Challenging an Iranian ‘Charity’

The Obama administration recently took decisiveaction to challenge Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s leadership of Iran.

No, President Obama did not join in protesting the country’s disputed election results, an action that might have summoned uneasy comparisons with the CIA’s use of mass demonstrations to install the shah as an American puppet.

Instead, lawyers for the U.S. government appeared in court against the leader of an alleged Iranian charity.

Facing upward of 20 years in prison, Farshid Jahedi, president of the Alavi Foundation, stands accused of destroying documents subpoenaed as part of a federal investigation into the charity, which the United States asserts is laundering money for Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. At stake besides Mr. Jahedi’s freedom: the foundation’s ownership interest in a Manhattan skyscraper that the United States wants to seize.

On one level, the government’s efforts reflect a straightforward attempt to stop the diversion of charitable assets — not only were the alleged money transfers to Iran technically a violation of federal law but also providing financial support to develop nuclear weapons is not exactly a traditional charitable purpose.

However, even if we assume the as-yet-unproved charges to be true, one could equally argue that they reflect nothing else besides the imposition of American foreign policy onto the charitable realm.

After all, the criminality of charitable weapons research is at base a function of political geography. While helping to support a nuclear-weapons program may seem like a clear sign of a fake charity, the very technology that Mr. Ahmadinejad is now trying to copy has its origins in the Manhattan Project at Columbia University, a venerable charity located just a few blocks north of the foundation’s controversial Fifth Avenue property.

The crackdown on the Alavi Foundation highlights an aspect of civic life that is important to remember in relation not just to Iran but to the global legal framework for civil society: Even countries cited as bastions of liberty routinely curtail the activity of nonprofit groups in pursuit of political aims.

From a government’s perspective, this is intrinsic to maintaining social order, yet it can also pose serious problems for organized philanthropy — and not just for the charities accused of breaking the law.

The more systemic risk flows from the conflation of political and charitable objectives. Close to 20 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Western foundations and donors continue to reflect what is at base a cold-war mind-set, dividing the world between totalitarian regimes that suppress civil society — Iran, Russia, the Bush-Cheney administration — and liberal democracies that promote it.

However, not only are such claims all too often overstated if not demonstrably false but also our commitment to promoting democracy can undermine other equally valued reforms. As inspiring as we may find the Iranian election protests, such mass-media spectacles have served to reinforce the link between populist movements and destructive instability. They are, in short, the political equivalent of nuclear bombs, obliterating not just the ambitions of the losers in a given election but also the entire social order.

In a media environment in which Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube amplify Western support for democratic civil society into global interactive theater, the net impact is an image of civil society that we may try to refute but have nonetheless helped reinforce: namely, its express identification with regime change.

Vladimir Putin’s response to the Orange Revolution in Ukraine — a direct antecedent of Iran’s Sea of Green — illustrates the effect that democratic movements can have on the legal infrastructure for nonprofit organizations.

While the U.S. Agency for International Development and an array of charitable supporters have insisted that they were focused on building a civil society and establishing the infrastructure for fair elections, the fusion of involvement in the electoral process with work on behalf of nonprofit organizations fostered the perception of the third sector as a fifth column, bringing people together in foreignfinanced organizations with the common purpose of challenging the political order.

Within a year, the successful democratic revolution in Ukraine spawned a substantial rollback of hard-won legal freedoms for Russia’s nongovernmental organizations, particularly groups that receive money from abroad.

The ripple effects continue to be felt throughout the region, from similar legal changes now being enacted in the former Soviet satellite of Azerbaijan to the Iranian government’s own propaganda campaign, which includes a notorious viral video in which computer-generated images of Americans seek to foment “regime change” by working “closely with the NGO’s that share our goals.”

Just as open access to information fostered by the Web can hinder attempts at centralized control, it can also undermine traditional strategies aimed at pressuring governments to enact sweeping changes.

For example, Russia’s new president, Dmitry Medvedev, last week proposed a set of incremental amendments to the Putin rollback, while a Russian appeals court counteracted another Putin-era regulation by ruling that grants from foreign charities are not subject to the profits tax.

Almost immediately, Human Rights Watch responded with a 68-page report questioning the validity of Mr. Medvedev’s election, dismissing his proposals as unreconstructed Putinism, and calling for Russia to enact more significant changes consistent with freedoms purportedly afforded Western nonprofit organizations.

Whereas 15 years ago a document such as this might have been an effective way to impress Russian legislators into bringing the country’s laws up to the supposed standard, today’s officials are now well aware of the ways in which European and American laws work to constrain nonprofit organizations. What stands out instead is the activists’ evident utopian ambition for ostensibly neutral laws designed to help mobilize “political dissent.”

As autocratic governments grow more media savvy, they will inevitably learn to become more effective at massaging their public image than the blatant vote-rigging evident in the Iranian election.

Instead, we can expect somewhat more subtle attempts to keep the masses in check, more along the lines of Mr. Medvedev’s strategic appropriation of the language of accountability to forestall more substantive reform.

To counter this dispiriting prospect, we must recognize that promoting both democracy and civil society can in certain contexts be a self-defeating quest. The more we work to secure the political system long cherished as the American ideal, the less freedom and security nonprofit organizations might enjoy.

Unless we are willing to face this most tragic choice, our efforts risk descending into a ritualized rhetorical performance, as governments act as if they are not trying to control civil society while charities pretend that their interest in democracy is purely procedural. Neither side will believe the other, but the show will go on.

Jeff Trexler is a professor of social entrepreneurship at Pace University.