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Every year, the McCain Institute – established to continue the legacy of character-driven leadership by the late Republican Senator John McCain – honours an attendee at its annual Sedona Forum with its ‘Courage and Leadership’ Award.
Previous recipients have included Pakistani women’s education activist Malala Yousafzai; Syria’s White Helmets; Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the women of Iran; and last year, posthumously, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was murdered in a Russian prison for daring to speak out against Vladimir Putin.
This year, the award went to Maria Corina Machado, leader of Venezuela’s democratic movement, who has been in hiding for more than nine months, since last year’s presidential elections, which the ruling regime of Nicolas Maduro refused to recognise as being won by her candidate. Instead, it instituted a further crackdown on Venezuela’s opposition.
Accepting the award on her behalf, her daughter Ana Corina Sosa Machado said that her mother was fighting not just for today, but for the freedom of “future generations to come”, and that freedom fighters everywhere – whether in Russia, Ukraine, Africa, or other parts of Latin America – were all fighting for the same cause.
“Everywhere, the fight for freedom is one and the same,” she said.
Earlier in the conference, participants heard from Anaise Kanimba, a survivor of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, during which her father, Paul Rusesabagina – the real-life hero of the film Hotel Rwanda – saved more than 1,200 people. Kanimba led an international campaign to secure the release of her father after he was detained illegally in Rwanda in 2020 and has since become an advocate for human rights defenders everywhere.
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We also heard from Roya Mahboob, a female Afghan entrepreneur, who helped establish the first Afghan women’s robotics team, and is continuing efforts to support Afghan women’s education from outside the country, following the Taliban’s takeover in August 2021.
Other attendees included Svetlana Tsikhanouskaya, leader of Belarus’s pro-democracy movement, who entered politics after her husband was arrested, and was later forced into exile. Her husband remains in jail, his condition unknown. She was joined by Vladimir Kara-Murza, the Russian political activist who was sentenced to 25 years in a Siberian gulag for his opposition to Russia’s war in Ukraine, and released last summer, as part of the largest prisoner exchange with Russia since the end of the Cold War. Also in attendance was Aisu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American journalist with Radio Free Europe, who was freed from a Russian prison at the same time as Kara-Murza, in the same prisoner exchange.
Every year, the testimonials of courageous individuals such as these, or their family members, have formed the emotional highlight of the annual Sedona Forum. It was impossible not to feel anguish as Dasha Navalnya received the award on behalf of her deceased father last year. For two years in a row, Vladimir Kara-Murza’s wife, Evgenia, attended the Sedona Forum alone, to raise awareness not just of her husband’s plight, but that of thousands of other political prisoners in Russia. As American Ambassador Roger Carstens, who coordinated the prisoner exchange leading to Kara Murza’s release, said at the conference, it was the highlight of his year to see Vladimir and Evgenia finally reunited and able to enjoy a cocktail together.
This year, in the context of Trump’s ‘America First’ philosophy, and radical cuts to US aid programmes, all of these participants were at pains to stress the continuing need for American leadership in the world, noting that when the US withdrew, the world became more dangerous.
Svetlana Tsikhanouskaya urged the US not to agree to an unjust peace deal in Ukraine, warning: “We need the USA to stay consistent and principled. Don’t allow the sphere of influence which Putin wants, and don’t abandon Belarus. The US has always been a beacon for freedom and in the fight against dictatorships.”
Kara Murza urged that any peace deal should not just be about land and minerals, but about people, including the thousands of Ukrainian children kidnapped by Russia, Ukrainian prisoners of war, and Russian political prisoners unjustly imprisoned for speaking out against the invasion.
Anaise Kanimba made a similar point regarding peace efforts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, urging that this be based on real political change and address root causes, including Rwanda’s role in fuelling the conflict for profit. She excoriated western countries, including the UK, for taking at face value Rwanda’s claims to be a champion in the developing world and potential partner on refugee or peacekeeping matters.
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Senator McCain’s widow, Cindy McCain – currently the executive director of the World Food Programme – noted that, as a result of US aid cuts to her organisation, she was having to decide to “take food from the hungry to give it to the starving”. She argued that “keeping people fed is not just the right thing to do, but in our interests: food security is national security, because without the basics people are going to die, migrate, or start a conflict”. She also observed that the Trump administration’s aid cuts were hugely damaging to American soft power, providing an opening for China to exploit.
Aisu Kurmasheva lamented the administration’s end of funding for Radio Free Europe, which she said risked abandoning millions of people around the world who relied upon it for accurate news reporting.
Another attendee noted that America’s adversaries were celebrating US aid cuts. Moreover, compared with US defence spending, democracy promotion work involved tiny amounts of money, for huge return. “Countries that can govern themselves well and justly don’t require US foreign assistance,” they noted.
Damon Wilson, head of the National Endowment for Democracy – established by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s as America’s pre-eminent democracy foundation – provided the fullest explanation for why the Trump administration’s aid cuts, especially in the field of democracy and human rights, were so short-sighted and harmful. “Where we are is a political fight,” he said. “The administration sent a draft budget to the Hill today that proposes to eliminate funding for the endowment. But it’s not even about the endowment. It’s about whether the United States will do anything to support freedom and democracy around the world.”
“When you get down to brass tacks, 82% of conflicts around the world come out of dictatorships, 90% of refugee flows, 75% of organised crime, transnational trafficking from autocratic regimes, not to mention sources of terrorism,” he added. “When freedom flourishes, it’s a really good thing for our interests.”
Whether these kind of arguments will have any impact on the administration, or members of Congress who have to approve Donald Trump’s proposed budget for next year, remains to be seen.
But, as one attendee at the conference explained to me, one reason why this administration may be so hostile to overseas democracy work is because it is counter to its own authoritarian instincts at home. Any mention of democracy and elections, even in other countries, is “triggering” for ‘MAGA’ adherents in America.
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A similar logic may be at play when it comes to reports that officials at the State Department have been instructed to scale back its annual international human rights report to remove longstanding critiques of abuses such as harsh prison conditions, government corruption, and restrictions on participation in the political process.
According to NPR, “despite decades of precedent, the reports, which are meant to inform congressional decisions on foreign aid allocations and security assistance, will no longer call governments out for such things as denying freedom of movement and peaceful assembly. They won’t condemn retaining political prisoners without due process or restrictions on ‘free and fair elections’. Forcibly returning a refugee or asylum-seeker to a home country where they may face torture or persecution will no longer be highlighted, nor will serious harassment of human rights organisations”.
The Trump administration is presumably concerned that it would be hypocritical to criticise governments abroad for doing things which it would like to do in the US. It would be far simpler to reclassify such acts as no longer violations of human rights at all.
This is the backdrop for what was perhaps the most disturbing exchange at the forum, in which one attendee asked the Rwandan activist, Anaise Kanima and Afghan entrepreneur, Roya Mahboob, whether they observed any of the same warning signs in the US that they had seen in their own countries – of a slide into autocracy. Mahboob said that the US needed to be alert to political corruption and misinformation; while Kanima cautioned against allowing hatred to grow. Both said that citizens had a duty to pay attention to warning signs and to act to protect their liberties.
It took only a short time of neglect for societies to collapse, but a generational effort to rebuild them.