Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters

Eric Dupond-Moretti, one of the lawyers for former French budget minister Jerome Cahuzac, who was sentenced to three years in jail for hiding an offshore bank account, walks past gendarmes during Mr. Cahuzac's tax fraud case in Paris, France in February.

In 1998, the Nigerian oil minister, Dan Etete, awarded the concession to oil block OPL245 to Malabu Oil and Gas – for $2 million, five days after the company was set up. It was later found that Mr. Etete was the real owner of Malabu, and that he had awarded himself the concession for a pittance: When it was sold 13 years later, he reportedly made $1.1 billion.

He is now facing corruption charges in Nigeria and in Italy.

In late 2007 and early 2008, a company in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) linked to Russian mobsters wired at least $900,000 to another BVI company owned by a Russian businessman who was later sanctioned by the United States for his ties to Syria's chemical weapons program.

These examples are just a hint of the the $8 trillion to $36 trillion estimated to be hidden away in the world’s financial system. Using shell companies and banks that keep their identities hidden, corrupt politicians, drug kingpins, tax evaders, and money launderers secretly park their money in countries far away from the prying eyes of law enforcement and tax officials. But an international push to make their identity public is gaining traction.

From Switzerland to the United States to Britain and the European Union, the shields of secrecy that have protected criminal transactions are beginning to fall like dominoes. While these moves don’t represent the beginning of the end of hiding assets overseas, they may represent the end of the beginning in a global movement toward new standards of transparency.

The latest domino that’s wobbling: BVI, the Cayman Islands, and other British overseas territories. The British Parliament Tuesday amended a bill on money laundering to oblige the territories to introduce public ownership registers revealing the true owners of companies incorporated in their jurisdictions.

The US is considering similar legislation. Behind the gathering momentum for the anti-secrecy movement is the growing realization of how corrosive financial secrecy can be.

“There are so many examples of shell companies being misused,” says Elise Bean, former staff director of the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and aide to former Sen. Carl Levin (D) of Michigan, who began investigating shell companies in 2000. “You can look at North Korea. You can look at drugs. You can look at opiates. You can look at sex trafficking. Everyone knows this is one of the big scourges in the world today.”

Nacho Doce/Reuters

The corporate logo of the Odebrecht SA construction conglomerate is pictured at its headquarters in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The company was ensnared in Brazil's largest-ever corruption investigation. The company has paid $3.5 billion in settlement over charges of bribes that flowed in part through shell companies outside Brazil, according to Reuters.

Anti-corruption activists are hailing the British Parliament’s decision, due to come into force in 2020, as a major victory. “This is the key step to making it very much harder for kleptocrats and others to loot their countries” and hide the proceeds, says John Christensen, a veteran campaigner and director of the Tax Justice Network, a lobbying and research group.

Impetus from a crisis

The global financial crisis provided the key impetus for the movement to crack down on offshore tax havens and financial secrecy, says Nicholas Shaxson, author of “Treasure Islands,” an exploration of the offshore world.

“Governments were short of revenue and seeking new sources; there was huge public anger at bailouts and banking is at the center of the offshore system; and there were rising concerns about inequality when offshore is an inequality machine,” Mr. Shaxson says. “NGOs played an absolutely crucial part, but the big beast was the financial crisis.”

In 2009, leaked documents on about 52,000 Americans as well as other foreign nationals with secret Swiss bank accounts, led to the US pressuring Switzerland to release the names of its non-Swiss account holders. Concerns about terror financing and tax evasion led the US in 2010 to pass laws requiring foreign banks to alert the US when Americans open foreign bank accounts. The move convinced the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which represents the developed nations, to embrace a common reporting standard for all its members.

In 2012, the world’s leading countries, represented by the Group of Twenty, agreed on new international reporting standards requiring multinational companies to publish the accounts of their subsidiaries in all the countries where they operate, making it harder to shift profits to low-tax jurisdictions. Last year, G20 member states introduced a system of automatic information exchange among national tax authorities.

“Bit by bit, international standards are being created,” says Mr. Christensen. “This is all being extended in the direction” of secretive jurisdictions such as Switzerland. But activists and journalists investigating fraud, kleptocracy, embezzlement and other financial crimes “hit a brick wall when we can’t establish the ownership of a company,” he adds.

