The broad picture from many news sources is that Zimbabwe’s voters braved long lines and an unbelievably creative menu of efforts to disenfranchise them - from chicanery to fraud to bribes to murder - and held the line. Returns are showing Mugabe claiming victory, as forecast, and the opposition crying fraud. How they deal with this fraud is the coming question.

I have this news roundup organized beginning with a backgrounder or The Stage for action; the the Timeline of events; the Foreign Response; and the observed irregularities: Intimidation, Disenfranchisement and Electoral Fraud.

Here is a summary of the news from Zimbabwe:

THE STAGE:

VOICE OF AMERICA:
What is at stake and what Zimbabweans are up against as they make their way to the polls.

THE POST OF LUSAKA: The opposition Tuesday warns it is ready for a peaceful uprising if Mugabe doesn’t give up power willingly. Long list of mismanagement of the Mugabe regime cited.

GUERRILLA NEWS NETWORK: Sad account of the gradual and total destruction of Zimbabwe’s health care system, once the envy of Africa. Recommend a click.

THE GLOBE AND MAIL: Opposition figures speak of continual beatings from Mugabe thugs over the years.

THE DAILY NEWS: Voters pray for regime change. I’ll let this graf speak for itself:

Unemployment is about 70 percent, inflation still the highest in the Southern Africa Development Community and Z$15 000 are now worth US$l on the parallel market. The health delivery system has virtually collapsed and the educational facilities are in tatters. There is precious little foreign direct investment … and there are four million Zimbabweans living outside their country as economic refugees.

REUTERS: Even if he cheats, Mugabe is unlikely to win Matabeleland province in the south where he is profoundly unpopular. Long list of atrocities described in this story.

TIMELINE:

SABCNEWS: Polling begins peacefully. Take a look at the photo on this story for the voters waiting in lines in rain.

IOL: Long lines at polling stations begin before dawn.

ABC NEWS AUSTRALIA: Voters discuss their aspirations.

REUTERS: Voters brave rain and some come to the polls in donkey carts.

REUTERS: Mugabe shows up in a crisp blue blazer and silk tie in some shantytown to cast his ballot.

FT: Voting largely peaceful but instances of intimidation reported.

REUTERS: Dictator Mugabe praises his own election. Lots of photos with this story.

STUFF-NZ: As of 2 pm, 1.2 million of 5.78 million voters cast ballots. Opponents say 1 million of those are dead people. 94,000 people turned away from the polls. Ballot papers run out in Manicaland province. Tally may take 48 hours.

BBC: Reporters in different parts of the country give eyewitness accounts of voting conditions based on what they see. Few white voters seen in Harare, most have fled the country. Mugabe officials warn voters in Bulawayo that ‘a vote for the opposition is a vote for starvation.’ In Mutare, some dope has people line up by letter of last name - since most Zimbabweans have last names beginning with ‘M’ there’s one long line there and all the others are short. In Masvingo, lines are scarce and lots of soldiers in trucks patrolling around are seen. Recommend a click.

THE TELEGRAPH: Two Telegraph journalists are arrested over credentials.

REUTERS: Mugabe’s government says it will deport the two journos.

AL JAZEERA: Polls close in Zimbabwe for parliamentary elections.

THE NEW YORK TIMES: The long slow tally of the votes, not expected to come in until the end of the week, will raise the possibility of fraud.

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: The opposition takes the lead in early polling results. CNN’s take here.

THE NEW YORK TIMES: Results are now pointing to a Mugabe victory.

VOICE OF AMERICA: The vote seems to be divided along urban and rural lines, with rural voters going for Mugabe and city voters going for the opposition. With that one BBC item about soldiers rolling around in trucks intimidating people, I am not convinced it’s just a simple red/blue divide of perspectives.

THE ZIMBABWEAN: The Roman Catholic archbishop reports that people are now praying for Mugabe to die.

ASSOCIATED PRESS: The opposition is crying fraud.

BLOOMBERG: Mugabe claims victory with a two-thirds majority in parliament and 80% of the vote counted.

FOREIGN RESPONSE:

VOICE OF AMERICA: The U.S. does not expect elections to be free or fair.

AFP: The U.S. denounces sharply Mugabe’s food for votes program. The ruling thug famously uses food as a weapon.

UPI: EU officials call the whole thing a sham.

THE DAILY NEWS OF HARARE: The UK Labour party seeks tougher sanctions on Mugabe.

NEWS.COM.AU: Aussies scold each other for not speaking out forcefully enough about democracy in Zimbabwe.

REUTERS: COSATU and other leftists call a protest against Mugabe, who’s evidently abused them, too. Only 300 show up.

BUSINESS DAY: About 10,000 were expected to show up. No reasons given for the low turnout.

VOICE OF AMERICA: South African traditional leaders (tribal chiefs) send election observers to Zimbabwe’s elections.

VOICE OF AMERICA: An ANC youth leader says all will be free and fair in Zimbabwe’s election and who is the West to try to tell Zimbabwe how to run its affairs, anyway, the yahoo added unneccessarily.

NEWS24: South Africa’s communist party chief (they’re not as bad as most communist party chiefs, South Africa’s communist party is one of the better ones) worries about what would happen to the Zimbabwe opposition if Mugabe steals the election.

VOICE OF AMERICA: U.S. State Department, in a preliminary assessment of the election, would only say it was peaceful. Turnout was high in urban areas. Europe plans fresh sanctions against Mugabe.

THE IRREGULARITIES:

== INTIMIDATION:

SABC NEWS: 120 people are arrested for praying in what authorities dub an ‘unauthorized gathering.’

NEWS24: Mugabe police warn voters to leave the polling stations immediately after they cast their ballots - or face arrest.

XINHUA: Mugabe goons block polling station agents from their stations in Njedza and Chingwaru.

NEWS24: Mugabe thugs “indecently assault” a South African church worker. IOL’s account here.

THE TELEGRAPH: A reporter learns of one white woman farmer who returns to her old stead, now confiscated, only to be chased around by Mugabe’s goons. She’d been whipped and jailed before but vowed never to give up. She beheld the ruins of her farm with defiance and sadness. The journo writing this account said it was not easy to take out a camera or admit being a journo in the current conditions. Recommend a click.

NEWS24: The opposition says one of its candidates standing for parliament has disappeared after a police raid the night before election.

METRO: Mugabe forces deny that an opposition candidate has disappeared and say he is in his constituency.

INDEPENDENT: The guy apparently shows up.

MAIL & GUARDIAN: South African news editors lament woeful lack of press freedom in covering Zimbabwe’s election.

==DISENFRANCHISEMENT:

ALLAFRICA: 350,000 black farm workers who were made homeless after the Mugabe land confiscations of white farms are denied the right to vote because they didn’t have “papers.” Recommend a click.

BBC: In London, angry exiles representing 3 million disenfranchised voters protested being excluded from voting and staged a mock vote to protest.

==ELECTORAL FRAUD:

ALLAFRICA: About 1 million of Zimbabwe’s 5.8 million voters are ‘zombie voters,’ meaning dead people.

SYDNEY MORNING HERALD: Mugabe goons offer polling agents $10,600 amounts of cash to allow ballot box tampering.

NEWS24: Mugabe’s ex information minister now running for office as an independent says there needs to be more than one agent per 3 voting stations in Zimbabwe’s 8,000 polling stations.

VOICE OF AMERICA: The dirty tricks don’t end - everything from wash-off ink for fingers to a whole print shop full of leaflets fakely claiming to voters that the opposition has dropped out of the race. Opposition figures deeply suspicious of international observers, most of whom are cossetted away in expensive Harare hotels. Recommend a click.

THE ZIMBABWEAN: More details on systemic fraud as it is observed in Zimbabwe.

…Only after the police tear gassed the protestors.

Kampala - Ugandan police used water cannons and tear gas to break up an opposition demonstration on Thursday, engaging in running battles with marchers protesting efforts to extend the president’s tenure.

Riot police dispersed the protesters, who were denouncing plans to amend the constitution so that President Yoweri Museveni can run for a third term in office. Police spokesperson Asuman Mugenyi said the demonstration had not been authorised.

“They knew that we had stopped it, but they continued inciting people to come and participate in violence and in an illegal assembly,” he said. Mugenyi said he didn’t know how many protesters had been arrested or injured.

The demonstration was organised by a newly formed group known as Force For Change. Police authorised a demonstration last.

