of letting sanctions and diplomacy undermine popular support for the regime is having the desired effect, confronting Tehran with its gravest challenge since Islamic clerics came to power in a  1979 revolution, the experts say.

The street value of the rial has dropped by half in the last two months and plunged 18% on Monday alone. The unofficial exchange rate for the dollar -- more than 35,000 before back-alley trading halted -- is almost three times the official rate of 12,260. But that subsidized exchange rate is available only from state banks to a limited and shrinking number of key importers.

Money traders stopped selling dollars Tuesday, confused over how to price the swiftly deteriorating rial. Some vendors closed their shops in protest of the government's failure to intervene and prop up the currency; others boosted prices beyond what many shoppers can or will pay.  

Before harsher sanctions kicked in three months ago, Iran's government had been using a sizable share of its $100-billion annual oil earnings to subsidize dollar-denominated food and consumer goods, to keep prices stable and placate the population, said Abbas Milani, a Tehran-born academic who directs Iranian studies at Stanford University.

Milani said he suspects the government was initially using the economic downturn brought on by the sanctions to put an end to the costly dollar subsidies. But he now concludes that the regime has been forced to let the rial tumble because it has run out of the hard currency needed to stop the slide.

"We're not talking about a billion dollars or 2 billion to stabilize a currency that has gone down so far. The government would have to find enormous sums of money to pour in, and if they had it they would have done it by now," Milani said.

"I don't think the regime can survive this one," he said, unless Khamenei does the unthinkable and meets Western demands that Iran cease enriching uranium beyond levels needed for civilian nuclear programs.

Tehran officials recently told the International Monetary Fund that they had $50 billion on hand, enough to see Iran through the sanctions bite for at least four or five months, Milani said. He calculates that the regime should have saved about $300 billion in a rainy-day fund over the last eight years. That no intervention in the currency crisis has been forthcoming tells him that much of the oil windfall has been squandered or siphoned off into private accounts of the Revolutionary Guards and government leaders.

"Social and political cohesion in Iran will be deeply disturbed by this economic crisis," predicted Alireza Nader, senior policy analyst on Iran for Rand Corp. "And it's not just the economic crisis -- you saw Iranians take to the streets in 2009 for a number of reasons, and those tensions have been simmering below the surface. We see them coming up now."

Nader pointed out that protesters at the bazaar this week have shouted denunciation of the regime's politics as well as soaring inflation. Shouts of "Leave Syria alone and think about us!" could be heard in clandestinely shot video footage of the angry crowds, he said.

 The Iranian government has been the sole regional supporter of Syrian President Bashar Assad and his brutal suppression of a rebellion now in its 19th month.

"Eventually this is going to put enormous pressure on the Iranian government to concede on a number of issues, not just the nuclear programs but domestic political issues as well," Nader said. "It's already gotten to the point where people's livelihoods are at stake and they're not going to tolerate that situation. We can definitely expect to see more unrest in the coming months."

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Photo: An Iranian shopper on Wednesday pays a fruit seller at the Grand Bazaar in Tehran with 50,000-rial banknotes. The sanctions-battered Iranian currency has lost 80% of its value in the last year, spurring inflation and social unrest. Credit: Abedin Taherkenareh / European Pressphoto Agency

Insert: Riot police block an approach to the Grand Bazaar on Wednesday after arresting money traders and dousing fires lighted in protest of the falling rial currency. Credit: European Pressphoto Agency

As 'Chavismo' sputters, a charismatic challenger woos Venezuelans

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has loomed larger than life over his oil-rich country for nearly 14 years, doling out healthcare and houses and university admissions to supporters of his “Bolivarian Revolution” aimed at creating history’s first affluent socialist state.

A barrel-chested former paratrooper who has tapped Venezuela's oil revenues to court a loyal following among the country’s poor, Chavez has handily outpolled disorganized opponents in past elections and harnessed people power to defeat a 2001 coup d’etat and win a recall vote three years later.

But much of the revolutionary fire that stirred the masses into a political phenomenon known as Chavismo has gone out of the cancer-stricken president. For the first time since his 1998 election victory, he faces a viable competitor with a message of unity and a track record of efficient management as governor of the state that surrounds Caracas.

Few neutral observers are yet convinced that Chavez will fall to Miranda state governor Henrique Capriles in Sunday’s presidential election. They are as dubious of polls showing the 40-year-old challenger with a slight edge as they are of the Chavez-commissioned surveys depicting the incumbent at least 10 percentage points ahead. 

Still, there is a solidifying impression among political analysts that Chavez's "missions" to eradicate illiteracy, improve healthcare, provide government jobs and build housing for the homeless have benefited too few for the vast sums squandered on the programs. A Reuters news agency report this week on its investigation into the opaque ledgers of a massive slush fund under Chavez's control identified more than $100 billion in off-budget spending over the last seven years.

While the social programs are popular and have made dents in poverty and illiteracy, Venezuelans are tiring of unfulfilled promises after 14 years, said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington. He believes that Chavez "has run his course."

Violent crime has skyrocketed -- including at least two fatal shootings of Capriles supporters at campaign events this week. Infrastructure is crumbling, as seen in deadly refinery explosions this summer. Power shortages afflict much of the country, and "there is a sense that Chavez's rhetoric has lost its magic," Shifter said.

