Blogging the democratic revolution
Hungarian freedom fighters atop the jackboot remains of the Stalin statue Source: 1956 Hungary President George W. Bush, in Europe today, remembered some of the bravest democratic revolutionaries in all history, Hungary’s Freedom Fighters, who stood up to Soviet tanks in the name of democracy. It’s the fiftiest anniversary of that stunning struggle in the name of freedom. Source: The Menzies Era In the aftermath of World War II, half of Europe was enslaved by the Soviet Union. The communism it imposed was a truly terrible kind, disallowing all free thought as the Stalinist colonializers stamped their deadening blotting-paper-gray imprint…
So after 3 months of squabbling the Orange Coalition is back on. But for how long? The quick details by the way are; that Yulia Tymoshenko will be Prime Minister, Yuriy Yekhanurov, no wait Roman Bezsmertny, oh hold on, maybe Petro Poroshenko will be Speaker of Parliament. Yes it seems certain forces are trying to mess things up from the offset. One of Tymoshenko’s previous demands had been that Poroshenko, the man with murky rumours swirling around his head, would not hold the powerful Speakers post. In fact this morning one of her Bloc’s spokespeople confirmed this, with former P.M.…
Think back to March 26 2006. Belarussians were on the street protesting against Lukashenka, an Afghan Christian convert risked the death penalty, London Mayor Ken Livingstone had just called the U.S Ambassador a ‘chiseling little crook’, and the Commonwealth games had just concluded. Whilst some sort of closure has been brought to all of those events, one news story from the week wrangles on. Ukraine went to the ballot box 4 months ago – a government has still yet to be formed. For those of you who have not been following the story, it will not take long to explain…
President Putin might want to watch out! A colored revolution may be brewing in his own backyard, as the protest babes advance on him. This babe, who represents the most decadent kind of freedom (my favorite kind), is setting up a youth group as an alternative to the many pro-government ones set up over the past few years. Serious threat or publicity play? You decide. All I know is if I were a male Russian teenager, I’d be rushing to join this club. RUSSIA’S most famous party girl has formed a political youth movement that could undermine one of her…
Elections to the lower house of the Czech Parliament, the Chamber of Deputies, begin at 2:00 PM on June 2 and end at 2:00 PM on June 3. The Chamber of Deputies is the more important part of the bicameral Czech Parliament. The Chamber of Deputies has 200 members, elected for four year terms. A party needs 5% of the vote to be represented in the government. In the election four years ago the Czech Social Democratic Party (center-left) received 30.2% of the votes and they currently hold 70 seats, the Civic Democratic Party (center-right) received 24.5% and hold 58…
Fifteen years ago pro-democracy activists in Russia tore down a statue in front of the Moscow KGB Headquarters. The statue was a monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka, the predecessor agency of the KGB. Back in 2002 the mayor of Moscow suggested that the statue be restored, which caused an uproar, and even the former KGB official, and President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, was opposed to the restoration. Felix Dzerzhinsky, known as Iron Felix, was responsible for mass arrests, brutality and thousands of executions. Once, when discussing the type of person he was looking for to work…
Turkish PM Tayyip Erdo????an visited Algeria this past week. Meeting with Algerian National Assembly Speaker Amar Saadani on Monday, Erdo????an met with president Bouteflika on Tuesday. After their three hour meeting, the two leaders announced an accord of “friendship and cooperation.” Erdo????an visited a veterans cemetery and the Algerian military museum, surveying artefacts from Algeria’s Ottoman period and praising Algeria’s veterans. “…..The heroes of the struggle for independence in Algeria are the best examples for today’s generations,” Erdo????an said. Erdo????an also made statements in relation to his county’s desired assencion into the European Union, sating that ???????If the EU is…
Who is President Bush????????s favorite choice to become Secretary General of the United Nations? Look for the United States to support the President of Latvia, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, to replace Kofi Annan when his term expires Dec. 31. Vaira Vike-Freiberga, the President of Latvia, has a history that has taught her the importance of democracy and freedom. President Vike-Freiberga was born in Riga, Latvia in 1937. During World War II Latvia was occupied by the Russians, then the Germans, then again by the Russians, and then was forced to join the Soviet Union at the close of the war. After the…
