Blogging the democratic revolution
Jim Hoft has a couple of roundups, here, here, and here in chronological order. Pajamas Media also takes a look at what others blogs are saying.
As growing numbers of elections approach and get down to the wire, Boz has all the latest poll numbers from around the region, giving one indication as to how they may go. Read it here.
Hundreds of students marched in the streets against corruption, with a cardboard model of a ????bagman????in a cage as well a model pig, both of which reprented corruption. The story in El Universo is here.
A brief timeline of events: – Iranian President says that Israel should be “wiped off the map.” – The United Nations condemns his remarks. – Iranian President calls for Israel to be moved to Europe and denies the Holocaust. – The United Nations is shocked — shocked! — by the remarks. Oops, I seem to have missed an event right there in the middle, right after the whole “Israel should be wiped off the map” thing. A week ago, the United Nations held a “Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People” at the UN headquarters in New York City, which…
From this: To this: See the BBC report here. A Croatian general charged with war crimes has been arrested in Spain, the UN’s chief war crimes prosecutor says. Ante Gotovina – the third most-wanted suspect from the Balkan wars – was held in the Canary Islands on Wednesday. Gen Gotovina, 50, is accused over the death of about 150 Serb civilians during a Croatian offensive in 1995. Make sure to read the post over at Balkan Baby, who hilariously sums up the mood. The third most wanted man in the Balkans (after Karadzic and Mladic) and the main reason Croatia…
Check this out. It’s the launch of a new Middle East human rights initiative to bring together activists from the Middle East and America. They’re doing an essay contest for people under the age of 26 to share ideas about what to do. Check out the website here. It’s being done by a good group of people and I recommend doing so. Click “read more” to see the press release.
Eurasia Daily Monitor has an in-depth article detailing pressure by Georgian President Saakashivili’s Rose Revolution government on the judiciary in the country. Widespread allegations about restrictions on judicial independence since the Rose Revolution have received new credibility following sensational confessions by four members of the Georgian Supreme Court. Tamaz Iliashvili, Merab Turava, David Sulakvelidze, and Nino Gvenetadze have publicly accused Kote Kublashvili, chairman of the Supreme Court, and Valery Tsertsvadze, secretary of the Supreme Council of Justice, of exerting political pressure on judges and forcing them to make decisions favoring the government on specific cases. Currently, the Judicial Discipline Commission…
Leaders of the ASEAN regional grouping, growing tired of the Burmese military junta’s unwillingness to fulfill its obligations, has called on the country to democratize and release dissident leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Kuala Lumpur, Dec. 9 (AP): Southeast Asian nations on Friday demanded that military-ruled Myanmar expedite democratic reforms and free Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, in the strongest display yet of their growing frustration with the junta. Myanmar has pledged to allow democracy under strong pressure from its neighbors as well as the U.S. and other Western powers, but has so far failed to deliver. Foreign Ministers…
The North Ossetian parliamentary investigation into the Beslan massacre is out, and guess who caused the fabled first explosion? Last week, the results of a North Ossetian parliamentary investigation into the terrorist attack in Beslan were made public. The report went largely unnoticed. The pro-government media shied away from a number of awkward conclusions, while the opposition was dissatisfied with the level of invective directed at the government of President Vladimir Putin. There is no question that the parliamentary commission, headed by Stanislav Kesayev, deputy speaker of the North Ossetian legislature, came under enormous pressure. A good deal was also…
It’s a hectic last week of school. Lots of essays that I have to B.S. for tomorrow.
Egypt has now completed the first round of the the third stage of its three-stage parliamentary elections, and is now completing the run-offs for the third stage. Egypt’s electoral system is complex and sometimes confusing to outsiders because the same election involves three stages, each for a specified geographic region of the country, followed by run-off votes in districts where no candidate received a majority. So there are six total election days. Following the first two stages, with roughly 300 out of 454 seats determined, the ruling National Democratic Party had 195 seats, the banned Muslim Brotherhood, running candidates as…
Blogging live from Caracas, Venezuela today, I found myself stuck in an hours long taxi line at a mall in Chacao, an upper middle class neighborhood in Caracas. Amid the prettily decorated mall trees, people were carrying red and green cello-wrapped baskets of Bimbo-brand Panettone and bottles of Concho y Toro wine, something nice for the holidays but certainly not rarified upper class delights. The line moved unbelievably slow and darkness fell after a couple hours. I started asking people around whether they voted, what they thought of their president and what they thought the future held. I had expected…
Burmese officials loyal to the regime are all meeting (read: getting drunk) at a convention that is supposed to put the country on the path to democracy. At least, that’s what the government spokesman are saying. Mad about not being invited to the party are every concerned democratic country on earth, the overwhelmingly popular opposition, and anyone else who might have an inkling of desire to reform the country. I know I didn’t get my invitation! Myanmar’s ruling generals on Monday opened a round of talks on drafting a new Constitution and steering the isolated country toward what the junta…
