Blogging the democratic revolution
It’s a hectic last week of school. Lots of essays that I have to B.S. for tomorrow.
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…
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!
A Saudi national studying at Arizona State University, a party school by all counts and from my own recollection, thinks that the school should sanction the possibility of expelling students for wearing any clothing with the ASU logo when posing for dirty, dirty magazines. The ASU Web Devil reports! If one student leader has his way, ASU students will no longer be able to grace the covers of Playboy and other sexually explicit magazines without consequences. Undergraduate Student Government President Yaser Alamoodi is hoping to pass a rule that would prohibit males and females from posing in magazines he believes…
Falsifying elections is a tough job, so you need just the right authoritarian government to do it. Armenia was another country on the list to do so this weekend, with a constitutional referendum that, despite polling places being nearly empty all day, reported a relatively high turnout. But given that the opposition simply boycotted the referendum, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if a “yes” vote actually did occur, from what I can tell, and the specific amendments — like giving more power to the parliament, granted the judiciary more independence, and giving diasporans citizenship — sound like the first…
Hey, why is only President Putin and his entourage of ass-kissers dancing? That’s because the first parliamentary elections in Chechnya since 1997 were held on Sunday, in what the dear leaders over in Moscow are hailing as the last legal step toward restoring the region. It’s all a flash-by cinematic sequence for those watching in the West, while on the ground the situation continues to deteriorate with democracy nowhere in sight. Officials are inflating turnout by the double-digits, the winning candidates were all hand-picked by the Kremlin, and it seems like the majority of voters were Russian soldiers. Doesn’t seem…
– 15,000 people protesting incredible election results in Azerbaijan tried to set up a permanent demonstration, but we quickly beaten down. – Police in Egypt are arresting hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood members and preventing people who would vote for them from entering polling stations. Knife and gun fights are ensuing.
The big but unsurprising news out of China is that — golly gee! — the government tried to cover up the huge chemical spill in the Songhua River that has closed down water supplies for nearly four million people in the city of Harbin. The International Herald Tribune reports on the timeline of events and how the government was finally forced to act. Similarly, the Washington Post describes the political fallout caused by the coverup. Environmental destruction due to the fast pace of industrialization and lack of regulation has been a big issue on the minds of the Chinese people…
It looks like the courts in Chile may finally be getting their man once and for all. General Pinochet, who overthrew the Soviet-funded communist government and served as president until he stepped down in 1990, has been charged by the court for abused of human rights during his rule in which more than 3000 people were killed. SANTIAGO, Chile (Reuters) – One day before his 90th birthday, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was under house arrest on Thursday and facing tax fraud and human rights charges in his toughest legal situation yet. On Wednesday, Pinochet was placed under house arrest…
The rift between Poland and Belarus continues, with the leading Polish newspapers blacking out their front pages to protest censorship in its less democratic neighbor. Could you imagine the papers here in the U.S. taking such a stand? WARSAW, Poland – Poland’s two leading newspapers blacked out large sections of their front pages Wednesday in an eye-catching protest against media repression in neighboring Belarus. The main pages of Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita looked as if a censor had taken a black marker to them, with most text and photographs crossed out. Amnesty International, which led the protest, wrote at the…
Pajamas Media hosted another one of its blogjams, where in this case the editorial board members discussed ways that the company could be more “bloggy” and overall revolutionary in its approach to media. Well, after reading the whole thing, I have one big suggestion that I think the editorial board should take into account when revising how it provides content. Since I wasn’t part of the blogjam, it’s going here. Don’t takes news from Xinhua, which you may or may not know, is the official state news and propaganda agency of the Chinese government. Google News does it, and it…
Garry Kasparov, writing for Newsweek International, calls President Putin out on the misnomer that he is a true ally of the West in the war on terror, and even less so committed to building a democratic society. And he really nails it. The embattled George W. Bush isn’t going to pick a fight with Mr. Putin on matters of democracy and economy when these days everything is secondary to the war on terror. Here we come to the most dangerous delusion of all????????that a strongman in the Kremlin is good for security and necessary for stability. What started as a…
The State Duma, in all of its scary Soviet decor, has completed its first reading of a bill that seeks to essentially halt the abilities of NGOs operating in Russia. It will forbid foreign funding, force them to register with the government, and allow the authorities to monitor every last activity that these organizations undertake. Most dreadfully, it will allow the government to brand any of them as an extremist organization, paving the way for politically motivated closings. It’s Yukos all over again, but instead of focusing on oligarchic opposition, the authorities are now focusing on civil society opposition. This…
It has been ten years since the Dayton Accords ended officially ended the war in Bosnia, which killed over 200,000 people and displaced over a million more. The agreement marked a peaceful separation of nations into a loose, autonomous confederacy of three peoples who had been forced together under Soviet totalitarianism and left to kill each other after its fall. But after all these years, it’s possible that these people are willing to begin the move toward living — together — under a unified nation. The first step will be reforms to enable more effective governance, along with the capture…
It’s been one year today since the beginning of the Orange Revolution, Ukraine’s democratic movement that has solidified a prompt for change across the entire region. Genuine and copycat attempts have broken out all over, some failing and some reaching realization. This blog was started based on inspiration drawn from the Orange Revolution. With its one year anniversary, what has the legacy of these mass popular movements been? What do you think the future holds for this part of the world, where freedom and democracy have been so elusive? There are plenty of assessments out there, but I want yours’.
Looking for a fiercely independent country in the heart of Central Asia, with a penchant for free enterprise and building a working democracy? Then you’re looking for Mongolia, a stab in the heart to all of the region’s dictators. Well, President Bush just made history by being the first U.S. president to visit Mongolia, a visit he used to praise the country’s developing democracy. Gateway Pundit has a roundup. Registan has links to Mongol blogs.
Two rounds of voting out of three have been undertaken in Egypt’s parliamentary elections, with the Muslim Brotherhood scoring approximately one fourth of the total seats. But after its initial strong showing in the relatively peaceful first round, the government took the initiative to crack down on the organization by arresting hundreds of its members during the second round. DAMANHOUR, Egypt: Police arrested hundreds of activists from Egypt????????s strongest opposition group and thugs trying to intimidate voters shot dead a man in legislative elections yesterday. The thugs shot Mohamed Ibrahim in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria and set fire to…
Election results from Egypt’s first round of parliamentary elections are coming in, and due to the greater transparency and lesser violence than before, the Muslim Brotherhood took a big chunk of seats. Of course, there were instances of fraud, intimidation, and genereal irregularities, but they seem to be committed on an individual basis instead of being part of a widespread campaign. Members of the more liberal opposition, however, didn’t fair so well despite that the Al-Ghad party candidate, Ayman Nour, taking second place in the presidential election. Egypt’s ruling party won 112 seats in the first stage of the country’s…