One September morning in Washington, D.C., a car exploded, killing a former Chilean ambassador to the United States, Orlando Letelier, and his assistant Ronni Moffitt. It was no accident.
Operatives had planted a bomb under Letelier’s Chevrolet Chevelle and triggered it by remote control as the car approached Embassy Row in the heart of the nation’s capital.
It was 1976, and the Cold War was playing out across Latin America. In Chile, the ruthless military dictator Augusto Pinochet was kidnapping, torturing, and killing hundreds of thousands of people while sponsoring a systematic campaign to target his critics abroad. Chilean operatives had already assassinated or attempted to assassinate dissidents exiled in Argentina and Italy, but the brazen plot to silence Letelier, a prominent and vocal critic of the dictatorship, shocked Americans. As the FBI agent assigned to the case told The Washington Post in 2016, “This was the first case of . . . state-sponsored terrorism in Washington. . . . It was the first time we were dealing with a foreign government as a suspect.”
It may have been one of the first and most visible instances of a foreign government reaching beyond its borders to silence a dissident on US soil, but it certainly wouldn’t be the last.
Transnational repression in the internet age
At a hearing in February, leading human rights groups including Freedom House and Human Rights Watch urged Congress to take action against what they called a decade-long rise in “transnational repression” — a term that encompasses a wide range of tactics employed by authoritarian regimes to punish defectors. “We’re finding evidence that more and more governments are engaging in this kind of repression around the world,” says Yana Gorokhovskaia, a research director at Freedom House.
Twenty-first century tactics like online harassment and digital surveillance have made it even easier for repressive governments to bully their critics into silence. Nowadays, autocrats don’t always have to send a hit squad to quash dissent. They can send an army of online trolls instead. “What’s key to understand is that almost no targets experience just one kind of repression,” says Gorokhovskaia. “Digital threats and harassment often build into physical threats.”
Turkish journalist Amberin Zaman has endured an onslaught of online threats and harassment for more than a decade. After her reporting on widespread demonstrations against the Turkish government (known as the Gezi Park protests) in 2013, she received “hundreds of tweets, using the most obscene language, threatening to kill me, threatening to rape me.” After Zaman interviewed a Turkish opposition leader in 2014, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called her a “shameless militant woman” who should “know her place.” In 2019, Turkish authorities opened criminal investigations against dozens of journalists and academics, including Zaman, based on frivolous allegations of terrorism. Zaman, who now lives in London, likens the repeated online attacks she has received to “cyber lynchings.”
Some usual suspects — and some surprising ones
Other common tactics that authoritarian regimes are deploying against critics abroad include abuse of consular services, such as revoking passports and visas, which can leave critics exiled and at the mercy of asylum laws in democratic countries; forcing an asylum country to hand over a dissident to an uncertain and potentially dangerous future in their home country; kidnapping; and assassination — 13 countries have assassinated or attempted to assassinate 48 people since 2014, notably China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. In many cases, especially as a result of coordinated online harassment, critics fear for their reputations and jobs, and many find themselves fearing for the lives and livelihoods of their family and friends back home.
In 2021, Freedom House released a landmark report on the ways repressive regimes target their critics at home and abroad. And by 2022, the watchdog organization had compiled 854 cases of people being targeted by 38 countries across 91 different locations since 2014. China alone is responsible for 30 percent of all cases, having attacked a broad swath of its persecuted minorities — especially Uyghurs — as well as human rights defenders and Communist party critics.
A surprising number of people are targeted by countries that US officials haven’t always viewed as hostile to democracy, like Turkey and India. Turkey in particular has bewildered allies with the speed and intensity of its international campaign against Erdoğan’s critics. It has targeted thousands at home and abroad, including canceling passports for 230,000 suspected dissidents to limit their mobility and aggressively pressuring countries harboring critics to return them to Turkey to face criminal penalties — which they have succeeded in doing in at least 58 cases.
India’s methods of targeting critics abroad are especially good examples of 21st century tactics.
Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership, the Bharatiya Janata Party has systematically sought to silence political opposition, environmental and human rights activists, and religious minorities — all of which the government sees as a threat to India’s sovereignty and jingoistic interests. And the government is able to muzzle detractors by calling for coordinated digital attacks. A murky organization calling itself the “Disinfo Lab” targets US-based critics of Modi with claims designed to discredit them and make them subject to online harassment. Although the lab claims to be independently run, three former employees of the lab told The Washington Post that it was set up by an Indian intelligence officer. Sumit Ganguly, a national security expert at Indiana University Bloomington, told the Post in 2020 that such ties “would be crossing a line reminiscent of KGB tactics during the Cold War.”
