While gay Americans have a lot to celebrate lately -- the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell and New York becoming the sixth state to legalize gay marriage, among them -- 76 countries still consider being gay a crime. Homosexuality has long been a heated issue in Ghana, and now its LGBT community may face jail time. "All efforts are being made to get rid of these people in the society," said Paul Evans Aidoo, an MP from the western region. Ghana's Bureau of National Investigations has been directed to track down and arrest anyone suspected of being gay.

Aidoo is not the first high profile person to go on the attack publicly. Reverend Stephen Wengam, a prominent religious figure in Ghana, recently wrote an op-ed for the Ghana Broadcasting Company where he stated:

"If homosexuality is tolerated, very soon the human race will be extinct."

Aidoo's efforts could lead to a witch-hunt as he has asked landlords to keep an eye out for "people they suspect of being homosexuals". The police are to be informed of any suspicious activity.

Ghana News Agency, a media outlet based in Accra, is claiming that homosexuality can lead to HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. While Ghana has recently cut its AIDS rate in half, the disease remains a constant fear of the small West African nation. The homosexual community has now fallen victim to the AIDS blame game.

Apart from South Africa, where gay marriage is formally recognized, homosexuality is shunned by most African leaders. Along with Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Iran, Africa is also home to several countries where being gay is quite literally, a death sentence. In Nigeria, those convicted face death by stoning. LGBT individuals in Ghana may soon join this disturbing trend. One member of parliament, David Tetteh Assuming, recently hinted that more permanent punishments will be instituted for those found guilty of homosexuality:

"I believe that they are treading on dangerous grounds and they could face lynching in future."

A Bahraini security court sentenced 20-year-old student Ayat al-Qurmezi to one year in prison yesterday. The young woman, infamous for her February recitation of an anti-government poem in Pearl Square, has been found guilty of speaking out against the king and inciting hatred. Her poem has become an international symbol of the Bahraini opposition:

We are the people who will kill humiliation and assassinate misery

We are the people who will destroy the foundation of injustice

Don't you hear their cries, don't you hear their screams

Down with Hamad

Al-Qurmezi has been in captivity since March. She was rumored to have been raped and tortured after an alleged phone call was made from doctors at an army hospital in April. Yesterday, a relative confirmed that her face had been shocked with an electrical cable, she was forced to clean the prison bathroom with her hands, and held in a near-freezing cell for days at a time. Ayat al-Ghermezi has incited a rally cry for free speech in Bahrain, where female students, doctors and professors have become targets of government crackdown on civil rights.

She is not the only poet to face such harsh punishments recently in the Middle East. Waleed Mohammad al Rumaishi had his tongue cut out after reciting poetry in support of embattled Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh. In 2009, civil servant and poet Moneer Said Hanna wrote a five-lined satirical poem about former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and is now serving a three year sentence, as well as paying a fine of over $16,000. Syrian poet, Faraj Bayrakdar, now fuels the revolution from Sweden after enduring over 13 years of torture in prison where he would carve pens from wood splinters and make ink from tea leaves in order to write poetry.

Robert Frost said that poetry is what gets lost in translation, but for Ayat al-Qurmezi and her fellow dissident poets, the message is quite clear.

As protesters overwhelmed former President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali's security forces in Tunis, the regional office of the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), the George W. Bush administration's signature democracy promotion organization, watched as its mandate was fulfilled in the most unlikely of places.

It is, to say the least, an awkward bit of symbolism. MEPI defines its mission as "develop[ing] more pluralistic, participatory, and prosperous societies." And in the country where it is based, the Tunisian people proved themselves to be uniquely and spectacularly unhappy with their regime.

But according to current and former democracy promotion advocates in the U.S. government, the decision to base MEPI's offices in Tunisia was made because the embassy had enough free space to accommodate its staff, and the country was thought to be stable enough to not interfere with the organization's sometimes controversial work.

