Blogging the democratic revolution
I’m currently reading The Oligarchs, a truly fascinating book about the six everyday Soviet citizens who bought up Russia during the period of privatization and came to rule the country from behind the scenes. It’s very good, very detailed, and told smoothly like a story. The most fascinating part about it is not so much what these men did, but how they did it — and the author starts from the beginning, going from the mid-’80s through the late-’90s — involving exactly how they built their empires in a legally deficit environment where everything goes. Check it out.
It’s the weekend everyone — and you know what that means. No more blogging until Monday. Consider this an open comment thread. UPDATE: Hey, it looks like my prediction that the Ukraine-Russia gas crisis would fuel Ukrainian nationalism and drive it further toward the West turned out to be true. “KIEV, Ukraine Jan 7, 2006 ???????? At the height of a gas dispute this week, anonymous text messages zipped across Ukrainians’ cell phones calling for a boycott of all things Russian. ‘Remember the Great Famine, Stalin terror ??????? If you are a Ukrainian, forward this to friends,’ one message read.”
Iraq the Model is talking about the death, shortages, corruption, and scandals that are taking a huge toll on public opinion in the country. Omar, known pretty well for his optimism, says that, “it is a fact that it hasn????????t been this bad in Iraq ever since the 9th of April 2003.” While I’m not one to disparage what we’re doing to build a healthy democracy in the country, it’s not easy to take a romanticized view of what’s going on and what it takes to solve these problems. I wrote many times, with much alarm, about the electoral violations…
Asharq al-Awsat has run an interview with ex-Syrian vice president Khaddam, who recently accused Assad of being involved in the Hariri assassination, and is now facing charges of treason and corruption by the Syrian government. In this interview, he counters what his detractors are saying by coming up with multi-million dollar accusations of corruption against Assad and his main men. And, most interestingly, he has a plan for reform in the country. Q: What are you current priorities? Do you want to reform the regime, reform it, or topple it? A: This regime cannot be reformed so there is nothing…
Here are some articles about RosUkrEnergo, the middle-man company being used in the gas deal between Russia and the Ukraine, and the particularly shady way it’s involved. – RFE/RL goes into the history of the company and why it was created. Let’s just say it involved a certain ex-president of Ukraine, a certain current president of Russia, some “unnamed Ukrainian investors,” and millions of dollars shuffled under the table at the top of both governments. – David McDuff posts several articles dealing with the scandal. – Abdymok notes that after Tymoshenko’s cabinet was dissolved, and former SBU head Oleksandr Turchynov’s…
It’s only lately with all this free time on my hands that I’ve been able to regularly read over Publius’ blogroll, so I stopped over at Tim Russo’s Democracy Guy blog to see if he was talking at all about his time working for NDI in Armenia. More than ever, it seems. He’s self-publishing a book online about his time doing democracy activism, providing slice-of-life details and funny anecdotes from the ground. The latest is about trying co-exist with scorpions, and failign. You’ll like it. He’s put up six chapters so far. Check them out here: 1, 2, 3, 4,…
Somewhat predictably, after the united opposition failed in its attempt to enact a colored revolution in Azerbaijan — or at least prevent voter fraud at the municipal level — it completely fell apart. This Eurasia Daily Monitor article goes into detail about how the Azadliq “Freedom” coalition has split up on the national level following two months of disputes about strategy, and how other parties have found themselves dissolving internally as well. It’s a must read article for understanding the nature of the post-election opposition movement. This is what we could consider a classic case of what happens to a…
Our favorite babe of politics has come out swinging in the settlement of the gas dispute between the Ukraine and Russia, and will be challenging the deal in court. The reason has little to do with the actual price negotiated, but much more to do with the single issue that she really stands out on: corruption. Apparently, the intermediary company is a bit shady; and by a bit shady, I mean a lot shady, and was once at the center of a Tymoshenko-led organized crime investigation nixed by the Yushchenko government. Neeka sums up the details. But, as noted above,…
Despite the arrest of thousands of peaceful demonstrators, the further slaughter of hundreds more, and the trial the leaders of the democratic oppositions, the United States will not be joining other World Bank donors in revoking aid to the Meles regime. According to the article, the U.S. doesn’t feel this is necessary as there has been progress toward democracy and because the aid is being used for development projects and the combating of AIDS. Therefore, the aid is actually being used to help foster democracy. Or so the argument goes, which is why the ambassador has called the idea of…
In a recent poll, Russian citizens picked superlatives for their politicians, naming among others who is the most honest, the smartest, and even who is the sexiest. As for the latter, ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky of the ironically named Liberal Democracy Party took the prize for the sexiest politician in the country. Just take a look at this handsome mug. He’s no pre-poison Yushchenko. I don’t see him going in the Babes Of Politics section anytime soon!