New pressure on 'shell companies'

That’s why anti-secrecy activists say the parallel move – to maintain public registers of the “beneficial” or real owners of a corporation – is so important.

Under the leadership of then Prime Minister David Cameron, Britain in 2016 became the first nation to require a public register of its corporations. Others have followed suit, including the European Union late last year. A new EU directive on money laundering means all 27 EU countries will have to introduce public registers by 2020. Britain’s move this week extends that same requirement to its overseas territories.

SOURCE:

The Tax Justice Network Financial Secrecy Index, 2018

|

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

The biggest impact of Tuesday’s decision in the British Parliament will be felt in the US, says Maggie Murphy, senior global advocacy manager at Transparency International, an anti-corruption campaigning group.

“States such as Wyoming used to say they are not as bad as the British overseas territories," she says. “Now ... they have lost that argument.”

And, for the first time, activists in the US say they have a shot at passing legislation that would also require a public register for corporations.

Possible steps in US

“Interest in this issue has just skyrocketed,” says Gary Kalman, executive director of the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition, a policy group focused on combating offshore tax abuse. The most action is centered on the House, where legislation has not only broad bipartisan support, but has attracted support from banks, multinational corporations, and realtors, among others.

“2018 is, in fact, the first year that we have the kind of interest and support that could move legislation,” Mr. Kalman says.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, has made moves to increase transparency in high-end real estate deals. The Obama administration got the ball rolling in 2016, with a pilot program by the federal Financial Crimes Enforcement Network requiring that title companies identify the real owners behind shell companies used to buy pricey residences in Manhattan and Miami. The Trump administration has twice extended the program and has expanded it to include five other US metro areas.

So far, FinCEN has found that about 30 percent of the transactions have involved people who have been flagged in prior bank reports for suspected money laundering or fraud.

The BVI and the Caymans both criticized Britain’s move, with the former calling for a private registry and the latter talking of options including a potential legal challenge.

Both have moved to modernize and diversify their financial industries beyond setting up secret corporations. “Back in the ’50s and ’60s, people would fly in with briefcases full of cash,” says Craig Boise, a tax law professor and dean at Syracuse University who has spent years studying both tax havens. Still, the latest change “is likely to cause a pretty seismic shift in their business model.”

In the days since Friday's summit between the leaders of North and South Korea, a newfound optimism has taken hold in Seoul. “Spring has come to the Korean Peninsula,” proclaims a giant banner stretched across the side of a downtown office tower. Newspaper headlines have been equally hopeful, as have many people.

“I cried when I saw it,” says Lee Chan-young, a 20-year old culinary arts student, referring to the moment on Friday when the two leaders first met. “When they shook hands, it was like a dream come true.”

The meeting in the border village of Panmunjom last week was no doubt historic. It was, among other things, the first time a North Korean leader has set foot in the South. But it was also only the start of what will surely be a long and complicated process. Establishing peace and denuclearizing the peninsula won’t come easy after seven decades of hostilities, to say nothing of the much loftier aim: reunification.

Reunification has long been the ultimate – even sacrosanct – goal of both Koreas. The term “unification” appears four times in the joint statement signed by the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and the South’s president, Moon Jae-in, after their meeting. It even made it into the statement’s title: “The Panmunjom Declaration for Peace, Prosperity and Unification of the Korean Peninsula.”

Yet such mentions don’t make the prospect of reunification imminent. In fact, many South Koreans view the idea as increasingly far-fetched. Decades of division have created an ever-widening economic and cultural gap that analysts say could take years to overcome – and that’s if South Koreans want to overcome it at all. Reunification has lost much of its appeal to a generation of young people who have no memory of a united peninsula. Many of them see little to gain from trying to bring together the capitalist, democratic South and the impoverished, totalitarian North.

It’s not only the younger generation that holds this view. Overall public support for reunification has steadily declined in the South Korea, where 57.8 percent see it as necessary, down from 69.3 percent in 2014, according to a survey published last year by the Korea Institute for National Unification, which is funded by the South Korean government. But among young people, many of whom aren’t swayed by appeals to ethnic heritage, the number is far lower. According to the survey, only 38.9 percent of those in their 20s say reunification is necessary.