A cult of personality enveloped Chavez through most of his presidency, with his visage ubiquitous on posters and billboards. Broadcast media have been obliged to carry every one of his 2,300 speeches. If aired end to end 24/7, they would run for 72 days, according to the calculations of two prominent Latin American statesmen in a report for the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

The report, by career Chilean diplomat Genaro Arriagada and former Mexican Federal Electoral Institute chief Jose Woldenberg, also noted that Venezuela’s high-tech balloting machines that identify voters by fingerprint are suspected by a third of the population -– and a majority of Chavez supporters -- of creating a record of how they voted, despite official demonstrations to the contrary.

Voters in line for new housing or other government perqs fear they'll be bumped from the waiting lists if they are found to have voted for the opposition, said Charles Shapiro, a former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela and now president of the Institute of the Americas in La Jolla.

"What is true is not as important as what people think is true," Shapiro said of voters' enduring  suspicions that their votes won't be secret.

Opinion polls in Venezuela are a poor gauge of voter intentions, said Shapiro, who wouldn't hazard a guess as to whether an end to the Chavez era might be on the horizon.

"What I do know is that Capriles has run a terrific campaign. Chavez has been president for 14 years, and in any country a certain weariness sets in," Shapiro said. "While Chavez is a very good campaigner, he clearly is not as vigorous as in past campaigns."

Chavez, 58, has had three cancer operations in Cuba in 15 months and often has been absent, uncharacteristically, from the public spotlight.

The 40-year-old Capriles, by contrast, has projected a dynamic image, plunging headlong into Chavista territory to assure the poor that as president he would maintain popular social programs but run them better.

"Capriles has been extremely smart in his campaign, in a way that would suggest there's not going to be a period of vengeance against Chavez supporters in the government," Shifter said. "The mistake the opposition has made in the past is saying that everything Chavez has done is bad."

It remains to be seen whether the young governor's message is strong enough to overcome the considerable powers of incumbency, with Chavez in control of the airwaves and the oil treasure chest, Shifter said. There are also concerns about whether a Capriles victory would be respected by Chavez loyalists on the electoral council, in the courts and among the armed forces.

"Capriles is the new generation," whether he wins this time or not, Shifter said. "People are obviously responding to his message and giving him a serious look."

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Photo: Venezuelan presidential candidate Henrique Capriles, at a campaign rally on Monday, has united the country's scattered opposition forces to confront President Hugo Chavez with the first serious challenge of his 14-year tenure in Miraflores Palace. Credit: Leo Ramirez / AFP/GettyImages

Insert: President Hugo Chavez, at a campaign rally in Yaracui state on Tuesday, still draws enthusiastic crowds but has been less in the public spotlight this election year because of long absences for cancer treatment in Cuba. Credit: Juan Barreto / AFP/GettyImages

Latest threat to the Eurozone: Catalonia independence quest

Just when it seemed stability was on the horizon for the tumultuous Eurozone, with Spain getting a grip on its debt financing and a plan to bail out insolvent banks, a fresh threat to the common currency has emerged with Catalonia's reignited drive to secede from the Spanish kingdom.

More than a million residents of the country's most prosperous region rallied for independence in a protest of historic proportions on Sept. 11, Catalonia's National Day. Some  estimates put the crowd as high as 2 million, or more than a quarter of the 7.5 million who live in the northeast region including Barcelona. This week, after Madrid rebuffed Catalonia leader Artur Mas’ demand for more control over his region’s tax revenues, the regional parliament set a Nov. 25 date for polling Catalans on "self-determination."

Spain’s constitution doesn’t empower the regions to call votes on sovereignty and questions of national integrity. But Mas has said his region will go ahead with a referendum without the central authorities’ approval to address what Catalans consider a grave injustice: They pay as much as $20 billion more into national coffers each year than they get back in public services.

The prospect of a national breakup, no matter how remote and fraught with procedural complications, spurred Spanish King Juan Carlos into rare action on a political matter.

“In these circumstances, the worst thing we can do is divide our forces, encourage dissent, chase chimeras and deepen wounds," the king warned in a letter posted on a new palace website, the daily El Pais reported. It was an apparent allusion to the nationalist stirrings that spurred the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and a dictatorship under Gen. Francisco Franco that endured until his death in 1975. It was the first time the Spanish monarch weighed in on a political issue in more than 30 years.

Other influential Spaniards have also stepped forward to propose compromise, such as a looser federal structure that would give rebellious regions like Catalonia more autonomy without fracturing a country that has also dealt with a Basque separatist movement for decades. Juan Luis Cebrián, media mogul and author, warned last week that all the secession talk threatened to unleash the “wild beast” of right-wing nationalism that shackled Spain’s development for much of the 20^th century.

Catalonia secession is neither a sure thing nor an imminent one, analysts note. Catalans for centuries have been bandying about the idea of independence for their thriving bastion of manufacturing, shipping, tourism and culture. The conservative government of Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has made clear that it opposes Catalonia’s bailing on the rest of the kingdom, and it holds what  essentially could be a veto if the region envisions moving into statehood and taking its Eurozone membership with it. By charter, the Eurozone’s 17 members would have to unanimously approve induction of any new euro currency user.