I can????????t top Rob????????s pictures of the Montenegro celebrators, but the Montenegro vote for independence does have significance for Serbia and the Balkans over and above the beauty of their independence supporters. Everyone (including me), and especially the intelligence agencies in Europe, expected Serbia to turn over Ratko Mladic prior to the May 1 deadline issued by the EU. Carla Del Ponte, chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (CTFY) accused Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica of misleading her by insisting a month ago that Mladic’s arrest was imminent. The failure of Serbia to capture and…
Economist Steve Hanke has a brilliant essay in today’s Wall Street Journal on his experience and knowledge of Montenegro. Professor Hanke is one of the most important sources of reliable information on the country’s progress and very knowledgeable about the leadership of the country. Notice that recurring theme of currency turmoil that has begun to recur in the Fareed Zakaria essay on populism and on the Pedro Camargo Ecuador essay – it is the very same story, in spades, in Montenegro. Currency devaluation and economic mismanagement are as good triggers as any for independence and democratic revolution. For Montenegro, the…
Montenegro is no longer the suffix of Serbia. With an overwhelming turnout, just over the required 55% needed votes were cast in favor of independence, making it the last country to break away from the core of what once was Yugoslavia. There are a lot of issues here. Will the Serbian unionists fight back? Can a state so small defend itself an build a proper economy? What about EU membership? These are the questions that will be answered in the coming days, months, and years. So I will not bother with them now. It will come. Peaceful self-determination is a…
BBC News: Russian President Vladimir Putin has used a Victory Day parade to issue a warning to neo-Nazis and other nationalist extremists. He said they were “leading the world to a dead end” and would not be tolerated in Russia. His comments follow a series of attacks on foreigners – some of them fatal. Ä…Å By using a big, set-piece occasion to raise the issue, Mr Putin is stressing the moral urgency of Russia’s racist problem, says the BBC’s Russian affairs analyst Steven Eke. “Those who are again trying to raise the defeated flags of Nazism, who sow ethnic hatred,…
Well, as we approach nearly 2 months since Ukraine’s first democratic elections of the century, the political wrangling continues. Any Kiev watchers will be familiar with the daily news stories coming out from Our Ukraine, Yulia Tymoshenko’s Bloc, The Party of Regions and the Socialists in regard to coalition building talks. Every evening a brief Google news search highlights constant backstabbing, foot-stamping and occasionally outright lies passed on to the international media. Today, one such story emerged from the oh so reliable ITAR-TASS. For the busy, a brief summary: Our Ukraine (Viktor Yushchenko’s pro-European, Liberal Bloc) and the Party of…
Imagine a country where you have to get permission to protest, and when the authorities give it to you, they snatch it right back. Then they arrest you and sentence you to 15 days in prison for an “unsanctioned rally.” The same thing happens to your colleagues; some of them are even beaten! What country is this? I’ll give you one guess: it starts with “B” and ends with “elarus”. The democratic opposition in Belarus held its first rally since tens of thousands of people protested in March following a fraudulent presidential election handed to current Dictator Alexander Lukashenko. It…
Ten thousand Belarusians gathered to commemorate the victims of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown twenty years after the disaster. It was organized by the democratic opposition led by Alexander Milinkevich and was the first such rally since the end of March when protestors were brutalized following a peaceful gathering of tens of thousands. You can see a minute-by-minute log of the events at Charter 97. They had hoped to gather in October Square, the sight of the post-presidential election protests last month, but lines of riot police blocked all avenues to the square. Furthermore, the trains were ordered not to stop…
Yesterday, April 21, 2006, the United Nations Environmental Program gave out awards to ???????the Seven protectors of the Earth.??????? These seven individuals are hailed by the UN as ???????the Champions of the Earth.??????? One of the seven ???????protectors of the Earth??????? and a United Nations ???????Champion of the Earth??????? is Mikhail Gorbachev! This coming week will be the twentieth anniversary of what is commonly accepted as one of the worst environmental incidents of all mankind????????the Chernobyl disaster. On April 26, 1986, while plant operators were conducting a safety test on Chernobyl’s Unit 4, it overheated and caused a hydrogen explosion.…
Russia took over the rotating chair of the Group of Eight (G8) Presidency on January 1, 2006, and therefore Russian President Vladimir Putin will host the G8 summit in St. Petersburg in July 2006. Putin has made it clear that he wants ???????Energy Security??????? to be the number one topic of the summit, and it appears that he will get his way. The Russian government wants the summit to be a success and wants to pull it off without any public disputes, however, the US, behind closed doors, is making it clear that Iran must be on the agenda????????threatening that…