“Sure we are the same people and even the same race,” says Ban Jae-hoon, a 28-year-old office worker in Seoul. “But politically and militarily we have been enemies as well.”

Mr. Ban’s views reflect the findings of a recent study published by the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank in Seoul. The survey found that young South Koreans are more likely to see North Korea as a nation threatening the South’s security rather than as a people sharing the same ethnic background. For most of their lifetime, North Korea has been defined by its military provocations and nuclear ambitions. They don’t share the pain caused by the peninsula’s divide and the 1950-53 Korean War.  

“Unlike those in their 60s and older, who still shared a sense of national identity with the North Koreans, many in their 20s merely perceived North Korea as an ‘enemy’ or a ‘stranger,’ ” says an analysis of the survey. “Many young South Koreans take the North Korean threat so seriously that they believed the greatest benefit of unification would be the lower risk of war on the Korean Peninsula.”

Still, that doesn’t mean they’re calling for an immediate reunification. Only 7.2 percent of young people who responded to the survey said the peninsula should reunify as soon as possible. For many of them, the gap between the two countries is still too large.

The North’s economy is dwarfed by the South’s, the 11th largest in the world. Then there are the gaps in infrastructure, education, and health care, all of which leads economists to estimate that reunification could cost as much as $5 trillion – a cost that would fall almost entirely on South Korea.

“Young South Koreans are not willing to accept the economic burden,” says Jo Dong-joon, the deputy director of the Institute for Peace and Unification Studies at Seoul National University. “They think the two Koreas are too different now.”

While reunification remains a distant goal – and one that could profoundly alter East Asian geopolitics – both North and South Korea have pledged to come together in smaller ways. During their summit on Friday, Mr. Moon and Mr. Kim agreed to resume temporary reunions between relatives separated by the Korean War and expand civilian exchanges. They also announced plans to set up a liaison office in the North Korean city of Kaesong, the site of a now-closed industrial complex that had for years been the biggest joint project between the two nations.

Joan Cho, an assistant professor of East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., says these kinds of exchanges – along with sustained economic development in the North – could go long way in strengthening public support for reunification in the South. So, too, could ongoing meetings between the leaders of both countries.

“The fact that Kim Jong-un came to South Korea had a positive effect on young South Koreans,” Dr. Cho says. “They saw a side of him that they hadn’t seen before. He was joking and smiling.”

Yang Eun-jun, a 26-year-old university student in Seoul, says she was encouraged by this other side of Kim.

“I don’t think he is a good person, but my opinion of him has improved a little bit because he has made an effort to have dialogue,” she says. “He’s not completely crazy.”

But Cho warns that it’s too soon to know how long that effect will last. “It's hard to tell if the summit really changed anyone’s mind about reunification,” she says. “This could just be a honeymoon period.”

In another gesture of goodwill, Kim has also promised to readjust his country’s clock to match the time zone in South Korea. The two countries had used the same time zone until 2015, when the North created its own by setting its clocks 30 minutes behind those in the South.

Kim said his decision to unify the time zone was “the first practical step for national reconciliation and unity,” according to the North's official Korean Central News Agency. There are many more to go.

For generations Mexicans have been moving abroad, mostly to the United States, where they’ve often tried to leave behind the troubled politics of home.

“I never considered voting in Mexico” after moving to the US, says Sergio Guerrero, a shuttle driver in Houston, who left the central state of Puebla more than two decades ago in search of work.

“Why would I vote for the corrupt politicians that created the conditions that [pushed me] to leave in the first place?” Mr. Guerrero asks.

But Mexicans abroad play an important role back home, largely in the form of remittances, and, observers say, they are starting to wake up to the influence they can have politically, too.

Roughly 12 million Mexicans live abroad, and those eligible to vote “could play a very important role, or even decide this year’s election” on July 1, says Rafael Fernández de Castro, director of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego. “This is enormous. But it’s only the potential.”