Mas may be stirring the secession quest to force Madrid to cede more power to Catalonia over its own finances. But in an environment of deep public spending cuts, the second bout of recession in four years and unemployment afflicting 1 in every 4 Spaniards, the notion of sheering off the northeastern corner flanked by Andorra, France and the Mediterranean Sea is clearly appealing to many. Catalonia accounts for 20% of the Spanish gross domestic product and a quarter of its exports.

Catalonia secession has long been part of the political landscape in Spain and has just entered a more active phase because of the tough living conditions resulting from European Union austerity measures demanded to keep euro users' national deficits in check, said Fabian Zuleeg, chief economist at the Brussels-based European Policy Center.

"This is potentially more serious, as it reflects a real conflict between the national and regional levels," Zuleeg said. "The way Catalonia sees it, they've been paying in excessively into the national coffers and, because they have their own deficit, they have to go cap in hand to the Spanish government," only to be denied latitude to keep the regional economy on track.

The 2013 budget unveiled Thursday requires all regions to cut back further on already pared public spending and to generate more tax revenue to service staggering national debts. The piled-on austerity measures are fomenting unrest throughout the country, as seen this week in angry protests demanding job creation and investment in growth, which had to be dispersed with tear gas and mass arrests.

The Catalans' reignited campaign for independence "is an escalation but by no means the last act," said Uri Dadush, director of the international economics program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "But it's another source of tension in Spain, a complicating factor and another way that things could unravel."

Hit by bailouts, failing banks, unsustainable interest rates and mounting public resentment of the severe belt-tightening across the European periphery from Ireland to Greece, the common currency is at risk, Dadush said, of "death by a thousand cuts."

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Photo: More than a million supporters of independence for Catalonia rallied in Barcelona and other cities on Catalonia National Day, Sept. 11, pressing secession as a means of controlling their own finances and preserving their language and culture. Credit: Stefano Buonamici / Bloomberg

North Korea farmers to test regime appetite for reform

Bountiful cucumbers, tomatoes and oranges grown in tiny backyard gardens kept private farmers' markets in business in the Soviet Union and served as a constant reminder that, by contrast, massive state-run farming collectives were pitifully inefficient.

In China, agricultural reforms were the crucial kick-start to the communist giant's three-decade transition from a centrally planned economy to one driven by market forces. And unlike their cohorts in Moscow, the Chinese leadership managed the rural revolution without losing its grip on political power.

North Korea's communist leadership is now reported by recent visitors to be experimenting with smaller-sized farming cooperatives and incentives for expanding food production by letting farmers keep and sell more of what they grow.

The dilemma faced by the Pyongyang regime, say academics who scrutinize the hermetic state, is whether opening the agricultural sector will rescue the economy, as it did in China, or whet North Koreans' appetite for more opportunity and political choice, thereby bringing down one-party rule, as it did in the Soviet Union.

No proclamations of radical change to combat persistent food shortages came out of Tuesday's session of the Supreme People's Assembly, a rubber-stamp parliament of 687 deputies all aligned with new leader Kim Jong Un. But veteran Korea watchers say they wouldn't expect a dramatic gesture.

"They can do that without trumpeting it," Stephan Haggard, director of the Korea-Pacific Institute at UC San Diego, said of the market reforms quietly introduced this summer at local and regional cooperative meetings. "That comports with the style I would expect to see, that the leadership is not going to stand up and make bold pronouncements that they're moving in a new direction."

Significant among the changes that will apply to next month's harvest,  Haggard said, is the government's revised formula for splitting crops between growers and the state. Farmers previously kept a small share of their output for their own consumption and delivered the rest to the government for distribution to the cities, but they now will be able to keep -- and presumably sell at market prices -- all produce in excess of an upfront quota for the state.

"The idea is that farmers are then incentivized to put in additional work to produce more, if they believe the quota will hold," Haggard said. "One thing we worry about is if they have shortages, the regime might be tempted to walk in and say that they can't have hunger in the military and will seize what they need."

There is also uncertainty over how willing the regime is to let the market determine food prices, as the government also talks of imposing price controls to rein in inflation, said Charles Armstrong, director of the Center for Korean Research at Columbia University.

Armstrong has been tracking what he calls a "bottom-up market reform" since the 1990s and sees significant parts of the economy now operating outside state control. Black markets flourish for scarce consumer goods smuggled in from China. Barter is a common means of commerce, independent of the won's fluctuating value. Underpaid professionals and craftsmen surreptitiously peddle their talents to monied elites in the capital and other major cities, Armstrong said.

Although Kim's leadership would want to prevent the rise of an entrepreneurial class that could challenge its monopoly on political power, Armstrong said, he still sees the most promising signs in more than a decade that the regime is eager to redirect investment from military to civilian pursuits.

Since he assumed power nine months ago, Kim has altered the image of the leadership with more speeches and public appearances  than his father, Kim Jong Il, made in 18 years as leader. He has weeded out some of the stodgier generals in the military hierarchy and promoted younger officers to positions of power, analysts note. And he is the first in the Kim dynasty, installed by his grandfather Kim Il Sung at the nation's founding, to introduce Western entertainment and attend performances with his fashionably dressed wife.