It started back in September 2005 when 18 children from the Chechen village of Staroshchedrinskaya were hospitalized with signs of poisoning, and then a month later 8 more children from the same school were hospitalized with the same symptoms. In December 2005 13 more children from the Chechen Shelkovskaya district were hospitalized with very similar symptoms. Since December more than 50 other children have developed the same symptoms, including children in the Chechen villages of Shelkozavodskaya and Starogladovskaya. The symptoms are fatigue, asphyxia, headaches, convulsions and hysteria. Some children also reported memory loss and hallucinations. All most all of the…
Ratko Mladic was the former Army Chief under Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. Along with Karadzic, Mladic is largely responsible for the campaign of ethnic cleansing of Croats and Muslims. Mladicwas indicted in 1995 by the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for genocide and crimes against humanity for his role in the siege of Sarajevo, which claimed 12,000 lives, and for orchestrating the massacre in July 1995 of more than 7,500 Muslims at Srebrenica. Mladic and Karadzic are the two most wanted suspects from the Bosnia conflict, and both are still on the run. When Slobodan Milosevic…
This would be the first time that any party has managed to hold power for two terms. As previously discussed, the political parties don’t quite conform to typical expectations as understood in the US, nor even as they would be understood a hop, skip, and jump away in Italy. If you’re not familiar with the scene, you’ll want to hit the link and jog your memory. Results here are as follows: MSZP 43.21% FIDESZ 42.03% SZDSZ 6.50% MDF 5.04% This is a strong showing for the Free Democrats (SZDSZ – mild minarchists, sort of libertarian lite), and a truly unexpectedly…
Latvia will host the NATO summit in Riga this November. Latvia joined NATO and the EU in 2004. However, the NATO summit aside, things may get very interesting in Latvia this fall if the Mayor of Ventspils, Aivars Lembergs, decides to run for parliament in the national elections in October. The last few days have seen a small crisis in the Latvian government as several cabinet ministers resigned and there was no longer majority support for the Cabinet of Ministers. The crisis was put on hold when the government had an extraordinary meeting to approve seven new ministers that were…
Last month Mikhail Gorbachev celebrated his 75th birthday. Gorbachev, the final leader of the brutal Soviet Union, was treated to a media love fest that proclaimed him the architect of the democratization of the former captive republics of his regime. ABC News called him, ???????The man who ended the Cold War and launched democratic reforms that broke the repressive Soviet regime..??????? Katrina vanden Heuvel attended a party for Gorbachev and proclaimed, ???????He liberated Eastern Europe to find its own political path.??????? The party also had video tributes from former President George Bush, Bill Moyers, Leonardo di Caprio, former President Bill…
You might not have guessed this right off, but Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has been watching Ukraine’s Orange Revolution intently. This Sunday, for the first time, he made a statement about his fear and loathing of it. On his weekly Sunday television variety show, ‘Alo President’ he made this following remark, addressed to his opposition. El Universal reports: Ch????vez wondered where his rivals for next December 3rd presidential election are. He reiterated that his opponents are determined to denounce electoral fraud. He said the dissent, with US support, would establish a “pink revolution,” just like the “gringos” did in Ukraine.…
One hundred thousand people gathered in Rome to remember the first anniversary of the death of John Paul II, the Polish pope who helped liberate Eastern Europe from communism. Thousands of others gathered in Krakow and around Poland. John Paul was a democratic revolutionary in the purest sense of the idea. Many of us know about how he undermined the communist regimes of Poland and elsewhere by working with the Israelis to provide intelligence and material aid to the Solidarity leaders imprisoned inside the communist regime. You can read about it in Peter Schweitzer’s splendid book, Victory, about what Reagan,…
If you ever needed more proof that Russian state-controlled natural gas monopoly is a political weapon of Putin, look no further. I will explain why in a second. For now, read the following article March 30, 2006 — Russia’s Gazprom said today it would raise natural gas prices for Belarus to European levels by 2007. Gazprom head Aleksei Miller told Belarusian Energy Minister Alyaksandr Ageyev about the planned change at a meeting in Moscow today. Gazprom said Minsk would respond by the end of April. Belarus, a close Russian ally, currently receives gas at a subsidized price of $47 per…