After the initial confrontation on Thursday, the protesters used concrete blocks to try to barricade Kampala’s main street. They waved banners reading, “Museveni Go,” “Respect the Constitution” and “United States Save Us.”

Uganda is a close ally of the United States.

“Museveni is a dictator and he wants to rule for life. Why should he change the constitution? Why is he behaving like (former President) Idi Amin? We will force him out of power,” Mary Namusisi, one of the demonstrators, said.

Under the current constitution, a president is limited two, five-year terms. Opposition politicians believe that proposed changes in the constitution are being tailored by the mainly pro-government parliament to allow Museveni to stand again and remain in power indefinitely.

You never know how these things are going to turn out, but judging from the quotes they used in the story, the what the protestors did was pretty rational. Being attacked for assembling is something nobody should have to fear.

The Nation magazine has a sugar-coated vision of Hugo Chavez’s Veneuzela, described in an article purportedly written as a “news” story by Christian Parenti, someone who used to spend his time at Young Communist League meetings in San Francisco. Parenti’s trying to make his story appear a respectable reporting job (as Cuban propagandists coincidentally advise) but it’s pretty clear he’s ignoring the biggest parts of the story in his bid to plug Hugo Chavez.

Essayist Gustavo Coronel, a Venezuelan who knows the deal, gives a good factual, statistics-heavy rebuttal to this blatant propaganda effort to defend the indefensible. Read the whole thing here.

Common canard holds that Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, whatever his faults, at least is ending poverty through his soup-kitchen programs. Andres Oppenheimer blows the lid off that steaming pot, though, by taking a good look at the Venezuelan government’s own statistics. What he sees appalls him. He writes:

Indeed, the latest poverty figures from Venezuela’s official National Institute of Statistics — buried in a mountain of figures deep in the bowels of its Internet site, www.ine.gov.ve — contain the most damning condemnation of the Ch????vez government I have seen anywhere.

The figures, on Page 5 of the Institute’s Social Report, show that poverty in Venezuela rose from 43 percent to 54 percent of the population during Ch????vez’s first four years in office. And extreme poverty — the percentage of the population that lives on less than $1 a day — grew from 17 percent to 25 percent during the same period, the figures show.

These are stunning figures, not only because Ch????vez is going around Latin America proclaiming to be heading a ”Bolivarian revolution” to help the poor, but also because the rise in poverty during his tenure has taken place at the very time when Venezuela has been benefiting from its greatest oil boom in recent history.

Meanwhile, blogger Miguel Octavio has a good translation of an essay by economics journalist Victor Salmeron who outlines the coming disaster of Hugo Chavez’s state capitalism. The result is the same result that every other place that’s tried it has found. He writes:

Up to now, the creation of public companies has not been successful. The banks of the People and the Women, emblematic institutions in the game board of the financial system that the Chavismo has created, are closing 2004 in the red, according to the financials of the Ministry of Finance.

The oxygen tank that the public budget represents will require that the price of the Venezuelan oil basket stays at high levels to continue pumping fuel to this new state structure.

Read the whole thing here.

I’m going to start this off by putting this article in the reverse way that it was written.

International human rights organizations and such other groups as the European Union, which on Wednesday called the election “phony,” say the outcome is unlikely to reflect the will of most Zimbabweans. Mugabe controls every daily newspaper, all broadcasting, thousands of patronage jobs, the electoral commission, the courts that would judge accusations of rigging and the dwindling food reserves for a populace on the brink of starvation.

Most international election observers have been kept away. And Mugabe increased the budget of his secret police force by six times in advance of the vote.
…
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe — Two weeks ago, Mike Sibanda strode down the dingy streets of Zimbabwe’s second-largest city with a swagger, chest out, shoulders rolling, a broad, wise-guy smile on his face. The image exuded a single message: I’m nobody’s fool.

So when the subject of Thursday’s national election came up, Sibanda, 24 and long attracted to opposition politics, swiped his right hand in the air and said dismissively, “Ah, it’s useless.” That week, as opposition activists braved possible arrests by gathering for a nighttime rally at a suburban park near here, Sibanda gathered instead with friends to drink beer.

But as the national parliamentary election has drawn nearer, his interest in voting against the ruling party of President Robert Mugabe — in power since before Sibanda was born — has returned. Sibanda has found his faith in democracy rekindled by what he calls growing tolerance of dissent and reduced threat of violence.

Mugabe’s camp still uses such rough tactics as withholding food from villagers who support the opposition, human rights workers say. And there have been dozens of arrests for participating in such political activity as candidate-voter meetings or hanging campaign signs.

But in the face of strong international pressure, Mugabe is seeking to convince the world that he can stage a fair election, analysts here say. The violent tactics of recent elections, such as beatings, torture and murder by government supporters, have declined, according to human rights workers. The government has also eased restrictions on access to airwaves, though they are still dominated by Mugabe’s message that members of the opposition are traitors who want to reestablish Zimbabwe as a British colony.

With these small steps toward fairness, attendance at campaign rallies is at the highest level in the five-year history of the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change.

“There’s a possibility for them to win now. There’s hope,” said Sibanda, who joined throngs at a soccer stadium on Saturday to cheer the opposition. “There’s no reason to be scared.”

Despite everything, there’s always hope. Zimbabwe is one of Condoleezza Rice’s “Outposts of Tyranny,” and Mugabe’s ousting from power would certainly be one of the biggest human rights achievements of our new millenium.

Check out this post from Norm Geras, who received a letter from Zimbabwe. There’s no permalink, but blogger and Zimbabwean Cathy Buckle has a post up regarding her hopes and fears as the election approaches. Here is an excerpt:

It does not matter how polite Zane PF are in this election campaign, how bright and white their T shirts are or how they crow incessantly on the radio that Zimbabwe is now a mature democracy, the fact of the matter is we are tired and abosultely fed up of living like this. When we vote on Thursday it will be for food, clean water, affordable schools for our children, hospitals which have drugs and leaders who will respect us and our universal rights of speech, movement and association. I have a picture in my head of a man on a horse trailing a yellow banner in the middle of this weeks revolution in Kyrgyzstan. That image from the other side of the world in a country whose name I cannot even pronounce, gives me hope.

Polls are just now opening.

Hundreds of voters braved early morning drizzle to queue hours before voting started at some stations. Polls opened in the capital Harare on time at 7 a.m. (0500 GMT).

“We have come to make a statement,” said one young man, grinning as he headed toward a polling station in the city.

There was no visible police presence in the center of Harare but witnesses said there were some patrols in outlying townships where there have been anti-government protests in the past.

Veteran Mugabe, 81, told loyalists of his ZANU-PF party on Wednesday that the poll would be fair and urged voters to reject the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which he calls a puppet of British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Here is another good article with loads of background and history.

The results of the vote will be announced 48 hours, just enough time for the ballot to be falsified. Mugabe is looking for a 2/3 majority in the parliament which will give him the power to both amend the constitution and appoint his successor — God forbid.

While everything is going on, let’s take a look at some of the dirty tricks underway. China has supplied Mugabe with a high powered radio jammer.

CHINA supplied Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s autocratic president, with a military-strength radio jammer to block opposition broadcasts ahead of today’s poll in the country, diplomatic sources confirmed.
The jammer has been operating from a base outside Harare, the capital, for several weeks to prevent candidates for the Movement for Democratic Change, the main alternative party to the ruling Zanu-PF, from putting their policies across on the airwaves in a state where radio is the only method of mass communication.
It has also blocked broadcasts by the Short Wave Radio Africa station, the population’s main source of independent and uncensored news from outside Zimbabwe.

The MDC was originally formed a labor union party, capturing much of the urban vote. Mugabe is trying to make an inroad to this by increasing wages by 900%.

The government has come up with another panic measure - this time to buy the urban vote. Today, domestic workers???????? salaries and wages were increased across the board by a staggering average of 900% backdated to 1st March, 2005.

Does the illegitimate and bankrupt regime really believe that domestic workers are stupid enough to change their allegiance over this last resort measure?

The urban masses know that the economy is in a state of collapse, they know how useless the Zimbabwe dollar is, they understand fundamental basic economics ???????? put wages up, inflation increases, salaries still worth nothing!

Government election observers are also turning away opposition observers, citing an act that doesn’t exist.

Today was the day to deploy all Election Agents (in previous elections known as Polling Agents) to the 8500 polling stations located in 120 constituencies.