Scott Carpenter, a former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bush administration who oversaw the creation of MEPI, said that the Ben Ali regime was "constantly paranoid" about the organization's presence in the country, and never allowed it to undertake significant democracy promotion programs. As a result, "we were doing a lot of stuff very, very quietly - not to say covert, but very quietly," Carpenter said.

The Ben Ali regime's hostility to any efforts to open up the political system was attested to by other Western diplomats who served in Tunis. Alan Goulty, who served as the British ambassador in the country from 2004 to 2008, said that the government would constantly raise the specter of terrorism to discourage any contact with Tunisian opposition figures.

"There was one explosion in 1987 of a bomb, where a British lady was wounded and lost her leg," Goulty said. "I lost count of the times that Tunisian officials, 15 years later, reminded me of that incident to justify their claims that the Tunisian opposition, whatever form it took, was terrorist."

In theory, the European Union should have had considerable economic and political leverage to convince the Ben Ali regime to liberalize. Trade between EU member states and Tunisia in 2009 was in excess of $20 billion - by comparison, total U.S. imports and exports to the country were valued at around $800 million. The EU association agreement with Tunisia also provided a ready-made avenue for discussion human rights and political liberalization. In practice, however, EU efforts in the country were anemic at best.

"Frankly, the EU always pulled its punches [on democracy promotion], because of the need to operate unanimously," said Goulty. "And a different approach was taken by [our] Mediterranean partners, principally France and Italy, who believed that the best way forward was to get close to the regime and further one's economic interests."

In fact, the primary contribution that the United States made to Tunisia's recent unrest was neglect. As U.S. relations with the other North African states improved over the past two decades, the relative importance of Tunisia as a U.S. ally in the region declined. U.S. diplomats may not have had much success promoting liberalization in the country, but the national security implications of the fall of Ben Ali's regime raised steadily fewer concerns in Washington.

David Mack, currently a scholar at the Middle East Institute, served as the deputy chief of mission of the U.S. embassy in Tunisia from 1979 to 1982. "If you go back to the time when I was there, our relations were disappearing with Libya, we had poor relations with Algeria, and strained relationships in many parts of the Muslim world," he noted. "But the reality is that today Tunisia plays a smaller role overall in U.S. strategic political calculation."

However, diplomats insisted that Tunisia's apparent stability under Ben Ali did not cause them to underestimate the population's grievances with his regime. A prescient June 2009 cable released by WikiLeaks criticizes the "sclerotic" regime, which it says has "lost touch with the Tunisian people." The same memo complains that "make it exceptionally difficult for the US Mission to conduct business" and meet with regime opponents.

Those who spent time in the country seconded that assessment. "The place was so sterile -- you just feel people's fear, and the complete lack of dynamism in the society," said Carpenter. "Within the State Department we used to refer to it as ‘Syria with a smile.'"  

A Pakistani lawyer is seeking the death penalty for Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg over the  "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" controversy:

BBC Urdu reports — according to a Google Translation — that Pakistan's Deputy Attorney General has launched a criminal investigation against Zuckerberg and others in response to Facebook hosting a "Draw Muhammad" contest on its site late last month. On May 19, Pakistani authorities blocked access to Facebook over the contest, and this ban was lifted on May 31 after Facebook removed the page in Pakistan and other countries.

It's a bit strange that all this rage has been transferred onto Zuckerberg, who as far as anyone knows, has never drawn Mohammed. The "Draw Mohammed" idea only came about on the social networking site after censorship of a "South Park" episode got the TV-watching public riled up. Trey Parker and Matt Stone probably aren't happy that the Internet wonderboy has stolen their thunder.

I hadn't seen this earlier: John Pomfret relays word that Google's declaration that it would no longer comply with Chinese Internet censorship rules was a verboten subject in Davos this year.

"At China's request, that topic was left off the table at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Josef Ackermann, chief executive of Deutsche Bank and co-chairman of the event, told Bloomberg News," he writes.