Sabrina Siddiqui, a Wall Street Journal reporter, is a target of Modi’s online troll army. During a joint press conference with Prime Minister Modi and President Biden in 2023, Siddiqui asked the Indian prime minister about his government’s human rights record. In retaliation, Modi’s allies, including a senior government official, have subjected her to a barrage of criticism and threats online, enough so that she canceled plans to travel to India, fearing for her safety. Human Rights Watch argues that the harassment Siddiqui has endured could constitute crimes under federal stalking laws prohibiting threats, harassment, and intimidation.
Although the majority of people persecuted by the Modi government live within India, the country has gotten much bolder about targeting its vast diaspora.
That time India revoked my citizenship
A request filed under India’s Right to Information Act by Indian journalist Vijayta Lalwani shows the Modi government has abused its consular powers to target critics of Indian origin, revoking overseas citizenship status for more than 100 people since 2014. India does not allow dual citizenship, but millions of people in the Indian diaspora have an Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) card, which functions as a bridge back to the country. Holders of this card can live and work in India without a separate visa.
One of the people whose overseas citizenship was revoked in the past decade was me.
After a year of documenting extrajudicial killings, unlawful detentions, and other human rights violations perpetrated by the Indian military in the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir in northern India, I was summoned by the Ministry of Home Affairs, told to hand over my OCI card, and deported within a few days. I had lived in India for more than three years and had not intended to leave — until I was forced to. I was never given an official justification.
Neither was Ashok Swain, a prominent academic and writer who emigrated from India to Sweden in the 1990s, who has been an outspoken critic of Modi and his party. Modi’s government canceled his OCI card in 2020 and banned him from returning to the country, preventing him from seeing his 80-year-old mother.
Swain’s attempt in 2022 to challenge his ban elicited only a cryptic government statement that Swain had been “found indulging in illegal activities inimical to the interests of India.” The worst part, Swain says, is many of his fellow Indians believe the allegations. “I am not a spy. They have created an atmosphere where everybody suspects me. They have made me an example to stop academics abroad from taking a position [against Modi],” he says.
Aatish Taseer, a British-American writer and journalist, received a letter canceling his OCI status in 2019 after he published an article critical of Modi in Time magazine. “In bland bureaucratic language [the letter] informed me that the country I was raised in and lived in for most of my adult life was no longer mine,” Taseer wrote.
Multiple forms of repression are often linked, and for critics who have been targeted by online trolls or had their citizenship revoked, the specter of something worse is omnipresent. Letelier, the diplomat killed in Washington, was stripped of his citizenship and banned from Chile before Pinochet’s operatives assassinated him.
Of course, the threat of physical violence and death to oneself or one’s family members is the ultimate danger. But the revocation of a passport or citizenship status or a maelstrom of online threats can often achieve the same desired outcome for repressive regimes: silence.›
The importance of accountability
“I have spoken to so many Indians living in the United States whose biggest fear is that the BJP troll army will inspire someone to actually hurt them or their families,” says John Sifton, Asia advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. “It’s very disconcerting for people to get massive amounts of hate speech and death threats over the internet.” A recent assassination plot targeting members of the Sikh separatist movement in the United States and Canada has only compounded fears. US authorities say an Indian official was behind the plot, which succeeded in killing a Sikh leader, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, in Canada last year.
Democratic countries have a responsibility to better protect dissidents seeking refuge within their borders, human rights groups argue. Such steps might include refusing to hand over a person for trial in their home country or providing extra security in response to a credible threat of kidnapping or assassination. The United States, for example, has generally refused to extradite political dissidents who have sought refuge within our borders and worked to hold state perpetrators accountable for the most serious abuses. Letelier’s assassins were convicted and imprisoned, although Pinochet himself eluded justice. The US government also has long harbored Fethullah Gülen, an influential Turkish cleric whom Erdoğan sees as a political threat. Gülen resides on a secretive compound in Pennsylvania.
In crucial instances, however, the Biden administration has allowed geopolitical interests to supersede human rights. Although the US government condemned the killing of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi — whose assassination US intelligence agencies believe was personally ordered by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the State Department ruled in 2022 that the Saudi royal was immune from prosecution.
“Governments have not paid a high price for trying to target dissidents abroad,” Freedom House’s Gorokhovskaia says. “If the Saudis don’t pay a price. . . you have to ask yourself, will other governments, especially partners [to the United States], pay?”
But if the United States wants to keep global authoritarianism at bay, it must make clear, including to friendly governments, that repression has no place among its allies.
Christine Mehta is the associate editor of Ideas. She can be reached at christine.mehta@globe.com.