The gas crisis that has shaken relations between the Ukraine, Russia, and the European Union is now over. The air is clearing, but whatever the politicians are saying now, the damage has been done. So the question begs: who came out on top of this? Or perhaps we should be asking who came out on bottom, and though the answer may seem counter-intuitive at first, the answer is Russia. President Putin was embarrassed late last year when his favored candidated in the Ukrainian presidential election, Viktor Yanukovich, was defeated by pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko following the Orange Revolution. Demand for…
Marina Ottaway from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace outlines in a brief policy paper what the current strategy for Iraq should be. To sum it up, the current momentum toward federalism is irreversible and the most important thing is to 1) convince Sunnis to accept it and 2) make sure that they get their fair share of the oil in their region. The U.S. can use troops withdrawals as a confidence-building measure that will eventually lead to this and, subsequently, a drop in violence. I agree that the oil distribution issue is probably the biggest issue facing the success…
Michael Totten has a really good piece in today’s Opinion Journal talking about how it is Lebanon, not Iraq, that is the Middle East’s first liberal democracy. I’m certainly inclined to agree with him. Lebanon is just about everything we could hope to strive for in Iraq over the next decade. A lot of his article focuses on the electoral system used in Lebanon, which is very strange by Western standards but guarantees people’s liberties by forcing the different groups in the country to share power. He says that, “Syria and Iraq, which also are composed of rival ethnic-religious sects,…
It looks like Nicholas Burns has been making some promises — promises I like! Turning to the agenda for 2006, Burns said the United States wants to continue to work through NATO as the core trans-Atlantic link but to broaden and extend NATO????????s mandate to Africa, Asia and the Middle East. In working with the European Union, ???????the next great mission for us together is spreading the freedom we enjoy in Europe and America,??????? Burns said. ???????We also need to complete our work in Europe by attending to the Balkans, Ukraine and Russia,??????? he said. ???????We need to continue fostering…
Former Vice President Khaddam, never a favorite character of mine, quoted Assad as having threatened Rafik Hariri before his assassination and now the Syrian government wants to try him for treason. Welcome, everyone, to another episode of “The Bold and the Syrian.” DAMASCUS (AFX) – The Syrian government will try on high treason charges former vice president Abdel Halim Khaddam, who has accused Damascus of involvement in the murder of Lebanese ex-premier Rafiq Hariri, and investigate him for corruption. The announcement came after Khaddam’s explosive allegations that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had threatened Hariri before his death, which he made…
Instead of letting them phase in following the New Year, President Yushchenko wants to hold a popular referendum on the constitutional changes that were agreed upon during the Orange Revolution last year. I smell a — dun dun dun — political ploy! KIEV (Reuters) – President Viktor Yushchenko said on Friday constitutional changes reducing his powers from the New Year could destabilise Ukraine and suggested he might call for a referendum on the matter. The changes, approved by parliament a year ago at the height of Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution”, were part of a deal to win broad agreement on restaging…
I see problems with this on multiple levels. CAIRO, Dec. 30 – Egyptian riot police officers rushed into a crowd of unarmed Sudanese migrants early Friday morning, killing at least 23 people, including small children, after the group refused to leave a public park it had occupied for three months hoping to press United Nations officials to relocate them. The Sudanese – thousands of men, women and children – were packed into what amounted to a traffic island in an upscale neighborhood. They had fled war-torn Sudan, but the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees office in Cairo – across…
These guys have the right idea. In a rare protest against an official media crackdown, about 100 journalists from one of China’s most aggressive daily newspapers have gone on strike after the paper’s editor and two of his deputies were fired, local journalists said Friday. The editor of The Beijing News, Yang Bin, and deputy editors, Sun Xuedong and Li Duoyu, were dismissed Wednesday as part of what media watchdog groups describe as a sweeping government campaign to tighten control over the media and the Internet. The striking journalists, about a third of the staff, stopped work on Thursday after…
Is it me, or did Publius‘ first birthday just pass yesterday?
Now that I’ve fully recovered — it was so bad that it must have been bird flu — I can finally get back to what’s going on with the Iraqi election results. Only it’s already beginning to wind down. The political groups are criss-crossing with dozens of talks all over the country to work out a compromise. New elections are certainly out of the question, but it looks like some of the demands of the Sunnis and seculars will be fulfilled and the Shia-Kurdish alliance will evolve into more of a national unity government. Final results will be released in…
I woke up yesterday morning to a conference being broadcasted on C-SPAN called “The Future of the Middle East,” and since I was still sick, I sat up and watched through the whole thing in between shots of Tylenol. There were a couple of people on the panel fielding questions, but the most interesting comments tended to come from the Turkish ambassador to the United States, Faruk Logoglu, with regards to Islam and building democracy in the region. Here are three of the remarks he made that I think are worth remembering: 1) We should not be asking whether democracy…
After being released on bail in March for the presidential campaign, Ayman Nour, the liberal opposition leader who got second place in this year’s presidential election, has been convicted of “forging signatures” for his candidacy registration papers. He has been given five years of prison time. The charges are false. The judiciary is corrupt. And this is certainly not the way to build a liberal democratic society. It has completely called into question Mubarak’s dedication to reform; not that anyone truly believed in it anyhow. The U.S. government is not taking kindly to the news. An Egyptian court sentenced a…
My gift this year was the flu from my family. I wish they could have included some Tylenol with that! Anyhow, loyal readers, what are you all doing today?
The Sunni lists, along with ex-PM Iyad Allawi’s multi-confessional secular list and others, have joined together to contest the results of the December 15 election in order, at the least, to have the results reviewed and their complaints addressed. At the most, some members of this new coalition have called for new elections altogether. BAGHDAD, Iraq Dec 22, 2005 ???????? Dozens of Sunni Arab and secular Shiite groups threatened to boycott Iraq’s new legislature Thursday if complaints about tainted voting are not reviewed by an international body. A representative for former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi described the Dec. 15 vote…