At Victoria Falls this afternoon, the MDC candidate????????s appointed Election Agents were turned away. The reason given was that they could not produce an affidavit that they had signed the ???????Declaration of Secrecy??????? as prescribed by the ???????Electoral Secrecy Act???????.

THERE IS NO SUCH ACT!

At several other polling stations, particularly in the rural areas, Election Agents were turned away because they could not produce a hard copy of the advertisement posted in the press to announce their names. These adverts were timeously published in a local newspaper, the Presiding Officer was simply up to dirty tricks.

Ironically, zanupf failed to honour the regulation set out in the Electoral Act that stipulates advertisement of the Election Agents be published at least three days before voting day.

Withholding food for votes has been a longtime tactic of the Mugabe regime, but this year it may just backfire.

Zhulube - Hundreds of bags of cornmeal were stacked in front of a bar near here this month, rising as high as its roof. The only problem for the hungry people of this drought-stricken area was that the food, like the bar, was controlled by officials from the ruling party. With a crucial election nearing, they weren’t about to give it to just anyone. The officials first held a rally by their impressive mound of food, witnesses here said. The next day, as hundreds of people from surrounding villages gathered to collect the 110-pound bags they had ordered and paid for months before, ruling party officials announced that only their supporters were eligible. When the names of opposition voters were called, they were simply handed back their money, according to several people who were turned away. The leftover bags went on sale hours later for twice the price. Human rights reports say withholding food from opponents is nothing new for the Zanu PF, the party of President Robert Mugabe. But this year, the threat of starvation is creating a potentially potent backlash against Zanu PF.

Many people in this tiny, impoverished village in southern Zimbabwe say that their votes in Thursday’s national parliamentary elections will be based less on their immediate food needs than on which party offers the best chance to reverse Zimbabwe’s five-year-old economic decline and end recurrent food shortages. Opposition party leaders say the issue might represent their best chance to make inroads into Mugabe’s traditionally strong rural support. Among those who went home empty-handed here on March 19 was Thenji Matema, 48, a lean and soft-spoken widow supporting a daughter and four grandchildren on the roughly $25 she earns each month selling mats that she weaves by hand. Matema said she walked away furious and doubly determined to vote for the opposition — even if she has to drink tea to curb her hunger before her one daily meal, and serve meat to her family only once a week. “It’s better I suffer than vote for Zanu PF,” Matema said. She later elaborated on her distaste for the ruling party. It is not only its role in mismanaging the food situation, she said, but “that they are forcing people to do what they want. People don’t like that.”

The U.S. and the EU have thoroughly denounce Mugabe, and I have to commend the media for giving it good coverage. Want to see something possibly more deranged than withholding food? How about this.

Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe is campaigning across the length and breadth of Zimbabwe accompanied by three Air Force helicopters packed with more than 100 million US dollars worth of state-of-the-art Hewlett Packard laptop computers.

Depending on the size of the community, the president doles out between ten and one hundred computers at each stop on the election trail.

Schools are the main beneficiaries - many of which have been without electricity, textbooks and even roofs for many years.

The money to buy the computers - enough to have imported nearly a million tonnes of staple maize for a country experiencing widespread crop failure and hunger - and to fuel the helicopters has come from state coffers in a clear violation of electoral rules forbidding competing parties from using government funds to contest elections.

And up to one million ghost voters could throw the election Mugabe’s way.

But what if the MDC actually wins? It’s a longshot, and they have huge problems to remedy that have diseased Zimbabwe for decades now. It’s unlikely that Mugabe will win the south, but then again, he is rigging the elections. If 2/3 is what he wants, 2/3 is what he’ll try to get by any means possible.

The blog Sokwanele had another great post regarding lack of turnout among the armed forces.

The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission opened the postal ballot to all civil servants working outside the country as well as the local army and police. Those in the armed forces within the country were also allowed to choose to vote by postal ballot or to go to their own registered polling station on the 31st March.

That ballot has already closed, all ballot papers have been submitted to the relevant Constituencies, to be opened at the end of the voting process and added to the local votes.

A mere 9500 postal ballots have been submitted. This means the armed forces have already decided to say ???????Enough is enough??????? and refused to vote in the presence of their commanding officers.

All activists working in the name of democracy would like to congratulate the armed forces for joining them in their quest for freedom!

Are the opposition leaders planning a protest? Some of them have certainly suggested it, though they are being tight-lipped.

A Zimbabwean opposition leader yesterday raised the prospect of “mass mobilisation” in the event of government fraud in today’s parliamentary election, and ruled out resorting to the courts, as the opposition did in 2000 and 2002.

Welshman Ncube, secretary general of the Movement for Democratic Change, the main opposition party, declined to be specific on the party’s plans should it wish to challenge the results of the widely criticised poll.

However, Mr Ncube said: “What we can say is that we won’t go to court - that strategy proved futile and useless.” He added: “These are political issues that could only be solved through mass mobilisation of people.”

The MDC will face President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party in the election, which is under intense international scrutiny.

Morgan Tsvangirai, MDC president, and Pius Ncube, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Bulawayo, have both warned of an angry public response to perceived voter fraud. However, the MDC has no history of successful mass street protests, and few in Zimbabwe expect a response to a rigged poll on the scale of the “people’s power” in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan.

Zanu-PF is predicting victory in today’s vote. It hopes to secure a two-thirds vote that would marginalise the MDC, one of Africa’s best- organised opposition parties.

But the MDC, despite protesting over what it says were unfair pre-vote conditions, says it expects to add several mostly rural seats to its 57 seats in Zimbabwe’s 150-seat parliament.

After threatening to boycott the vote, the party appears to have caught Zanu-PF off-guard by staging a spirited and efficient campaign, extending its party structures deep into ruling-party strongholds. It has drawn crowds of up to 20,000 at its rallies, compared with fewer than 5,000 at President Mugabe’s final rally in a Harare suburb yesterday.

Here’s a picture from the voting lines (don’t expect any protest babes):

UPDATE: We have our first candidate missing.

BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe (Reuters) - The opposition MDC said one of its candidates had disappeared in the south of Zimbabwe after an attack by government supporters on the eve of Thursday’s parliamentary election.

The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) which is battling President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF in the parliamentary poll, said Siyabonga Malandu, of Isinza constituency in Matabeleland Province, disappeared on Wednesday night.

“He last contacted us at around 7 p.m. last night saying they were under attack. He said ZANU-PF have started beating up people,” MDC Secretary-General Welshman Ncube told Reuters. “Up to now we have had no contact from him.”

Police in the capital, Harare, said they had not yet received any report on the incident but would look into it.

Young, angry — and voting.

UPDATE: Quote of the day!

“The moment M.D.C. was able to campaign without violence in place, it gave people courage,” he said. “It’s like being let out - you release the cows in spring, and there’s all this fresh grass, and the cows just go crazy.”

Another good note: “MDC spokesman Nkanyiso Mageda also says he has little faith in international observers in reporting the problems. He says many of them have already announced that the elections will be free and fair, while others stay in comfortable hotels in the cities ???????? far away from the more vulnerable rural areas.”

Keep checking Sokwanele for more updates on regional conditions. we won’t know the results until at least Friday so just enjoy the ride until then.

There’s been a lot of talk with regards to the Iran soccer riots, and it looks like North Korea’s loss to them has triggered riots in the homeland, a rare public display of unrest!

Angry North Korean soccer fans interrupted their national team’s World Cup qualifying match against Iran on Wednesday, throwing bottles and chairs at the referee and visiting team.

The unrest erupted when North Korean defender Nam Song-chol was sent off for shoving Syrian referee Mohamed Kousa during a 2-to-0 home loss match, which was seen on international satellite television. The violence spilled over outside the Kim Il-Sung stadium in Pyongyang, as thousands of North Koreans prevented Iranian players from boarding the team’s bus.

North Korea’s state-run news agency carried only a two-sentence report on the game without mentioning the violence.

So first it’s protest babes, and now sports. How much more masculine can civil disobedience get? All we need now are a few kegs and it’s set! Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy!

Wow! It was a quarter ago that I followed John Hawkins’ lead and published a list of my favorite bloggers. Have I been blogging that long already? Certainly my eyesight has gotten worse.