Victor Cha, head of Korean scholarship at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, heralds the signals of change as "encouraging" but adds that reform has been attempted in the past only to be rescinded later.

"The dilemma for them is that real reform means loosening political controls and allowing opening, which a young, leadership-in-transition, is afraid to do," Cha said of Kim Jong Un.

The young leader's father introduced modest agricultural reforms in 2002 but revoked them three years later, reverting to an isolationist posture amid condemnation of North Korea's nuclear aspirations. He again embraced a quixotic policy of food self-sufficiency, refusing foreign humanitarian aid despite persistent malnutrition, the country's dearth of arable land and vulnerability to floods and mudslides.

Cha applauds the latest reform measures, not because he thinks they herald the kind of charismatic top-down transformation executed by China's Deng Xiaoping, "but because each time they allow for some economic incentivization in the market, they pull it back again at their own peril."

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Photo: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on a recent visit to the Pyongyang Vegetable Science Institute. Since Kim assumed the leadership nine months ago, he has quietly introduced some market-oriented agricultural reforms in hope of boosting crop outputs and easing chronic food shortages. Credit: Korea Central News Agency 

World of woe, little hope of relief, await U.N. General Assembly

When 120 world leaders and their entourages gather at the United Nations this week, the woes of the world will be onstage in all their tragic detail: a civil war in Syria, the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, reignited ethnic conflicts in Africa and uphill battles against poverty and global warming.

What is likely to be in short supply at the General Assembly are fresh ideas for resolving the kaleidoscope of crises afflicting the planet. The U.N. Security Council has been hamstrung by internal conflicts among its permanent members in devising effective intervention in the Syrian bloodletting, and a colossal conference on sustainable development hosted by the world body three months ago was widely viewed as unproductive.

The Middle East and its myriad security challenges are expected to dominate the marathon of speeches beginning Tuesday, especially against the backdrop of worldwide Muslim outrage over an amateur video made by U.S.-based Christian zealots depicting the Prophet Muhammad as vile and sadistic.

Violent protests over the 14-minute film clip flared earlier this month after a version of "The Innocence of Muslims" was dubbed into Arabic and posted on YouTube. Conservative Islamists, some backed by Al Qaeda-aligned holy warriors, have attacked U.S. and other Western embassies and businesses across the Islamic crescent spanning the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. In the worst of the violence on Sept. 11, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, was killed along with three other Americans at the consulate in Benghazi. On Friday, the Muslim sabbath, enraged demonstrators clashed with police in Pakistan, killing at least 18 people.

Europe tackles torture allegations that were swept aside in U.S.

When CIA agents nabbed an Egyptian cleric on the streets of Milan, Italy,  and whisked him off for interrogation in a country that turned a blind eye to torture, they violated international law and were justly sentenced to prison, Italy's highest court has ruled in a landmark case against the U.S. counter-terrorism tactic known as "extraordinary rendition."

The final judgment by Italy's Court of Cassation on Wednesday upheld the convictions of 23 American operatives for their roles in the 2003 abduction of Hassan Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. Their five- and seven-year prison terms meted out by a lower court three years ago were not only upheld but extended by two years, although it appeared unlikely that  any of the convicted U.S. operatives would be surrendered to serve their time.

Human rights advocates concede that  the legal judgment against rendition is mostly symbolic. Unless Italy seeks extradition -- something Washington has been fighting fiercely, leaked diplomatic cables suggest -- the only punishment the Americans are likely to face is the threat of arrest if they travel to Europe or nations elsewhere that might elect to fulfill commitments under the U.N. Convention Against Torture.

Despite the limited reach of the Italian court's decision, rights advocates have applauded the ruling as evidence that European courts are willing to bring to justice those who violate the law in the so-called war on terror, even though the U.S. government has declined to do so.

Milan prosecutor Armando Spataro, who brought the case against the Americans and a few Italian intelligence agents complicit in Nasr's abduction, declared that the high court ruling is a definitive judgment that rendition is "incompatible with democracy." He said a government decision on whether to seek extradition wouldn't be expected until the high court issues its full written opinion, which could take two to three more months.

The CIA did not respond to a call and email from The Times asking for comment on the Italian court ruling and whether the agency is advising the convicted Americans against foreign travel.

The United States has an extradition treaty with Italy, and any request for Washington to deliver the Americans to serve their prison terms would be difficult for the U.S. government to ignore, said former Air Force Col. Morris Davis, a former chief prosecutor at the Guantanamo Bay war-crimes tribunal who was forced to retire after criticizing U.S. handling of terrorism suspects.

"If the Italians were to submit an extradition request, there would be no legal basis for us not to comply," Davis said. "I’m sure there’ll be a lot of behind-the-scenes diplomatic wrangling on the Italian government not to submit the request."

The Italian case isn't the only one threatening to spotlight legal breaches by American agents since Sept. 11, Davis said. He pointed out that most of the legal actions abroad in defiance of the Obama administration's decision to "look forward, not back" on counter-terrorism excesses are coming from allied countries, "not Iran or Cuba or Venezuela."

