Blogging the democratic revolution
Eurasia Daily Monitor has a very in depth article concerning the parliamentary and government rivalries going on in Ukraine. In particular, PM Tymoshenko wants President Yushchenko to break with parliamentary speaker Lytvyn and put together a parliamentary majority so that they can finally get WTO legislation passed. In this case, the problem is in the pudding, and the current make up of parliament isn’t very favorable to that happening. The first demand is that Tymoshenko remains prime minister until the 2006 election. The second demand is to exclude Lytvyn’s NPU from the 2006 election coalition (see EDM, August 3). In…
As most House spending bills do, this one almost slipped under the radar. They just approved $24 million dollars to fund democracy in Belarus. The U.S. House of Representatives voted late Wednesday to earmark $24 million for promoting democracy, development of political parties and independent media in Belarus over the next two years, the RIA-Novosti news agency reported. The bill on financing the U.S. foreign policy in the years 2006-2007 was passed by 351 vs 78 votes, the House of Representatives Secretariat reported. In particular, the document authorizes the U.S. government to spend $24 million on assistance in building democracy…
The new terrorist president of Iran will have to give an address to the United Nations soon. The Bush administration is thinking of preventing that from happening. The Bush administration is considering taking the unprecedented step of preventing a visting head of state from addressing the United Nations in New York by denying a visa to Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, Iran’s new elected conservative president. Officials said a decision rested on investigations into whether Mr Ahmadi-Nejad was involved in the 1979 US embassy hostage crisis and the killing of an Iranian-Kurdish dissident leader in Vienna in 1989. Iran denies his involvement in…
I’m watching this very closely, because it’s so interesting and complex a situation. Seventeen soldiers stage a coup while President Taya is out of the country, people rejoice in the streets, and everything goes back to normal. There’s more to it than that, but the normalcy is what makes it such an interesting case. The new military junta did make some maneuvers, however. Noukchott – The army officers who seized power in Mauritania moved to strengthen their hold on the arid northwest African country on Thursday, dissolving parliament but keeping the ministers of deposed leader Maaouiya Ould Taya at their…
The leader of the Yeni Fikr youth movement has been arrested by authorities, who are claiming that he took money from Armenian special intelligence in order to prepare a revolution in Azerbaijan through a plot hatched by the United States NDI. Azerbaijan’s Prosecutor-General’s Office announced on 4 August the arrest of Ruslan Bashirli, leader of the opposition youth movement Yeni Fikir (New Thinking), on charges of plotting to overthrow the Azerbaijani leadership at the instigation of Armenian intelligence operatives. Those allegations, which the Armenian National Security Service and Bashirli’s fellow Azerbaijani oppositionists have both rejected, highlight Azerbaijan’s ongoing suspicion and…
As the ongoing feud between the Polish and Belarussion government over ethnic Poles in Belarus continues, and with all countries in the area outside of Russia declaring support for democracy, Polish activists are taking the issue up in a way that Elvis would be proud of. I’ll let the headline speak for itself, “Polish activists rock against Lukashenka.” 3 August 2005 (RFE/RL) — Young Poles want to use rock music to help Belarus’s pro-democracy opposition resist the regime of Belarusian President Aleksyandr Lukashenka. Pawel Stanczyk, head of Poland’s Association of Young Conservatives, says in Warsaw the association has launched a…
Kazakhstan is the most economically developed country in the region, yet after a series of colored revolutions in the former USSR, President Nazarbaev has begun to pay more attention to the activities of opposition groups and especially NGOs. The presidential election in 2006, therefore, is going to be an important milestone in judging the strength of Nazarbayev’s position. Nobody thought there would be a revolution in Kyrgyzstan, and neither did Akayev. Now, it seems as if President Bush has set this country in his sights for another possible success. He has written a letter to Nazerbayev urging him to take…
A writer at Kommersant thinks so, given the trend of events over the last half year or so, and he thinks Russia’s banning of ABC over its airing of an interview with Shamil Basayev is the freezing point. It is not surprising that Washington defended the TV company. The thing is that the Nightline program with Shamil Basaev happened at the right time when Russian-American relationship has reached the maximum freezing point. It is not hard to remind that the main problem between Russian and the United States appeared right after the Beslan events. Then President of Russia Vladimir Putin…