Because of changing events in the world, my destinations are certainly different on a day to day basis and the list will probably reflect that. There’ll probably be quite a few changes from last time! But without further ado…

20. Neeka’s Backlog
19. Radio Free Nepal
18. A Step at a Time
17. The Word Unheard
16. Belmont Club
15. Blogrel
14. Barcepundit
13. Bloggledygook
12. Chrenkoff
11. Enough!
10. Simon World
9. Right Wing News
8. Big Pharaoh
7. Window on the Arab World, and More!
6. Gateway Pundit
5. Instapundit
4. Siberian Light
3. Winds of Change
2. Across the Bay
1. The Argus

Feel free to create your own list and trackback to this topic, and I’ll update the post as people create lists.

Andy has the weekly roundup… up. Everything dealing with Putin and his cronies and the near abroad! Check it out! My personal favorite was Russia’s threat to withhold funding from the OSCE if it doesn’t change its mission from those sickly human rights to security.

They would say that, wouldn’t they?

Defying a ban against unauthorized rallies, several hundred people took to the street.

Hundreds of supporters of one of Egypt??????s largest opposition groups have defied a government ban against unauthorized protests and taken to the streets of Cairo to demonstrate.

Ahead of landmark elections, dozens of Muslim Brotherhood officials chanted that President Hosni Mubarak was no longer fit to rule Egypt.

Many demonstrators were detained and remanded in custody for 15 days on charges including “membership of a banned organization, participation in illegal demonstrations and incitement to hatred of the regime,” judicial officials said.

Pro-Islamic students at universities in Cairo, Alexandria and Mansoura have protested the government’s detention of the demonstrators.

A small number of protesters from the Kifaya, or “Enough” Movement were stopped from marching toward the parliament.

They then marched to the Journalists’ Syndicate, where the crowd grew to 400, chanted slogans against President Mubarak and carried the movement’s yellow and red flag.

“The one who bars demonstrators would face the fate of Sadat!” said one chant, referring to the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat by Islamic extremists.

For some effective discussion on whether opposition Islamists overthrowing the government would lead to a democratic government in the end, check out first this post by Kirk as well as the comments, and then this one afterword. I left a comment in the latter which I’ll repost right here, because Egypt is strange case deserving further discussion.

You know, it????????s something I myself am somewhat unresolved on. Is it better to open up immediately and allow political liberalization at the risk of extremists sweeping into power and strangling other political resistence as a dictator would? Or is it better to slowly reform?

I am confused, in part, because of my experience with Chile. Pinochet killed several thousand people and embezzled hundreds of millions of dollars ???????? these are the obvious deplorable things. But he also liberalized the economy which naturally led to the political liberalization of the country. And despite the media claims of his souring in the public eye, you????????d be amazed at how much support he has outside of the upper-class suburb tucked behind the hill of the actual city.

In any case, this brings to mind your other article ony Egypt dealing with its own economic liberalization. The way I see it, even if Mubarak does rig these next elections, the more the economy liberalizes the more people will have a natural interest in having a voice in the country????????s direction. I????????m not condoning what Mubarak does, but it certainly seems like the right way to go if the pressure is kept on him, and a much softer way at that.

But will his overthrow and the installation of an Islamic government lead to democratic reform? If it does, people will certainly know better for the next election. But if it doesn????????t, then people will be stuck with someone perhaps worse without a viable way out. It????????s quite risky given that while economic reform is underway, it hasn????????t captured wholly the minds of the people yet.

This opens up a much broader topic though. I think it is important to note that freedom and liberalization generally leads to democracy, but democracy may not always lead to freedom. I think you must have the first to have the latter, and the distinction should probably be made between the two.

Big Pharaoh has thoughts that echo my fears.

Feel free to share your thoughts on this. Is it better to leave someone like Mubarak in power who will slowly reform, or allow an Islamic opposition to take the reins and possibly cause further turmoil? Does democracy lead to freedom, or the other way around? The more we develop ideas about these kinds of things, the better we can both understand the world around us and effectively promote the policy.

A few significant things have happened in this arena besides the sale of fighter jets to both Pakistan and India. Secretary of State Rice has recently said that the U.S. aims to make India a world power in the 21st century.

Washington: The United States unveiled plans Friday to help India become a “major world power in the 21st century” even as it announced moves to beef up the military of Pakistan.

Under the plans, Washington offered to step up a strategic dialogue with India to boost missile defense and other security initiatives as well as high-tech cooperation and expanded economic and energy cooperation.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has presented to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh the Bush administration’s outline for a “decisively broader strategic relationship” between the world’s oldest and largest democracies, a senior US official said.

“Its goal is to help India become a major world power in the 21st century,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“We understand fully the implications, including military implications, of that statement.”

He did not elaborate but noted that South Asia was critical, with China on one side, Iran and West Asia on the other, and a somewhat turbulent Central Asian region to the north.

I was actually having a discussion on this with Bill Rice a few days ago. Here’s the relevant part that I observed:

With Condi as our new Secretary of State, we’ve been diverting much more to regional powers of late. A major case thus far has been India. India has done an amazing job with helping in the tsunami crisis, and currently they are handling the democratic crisis in Nepal. The new U.S. foreign policy seems to build strong democratic societies that can then exert influence on budding or established problem/communist states. With China enforcing its naval power in the straits and Indonesia, a powerful and populous ally against the communist mainland right next door is certainly in our strategic interest.

Now there’s one more thing I want to add to that, with regards to “turbulent Central Asia.” This, in particular, has to do with gas pipeline revenues to specific hostile governments.

For the time being the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) does not correspond much to the OPEC configuration. Some experts believe, however, that precisely Russia will determine gas prices on a future integrated market.

Combining the efforts of Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, which own immense gas resources, is an objective condition for creating a large regional gas alliance. Available sales markets, like India, Pakistan, China and some other countries, make this idea even more attractive.

There is a lot of gas in these regions and the profits from it help to keep some ugly regimes afloat. If these were to expand, certainly it could extend their lifetimes. If they are marginalized, however…

NEW DELHI, March 29: The surprise US offer of nuclear cooperation with India, specially for power production, has thrown the entire Indian geo-strategic planning into disarray with the future of gas pipelines from Iran and Myanmar clouded with uncertainty.

While the Foreign and Defense Ministries in New Delhi are jubilant, the Petroleum and Natural Gas Ministry is suddenly apprehensive as nuclear power stations set up with US help could offset the need of long and insecure pipelines this ministry was preparing to lay.

Indian Petroleum and Natural Gas Minister, Mani Shanker Aiyar is, at present, on an official tour of the Middle East to probe the possibilities to cater to the energy needs of India. In the coming months, Aiyer has to hold talks with his counterparts in Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar for these proposed gas pipelines. But the US proposal of civil nuclear energy cooperation has entirely changed the energy scenario.

Bush Administration????????s offer of nuclear cooperation was part of a series of measures to upgrade the Indo-US Strategic Partnership, which includes supply of F-18 fighter jets and nuclear safety cooperation to India.

The Foreign Ministry has welcomed the offer for nuclear technology and cooperation in the field of nuclear safety, describing it as a “a welcome step which reflects an understanding of India’s growing energy requirements.???????

It’s an interesting move for setting up a checkmate, that’s for sure. This particular deal has to do with Iran, something that would both slow the Iranian theocracy’s influence and boost U.S. prominence in the region. In the larger picture, I think stunting demand from one of the world’s biggest future energy demanders would accelerate the decline of governents with such vast gas resources. What do all of you think? Could India be a possible ace the U.S. has up its sleeve?

UPDATE: Bill has more on the U.S.-India strategic partnership, with him and Simon engaging in discussion over it. Bill Roggio also has a lot more.

I was just going through Google news last night and read an article on The Tufts Daily, an editorial piece regarding the Tulip Revolution. A lot of it had to do with post-revolution relations with Russia and how Kyrgyzstan should move away from its influence. Well, besides being physically impossible to move, I dropped a comment on there that I’ll report here for analytical sakes given then I rarely do that.

Kremlin foreign policy post-Orange Revolution has been to work with both governments and opposition parties to ensure steady political and economic relations with Russia despite a change of governance. When it comes to Central Asia, an area not so close to Europe as Ukraine, Russia will continue to have at least a notable economic influence over Kyrgyzstan as a regional power.

That’s not to say Putin will be interfering in elections as much as he did (having been burned so many times already) but certainly, even in a democratic Kyrgyzstan, relations with Russia are important. That’s why he doesn’t have to speak out or take sides.

The opposition leaders do have some problems with them in terms of history (beating down protesters before the collapse of the Soviet Union and such); Bakiyev included. For that, we will just have to continue watching to see what unravels, though it will be pretty hard to get away with much given the whole world watching and finally caring.