A Spanish judge in 2009 ordered an investigation of torture allegations at Guantanamo Bay. Polish authorities are demanding full disclosure of the former government's complicity in CIA detention and interrogation of rendition subjects at a remote secret prison there. The British government has paid compensation to citizens and legal residents released after abusive CIA interrogations, including plaintiffs whose cases were thrown out of U.S. courts when the George W.  Bush and Obama administrations claimed that to try them would expose "state secrets." In Canada, the government has apologized to and compensated Maher Arar, a citizen nabbed by U.S. agents while traveling home from Tunisia in 2002 and sent to Syria for "enhanced interrogation."

Nasr, an Egyptian-born imam, was suspected of recruiting men from his Milan mosque to fight U.S. and other foreign troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, the impetus for his Feb. 17, 2003, abduction and delivery to a secret interrogation site in his homeland. He said he was beaten, bound and blindfolded for months in a cold cell and subjected to electrical shocks to his genitals while being questioned.

A lower Italian court found the 23 Americans guilty in 2009 and sentenced former Milan CIA station chief Robert Seldon Lady to seven years in prison and the others to five years' detention. The high court stiffened those sentences by two years and sent back to the lower court several cases against Italian agents involved in the Nasr rendition that had been dismissed on immunity claims.

While the Italian judiciary, like that of the United States, has no power to enforce its rulings if the government fails to request extradition, the rendition judgment serves a powerful symbolic purpose in branding those who would violate laws against torture as criminals, said Jamil Dakwar, director of the human rights program of the American Civil Liberties Union. He pointed out an array of other legal challenges to rendition and warrantless detention brought by former terrorism suspects that are making their way through foreign and multinational courts.

The Italian ruling this week, Dakwar said, "sent a strong message that if the United States fails to hold accountable its own officials for human rights violations that European countries will do so."

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Photo: A police officer stands guard at the Milan trial of 23 Americans involved in the 2003 abduction of an Egyptian cleric. European and international courts are prosecuting cases of alleged torture of terrorism suspects despite the U.S. government's policy against exposing its counter-terrorism practices to the judgment of the courts. Credit: Giuseppe Cacace / AFP/Getty Images

Insert: Egyptian-born cleric  Hassan Osama Nasr, known as Abu Omar, says he was kidnapped in Milan and tortured in an Egyptian prison. Credit: Amr Nabil / Associated Press

Quebec separatist party riding wave of voter dissatisfaction

This post has been updated. See note below.

When the separatist Parti Quebecois burst on the political scene 40 years ago, financial institutions and global corporate headquarters fled Montreal for neighboring Ontario in fear of the economic disaster predicted if Quebec were to secede from the Canadian federation.

In 1995, when the party again gained control of the provincial government, voters defeated a referendum on separation by such a small margin -- the difference was 1 percentage point -- the province again suffered a loss of business investments that killed jobs, dropped property values and depressed the Canadian dollar for much of that decade.

So why, in an age of relative prosperity that is the envy of the recession-racked world, are Quebec voters again surging to the side of Parti Quebecois and its nationalist platform for more sovereignty and French language dominance? As the Ottawa Citizen warned in an editorial Tuesday, a victory for Parti Quebecois leader Pauline Marois in Tuesday's legislative elections would give her "a chance to turn her province into the Greece of North America and slow Canadian progress for many years."

Votes were still too close to call in some hotly contested districts, or "ridings" as they are known in the province, but Canadian Broadcasting Co. declared Parti Quebecois the winner and Marois poised to become Quebec's first female premier. Incumbent Jean Charest and his Liberal Party colleagues lagged by at least 10 seats in the winner-takes-all district contests. Parti Quebecois could end up heading a minority government, though, as a relatively strong third-place finisher, the Coalition Avenir Quebec, appeared to deprive the separatists from getting at least 63 seats for an outright majority.

[Updated 9:30 a.m. Sept. 4: In a possible sign of the tensions that can flare on the separation issue, shots were fired during Marois's victory speech shortly after midnight, prompting security officers to whisk the party leader off the stage. Police said they were questioning a man detained at the scene who was wearing ski mask and blue bathrobe. Marois was unhurt, but a 48-year-old man was killed and another man wounded, Quebec police reported.]

Support for separation has fallen dramatically since two previous referendums found insufficient voter interest in going it alone. A 1980 ballot measure failed with only 40% in favor, and the vote 15 years later narrowly missed with 49.5% backing. Today, only about 28% of the electorate wants to separate from Canada, according to a recent poll published by La Presse of Montreal.

What has brought voters back to the Parti Quebecois fold, says McGill University law and politics professor Daniel Weinstock, is Canada's long tradition of "democratic alternance in power," a cyclical sweeping out of the governing echelons.

"After three or four terms in power, a party gets complacent. Corruption sets in and it gets too cozy with people it shouldn’t be getting cozy with. About a quarter of Parti Quebecois voters say they just want change," said Weinstock, alluding to a scandal involving the building trades and organized crime that eroded support for Charest and the Liberal Party.

Quebec has also been roiled this year by massive student unrest in protest of tuition increases, which flared into ugly confrontation between police and demonstrators. Thousands were arrested this spring, and new restrictions imposed on public demonstrations have angered free-speech advocates across Canada.