It looks like President Taya is out of luck today. He was out of the country attending King Fahd’s funeral in Saudi Arabia when the military decided they were going to take over! Good news? Bad news? Let’s see what all happened. Nouakchott, Mauritania – A group of army officers in Mauritania have overthrown President Maaoya Sid’Ahmed Taya in an apparently bloodless coup d’etat, announcing a military junta would rule the Islamic nation for up to two years. Taya, who himself seized power in a coup two decades ago, was out of the country at the time. arrived on Wednesday…
While the whole world, myself included, has been focused on the withdrawal of U.S. forces from its base in Uzbekistan, something interesting has been going on in the upper hierarchy of the Uzbek government relating directly back to the Andijon massacre. If you’ll recall, President Karimov blamed the entire uprising as being organized by radical Islamist militants. This story was backed by Russia and China. But as I explained, and this is what everyone else keeping tabs on this story knows now, is that the protestors were pissed off because the government was trying 23 businessmen who made up a…
I have always said that the reason President Mbeki of South Africa won’t intervene in Zimbabwe is because he is Mugabe’s ideological admirer. Government-backed land redistribution in Zimbabwe only resulted in formerly white commercial farms going unused. Famine set in, and when international donors sent food aid, Mugabe’s government seized it. The government in South Africa has always been making attempts at “racial justice,” but it has been generally by market means. They want to have at least 30% of the land tranferred to black farmers by 2014, though only an estimated 5% has switched hands fairly. So what happens…
It happened after Hurricane Mitch struck Central America in 1998. Nine billion dollars in reconstruction aid was promised by donor governments and corporations, yet less than 50% of it actually materialized. In 2003, a devastating earthquake his Bam, Iran, in which 26,000 people died. I still remember the images, and I still remember that over $1 billion in relief aid was pledged. Yet less than $120 million showed up. And remember the tsunami that rattled the world in December 2004, when we saw unprecedented generosity on behalf of the people of the world? Our respective governments tried to match up…
The lessons of history never fail to escape the minds of some. Hitler raged on about his goals in the most overt manner while the rest of Europe believed that one invasion after the other would be enough to appease him. Likewise, the government of Iran, best known for its chants of “Death to America,” is beginning to remove the UN seals on its nuclear reactors while maintaining that the energy will only be used for peaceful purposes. This program has been secret for 18 years, who really believes that? Who really believes now that North Korea’s secret program, even…
Adam Gurri is hosting this week’s carnival of revolutions! Check it out, along with the Iran week in review.
John Garang is ÄnowÅ an ex-rebel leader from the south of Sudan, where millions have lost their lives in a systematic genocide committed by the government. In a peace deal worked out between the two sides, Garang was sworn in as Vice President of the country and the situation was looking hopeful. Well, scratch that. Tens of thousands of people are flooding the streets of Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, enraged by the death of John Garang, who led the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army rebels for more than two decades. Mr. Garang was sworn in as Sudan’s first vice president less than…
Look at the search results from the past hour to this website, and tell me there aren’t people out there who love Yulia just as much as we do. 01 Aug, Mon, 09:33:24 Google: Yulia Tymoshenko Pictures 01 Aug, Mon, 09:33:49 Google: Yulia Tymoshenko nude 01 Aug, Mon, 09:34:57 Google: Yulia Tymoshenko pictures 01 Aug, Mon, 09:36:28 Google: pics of Yulia Tymoshenko 01 Aug, Mon, 09:37:15 Google: Yulia Tymoshenko pictures 01 Aug, Mon, 09:37:30 Google: Yulia Tymoshenko photographs 01 Aug, Mon, 09:38:57 Google: In a Ruined Country david samuels 01 Aug, Mon, 09:41:48 Google: pics of Yulia Tymoshenko 01 Aug,…
Jim Hoft is rounding up all the news on this. In other news, the candlelight vigil against terrorism being organized by Egyptian bloggers was cancelled. Big Pharaoh posts his reaction. Egyptian Sandmonkey is also feeling melancholy, and so is Karim Elsahy. Better luck next time guys, I wish it would have worked out.