No comment on the United Nations. Just kidding! Kyrgyzstan is one of the few countries with both a U.S. and Russian military base. That kind of matter doesn’t need to be complicated any more through a UN peace-keeping force. A better idea would be to train Kyrgyz in democratic thought and peaceful activism a la Gene Sharp. It worked in Ukraine. Not only would this allow them to keep their sovereignty from a foreign occupation group but would help them understand the principles of the government they are trying to adopt.

The other day, both parliaments were rivalling for power. That got put an end to, with the upper house dissolving.

Bishkek, 29 March 2005 (RFE/RL) — The upper chamber of Kyrgyzstan’s old parliament today followed the outgoing lower chamber in suspending its activities and giving way to the newly elected single-chamber parliament.

Muratbek Mukashev, the upper chamber’s speaker, read a statement signed by 32 lawmakers from the 45-seat chamber, saying it would end its work “for the sake of stability and to avoid conflict situations.”

Ishenbai Kadyrbekov, speaker of the outgoing lower chamber, said before his chamber disbanded yesterday that the decision was being made for the good of the country although many of its members believe the new parliament lost its legitimacy when the Supreme Court ruled recent parliamentary polls were fraudulent.

The new parliament yesterday followed the outgoing parliament in approving Kurmanbek Bakiev as prime minister. Bakiev is also serving as interim president due to the absence of ousted President Askar Akaev, who has fled the country to an unknown location.

Akayev has also said he may resign.

Kyrgyzstan’s ousted President Askar Akayev says he is prepared to resign if he is given “relevant guarantees”.

Speaking to Russian state TV, he said he was willing to step down if Kyrgyz law was “totally respected”.

The statement contrasts with earlier comments on Russian radio, when he said he was the “sole legitimate president”.

Mr Akayev fled Kyrgyzstan last week, when opposition supporters seized control following protests over recent parliamentary elections.

He told the radio station that he was now in Russia, staying in the country as a guest of President Vladimir Putin.

In his first public comments since being ousted last Thursday, Mr Akayev kept his critics guessing with what appear to be contradictory statements, the BBC’s Ian MacWilliam reports from Bishkek.

I’m guessing these “relevant guarantees” will be legal protections against prosecution and such. Either way, the opposition government was in power whether Akayev liked it or not. These resignations of the old guard and the possiblity of Akayev’s go further to legitimize the new one constitutionally — a good sign of less conflict to come. And right now, when so many people are worried about the final outcome of this situation, all signs of hope are welcome.

Damn Nathan for hitting me with this chain letter! I’ll get him back for it! But who can refuse a chain letter? Plus, it’s about books, so instead of me writing about secret crushes and first kisses, I’ll be pointing you in the direction of good bathroom material. He did forward this to me to see my response, so here we go.
(more…)

I was taking a look at this article about recent demonstrations around Russia — you know, Kyrgyzstan and a little bit about Belarus. One part in particular caught my eye, though.

Two Russian ethnic republics, Ingushetia and Bashkortostan, have seen mass street demonstrations this week directed against Kremlin-installed leaders. Even in remote Mongolia, the former USSR’s Asian satellite, hundreds of protesters gathered last week to “congratulate our Kyrgyz brothers” and demand a rerun of last June’s disputed parliamentary polls.

Amazing how these things almost fly under the radar (just like how Bahrain totally missed the MSM’s map). Partner in revolutionary activities Gateway Pundit picked up on it though (read that post to see what happened). Today he posts an article in Gateway to Russia relating that a revolution might be in store for this ethnic region.

Yesterday’s events showed that a revolution awaits Ingushetia.
Ingush President Murat Zyazikov was saved by the very people who could have easily turned the events into a revolution. The very same Äopposition MPÅ Musa Ozdoyev who calmed down the protesters. The very same Youth Movement of Ingushetia, whose leaders tackled the most radical young people who had been planning to stage protest actions in Äthe capitalÅ Magas.
Those were the people who prevented a “velvet” revolution from taking place in Ingushetia. They did not let the genie out of the bottle. They made a wise decision because they were well aware that the crowd could become unmanageable.

But Zyazikov and his entourage were baffled even by what happened on 28 March and showed that they were helpless and frightened. At the Ingush Interior Ministry they are joking about hysterical calls which they have been receiving from Magas over the past two days ordering “prevent”, “encircle”, “don’t allow”, “seal off”, etc.

What happened on 28 March is a signal to the Russian leadership. The opposition has decided to hold off Ästaging ralliesÅ and is expecting Russian President Vladimir Putin to react.
Will he be able to understand that if President Murat Zyazikov, who is hated by the people, continues to stay in power, this can blow up the situation in Ingushetia? Ingushetia is on the brink of revolution.

That certainly shows some remarkable restrain on part of the opposition. Very impressive. The article also notes the protests in Bashkortostan, in which more than 10,000 people gathered.

MOSCOW, March 28 (RIA Novosti) - Protesters have rallied in Bashkortostan, an autonomous republic in the Volga region, against President Murtaza Rakhimov and the authorities’ social policy, the Russian news site Gazeta.ru reported.

More than ten thousand people poured into the streets of the Bashkir capital of Ufa demanding Rakhimov’s resignation and the repeal of the monetization of benefits. The authorities did not address the marchers who have already begun “choosing the color” of the revolution.

According to Chairman of the For Human Rights organization Lev Ponomaryov, human rights advocates have long been closely watching Bashkortostan since the number of rights-violation appeals from there is much greater than those from other regions.

According to Ponomaryov, both the Bashkir and Kyrgyz structures resemble clan and nepotism societies, meaning Bashkortostan could go the way of Kyrgyzstan. In addition to demanding Rakhimov’s resignation, marchers want compensation for emotional damage and physical damage residents of Blagoveshchensk suffered when police and special forces beat people during a December operation.

Marat Hairullin, member of the public committee for the Blagoveshchensk affair, said that if the authorities did not respond to the outcries of the population, then the Bashkir opposition would conduct another protest in April demanding Rahimov’ s resignation.

If still no response is evoked, then several thousand people will march on Ufa’s Central Square on May 1.

Opposition activists say they are seeking to draw the attention of Russian authorities to the people’s discontent with the republic’s president and the federal government. The May 1 protest would be the third protest opposing the Republic’ s leadership.

Ramil Bignov, Chairman of the regional national cultural Tatar Autonomy, said that the appeal for Rakhimov’s resignation has collected about 10,000 signatures and that Bashkir residents have already begun muttering words like “to build” and “colored”, referencing a revolution.

It isn’t just the big countries undergoing this effect anymore.

So much is going on in the world that a large roundup of Lebanon has been hard to do, but there’s been quite a bit of news lately so it’s certainly a good time to do one.

News:
Over the past week and a half three bombs exploded near Beirut in mainly Christian suburbs. Christians have been one of the major backings in Lebanon (as well as Ukraine) in the opposition protests. But this is not the Lebanon of 25 years ago. This is a Lebanon that is united for their own sovereignty above what Syria will do to them, so there is likely no chance whatsoever of a civil war.

In demonstration of this solidarity, a protest of all women demonstrated against the attack.

Thousands of women from all Lebanese confessions have staged a demonstration at slain ex-premier Hariri’s graveside, shouting impassioned chants that the recent wave of bombings in and around Beirut would not break the national unity generated by Hariri’s blood.
Brandishing Lebanese flags and chanting “We Want the Truth. Ask the Sister,’ the women marched from the scene of Hariri’s assassination at central Beirut’s St. George seaside resort to the tomb at the downtown Martyrs Square, where hundreds of opposition activists have been maintaining a graveside vigil said the Feb. 14 murder. The ’sister’ in the chant was a reference to Syria.

Leading the demonstration were legislators Naila Mouawad, widow of slain ex-President Rene Mouawad, and Ghenwa Jalloul, of Hariri’s bloc in Parliament. A poster reading in English “Stop State Terrorism” was waved over the front row of the demonstration, referring to the bombing attacks in Jdeideh, Kaslik and Dekwaneh.

“Enough blood, enough assassinations and enough bombs,” other posters hollered, blaming the bombing wave on Lebanon’s Syrian-controlled security services.

Here are more pictures from that demonstration. It looks like they are more of the MILF type though. Protest babes come in all ages!

The petition to release Samir Geagea. leader of the Lebanese Forces, from jail has gathered steam as a demonstration took place.