More than an opportunity to raise the separatist cause again, Marois has appealed to voters with populist pledges to boost taxes on wealthy individuals and charge higher mining royalties on multinational extractors to raise revenue for public projects. She has also called for making it more difficult for foreign companies to buy out Canadian competitors, like the $1.8-billion offer from home improvement giant Lowe's of North Carolina for Quebec-based chain Rona Inc. that could imperil thousands of Canadian jobs, mostly in the Francophone province.

Under pressure from party hardliners, Marois has demanded provincial autonomy in foreign affairs and immigration policy and called for making French the exclusive language of education at the community college level. French already has that status in primary and secondary school teaching.

Marois made clear on the campaign trail that getting Quebec's finances in order would be the first priority if her party regains power. But she also reiterated Parti Quebecois' separatist aim in vowing to hold a referendum "tomorrow morning" if polls show majority support.

Finn Poschmann, vice president of research at the C.D. Howe Institute, an economic and social policy think tank in Toronto, says separation makes no sense economically for Quebec and Marois has said she would push for a third vote on it only when the measure is assured of passage.

Still, the notion of independence has an emotional appeal for many in Quebec, Poschmann said.

"It's the sovereigntist ideal, that if only the province could have more control over its destiny that everything will get better," he said. "There are going to be significant groups of people, particularly in rural areas and among youth, who are true believers in the separation program. But that is not the dominant force in Quebec politics."

Canadian markets and currency have weathered the latest Parti Quebecois rise without the nerves and panic of previous political shifts in Quebec, probably because analysts see little imminent threat of another secession vote, said Poschmann.

But he points out that the campaign promises made by Marois -- higher income taxes for  big earners and $1 billion in new public spending -- would be enough to damp investors' enthusiasm for Quebec and Canada as a whole even if the separation issue has been relegated to the back burner.

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Photo: Parti Quebecois Leader Pauline Marois is whisked off stage as she delivered her victory speech in Quebec on Tuesday. Police were not immediately able to provide details but party organizers informed the crowd that there had been an explosive noise and they needed to clear the auditorium. Credit: Paul Chiasson/Associated Press

Gambia, Iraq executions buck worldwide abolitionist trend

Human rights advocates the world over have been shocked and outraged by Gambia's first executions in 27 years and an escalation in hangings in Iraq that has already sent 91 to their deaths this year.

The rash of executions in the two countries -- nine in Gambia last week and 21 in Iraq on Monday alone -- are particularly disturbing for the targeting of prisoners convicted on what appear to be politically instigated charges in secretive and unfair trials, international law experts said.

Yet as lamentable as the recent death row purges may be to those who monitor and censure human rights abuses, they are in stark contrast to a global trend toward abolition of the death penalty and de facto moratoriums on executions in an ever-larger number of countries.

About two-thirds of the 196 countries tracked by Amnesty International  have renounced the death penalty in law or in practice, the London-based rights champions calculate. That has grown from only 16 countries that had outlawed executions before Amnesty launched its global campaign to eradicate the death penalty in 1977.

"Even in countries like China, while we don’t know how many they have executed, we do know that they have reduced the number of crimes that can be punished by death and they have reduced the number of people executed in recent years dramatically," Christof Heyns, assigned by the United Nations to monitor extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said in a telephone interview from his home in Pretoria, South Africa.

On behalf of the world body's Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Heyns delivered a message to Gambian President Yahya Jammeh this week to "strongly condemn" the autocrat's proclaimed intent to execute all 48 death row inmates in the tiny West African country by mid-September. Nine were executed last week, Jammeh's government confirmed Monday, and the remaining 39 condemned prisoners have been moved from their cells to the execution site.

Heyns' letter demanded that Gambia refrain from any further executions, calling last week's deaths "a major step backwards for the country, and for the protection of the right to life in the world as a whole.” The U.N. agency rebuke joined others from Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, European nations and an expression of "great concern" from the United States, which itself ranks high on annual rights agencies' lists of countries with the most executions.

Gambia had last executed a prisoner in 1985, and had adhered to the practice increasingly prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa of reducing the list of crimes for which the death penalty can be applied as well as the number of capital sentences, noted Sandra L. Babcock, a law professor at Northwestern University and founder of its Center for International Human Rights.

Babcock attributes the Gambia executions to "the whim of an unpredictable and, by all accounts, unbalanced dictator," and she sees little threat of Jammeh's crackdown inspiring emulation.

"It's an exception to the general rule that once a nation heads down that path of refusing to carry out executions, that it leads to abolition as a matter of law over time," said Babcock, whose center maintains a database on the Death Penalty Worldwide.

Iraq's mounting zeal for executions is the more disturbing, Babcock said, as many of the 1,000-plus condemned Iraqis were convicted of treason or terrorism, often "thinly disguised justification for prosecuting political opponents."

Iraq has long featured in the dubious ranks of the Top Five countries carrying out the most executions each year. In 2011, China led Amnesty's list with executions estimated at more than 1,000, but it also eliminated the death penalty for 13 crimes that previously could draw the ultimate punishment. Iran acknowledged executing at least 360 people, followed by Saudi Arabia with 82 reported executions, Iraq with 68 and the United States 43.