Mexicans first voted in presidential elections from abroad in 2006, but turnout has been unexpectedly low. An estimated 4.2 million Mexicans outside the country were eligible to vote in 2006, and roughly 32,000 cast ballots, or less than 1 percent, according to Víctor Alejandro Espinoza, director of the Department of Public Administration Studies at Mexico’s College of the Northern Border (COLEF). In 2012, there was a slight uptick in participation, to about 40,000 ballots cast from abroad.

But a recent reform allowing voters to renew their required IDs at Mexican Consulates and register to vote online could be a game-changer in this year’s race. As of April, more than half a million voter IDs have been delivered to Mexicans abroad, and close to 670,000 requests for IDs have been made.

An increase in recognition of the importance and potential power of voters outside of Mexico has led to more efforts by consulates, individuals, and community organizations to get expatriates involved. Mexicans abroad, particularly those in the US, play a key role in bridging economies and cultures. Their economic contributions back home – and in some cases their leadership from afar – position them to express their say in how Mexico moves forward, experts say.

“There are millions of people living in the US that are very highly connected to their family in Mexico. They travel back and forth, they send remittances, they set up businesses,” says Professor Fernández de Castro. “We are seeing more people vote [from abroad] in each election, and that will only be strengthened. This compliments the increasingly transnational way of living.”

Getting out the vote

For Marisol Ibarra, who moved to the United States from the border state of Nuevo León seven years ago, if she wants to stay connected to home, she has to vote.

“If you don’t vote, you have no say in your country. You have no right to complain,” she says.

But back in February, she started to worry. Work colleagues and neighbors in the Houston suburb where she lives mentioned over and over how they weren’t prepared to vote this year. Everyone agreed it was important, but life was getting in the way.

In some cases, their voter ID had expired while they were away from home. Others had children turning 18 in the US, about to vote for the first time. Sure, there was new legislation that would allow them to get their paperwork in order before the registration deadline on March 31, but everyone she talked to seemed put off by the bureaucracy and the need to take time off school or work.

Then she had an idea. She was seated next to someone from the Mexican Consulate in Houston at an event organized by the Association of Mexican Entrepreneurs, where she’s a chapter manager.

“Can we do something about this together?” she remembers asking.

In just over a month before the registration deadline, she helped set up expedited appointments – often on the weekend – to get roughly 200 people registered to vote from abroad. Other individuals and organizations in the US and Mexico also have upped their outreach this year. The Mexican consulate in Houston conducted traveling consular days to reach distant communities so people could renew their IDs.

A social-media-focused effort called Voto Chilango – based in Mexico City, where for the first time voters abroad can participate in the mayoral race this year – set up a 24-hour hotline in the US to answer questions about voter registration.

Fernando Villanueva, his wife Dolores Boone, and their daughter, who recently turned 18, all benefited from Ms. Ibarra’s outreach.

They’ve been in the US for about three years, but the Mexican elections matter to them.

“If I had the opportunity to go home tomorrow, I would,” says Mr. Villanueva, who moved to Missouri and then Texas for an opportunity with a Mexican manufacturing company. “There’s a lot of poverty in Mexico, but the majority of Mexicans aren’t narcos or rapists,” he says, alluding to President Trump’s comments on the 2015 campaign trail. “We need work and the opportunities in Mexico aren’t sufficient.”

Experts estimate about 150,000 Mexicans will cast ballots from abroad this year. That’s not insignificant, given that the 2006 race was decided by roughly 240,000 votes.

“Our votes are equal to more than [the eligible voters in] some states in Mexico,” says Rosendo Villarreal, Ibarra’s husband.

That underscores a key shortcoming of voters abroad, however: they don’t vote as a solid bloc. That’s top of mind this election, where the leading politician is known for his populist rhetoric and only recently walked back threats to reject the North American Free Trade Agreement upon his victory. Third-time presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, was polling at 38 percent in Mexico as of early April, 18 points ahead of second-place candidate Ricardo Anaya Cortés.

While Villanueva, a businessman, and many of his peers living in the US say they support Mr. Anaya from the National Action Party, Fernández de Castro believes the diaspora in the US will be backing AMLO “in a higher proportion” this year.