Lebanese Forces activists have staged an Easter demonstration at Samir Geagea’s hometown of Besharri demanding his release from nearly an 11-year imprisonment as a drive for a parole gathered steam in parliament.
Legislator Nicholas Fattoush has added his signature to a parliamentary petition for an amendment of a 1991 post-civil war amnesty law to allow the LF commander to be set free from jail at the Defense Ministry compound in Yarze, where he spent more than 10 years in solitary confinement.

“I am signing the ‘free Geagea’ bill because his freedom is an essential requirement of a genuine national reconciliation,” Fattoush said as he signed at Geagea’s suburban house north of Beirut in the presence of his wife Strida and parliament member Nihmatallah Abi Nasr Monday, An Nahar reported on Tuesday.

Abi Nasr is one of the six legislators who signed the bill last week. The draft needs between six and 10 signatures to set the amendment move in motion at the 128-member legislature.

Hundreds of LF activists brandishing Geagea’s portraits in a forest of LF and Lebanese national flags paraded in the streets of Besharri, shouting slogans demanding his unconditional release as a precondition for national reconciliation.

The LF has forcefully joined the opposition drive to end Syria’s tutelage over Lebanon in the wake of ex-Premier Hariri’s assassination. So did exiled Gen. Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement. Activists from the two far-right groupings are taking part in the 43-day-old non-stop vigil at Hariri graveside.

This is one of the demands, pretty much that political exiles and prisoners be allowed back. Another big one is the resignation of the security bosses, and the head chief has just taken a “vacation.”

The chief of Lebanese military intelligence, whose resignation the opposition is demanding, stepped aside Tuesday by taking a one-month leave, a military official said.
Maj. Gen. Raymond Azar, the director of military intelligence, took a one-month “administrative leave,” the official said.

The anti-Syrian opposition has been demanding the resignation of Azar, five other generals and prosecutor-general Adnan Addoum in the wake of the Feb. 14 assassination of ex-premier Rafik Hariri, which the opposition has blamed on Damascus and its allies in Lebanon.

General Georges Khoury, head of intelligence in the Mount Lebanon province, was appointed to fill the post in Azar’s absence.(AP)

The opposition is still holding out for the resignation of four other security chiefs as well as the prosecutor general.

Another big hit comes with Karami. Even though he was recently reappointed as prime minister, he hasn’t been able to form his “national unity” bipartisan government. The opposition wants to see a neutral government concerned with overseeing Syria’s withdrawal and free and fair elections. With Karami’s failure to establish a new government, he has yet again resigned.

The pro-Syrian prime minister in Lebanon said Tuesday that he would step down because he could not persuade anti-Syrian opposition figures to join a national unity government to lead the country to elections due in May.

In a move that could delay those polls, the prime minister, Omar Karami, told reporters that he was not willing to lead a cabinet that did not include both pro-Syrian loyalists and opposition.

“I ‘m not willing to form a government of this sort and I came to put the speaker in the picture,” he said after meeting Parliament’s speaker, Nabih Berri. “I am going to see the president to inform him of this decision.”

President Lahoud and the opposition are finally beginning to work on this transitional government, however, through the intervention of the Maronite Patriarch.

A consensus is shaping up between President Lahoud’s Syrian-backed regime and Lebanon’s opposition front on a political truce to allow the formation of a transitional government of 6-to-10 elder statesmen to conduct the spring parliamentary elections on schedule or with a delay of up to three months, An Nahar reported Tuesday.
The crux of the developing accord came out from an Easter meeting between Lahoud and Patriarch Sfeir, which was welcomed by most of the effective forces on Lebanon’s political spectrum and conveyed to Premier-Designate Omar Karami, who said he needed some 48 hours to make up his mind, An Nahar said.

The Beirut media was unanimous, however, that Karami was bent on turning down anything short of a national unity government made up of the opposition and loyalists, invariably quoting him as saying he would see Lahoud at the Baabda palace Wednesday to tell him ‘I am quitting.’

Outgoing economy minister Adnan Kassar and ex-premier Salim Hoss have been tipped as front-runners to head the new government of elders if and when Karami steps aside. Former Foreign Minister Fouad Butros, ex-Premier Rashid Solh, former Justice Minister Nasri Maalouf and ex-Information Minister Michel Edde are widely tipped as members of the concise cabinet.
…
The opposition is contending that the delay should not exceed May 31, when the mandate of the current parliament expires. But the loyalist camp is pressing for postponement ranging from three to six months, according to An Nahar

There isn’t enough reason to put off the elections, though. This government can easily be formed and, if Assad continues to withdraw, Syria will be out by the middle of next week.

The deadline has been pressured from two months down to 20 days as of last Wednesday. This made the middle of next week the historic date for the departure of the last Syrian soldier from Lebanon, An Nahar’s Domestic Affairs Editor Nicholas Nassif reported.

Assad’s decision was conveyed to the Lebanese army command in the latest of three unpublicized meetings held by the Lebanese-Syrian joint military committee March 18, 21 and 26, Nassif wrote.

“The decision quickens the pace for a complete termination of Syrian military and intelligence presence in Lebanon to strip the U.N. Security Council from any alibis to keep Syria under pressure,” An Nahar’s Nassif stressed.

I’m less concerned about the soldiers and more so about thei ntelligence and collaboration between them and Hizb’allah, however. They have right to be concerned, with the UN report condemning them and the backed Lebanese government in Hariri’s murder, as well as establishing an international investigation that they have agreed to because they really have no other choice.

Lebanese President Emile Lahoud has pledged full cooperation with the United Nations in order to bring to justice the assassins of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri.

Mr Lahoud “stressed his commitment to do whatever it takes to reveal the circumstances surrounding the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, in cooperation with the United Nations by whatever method it adopts in order to know the identity of the perpetrators of the crime,” a statement said.

The president also called for “the heaviest sanctions to be imposed on those the investigation proves hatched the plot, those who carried it out and those who helped with its execution”.

“The measures will affect all those who, according to the results of the inquiry, are proved to have been negligent in their duties or who committed errors that damaged the reputation of Lebanon, its institutions and its security services.”

The presidential statement came after the foreign minister, Mahmoud Hamoud, said Lebanon would agree to the creation of an international commission of inquiry if it is called for the UN Security Council.

A video has also been captured showing the suspect car in the Hariri blast.

Meanwhile on the Hizb’allah front, the opposition seems to be trying to neutralize them on the pro-Syria front by saying they should keep their arms.

Lebanon’s most prominent anti-Syrian opposition leader said yesterday that Hezbollah, the Syria-backed Shiite Muslim group, should keep its weapons until Israel withdraws from Shebaa Farms, a tiny disputed border enclave on the border between Lebanon, Israel and Syria’s Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

The meeting between Druze leader Walid Jumblatt and Hezbollah chief Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the first between the two prominent figures since last month’s car-bomb assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, could signal a thaw in frosty relations between the opposition and Hezbollah.

Indeed. Now that they have their only demand fulfilled, they are put into a position where they effectively must coordinate with the opposition or be seen as truely Syrian-controlled (something not all so popular as you can imagine). Certainly, with the change in Lebanese politics since February, whether or not they have arms may not make a difference if they are legitimately voted down a notch.

Blogs:
Tony has a brilliant analysis on the compromise with Hizb’allah. One thing he notes is that Jumblat did not announce this compromise before consulting with U.S. officials, and since it is the case that President Bush has already said Hizb’allah might have a place in Lebanese politics, I think it is clear that once elections are held, Hizb’allah will be forced to moderate or begin to lose.

The Head Heeb has part five of his introduction to Lebanese politics.

Amer Chehab wonder what all the explosions mean for Lebanon’s stability while Mustapha recalls Hama Rules for us. Luckily, it hasn’t come to anything like that yet. But the posts certainly highlight the worries about Syria that many Lebanese have.

This Reuters analysis thinks that Syria’s influence won’t end with the pullout (duh). Tony goes further, noting the vast cash cow Syria has to lose there, and the Lebanese Political Journal notes some business connections between the two.

Lastly, Michael Young has a pretty damning editorial about the UN investigation with regards to the Lebanese government.

The Fitzgerald report is much more than an investigation into a murder. It is, first, an accusation against both the Syrian and Lebanese security services, suggesting they were responsible for creating a climate that led to Hariri’s assassination, even as it strongly implies they were also directly responsible. Second, it is an expos???? of how the Lebanese authorities sought to manipulate evidence at the crime scene, perhaps behaving criminally. Third, it is an indictment of the Syrian-dominated order in Lebanon. And finally, it is a proposal to dismantle that order.