So now China is capable of silencing debate in what's supposed to be an open forum?

Here's more from Bloomberg, which quotes Ackermann saying "China didn't want to discuss Google":

At Davos, participants such as financier George Soros, economist Joseph Stiglitz and French President Nicolas Sarkozy debated technology topics such as social networking and 3-D features used in the motion picture "Avatar." The discussion didn't include the conflict between China and Google, even in panels such as "The Rise of Asia" or "Redesigning the Global Dimensions of China's Growth."

Way to tackle the tough issues, guys.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt did briefly raise the subject on his own, however, according to the Wall Street Journal:

"We like what China is doing in terms of growth...we just don't like censorship," Mr. Schmidt said, speaking at the World Economic Forum's annual summit here. "We hope that will change and we can apply some pressure to make things better for the Chinese people." [...]

Mr. Schmidt maintained Friday that Google wants to continue operating in China. But he said the company didn't want to do so if it had to operate under China's censorship laws. To operate its Web site, Googe.cn in China, Google had to agree to censor its results.

"We would very much like to stay in China. We would very much like the censorship we oppose to improve in China," Mr. Schmidt replied.

Li Keqiang, China's vice premier, didn't address the issue in his speech, but apparently insisted in private that foreign companies must follow Chinese laws.

Freedom House released its 2010 Freedom in the World survey, which sadly, shows overall freedom declining around the world for the fourth straight year. The report designates a total of 89 countries as free, 58 as partly free, and 47 as not free. Last week, I asked Freedom House Director of Research Arch Puddington about some of the more surprising developments from this year in freedom:

We’re concerned about the self-assurance, even arrogance of some of the big authoritarian countries. China, most notably, but also Russia, Venezuela, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.  They have their own systems they’re going to go their own way. With China what we’ve seen is that there’s a new effort to influence how the rest of the world talks about China and sees China. The Chinese bullied a book fair in Germany and a film festival in Australia, as well as  events in Taiwan, Korea and Bangladesh, because the Uighur question or other controversial events might come up at these events. This sort of thing is a concern. 

I was surprised to see a slight improvement in Zimbabwe's score, though it's still designated as one of the world's least free countries:

It was principally because of the agreement that was reached that brought the [Movement for Democratic Change into the government. This gave Morgan Tsvangirai the prime minstership and led to the swearing in of a parliament dominated by the MDC. These are modest improvements but we felt they merited a small increase.

Honduras lost its status as an electoral democracy because of this year's coup. I asked Puddington how Freedom House dealth with the controversy surrounding the coup, which some felt was a legitimate response to President Manuel Zelaya's own abuses of power:

We are very sensitive to the nuances of Honduras. We recognize that this was not the equivalent of what happened in Argentina under the generals or Chile under Pinochet and we don’t call it a military coup. It was a coup of the courts and the military elites. Removing [Zelaya] from office and was done willy-nilly consitutionally. Exiling Zelaya crossed the line in our view, especially in a region like Latin America with its history of coups.

I asked Puddington if he thought the Obama adminstration's democracy promotion efforts were adequate. 

This is the fourth consecutive year we’ve seen decline, so we’re not going to blame Obama for what’s happened. I would say that we’re not satisfied with his policies. He still seems to be unclear about what those policies will be, but he's now coming around to something a little more concrete and coherent. There was a period in the last year where the adminstiation wanted to do the opposite of everything the Bush administration did and that attitude infected the Obama administration's development of a pro-democracy policy. I think that they’re now getting over that mindset but we’ll still have to see.

Chinese President and vocal free speech advocate Hu Jintao vowed to continue safeguarding the rights of foreign media working in China, reports the state-run paper China Daily.

