At Large

In early July, news leaked that a German nonprofit organization, Quadriga, would bestow its annual honor -- given to "role Models for Germany" -- to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Yes, that Vladimir Putin, the man who, in his 11 years ruling Russia, has presided over the country's slide into authoritarianism, a withering of the rule of law, and a foreign policy of aggression toward its neighbors.

According to the German newspaper "Sueddeutsche Zeitung," Quadriga selected Putin, whom it described as, "in the tradition of Peter the Great, a switchman in the direction of the future" for his fostering "stability through the interplay of prosperity, economy and identity." An outcry erupted in the German media, and a national leader of the country's Green Party, along with a respected historian, resigned from Quadriga's board of trustees.

But ultimately it was the threat from Vaclav Havel, playwright, anti-communist dissident and the first president of a free Czechoslovakia, to return the prize he had won in 2009 that persuaded the foundation to change course. The very same day that Havel's disapproval was reported by the Czech newspaper "Lidove noviny," Quadriga announced that it would cancel the award celebration, originally scheduled for October 3, the date that East and West Germany were reunified. The foundation said that it "most deeply" regretted the displeasure expressed by Havel, whose intervention was all the more stirring considering his poor physical condition: the former president has not made a public appearance since March. ("The truth is that Russia has become a threat to its neighbors," Havel told my co-blogger Michael Zantovsky for a "World Affairs" profile that appeared earlier this year. "I don't care whether this be considered liberal, or conservative, or progressive.")

Anyone with a passing understanding of contemporary Russia can understand the outrageousness of recognizing Vladimir Putin for a contribution to human rights. Doubly ironic is bestowing an award in recognition of the reunification of Germany to a former KGB officer who recruited Germans to spy on their countrymen. Stationed in Dresden from 1985 through 1990, Putin worked hand-in-hand with the Stasi, the East German secret police and one of the most ruthless intelligence services known to man, whose files, according to the historian Timothy Garton Ash, stretched for 110 miles when opened after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The initial decision to give Putin the award may owe partly to the fact that the vice chairman of Quadriga's selection committee, Lothar de Maiziere, was forced to resign from the cabinet of ex-Chancellor Helmut Kohl over rumors that he had worked for the Stasi. But the Quadriga controversy was more than the result of some personal favor. And the organization's choice to rescind its prize to Putin at the behest of Havel is not only a story of the dueling reputations of world figures. The whole episode is illustrative of a worrying trend in German foreign policy that has seen it move closer to Russia at the expense of its traditional Western allies and the new democracies to its east.

Germany's relationship with Russia hinges on its heavy consumption of Russian-supplied gas. Germany, the industrial powerhouse of Europe, is the biggest customer of Gazprom, the Russian energy conglomerate, which Putin has assiduously used as an instrument of foreign policy over the past decade. German-Russian relations reached their peak under the former Social Democratic chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, who once described Putin "an impeccable democrat." Just weeks after stepping down as chancellor in 2005, Schröder became chairman of the board of Nord Stream, a project that would transit Russian gas directly to Germany through a pipeline under the Baltic Sea. By avoiding land routes and bypassing transit countries in central and Eastern Europe, Nord Stream will allow Russia to cut off gas to these nations while continuing to ship it to Germany. Not for nothing did the late American congressman and human rights advocate Tom Lantos deem Schroeder a "political prostitute" in 2007.

Relations between the two countries thawed under Schroeder's Christian Democrat successor, Angela Merkel, who grew up in East Germany and was thus all-too-familiar with the reality of Russian dominance. But over the past five years, relations have slowly returned to the Schröder-esque status quo. When Putin's handpicked successor and puppet, President Dmitry Medvedev, mentioned the word "candidate" in passing during a speech at a conference in Hanover in July, Merkel replied, "Candidate, that's lovely to hear." With a Russian presidential election coming up next year, the remark was hardly accidental. This utterance amounted to, in the words of "International Herald Tribune" columnist John Vinocur, "an approximate political endorsement by a German chancellor of a nonannounced candidate for president" in a country where elections are a farce. More significant was Merkel's March decision, highly controversial within Germany, to abstain from the United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing a no-fly zone over Libya, distancing Germany from France, the U.K., and the U.S. and putting it on the side of Russia and China.

To be sure, Germany has serious economic considerations to weigh regarding Russia that cannot be written off. But being Gazprom's largest customer and Russia's biggest trading partner comes with its own levers. Trade is a two-way street; without a German consumer, Gazprom and its subsidiaries would not be able to collect fees. The relationship between Germany and Russia, in other words, is one of co-dependence, and, on the German side, could become more independent were Berlin serious about weaning itself off Russian gas. The German government's knee-jerk decision in the aftermath of Japan's Fukushima disaster to end its use of nuclear power demonstrates a lack of seriousness when it comes to energy generation.

As with many aspects of contemporary German political life, another reason for Berlin's timorousness toward Moscow is in some part attributable to historic guilt from World War II, when Nazi forces committed heinous acts against Soviet citizens and starved millions of Soviet troops to death in Operation Barbarossa. It is this very sort of admirable, if at times misplaced, feeling of responsibility for the past, however, that doesn't exist in Russian leaders of the Putin mold. "There's a sense we should avoid conflict at any cost," Rolf Fuecks, director of the Heinrich Boll Foundation, recently told RFE/RL about the attitude of the German political establishment toward Russia. The uproar over the Quadriga award, however, indicates that many Germans do not approve of the way in which their country's foreign policy has been headed.