“It’s not a homogeneous group,” says Professor Espinoza, from COLEF. A Mexican in the US without legal documentation may not be as likely to vote as someone there with a work visa, and when they do vote, their priorities back home likely differ, he says. AMLO, for example, appeals to the have-nots in Mexico, with promises to stick up for the poor and little fear in calling out Trump as a “bully.” 

The one thing voters outside Mexico have in common? They “are solidly anti-PRI,” Espinoza says, referring to Mexico's ruling party, which was in control for nearly seven decades. (It was the “perfect dictatorship,” Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa famously quipped.) The PRI returned to power in 2012 under current President Enrique Peña Nieto, who cannot run for reelection.

“They are seeing Mexico from the outside,” Espinoza says of voters abroad. “For many, the reason they left is associated with the PRI.”

Taylor Luck

Camels graze underneath wind turbines on pastoral lands in the region of Tafila, Jordan, April 25, 2018.

Mohammed, 14, walks, as he does every day each spring, with his flock of 200 sheep along the still-green slopes of southern Jordan.

Above them, fan blades 170 feet long whirl in the sky.

“That is the future,” he says, pointing his wooden staff toward the wind turbines. He nods to his sheep. “And this is our present. Side-by-side.”

In a troubled tribal town in Jordan, residents are turning to wind energy to lift the region up from underdevelopment, unemployment, and unrest, and as a model for green energy.

In the town of Tafila and surrounding villages, known collectively as the Tafila governorate, 100 miles south of Amman, some 96,000 residents have long lived in the shadow of the capital.

There is little investment or industry. Most private-sector enterprises are farms and mom-and-pop grocery and supply stores. Most Tafila residents have long relied on government jobs such as the police and the army. The rest rely on farming and shepherding sheep and camels.

Unemployment in the region has consistently been among the highest in the kingdom: as of late 2017, unemployment in Tafila hovered close to 25 percent, well above the national average of 18.3 percent. Youth unemployment is over 40 percent.

The lack of jobs, investment, and, say residents, respect and attention from the government led Tafila to become an epicenter of a nationwide protest movement when the Arab Spring hit Jordan in 2011.

For three years, young men marched through the town’s main street on a weekly – and at times, daily – basis, demanding jobs, price controls, a democratic opening, and an end to corruption.

“There was a sense of despair and that, for us as young Jordanians in Tafila, we either had no future or a limited future,” says Rakan Arrfou, 27, who, although he did not take part in the protests, had many friends and university classmates who took to the streets.

It was amid this atmosphere of frustration, disillusionment, and public anger that a company quietly began pitching a very unusual project: a wind farm.

The Jordan Wind Project Company (JWPC), a consortium of Jordanian, French, Cypriot, and Emirati firms, had been selected by the Jordanian government in 2011 to build the country’s first-ever wind farm.

Tafila, with its exposed hilly plains and dramatic gorges that open westward onto the Jordan Valley below, is home to the highest annual wind speed in Jordan at more than 7 meters (23 feet) per second. With such potential, the JWPC was set to build a 117-megawatt wind farm in Tafila’s agricultural plains.

There was only one problem: No one had ever built a commercial wind farm in the Arab world before, and certainly not in rural southern Jordan. Very few in Tafila had heard of the technology, let alone considered 100-meter-tall wind turbines standing in the middle of their ancestral pastoral lands.

Overcoming distrust

“Here we are coming to a conservative, largely farming society and telling them that we are going to build wind turbines – something many cannot even picture in their minds,” says Samer S. Judeh, JWPC chairman.

“It is not an easy sale in the US or Europe, how do you do it in rural Jordan?”

The JWPC also had another obstacle: distrust. Jordan’s outlying governorates have a long history of bold mega-projects billed by the government as cure-alls that either never materialize, arrive decades late, are tainted with corruption, employ few locals, or do not employ locals at all.

To sway skeptical residents and community leaders, for months the JWPC held town-hall meetings with community leaders, the business community, teachers, university students, and average citizens. Explanations were given on the economic benefits of wind energy, the minimal impact on the environment, and cuts in carbon emissions.