"It is more important than ever before that the media should establish and uphold social responsibilities," Hu said at the World Media Summit. Apparently Hu cares so much about the media doing the right thing that he employs about 30,000 "Internet Police" to discourage everything from negative news to pornography. China's Internet filtering (AKA "The Great Firewall") was especially frustrating for overseas reporters covering the 2008 Olympics in Beijing; the control of the Internet probably has something to do with why Freedom House ranks Chinese media the 181^st least-free out of 195 countries surveyed, tied with Iran and Rwanda.

On the other hand, Hu did say, "The media should uphold the ideas of equality, mutual trust, mutual benefit and common development, and better facilitate exchanges and cooperation."  And if you can't trust friends like these...

Photo: PETER PARKS/AFP/Getty Images

It's cartoon Wednesday here at Passport. Three editors at the Uganda weekly The Independent, including editor-in-chief and FP contributor Andrew Mwenda, were summoned by police over a political cartoon in last week's magazine. The cartoon, seen above, implies that President Yoweri Museveni is beginning a strategy to rig the elections scheduled for early 2011. Uganda is one of the few self-proclaimed democracies to retain criminal libel laws which can be used to prosecute journalists. However, the sedition law is currently under appeal to the Supreme Court and no prosecutions are allowed to move forward. (Freedom House rates Uganda "partly free.")

The Comittee to Protect Journalists, which gave Andrew Mwenda its International Press Freedom Award for 2008, has the details and explains the first list item:

For four hours, 10 officers of the Media Crimes Department of Uganda's Criminal Investigations Directorate questioned the editorial decisions of Managing Editor Andrew Mwenda, Editor Charles Bichachi, and Assistant News Editor Joseph Were of the bimonthly newsmagazine The Independent, according to defense lawyer Bob Kasango. Were was told to return for further questioning on Saturday, while Mwenda and Bichachi were ordered to return on Monday, according to local journalists...

Officers pressed the trio over the motive and production of an August 21 cartoon spoofing Museveni's controversial decision to reappoint members of the embattled electoral commission to supervise the 2011 general election. The Supreme Court ruled that in the 2005 election the electoral commission did not adhere to its own rules and allowed irregularities including bribery, ballot-stuffing, and voter disenfranchisement.

A formal sedition charge from 2005 already hangs over Mwenda, one of 21 criminal counts that Uganda's best-known political editor and 2008 CPJ awardee is battling in court.

The second spot on the list alludes to the treason charges against opposition leader Kizza Besigye, who was brought to trial in late 2005 at the same time he was the main candidate opposing Museveni's reelection. Olara Otunnu, a former U.N. official is thought to be another possible challenger in 2011.

The third item, Kiboko squads, refers to violent groups of men that attacked anti-government protesters in 2007 and were since linked to Museveni's government by the Uganda Human Rights Commission, among others. 

Museveni is expected to face a serious challenge in the 2011 elections if the opposition can unite behind a single candidate. My sources in Uganda say he personally was very angry about the cartoon, leading to the questioning.

But still, a cartoon?

Press intimidation is fairly frequent in Uganda, but most international donors tend to look the other way as Uganda is relatively stable overall. 

But seditious cartoons? Really? That can't be good for aid dollars. 

Full disclosure: I know all three editors well and worked at The Independent in 2008. Shortly before I arrived, a more dramatic incident occurred with government forces actually arresting several journalists at the magazine, raiding the office and seizing files and disks alleged to contain "seditious materials." No charges were filed. 

The Independent, Uganda

Two weeks ago, Bill Clinton, the former U.S. president and husband of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, visited North Korea. He met with dictator Kim Jong-il and secured the release of two American journalists who had been held there for months. 

This past weekend, Sen. Jim Webb traveled to Myanmar on a trip through Southeast Asia. Webb -- who likely knows more about the region than anyone else on the Hill -- has long criticized U.S. sanctions on Myanmar. He met with the head of the country's military junta and leading dissident Aung San Suu Kyi. And he secured the release of an American who had been jailed for breaking into Suu Kyi's compound, where she is on house arrest. 