The Iranian regime for decades has been a state sponsor of terrorism, both domestically and internationally. Concern is ever the more mounting after the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who may have been involved in, or even the leader of, the 1979 embassy hostage crisis. But how directly involved is the Iranian regime in funding and aiding terrorist groups? Apologists might say that the regime’s money trail and links to groups like Hizb’allah and Islamic Jihad are too obscure to trace and may not even exist at all. Well, they’re apologists, what do you expect? Even if there was ever evidence…
Bahrain isn’t exactly known for its vibrant civil society and liberal democracy, but it has slowly been developing since King Hamad began introducing slow reforms when he took power in 1999. That’s why protests there are so interesting to highlight. Today, 4000 protestors took to the streets because of a law recently passed that would restrict the greater freedom of association that had been earlier granted. I can imagine that wouldn’t sit well with anybody! MANAMA (AFP) – About 4,000 activists demonstrated to protest the ratification of a law regulating political associations in Bahrain, which opposition groups said will restrict…
Forbes presents to you t a list of the 100 most powerful women in the world. This goes without saying, but not only is Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice the most powerful woman in the world, but she uses it to advance the most important cause there is: the advance of freedom. She is joined by Ukrainian Prime Minister and Orange Revolutionary Yulia Tymoshenko, ranked third on the list. And Burmese freedom fighter and nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who to this day remains under arrest, ranked number fifteen on the list. This is a tribute from Publius to…
In the wake of terrorist bombings against his country, Egypt’s President Mubarak has declared his candidacy in the upcoming presidential elections. Not that there was any doubt that he’d run for a fifth term, but now he has a platform to go on. President Hosni Mubarak announced his bid yesterday to run in Egypt’s first multicandidate elections on Sept. 7, promising new legislation to “besiege” terrorism and replace the country’s much-criticized emergency laws. Mubarak, 77, Egypt’s leader for almost a quarter of a century and a key U.S. ally in the Arab world, has cast himself as a moderating influence…
With so much talk of the return of the Great Game in Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan’s maneuvers between the powers and its neighbors makes for one of the best case studies. The refugees who took flight from Andijon across the border to Kyrgyzstan following Karimov’s May massacre has been one of those issues that the new government has had to deal with carefully. At once, the new government must raise standards of respect for human rights both for itself and to please the United States, and on the other hand it must not earn the scorn its neighbors and isolation from…
I wanted to highlight this because it’s really very dramatic given how much the international eye has refocused on Serbian war crimes. The wife of one of the leaders indicted for genocide spoke out on regional television stations appealing for his surrender. I can’t even imagine how hard that must be. 29 July 2005 (RFE/RL) — The wife of war crimes indictee and former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic appealed to her husband in a broadcast carried by several regional television stations yesterday to surrender to the Hague-based war crimes tribunal. Bosnian and international media said the appeal came as…
It looks like a somewhat promising election is about to go down the tubes. It looks like deposed military strongman Vieira won Guinea-Bissau’s runoff election. But allegations of fraud are coming from the other candidate, Sanha, who is the current ruling party’s candidate. Guinea-Bissau’s former military ruler Joao Bernardo Vieira has won run-off presidential elections, the electoral commission has announced. Mr Vieira, known as Nino, came to power in a coup and ruled for 18 years until overthrown in 1999 by the armed forces. Hours before the provisional results were announced, a spokesman for Mr Vieira’s rival said he would…
Ugandans went to the polls today to vote in a referendum on allowing multiple parties run in elections. Political parties were effectively outlawed 19 years ago, but President Museveni is being pressured by foreign donors, who supply half of the government’s budget, to enact reforms. Turnout was very low largely due to torrential rains and partly due to apathy. Ugandans are choosing whether to allow multiparty politics in the East African country in a referendum Thursday, the first step in reforming the country’s constitution, which forbids political parties from campaigning in elections. President Yoweri Museveni banned multiparty politics when he…