"People, your government has returned to you!" Havel triumphantly declared in his 1990 New Year's Address, his first major speech as president of a free Czechoslovakia. The loss of a human rights prize is hardly bound to make Vladimir Putin blanch; the former KGB man is not known for his sentimentality. But how fitting that a lifelong dissident who sacrificed so much to return government to his people should strike a blow for freedom against a dictator who has stolen government from his.

originally published in "World Affairs Journal"

TUNIS -- The battle to depose Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi has yet to be won, but his former subjects in neighboring Tunisia are already celebrating victory.

As reports of scattered gun battles across Tripoli continued, cheering Libyans took to the streets of the Tunisian capital, waving the horizontal red, black, and green flag, that of the short-lived Kingdom of Libya that the anti-Qaddafi rebels have adopted as their own. With the "Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya," as Qaddafi is officially known, somewhere in hiding, many young Libyan men residing in Tunisia are preparing to join the front lines.

"The morale is high," said Hitham Bouishai, a 24-year-old native of Tripoli who defected from his position as a border guard not long after the uprising began in February. He joined the rebels and fought against Qaddafi's army for several months before crossing the border into Tunisia last week. When I met him on August 22, he was organizing a 3 a.m. convoy of 135 cars that would ferry Libyan exiles from Tunisia to Tripoli.

Young men like him are alternately inspired and horrified by the rumors they hear about what's happening in their homeland. The news that rebels had seized an arms depot in the northwestern city of Misurata, replete with "1 million Kalashnikovs" from the former Soviet Union, gives him hope that Qaddafi's last stand is about to end. He swears to me that rebels found a human meat grinder in the home of Abdullah al-Sanussi, Qaddafi's brother-in-law and the head of the Libyan intelligence service.

In waging an uprising against Qaddafi, Libyans took the lead from their Tunisian neighbors, who had launched a successful revolt against their own dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, just a month prior. A walk along Tunisia's windy streets, listening in on the conversations being had in the city's boisterous cafes and teahouses, revealed that the ongoing situation in Libya was much on the minds of the people who lit the flame of what has now become known as the "Arab Spring."

Last night's celebrations are a continuation of those which began late on August 21, when rebels made their final push on Tripoli and seized control of most of its neighborhoods. That evening in Tunis, a massive crowd demonstrated outside the Libyan Embassy here to celebrate Tunisia's formal recognition of the National Transitional Council as the legitimate government of Libya, draping the building with the rebel flag.

Repaying Qatari 'Traitors'

Though Qaddafi's regime is teetering on the edge of collapse, the dictator recently reached into his old bag of tricks by attempting to pull off a feat of international terrorism, a field in which he used to lead, what with the bombings of Pan Am 103 or a Berlin discotheque patronized by U.S. servicemen. The jubilation here in Tunis stalled briefly when news emerged late on August 22 that Qaddafi had dispatched one of his soldiers, Abd Erazzak Al-Rajhi, to bomb an Arab embassy in Tunis. Rajhi turned himself in to Tunisian officials, who announced the news at a press conference.

Though the Tunisian authorities did not reveal which country's embassy was the target, word on the streets of Tunis is that Qaddafi wanted to send a final message to Qatar, owner of the Al-Jazeera cable network that has relentlessly and sympathetically covered the Libyan uprising. Libyan state television ­- when it was still controlled by Qaddafi -­ frequently referred to the Qataris as "traitors."

In El-Nasr city, a trendy suburb north of Tunis, the streets filled with cheering Libyans. As honking cars pass by, young Libyan girls wave flags while yelling, "Zenga, zenga!" ironically echoing Qaddafi's promise to hunt down his citizens "alley by alley." One woman, who sits exhausted on the sidewalk, tells me that she came to Tunis from the eastern city of Benghazi, via Cairo. She fled in February, right after the revolution began, with her 10-year-old daughter, Fatma. Her husband is fighting with the rebels and, while Benghazi has long been a rebel stronghold, she cannot afford to return home. She has been living in a cheap hotel, cared for by a charity run by Libyan exiles.

I ask her what she wants to become of Qaddafi. She looks at me and makes a throat-slitting motion with her hand. Fatma walks up and says, "He should suffer first."

'We Are Better Than Him'

Mohammed Abukhres is a 59-year-old Libyan ethnic Berber who has spent half his life living in the United States, some of those years as a caregiver for the mentally handicapped and most of them working odd jobs. "I used to take freedom for granted in the States," he tells me. He is missing several teeth and probably hasn't showered in several days, but he has a wry sense of humor and speaks perfect English.

An early student activist against Qaddafi, he came to appreciate his American freedom even more when he returned to Libya in 2006 to care for his dying mother. The government seized his passport at the airport and Abukhres ultimately lost his permanent Green Card status as a result. While he desperately wanted to return to the United States, "I think things happen for a reason," he told me. "I'm happy I was in Libya when this shit started."

When protests broke out in Tripoli against Qaddafi in mid-February, Abukhres immediately joined the crowds. "I never felt as proud of myself as I did when I came out and protested. I saw people drop dead before my eyes." Since escaping to Tunisia in May, he has helped raise money to buy food and medicine for fellow Libyan refugees under the auspices of an organization called the February 17th Gathering, which commemorates the day when the Libyan uprising began.

"I want him to be prosecuted in a democratic, just way," he tells me when I ask him what should be done with Qaddafi if he is found alive. "The bad part of me wants to see him shot. But we are better than him."