The Obama administration and U.S. news outlets have described these two missions as "private diplomacy." Webb and Clinton are both foreign-policy heavyweights outside the administration. Their stature and connections provided them with the latitude to make entreaties to these rogue, adversarial governments. They offered nothing in terms of aid or support or promises of policy-change -- they did not represent the Washington, of course. But they offered good press and a thread back to the capital -- which proved enough for the strongmen, Kim and Shwe.

Clearly, though, the word "private" is not totally accurate here. Both did it with the administration's nod and help.

The Washington Post wrote of Clinton's visit: "The trip came about only after weeks of back-channel conversations involving academics, congressional figures, and senior White House and State Department officials, said sources involved in the planning. North Korea rejected the administration's first choice for the trip -- former vice president Al Gore." The Wall Street Journal reported that the White House approved Webb's mission -- and he used a military plane for the trips.

All of which leaves me a bit queasy, though ultimately hopeful, about this rash of private diplomatic missions.

Part of me thinks the White House shouldn't be in the lame business of disavowing trips it clearly had a hand in making. Further, I worry the United States gave up an opportunity to publicly demand something out of Yangon. Clinton herself has said the United States would consider trading an easing of sanctions for the release of Suu Kyi. Webb may have made some headway towards that goal. But to hear Clinton or Obama comment on it would have doubtless brought a sense of urgency to the issue and shined a brighter spotlight on what the junta needs to change.

On the other hand, both the United States and the rogue governments got what they wanted. The U.S. gave up virtually nothing, got its citizens back, and won some good press for its diplomatic successes. Myanmar and North Korea got, for a moment, to look magnanimous and reasonable -- tempered by the stories about their human-rights abuses, and the fact that Washington did not send interlocutors with actual foreign policy power (Clinton herself, or a committee chair, say) to confer with them.

I suppose these carefully charted and subtle missions proved to work fine. To consider them isolated incidences or unqualified successes (or failures) would be the worst misjudgment -- foreign policy is always about carrots and sticks, and back and forth. This White House gets that really well.

PORNCHAI/AFP/Getty Images

A major newspaper in Bahrain has returned to the presses today, after yesterday's reports that the government had shut it down on Monday amid ongoing protests in Iran. Though officials didn't give a reason for the forced closure, many suspect the move was prompted by a recent article that criticized Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Despite the backtracking of the Bahraini regime, the episode has further inflamed already-brittle tensions between the Sunni-minority government and the Shia majority in the country.

AFP/Getty Images 

Here's what the action star said at a forum whose attendees included Wen Jiabao:

"I'm not sure if it is good to have freedom or not," he said. "I'm really confused now. If you are too free, you are like the way Hong Kong is now. It's very chaotic. Taiwan is also chaotic."

He added: "I'm gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we are not being controlled, we'll just do what we want."

Via Evgeny, I see that the comments have provoked an angry online backlash in Taiwan and Hong Kong as well as the blogosphere on the mainland. There are calls for a boycott of the "racist" Chan's films.

At Post Global, John Pomfret sees a class dynamic at play:

Chan is just saying what a lot of other rich Chinese feel. In the 20 years since Tiananmen, Chinese society has changed enormously. One of the most astounding ways has been in the return of a class society and in the disdain with which China's rich view China's poor. When Chan was saying Chinese need to be "controlled," to be sure, he was speaking about the poor. He didn't have to say it, But that's what the audience at Boao heard and that's why they cheered him on. Anyone who has conversations of depth with members of China's elite has heard this argument before.

Granted I don't know much about the context, but it seems to me like it's at least possible that Chan is being sarcastic. The comments were in response to a question about censorship. Chan's new film Shinjuku was recently banned in mainland China because of violence. It seems strange to me that Chan would so vociferously praise a set of policies that resulted in him losing quite a bit of revenue. Whatever his class prejudices or political beliefs, I'm sure that Chan believes that poor Chinese should at least be free to spend their hard-earned yuan on his products. He should also know better than to insult his many fans in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Chan's not in a position to criticize a decision by the Chinese government, but the over-the-top comments seem like they could be a subtle dig at the Chinese authorities for being so uptight about his movie. Then again, I could be giving the guy too much credit. 