Lastly, John Chilton of The Emirates Economist notes that the Arab media is catching on to our fascination with their women!

Hat tip to Andy for this article. The King of Bhutan, a small country located near undemocratic Nepal and India, has drafted a constitution to allow for multi-party democracy.

The king of the Himalayan state of Bhutan announced the end of a century of absolute royal rule yesterday with the publication of a draft constitution to establish a multiparty democracy.

King Jigme Singye Wangchuck said that by the end of the year his 700,000 subjects would be given the right to elect two houses of parliament, whose members would be empowered to impeach the monarch by a two-thirds vote.

Bhutan, a tiny Buddhist kingdom between India and China, does not have a written constitution and its monarchy goes back to the days of the British Raj, when Jigme’s great-grandfather was anointed king by London.

The British-educated King Jigme, who succeeded at the age of 16 in 1972, said an absolute monarchy was an anachronism.

Kinley Dorji, editor of Bhutan’s national daily, Kuensel, said: “Some people say why change a system that works, while others said that we are not educated enough to make decisions on our own.

“The king’s answer has been that the country needs a system, not an individual, to run it.”

Bhutan has been making slow but steady progress towards democracy since 2001, unlike its neighbour Nepal, where King Gyanendra seized power this year and sacked the elected government.

Until the 1960s the “Land of the Thunder Dragon” was an isolated country, dependent on subsistence farming, with few schools, and no telephones, national currency, hospitals or postal service.

Many say the adoption of democracy signifies that the traditional hermit kingdoms of the Himalayas are quickly waking up to the pressures of the modern world.

The king has opened the country to tourists, and he allowed television in the late 1990s. It got its first internet cafe in 2001.

In late 2003 it made its first military offensive, attacking Indian militants who had been waging a separatist war from camps in the southern forests.

The BBC has a timeline of events in this country’s history. It notes that an up or down referendum will be held to approve the constitution.

Mark Colvin has a transcript from his radio program where he interviews Bhutan’s chief judge, who thinks people are ready for the change.

JAYNE-MAREE SEDGMAN: It’s a rare king who chooses to relinquish his power but, from all accounts, Jigme Singye Wangchuk is no ordinary king.

He freely admits monarchy is not the best system of government and has been advocating change for decades.

Under his proposal, the king would remain head of state but the day-to-day power would move to an elected prime minister.

Bhutan’s Chief Judge, Lyonpo Sonam Tobgye, is confident when the time comes people will vote in favour of change.

LYONPO SONAM TOBGYE: They are quite convinced, and they may not like to disappoint their king, so they will vote for the constitution. But I would like to correct it here, first he will consult with the people the maximum grass-root cross-section of the society, and later it will be adopted at the national assembly. I’m quite positive that it will be adopted, but I’m sure there will be some changes or amendment to what we have proposed.

JAYNE-MAREE SEDGMAN: In the past those wishing to visit Bhutan could do so only by royal invitation, but now tourism is a huge industry, second only to hydro-electricity.

However it’s not budget travellers who are flocking there, with the Government requiring visitors to spend a minimum of $250 a day. This is also a country where television and the internet have only been available for the past five years.

So if the new system is adopted how might it affect the fairytale kingdom? I put that question to Kinley Dorji, the editor of Bhutan’s only newspaper Keunsel.

KINLEY DORJI: That is the hundred dollar question which we are all asking, I guess.

It was very exciting, you know, on Saturday when we saw the draft constitution. I mean, you turn every page and it’s history, I mean, it’s so dramatic in many ways, it’s very exciting.

At the same time, we are apprehensive, I mean, I would say I am also apprehensive, because democratic governance takes a lot of understanding, I think, a lot of, ah, it takes education, it takes democratic and political experience, and it’s all new for the Bhutanese people.

We also look around at democracies around the world and we see a lot of problems and we wonder whether we’ll be able to avoid them.

JAYNE-MAREE SEDGMAN: Chief Justice Tobgye says in the lead up to the referendum, to be held within the next two years, the King will meet with as many of the country’s half-a-million residents as he can to discuss their concerns and make any necessary amendments. He says it’s only natural there’s been a degree of apprehension about such radical change.

LYONPO SONAM TOBGYE: Initially there were oppositions from the people because over the last hundred years, almost hundred years, the monarchy had provided stability, economic development, security, tranquillity to the nation.

However, with the persuasion over last three years, his Majesty has convinced the people that having a constitution is most imperative for the greater and the glorious Bhutan.

So there will be opposition and dissenting voice, that is a very essence of democracy which his Majesty wants.

He seems like a very wise king.

Norm Geras has it, and he has been following this one for awhile now. Check it out!

Back at Columbia, my roomate was a Cuban-American lawyer. She insisted that if you are a lawyer, it is an absolute that you can write. All lawyers know how to write, she added. If law school can teach you one thing, it is the capacity to write well.

But now an apologist for Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez named Eva Golinger, who says she’s a lawyer, has taken to writing malevolent - and sub-literate - gibberings full of raging personal attacks against noted investigative researcher Alek Boyd. Her suspect activities have been exposed by Boyd, and she’s reacted like a cornered rat on the rag. Anyone can see her reasons, of course, but who wouldn’t wonder about her professionalism? And unlike other lawyers, this “lawyer” can’t spell, write clearly, use proper grammar or make coherent arguments.

I am amazed at what’s getting through law schools these days. It makes me wonder if this ex-garage-band singer turned Chavez apologist actually did.

That is what I wondered when a question was posted to me about him.

Hello,because my experiences I hate the term revolution,I prefer movement,the only revolution I love is American in 1776,every other is similar to French. But I love to see criminals overthrowed. What is your opinion on Justin Raimondo -and similar libertarians-,his opinions on Kirgyz,Iran,Lebanon,etc. he is a lazy idiot or even worse?

Well, I didn’t really know who the commenter was referring to so I had to Google the name. It’s also ironic that today, just after hearing about him, he sent me some traffic by linking to my “Kyrgyz protestor babe” post at the beginning of his long-winded diatribe about Kyrgyzstan. His column is located at antiwar.com, so that would explain quickly his position on issues. He strikes me as something of an angry and a tad warped individual, because being against the war seems to be his only issue.

So much so that the presuppositions he makes regarding the various revolutions around the world right now are pretty inconsistent from post to post. In his latest article he says that That the Bush administration has unleashed a war of “the poor against the rich” in all of these countries. along with some jibber jabber about the Bill of Rights being suspended, as if he knows what something like that would actually be like. As far as I know, he is still barking lunacy on the internet. And the poor against the rich? What about Lebanon where many people are calling it “The Gucci Revolution?” Or Ukraine, where the revolutionaries were predominantly middle class?

Speaking of Ukraine, Justin thinks that the protests erupted simply because of exit polls.

In the Ukraine, tens of thousands of protesters march through the streets demanding that pro-Russian Prime Minister and presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovich give up the reins of power: he stole the election, they claim. The whole thing was “rigged.” How do they know this? Well, you see, the exit polls ???????? conducted by Western organizations ???????? showed their candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, the winner. When the final results didn’t jibe with the polls, and Yanukovich came out ahead, Yushchenko called his supporters out into the streets, anointed himself the winner, and threatened civil war.

Gee, why didn’t’ the Kerryites think of that? After all, early exit polls in the U.S. showed the Democratic candidate as the putative winner: on election day in the U.S., rumors of Kerry’s imminent victory were spurred by (possibly biased?) reporting based on the preliminary numbers that were coming in. According to the “logic” employed by Yushchenko and his Western supporters ???????? including the EU, the OSCE, and U.S. government officials (and the White House) ???????? this means Kerry is the actual winner of the November election, and a usurper sits in the Oval Office.

Perhaps — except that the vast difference between the exit polls showing Yushchenko’s clear majority over over Yanukovich and the vast electoral fraud committed. You would think a libertarian would disapprove of such a thing, but in case he just didn’t read the report, here it is. I guess he didn’t see the videos of the mass bussing of Yanukovich supporters and beatings of Yushchenko voters.

Perhaps they protested because something was actually wrong, but Justin started his article with the catchy little line, ” From Iraq to the Ukraine, ‘democracy’ marches on ???????? crushing the popular will.” Because all he has is catchy little lines. Nathan, in fact, has a post up calling into question his recent column on Kyrgyzstan. As a commenter notes:

Most paranoid schizophrenics make up elaborate plots that cannot be proven or disproven. The paranoid attributes any attempt at reasoning with him as evidence that someone is either in on the original plot or covering it up. I????????ve spoken with Justin Raimondo before, and I can????????t say that I????????ve ever personally dealt with a more completely batshit insane individual in my life.