Russia, for some reason allowed to be a part of the OSCE, is fighting tooth and nail to dismember the best election monitoring team in the world. Why? Because behind Russia’s supposed concerns that the monitors are politically motivated, it is actually worried that the unveiling of more phony elections in its backyard will spark further pro-West revolutions. Instead, it would prefer that the OSCE monitoring team be complacent and say that elections are free and fair when they really aren’t. Charming, no? Well, we can’t have that. Ljubljana, 5 December 2005 (RFE/RL) — U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns…
Here’s the untold story of the tiny country of Tonga, with a population of 100,000 spread over 171 islands and a monarchy that refuses to reform itself. The past several months have been tense. Thousands of people are organizing and protesting for democracy. The government is coming under intense pressure, but the church is serving to prop up the regime. Oppositions MPs demanded the king begin reforming the government by Dec. 5, which would include popular election of all parliamentary deputies, choosing of the prime minister by the parliament, and the reduction of the king to a ceremonial role. When…
You may have noticed a lack of updates today. While it’s partially due to end of semester term papers and finals (oh, you should see my last-ditch effort at putting together a piece on Lebanese consociationalism as a model for Iraq), it also has to due with a very special project I was putting together. The Venezuelan blogosphere scooped the mainstream media when it came to the phony elections held on Sunday, but the problem was that nobody was really telling the story. Well, problem solved. Read the special report at Pajamas Media here, which gives well deserved press coverage…
Publius has been nominated as a finalist for the Best Group Blog category in the 2005 Weblog Awards. You can vote by clicking here, and you can vote every 24 hours. So please do that! It’s quite an honor to be a finalist, after less than a year of blogging, and on the same level as other legendary blogs . And it certainly wouldn’t have been possible without the contributions of A.M. Mora y Leon, Kirk H. Sowell, Daniel Holt, and Daniel Berczik. They’ve been here since the beginning with me and this blog would never have come so far…
That????s what happened in Venezuela today. I????m blogging live from Caracas, and today I saw utterly empty polling stations, one after another, guarded only by tinpot military men with big guns and the occasional red-t-shirted chavista troll on the street corner, standing around looking mean and intimidating for voters. On and off it rained, as if to signal the end of Chavez????s fortunes. A news story about the fiasco is here. Miguel Octavio and I went across the entire city of Caracas in search of a polling station full of people. Or half full. Or people at all! We targeted…
People are voting in presidential elections today in Kazakhstan, though the winner is a forgone conclusion. Oil-rich Kazakhstan, the most prosperous country in ex-Soviet Central Asia, voted Sunday in a presidential election widely expected to give Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has led the country for the last 16 years, another seven-year term. Amid allegations of both official and opposition misdeeds, Nazarbayev was so confident of victory over his four challengers that he scheduled a gathering with supporters at a sports complex in the capital, Astana, on Monday morning, just minutes after election officials planned to announce preliminary results. Many opinion polls…
Hong Kong is like no other place on earth. It’s a sanctuary on an island, ceded to the British in 1842 and ruled by China since 1997. The city is a frothy blend of these two cultures in what has matured to be one of the most liberal economies and societies in the world. It is an outpost of Western ideas on the flank of communism. Perhaps that’s why it is the only place in China where tens of thousands of people can march for universal suffrage on a Sunday afternoon without fear of reprisal. Dec. 4 (Bloomberg) — Tens…
With the Muslim Brotherhood gaining an unprecedented amount of seats in this month’s parliamentary elections, the authorities in Egypt clamped down to the point of surrounding polling stations with riot police and knifing down voters. These voters, in turn, went as far as using ladders to sneak into polling stations so as to simply cast a ballot. But there is another group that factors into this electoral equation: judges, who are at every turn ruling against the regime on a number of electoral issues. In this case, the court has decided that NGOs can monitor the electoral process through video…
Sorry about the lack of updates everyone. My birthday was on Thursday and people had plans for me that apparently didn’t involve a computer screen. I’ll make it up over the weekend!
02.12.05 ö Diplomatic sources in Caracas report about an opinion trend that appears to be gathering force. The “electoral boycott” hypothesis, peddled by Venezuela’s officialdom and its OAS sidekicks, has it that the decision of opposition political parties to withdraw from Assemblymen elections on December 4 constitutes, at best, a “boycott” and at worse “an electoral coup.” Chavez opponents also stand accused of having, irresponsibly, broken an agreement with the OAS whereby participation in the race was a given. Let me be real clear about the reason that prompted such a reaction by the opposition. On Wednesday 23 an audit…
As Bolivia’s Dec. 18 presidential campaign, one that will influence the entire direction of a continent kicks, into high gear, Eduardo Avila has compiled a comprehensive roundup of what’s being said in the Bolivian blogosphere. There are the usual good analytical blogs, but he’s found some photo blogs and new names we’ve not seen in the past. The whole this is on Global Voices and is well worth a click here.
Val Prieto at Babalu has found the most incredible Italian film quietly describing the always constant move toward democratic revolution. Just to see it is light and edifying – its charm and creativity and emotion capture the spirit perfectly. See the whole marvelous thing here.