Despite the rise in executions in some of the most active "retentionist" nations, as the rights groups refer to those that haven't signed on to the international covenant that defines the death penalty as a human rights violation, there are positive trends even in areas where the death penalty long enjoyed broad public support, the law experts said.

The Philippines abolished capital punishment six years ago, and all republics of the former Soviet Union except Belarus have renounced the death penalty or ceased carrying it out. Malaysia and Singapore are reconsidering whether all drug-trafficking crimes should be death-penalty eligible, and China is conducting a review of all death sentences, Babcock said. All of Europe is abolitionist, and most of Latin America -- with the glaring exception of the Caribbean states -- have ceased executions.

The only two highly developed democracies that continue to execute are the United States and Japan, the rights groups note. And abolitionists are regaining traction in Japan that was lost 17 years ago when the Aum Shinrikyo cult attacked Tokyo subway riders with sarin gas, killing 13 and poisoning 6,000.

Moving the United States into the execution-free category is going to take time because of the 50 separate state penal codes and popular support for the death penalty in some regions, Babcock said.

But she pointed out that the rising cost of keeping the death penalty on the books in states like California, with 729 on death row, is beginning to make inroads with death penalty supporters who have been unmoved by the moral arguments against the state taking lives.

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--Follow Carol J. Williams on twitter.com/cjwilliamslat

 Photo: Protesters gathered outside the Gambian Embassy in Senegal on Thursday to demand President Yahya Jammeh halt the mass execution of prisoners. Two of those executed by Gambia last week were Senegalese, including a woman. The banner reads "Gambia. Stop the reign of fear." Credit: Seyllou / AFP/Getty Images

Envisioning a post-Assad Syria as civil war grinds on

With no end in sight for the bloody fratricide ravaging Syria, and with the world's most powerful nations bitterly divided over what to do next, U.S. and European diplomats have redirected their efforts from trying to halt the civil war to planning for a new Syria once it is over.

The blueprints emerging are necessarily vague, given that no one yet knows how or when Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime will fall or what constellation of political opponents will replace it. The proposals also lack any common strategy, reflecting discordant views among advocates of a free Syria on how best to aid the outgunned rebels. Washington is more wary than its allies of sending arms that could end up in the hands of Al Qaeda and other Islamic militants who have infiltrated the civil war to gain a new foothold in the Middle East.

French President Francois Hollande this week called on rebel factions to cobble together a transitional government that the international community can officially recognize and work with. But U.S. diplomats and political analysts argue that Assad's opponents are too fractious to put forward a united front or cohesive strategy for the war's end game. And with President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney equally loath to endorse bolder action on Syria -- fearing another costly, faraway conflict -- responsibility for contingency planning has fallen to academia instead of the Pentagon.

On Tuesday, the United States Institute of Peace issued "The Day After" plan for a post-Assad Syria. The 133-page statement of goals and principles for a new Syria was six months in the making. It was produced by 45 Syrian opposition figures brought together by the State Department-funded institute's Middle East experts and partners from the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. It is long on institution-building wonk-speak and short on how the opposition is supposed to get to the post-Assad era. But analysts hailed it as a worthy undertaking even as government and rebel forces are mired in protracted battles to control key areas of Damascus and Aleppo.

No representatives of the Free Syrian Army fighting the regime were party to the post-Assad project, said Steven Heydemann, a senior advisor on Middle East initiatives who coordinated the talks among Syrian exiles, defectors and regime opponents who managed to travel abroad or participate via video linkup.

"The group very sensibly recognized there was no way to anticipate how the transition would happen," instead focusing on identifying the challenges that would confront the next leadership whether Assad flees, negotiates an exit or is deposed in a palace coup, Heydemann said. However the Assad dynasty ends, he noted, Syrians will have to grapple with divisive questions on how to treat those accused of war crimes, deter revenge killings and get the economy and social services back in working order.

While the United States is holding firm to its policy of providing only nonlethal aid to the rebels, Heydemann said, Washington could play a more effective role in coordinating other outside support. He pointed to the mounting incidents of Islamic extremists waging strikes against the Assad regime for their own purposes and weaponry coming in from autocratic supporters like Qatar and Saudi Arabia as giving "a Wild West quality" to help for the underdog rebels.

"The United States is very concerned that support from outside for elements of the Syrian opposition not lead to strengthening of Al Qaeda or Islamic fundamentalist forces that becomes problematic in the postwar process," said Charles Ries, a career diplomat heading Rand Corp.'s Center for Middle East Public Policy.  "But our reluctance [to supply arms] has paradoxically caused the division of the Syrian opposition and has encouraged those Islamist elements to find their own sources of support and influence."

The task eluding the United States and its allies is uniting the disparate opposition forces inside and outside Syria into a cohesive leadership that they can support and ratchet up the pressure on Assad, Ries said. 

Bilal Y. Saab, a Syria expert at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, shares other analysts' concerns that Islamic militants are filling the vacuum left by a hands-off U.S. policy toward the rebels. But it would be "ill-advised," he said, for the United States to recognize a transitional government that isn't broadly inclusive of the myriad ethnic, sectarian, religious and political factions in Syria.