Taylor Luck

Mamdouh Al Rafoua, a community leader in Tafila in southern Jordan, stands amid rows of barley on his farm, which he has leased to the Tafila Wind Farm, April 25, 2018.

Then there was the question of land.

Land is a sensitive subject for Jordanian tribes, whose livelihood is based on farms and grazing lands, part of a harmonious cycle for centuries.

Families elsewhere in the country have accused the government and influential investors of using pressure to push them off tribal lands or seizing land plots in the name of the state, only to sell them as a privatization scheme.

Landowner rights

The JWPC made a decision: it was not going to buy or take away land. Instead, it would lease land from local residents for a 20-year period.

The company made an important stipulation: landowners would retain the right to continue to use their land as they see fit, save for the quarter-acre plot each wind turbine stood on.

Landowners also retained the right to sell or rent their land at any point during the rental agreement, as long as the new owners or tenets agree to the wind farm’s conditions.

Those who rented their land could continue to plant crops, graze sheep and camels, and set up tents during the summer.

In late 2011, Mamdouh Al Rafoua, former mayor of the nearby village of Buseira, became the first to sign a lease. Seeing a trusted community leader sign up, dozens more took the plunge. Now the Tafila Wind Farm rents over 1,000 acres from the local community for 38 turbines.

Today Mr. Al Rafoua grows hills of barley and stalks of wheat over 25 acres, which are home to three turbines. He continues to harvest most of the crops, leaving a third for local shepherds’ flocks to graze on, continuing a centuries-old arrangement.

“Right now, I am renting 25 acres of land, but have only lost a quarter acre of productivity,” Al Rafoua says, standing between rows of three-foot-high green barley stalks swaying in the shadows of a wind turbine.

“There is no smoke, no dust, no pollution, and plenty of economic opportunity,” he says. “This is a deal too good for anyone to pass up.”

Urban flight

During the construction phase, the Tafila Wind Farm created 360 temporary jobs, handed out some $30 million in contracts to local contractors, rented more than 300 pieces of heavy equipment, and pumped more than $10 million directly into the region’s economy.

Yet project staff cautioned Tafila residents from the onset: The project was not a cure-all, nor would it create hundreds of permanent jobs.

Since it opened in 2015, the Tafila Wind Farm has hired 60 workers, 90 percent of whom are from Tafila, including 11 engineers to run the plant. The project has even contracted three full-time bird watchers to monitor migratory birds and endangered birds residing at the nearby Dana Biosphere Reserve.

Despite its modest numbers, for many families the wind farm was a much-needed lifeline and led to a reversal in the growing migration of young residents to the capital.

For years, engineering graduates in Tafila had two options: stay unemployed at home or leave for the big city. Neither option was too appealing.

Often, the only jobs available to Tafila engineers were in plastic factories in Amman and Zarqa. The $400 monthly salary would barely cover the cost of rent in the capital, food, and transportation. Tafila residents were unable to save money, help their family, or plan to marry. Currently, there are more than 400 unemployed engineers in Tafila alone.

Now, for the first time in a generation, Tafila’s best and brightest can return home.

“We grew up believing that we would have to leave home to make a living,” says Mohammad al-Mahasneh, 33, who after working at a conventional power plant in Zarqa was appointed as an electric engineering manager at the Tafila Wind Farm.

“Now I can be at my door within 15 minutes.”

Arrfou, the 27-year-old Tafila resident, spent two years living in his parents’ home applying for jobs before the call came: Tafila Wind Farm was hiring.

“If it wasn’t for this opportunity, I would still be at home like most of my classmates,” says Arrfou, who is entering his third year with the wind farm.

More wind farms on tap

Wind farm staff caution that the jobs are a modest contribution, but also the beginning of a much-needed turnaround for Tafila’s fortunes.

“People believe one wind farm will sort out unemployment alone,” says Mr. Judeh, the JWCP chairman. “It doesn’t, but 20 projects like it could, and that is what we are paving the way for.”

Sure enough, encouraged by the success of the wind farm and community buy-in, several other local and international firms are looking to follow suit and tap into Tafila’s wind energy potential.