Victor Fraile/Getty Images

On his China Rises blog, McClatchy's Tim Johnson reports that Chinese authorities have cancelled performances by British band Oasis because of concerns over singer Noel Gallagher's political views. From the band's press release:

"The licensing and immigration process for the two shows had been fully and successfully complied with well before the shows went on sale. The Chinese authorities action in cancelling these shows marks a reversal of their decision regarding the band, which has left both Oasis and the promoters bewildered.

"According to the show's promoters, officials within the Chinese Ministry of Culture only recently discovered that Noel Gallagher appeared at a Free Tibet Benefit Concert on Randall's Island in New York in 1997, and have now deemed that the band are consequently unsuitable to perform to their fans in the Chinese Republic on 3rd and 5th of April, during its 60th anniversary year.

By now, China should've somehow realized that it's gotta lighten up on those artistic censorship laws. Other superpowers' leaders seem perfectly content to just ignore self-righteous outbursts from ageing foreign rock stars.

Dave Hogan/Getty Images

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez reportedly told an interviewer that former Polish President, Solidarity leader, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Walesa has been banned from entering the country to speak to a student opposition group:

Chavez instructed authorities on Tuesday to ensure that Walesa does not enter Venezuela, which is preparing for a Feb. 15 referendum on a proposal to lift term limits for all elected officials.

Chavez made the comment after an interviewer suggested that Walesa had received a new invitation.

Granted, Walesa has turned into a bit of a blowhard in recent years, (a Polish friend once told me that he can only stand to read Walesa speeches after they've been translated into English) but the role he played in Eastern Europe's struggle for democracy is legendary. Chavez just put himself in some pretty bad company by denying him the right to speak.

Photo: JANEK SKARZYNSKI/AFP/Getty Images

Freedom House has just released its annual Freedom in the World report on global political rights and civil liberties. Overall, the report shows global freedom in decline, a continuation of a trend over the last three years.

Last week, I spoke with Freedom House's director of research, Arch Puddington, about some of the report's more significant findings. Among these was a general improvement in the state of democracy in South Asia in 2008, a rare bit of good news for the increasingly unstable region.

South Asia is a volatile region. Last year one of our headlines was, "South Asia shows major decline." But you had some progress in Bangladesh, in Pakistan and some small countries like Bhutan, Nepal and the Maldives. They did show progress... I think that having India as the most powerful country in the region has a powerful ripple effect. India, despite its ethnic divisions and problems with terrorism and poverty does maintain a pretty stable democracy, which has rubbed off on its neighbors.

This year's report is also an opportunity to reflect on the effectiveness of outgoing President George W. Bush's famous "freedom agenda."

If you look at just our findings, there was a modest improvement over the eight years of the Bush administration. There was modest improvement in the Middle East. There was modest improvement in sub-Saharan Africa. The only region that showed decline throughout that period is the former Soviet Union.

So we certainly would not conclude, as some have, that the Bush administration was a catastrophe for the state of world freedom. There was some gain. Most of that gain came during the first four years and the decline came after the color revolutions and the backlash in the Middle East and you saw some of the gains eroded.

Also relevant to the discussion of Bush's legacy is the the only country in the Middle East that improved this year: Iraq.

The diminution of violence and expecially the decline in influcence of the Shia militias were cited by our analysts are improving the security environment and therefore enhancing, to a modest degree, the freedom of orginary people. I should not that we've always designated Iraq, in the post-Saddam era as "not free" and it's still not free. The improvement is modest but we thought significant enough to make note of, since we've been pretty hard on Iraq in the past.

The report may also put to rest notions that the Olympics would do anything to improve the state of freedom in China.

You can check out Puddington's full overview here.