"This administration is nowhere near doing that," Saab said of the prospects for a representative rebel leadership.

That said, initiatives like "The Day After" are laudable for keeping the Syrian opposition forces and their allies focused on the daunting challenges of building a stable nation once the civil war ends, Saab said.

"This is the most comprehensive effort by a U.S. entity to date to think about scenarios for after Assad," Saab said of the peace institute project. "It's not putting the cart before the horse."

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Photo: A rebel supporter treads on posters of Syrian President Bashar Assad lining the floor of a Free Syrian Army office in the town of Tal Rifaat, near Aleppo. Fighting has ground into a bloody impasse as international mediators differ on how to end the 17-month-old conflict. In Washington, the U.S. presidential election has relegated the Syrian civil war  to the diplomatic sidelines. Credit: Phil Moore / AFP/Getty Images

A deadly denouement for foreign troops in Afghanistan

The Netherlands pulled out of Afghanistan two years ago. Canada brought home its contingent last year. France, the fifth-largest contributor of troops to the International Security Assistance Force, will exit the war by the end of this year. New Zealand soldiers will be home by April.

Commitment to the 130,000-strong force fighting to drive Taliban and Al Qaeda militants from their Afghan strongholds has been eroding since the U.S. announcement three years ago that defense and security will be handed over to Afghans by the end of 2014. Analysts say that proclamation of a mission deadline was premature and fired a starting gun for a haphazard exodus driven by domestic political pressures rather than meeting benchmarks for a mission accomplished.

The U.S.-led campaign to defeat insurgents has had its successes, and life for average Afghans has markedly improved since the U.S.-led invasion nearly 11 years ago, security experts say. But the ultimate goal of leaving a stable Afghanistan when the drawdown is finished is now imperiled by a deadly phenomenon many see as inspired by the signaled exits:  Afghans in the green uniforms of police and militia recruits have been turning their guns on their foreign trainers.

Of the 237 U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan this year, according to icasualties.org, at least 40 died at the hands of supposedly allied Afghans. Some of the turncoats are suspected Taliban infiltrators, while others appear to be acting on individual grievances and rising anti-American sentiment. 

"Green-on-blue killings are as devastating a tactic in Afghanistan as were IEDs [improvised explosive devices] in Iraq. This is the most dangerous tactical challenge that U.S. forces have faced in the war," Andrew Exum of the Center for a New American Security said of the rash of "insider" killings.

The betrayals throw into question a core U.S. conviction that Afghans are loyal partners eager to learn from foreign soldiers how to defend and protect their homeland, Exum said. They also wear down the willingness of ISAF's 40-plus contributing nations to send troops into a volatile and dangerous end game, he said.

"There's been a lot of patience from the United States and other troop-contributing nations to send soldiers to fight and sometimes die in the face of combat with the Taliban, but there's a lot less patience with sending soldiers to be shot in the back by their Afghan colleagues," Exum said.

Ahmad Majidyar, a senior research associate at the American Enterprise Institute who briefs U.S. troops ahead of deployment on the social complexities of his native Afghanistan, likewise sees the insider killings as a consequence of Afghans fearing that the foreigners are heading for the exits.

"With the announcement of a withdrawal timeline, you see a lot of people hedging their bets," he said of tribal leaders worried about Taliban fighters regaining sway over their territory. "It has emboldened the Taliban. Their strategy now is just to wait out the coalition forces."

Majidyar cites the impending departures of French and New Zealand troops as decisions driven by domestic political concerns "rather than a policy based on security realities on the ground." That sends a bad message, he added, to both friendly and enemy forces.

Security force trainees are ordinary young Afghan men, with friends and relatives who sympathize with the Taliban, notes Sarah Chayes, a senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She has spent most of the last decade in Afghanistan on development projects and has worked as an advisor to the U.S. military.

"It’s just demographics," she said of recruits who mingle with Taliban supporters when they visit their home villages or talk over tea. "Everyone is vulnerable to being recruited by extremists because, frankly, the propaganda is fairly convincing: The [Afghan] government is profoundly and abusively corrupt in a structured way that the international community hasn’t paid much attention to."

David Cortright of the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies sees the insider killings as a sign that the U.S. strategy to hand over security to allied regional militias is doomed, as was the Soviet effort in the 1980s to mold Afghanistan into an ideological ally.

"A political option needs to be pursued," he said, embracing a Rand Corp. blueprint for Afghan peace talks drafted last year. It proposes U.N. oversight of a forum including the government of President Hamid Karzai, rival political forces and the Taliban, with the United States and Afghanistan's neighbors conducting parallel talks.

Cortright acknowledges there is little appetite in the international community for any new Afghan initiative, especially one including the Taliban and in the throes of a U.S. presidential election. But he argues that the social gains achieved over the last decade are at risk if Afghanistan collapses into civil war when the foreign troops leave, and that the chances of the military mission delivering a lasting peace are "close to zero."

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Photo: A U.S. soldier rests at Forward Operating Base Joyce in Afghanistan's Kunar province. Credit:  Jose Cabezas/AFP/GettyImages