Several large-scale wind farms are either under construction, in the pipeline, or being considered in Tafila, with a 100-megawatt wind farm from GE to be completed in 2019 and a 49-megawatt Korean wind power plant in 2020.

With all these wind projects in the pipelines, firms are looking to employ dozens of Tafila engineers, contractors, construction workers, security guards, and birdwatchers. And the Tafila Wind Farm is serving as the perfect training ground for a new generation of wind energy experts.

In cooperation with the local Tafila Technical University, the wind farm is taking on a half-dozen engineering students each semester, giving them over 200 hours of training and hands-on experience in wind energy and management.

On-the-job training at the Middle East’s only large-scale commercial wind farm is making Tafila university graduates a hot commodity, with tens already being hired by the new projects.

“We have shown that Tafila residents have the same qualifications and skills of those from Amman and Western capitals,” says Al Rafoua, the landowner and community leader.

“If we can make electricity from the air, then we can make change on the ground.”

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Zina Salim Hassan Hamu (l.), a 21-year-old Yazidi woman who promotes the cause of Yazidi women and girls through photojournalism and Firuz Yogbekov (r.) of Tajikistan, who sets up debate clubs where young Tajiks develop critical thinking and skills that can help them resist Islamist extremist propaganda are two recent recipients of the US State Department's Emerging Young Leaders Award.

If a single event from the State Department Wednesday makes it into the history books, it would probably be the ceremonial swearing in of Mike Pompeo as the 70^th secretary of State.

It was President Trump’s first visit to a department that has flagged under his presidency. Vice President Mike Pence also attended the ceremony, held in the ornate Benjamin Franklin room. In his remarks, Mr. Pompeo repeated the pledge he made at his confirmation hearing to bring “swagger” back to American diplomacy.

But later in the day, at the other end of the building, another ceremony was held. This one honored 10 young people, ranging in age from 18 to 25, from Iraq, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Turkey, Pakistan, Panama, Norway, South Africa, and Tajikistan, as well as a Yazidi woman getting her university education in Lithuania. 

The Emerging Young Leaders Award recognizes young change-makers each year with not only a ceremony and a nice crystal statuette, but, more importantly, two weeks of discussions and workshops with experienced practitioners in their chosen fields of positive social change. The State Department holds events like this fairly often, honoring stand-outs from around the world in categories ranging from educators and young entrepreneurs to women in government and development.

Yet the ceremony also underscored the value of the kind of soft-power diplomacy that has been dismissed and even come under outright attack by an administration more focused on the exercise of hard power.

After all, Pompeo’s predecessor, Rex Tillerson, viewed much of the department and the work of its diplomats as superfluous enough to merit lopping off nearly a third of the State Department budget – even as the Pentagon was getting a bump-up in funding.

But to listen to these young people’s stories is to hear a variety of ways key United States interests are being promoted around the world – from countering Islamist extremism to furthering prosperity through women’s and girls’ development.

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Tanzil Ferdous (l.) of Bangladesh, who works with Rohingya refugees as part of her work to promote youth and women's development and Dania Hassan (r.) of Pakistan, who at 18 has developed a program that takes volunteers into underprivileged schools to promote education in everything from personal hygiene to green living and community security are among the most recent recipients of the State Department's Emerging Young Leaders Award.

To hear Tanzil Ferdous of Bangladesh describe how she works with refugee Rohingya children so that they can one day resume their education back home in Myanmar, is to hear how US dollars are helping address a humanitarian crisis and stabilize an explosive Southeast Asian conflict.

To hear Zina Salim Hassan Hamu describe how she endured the 2014 ISIS-perpetrated genocide of her Yazidi community in Iraq, and persevered to tell the story of Yazidi women and girls through her photojournalism, is to hear how international humanitarian assistance can spark the human spirit.

And to hear Firuz Yogbekov of Tajikistan describe how he shared his love for debate by creating clubs where schoolkids can develop the critical thinking skills to resist and debunk the allure of radical Islamism, is to hear how modest US support can help nip Islamist extremism in the bud – before it must be repelled by costly military intervention.

Indeed to Mr. Yogbekov’s way of thinking, the support the US provides through programs like the Emerging Young Leaders Award is really about promoting the values Americans hold dear around the world.

“A program like this is not simply spending money on some activities for a group of foreign young people coming to Washington, but it inspires a lot of efforts and movement on things that seem to be important” to the US, he says. “So I would say the Americans paying taxes, they are paying for inspiration. They are paying for something new on problems facing all of us.”

Dania Hassan of Pakistan exemplifies how a seed planted by a US public diplomacy program can sprout into something larger promoting US interests. In 2016, when Ms. Hassan was 16, she took part in another State Department-sponsored program, the “Summer Sisters” exchange, which brought her to a summer school program at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md.

Once back in Pakistan she established “Fun to Learn,” which sends volunteers into underprivileged schools to teach lessons in personal hygiene, green living, and personal and community safety, through song, cartoons, and other “fun” activities.

“We take the serious things like school safety and incorporate some fun into it,” says Hassan, who notes that much of her organization’s small budget is funded by Americans. And what that tells her, she adds, is that Americans understand how countries and people are interconnected and face many of the same problems.

“People may say one thing, but to me the American people are kind, caring, and passionate about helping others,” she says. “I’d say my organization gives an example of that.”

Ms. Ferdous of Bangladesh says the recognition she’s getting from the State Department is providing a second wave of inspiration for her work with Rohingya refugees.

“It’s given me so much motivation to see how, even though they have gone through so much and lost so much, they still have hope,” she says of the Rohingyas. That prompted her to create what she calls a “child-friendly safe space” in the refugee camp: a series of three tents where Rohingya refugee children go for education and creative activities, to develop digital literacy, and for play.

Ferdous is keen to point out that the funding to get the children’s “safe space” off the ground came from Washington – for her a reflection, like the award she’s received, of the importance Americans put on humanitarian issues.

“None of us thought we’d get a prestigious award – but this tells us that people in a completely different part of the world see value in what we are doing,” she says. “This is an inspiration for us, and motivates us to work more.”

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect the correct spelling of Firuz Yogbekov's last name. 

Reuters

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker presentS the final proposal for the bloc's next long-term budget, in Brussels, Belgium, May 2,

One of the world’s greatest acts of charity has been the aid given to the newer members and poorer nations of the European Union by wealthier states, especially since the admission of many former Soviet-bloc countries in 2004. This “cohesion” money is largely spent on reducing inequities in trade, transport, and communications across the Continent.

Yet soon those funds may also be used to ensure the EU has no inequities in democratic standards, such as freedom of the press and independence of judges, that lie at the core of Europe’s civilizational identity.

On May 2, the European Commission, which is the bloc’s bureaucratic body, proposed that the handouts be curtailed to any member state that has “deficiencies in the rule of law,” as EC President Jean-Claude Juncker put it. The move, which does not require the unanimous approval of the EU, is aimed particularly at Poland and Hungary. Right-wing nationalist governments there have violated norms that protect the liberty of individuals, media, and businesses from arbitrary rule.

For years, the EU has sought ways to punish Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party for its assaults on the independence of the judiciary. And as Hungary has curbed press freedom and taken other authoritarian steps, it, too, faces challenges from EU institutions. Under the bloc’s rules, however, it is difficult to discipline a country once it is a member.

The Commission’s threat to cut aid is a clever way to force Warsaw and Budapest to think twice. And it’s not merely a message about values. Rather the proposal is framed as a practical concern about aid being stolen or the possibility of a legal dispute not being handled fairly in a country’s court system. In other words, member states would be held to account for “sound financial management” of EU largess.

For Poland and Hungary, ending aid from the EU would have significant consequences. Most of their infrastructure spending has come from the EU. And in 2016, the subsidy amounted to 2.6 percent of Poland’s gross national income and 4.2 percent of Hungary’s.

Holding the line against dictatorial tendencies is key not only for the current EU but also for its expansion plans. Seven countries on the edges of Europe are candidates to join. This club of democracies has been critical in preventing war. It is also a model in showing rule of law can ensure prosperity and freedom.

The EU charity has built a safe home for Europe. Keeping it safe may require not contributing to countries that stand outside its democratic norms.