More accurate than anything I’ve seen Justin write thusfar.

UPDATE: He apologizes for using the fake memo!

Just after many major opposition leaders were released from prison, they’ve decided to make Aliyev regret it. In the beginning of April, the three main Azeri opposition parties will unite and stage a protest against the government.

BAKU. March 28 (Interfax-Azerbaijan) - Three Azerbaijani opposition groups - the Popular Front, the Democratic Party and Musavat - have decided to join forces in a protest action early next month, Popular Front leader Ali Kerimli said on Monday.

Kerimli said at a meeting of the Popular Front leadership the date for the start of the action would be agreed upon within days.

Eurasianet has a keen analysis up as usual. Of particular note:

Members of the “group of seven” said their fight “for the democratization of Azerbaijan” has just begun. Huseynov, one of those recently released from prison, does not believe that Aliyev????????s decree will usher in a new era of harmony in relations between the authorities and opposition. “One decree will not be able to solve the problem of political prisoners,” Huseynov told EurasiaNet. “Only a democratic revolution can eliminate this regime.”

Other freed opposition leaders agreed. “The only support the authorities have today is from law enforcement bodies, but activation of the political fight will deprive them of it,” said Jalaloglu.

Azerbaijan????????s opposition has been fragmented since the October 2003 crack-down that led to the arrest of hundreds of government critics, journalists and human rights activists. Opposition parties made only a haphazard showing in December 2004 municipal elections. But on March 18, three main opposition parties ?????? Musavat, the Popular Front and the Democratic Party — announced the formation of a coalition for the November 2005 parliamentary elections.
…
Though Aliyev????????s pardon freed political prisoners, it did not meet the OSCE????????s demand that the opposition activists be formally acquitted of the charges against. Under existing legislation, the still-standing convictions could bar the freed opposition activists from running for a seat in parliament. In addition, officials have expressed no intention to investigate charges that law enforcement officers tortured the October prisoners. Opposition leaders, including Panah Huseynov and Igbal Agazade, leader of the Umid Party, have said that they plan to petition the European Court of Human Rights regarding the torture of prisoners, and to secure an acquittal for the charges brought against them. “A crime was perpetrated against us, and we suffered from torture,” Huseynov said. “Both the organizers and executors of this crime have to be punished.”

If Aliyev were to prevent these candidates from running, it is quite possibly the stupidest move he could possibly make. As is highlighted in the article, the 2003 presidential elections have already demonstrated the will of the people of Azerbaijan to protest. Any particularly confronting moves like this would mobilize the opposition even quicker than it is already. If there is any trend to be noticed, however, it is that the various oppositions are learning. They realize that they can settle the rest of their differences after achieving democratization.

United we stand, or divided we fall, right?

My post yesterday questioning whether opening elections to the Muslim Brotherhood might bring about disaster got more responses than any other post I have done on Publius Pundit. I felt that some of the issues raised by the comments had sufficient significance for democratic development theory to justify a full post response. (To read my initial post and the comments, see Egypt: Democracy Enthusiasts’ Toughest Test?)

There were some responses with which I agree or at least find reasonable:
(1) It is almost certainly true that were the Muslim Brotherhood to come to power in Egypt, this would lead to widespread disenchantment and a reaction against them. This has happened already in Iran. While support for Iran’s Islamist regime was never overwhelming, some who originally supported it have turned against it.

(2) I agree that the MB would probably moderate its aims somewhat if it came to power.

(3) Regarding the argument that supporting dictators out of fear of the alternative is foolish: I would say that we can back off support for Egypt’s current government without pressuring Egypt to allow the MB to compete openly. The $2 billion subsidy the U.S. pays to Egypt was in exchange for peace with Israel, but that is in Egypt’s interest anyway, and it is certainly correct to point out that funding autocrats like Hosni Mubarak is backfiring. The U.S. gets nothing for that aid and a lot of problems from it.

One option would be for the Egyptian government to allow an open election for the non-Islamist parties, but not for the MB, at least for a few years. Given the MB’s huge organizational advantage, this would allow the pro-democracy reformers some time to build up the strength to compete. I don’t see any reason that it is necessary to go all the way one way or the other immediately.

Ultimately it is their decision, not ours, so my point is more about fostering proper expectations than arguing for a specific course of action.

I also disagree, or would at least question, some of the other responses to my post:
(a) Point (1) above does not necessarily solve the problem, and probably won’t. Iran’s theocracy has been unpopular for a long time, yet it has funded Hizbullah and Palestinian terrorists since the 1980s, has provided at least some assistance to Al-Qaeda, has provided weapons and logistical assistance to the jihadists fighting us in Iraq, and is likely within a year or two of having nuclear weapons. The fact that the MB could not win a second open election does not reassure me. I don’t think there would be one.

Likewise, regarding point (2) above, being in power would likely temper the MB, but this might mean that rather than launch an invasion of Israel, Egypt would begin covertly funding and harboring terrorists. Support for Hamas is so strong in Egypt that I find it inconceivable that they would not. And they would likely support Al-Qaeda.

(b) The argument that repression breeds radicalism is a common one, made by scholars as well as generalists, but with this I disagree because looking across a broad range of countries I don’t see the empirical relationship.

In the case of the MB itself, it did radicalize relatively following Nasser’s repression during the 1950s, but they were jihadist to begin with, and their moderation in recent years is directly related to the severe repression they suffered during the 1990s. Repression did bring radicalization in Algeria, but it brought moderation in both Morocco and Tunisia. Repression in Syria and Iraq caused Islamists (who survived the massacres) to just get out of the game; the most radical went abroad, and the rest just stopped resisting. In Saudi Arabia Islamists (the Wahhabis) were terroristic to begin with, were given a share of power, and stayed terroristic over time. In the other Persian Gulf countries, governments mainly tried to co-opt Islamists by having Islamic trappings but essentially repressed Islamists themselves, and none have faced the kind of radicalism Egypt has. I just don’t see a relationshp.

Outside the Middle East, there is also no clear repression=radicalization relationship. Jihadists are thriving in Europe, where many of their members have the right to vote, and a number of democratic countries have had very resilant terrorist movements - Britain, Spain, Italy, India and Japan being prime examples.

In short, although the “repression=radicalization” theory may seem logical, and it is surely always true of some individuals, it seems that the key is the nature of the original movement. If a movement begins with violent tendencies, it will go violent whenever it can’t get its way democratically - this is why democracies have terrorists. Those that begin peaceful by and large stay that way.

(c) And yes, it would be good to empower Egyptian reformists, as one reader wrote, but be careful about this. Back in 2002, Bush cut Egypt’s aid for arresting a pro-democracy reformer, I think it was Saad Ibrihim (mentioned in the comments), and this united Egypt’s factions around the government, and against the U.S.

Reformers like Ayman Nour really are our best hope, but it must be remembered that American support can backfire because anti-Americanism is so strong there. Don’t be fooled by the relatively strong pro-American sentiment found now in Iraq; while most Iraqis are very happy that the U.S. invaded their country, the invasion is still vehemetly opposed by majorities across the Arab world as an attack on Islam.

Contributed by Kirk H. Sowell of Window on the Arab World, and More!

Gary has been reporting on the huge democracy protests that have been going on in Iran and the mainstream media has failed to report them. Here’s the latest:

Iran Press News claims hundreds of thousands of Iranians poured into the streets of cities all across Iran last Friday night. Iran’s TV media blamed anti-regime Iranian media abroad for inciting the revolts. The demonstrators were quoted as chanting: “People join us and condemn the executioners and oppressors…death to dictators…get lost hired killer mercenaries… and Bush, Bush, support, protection…”

SMCCDI reports that as a result of the failure of the regime to deal effectively with the demonstrations, the regime held a high level meeting of those responsible for security measures. The regime is bracing for more demonstrations this next Wednesday (when Iran plays North Korea) and next Saturday (the final day of New Years celebrations). Pro-democracy forces are calling for more demonstration on these dates.

Enough! (A blog I am coming to like) has pictures here.

The monarchy’s coup in Nepal continues, with demonstrators being arrested.

Police in Nepal have arrested at least 120 anti-government activists across the country who defied a ban on protests to show their anger at King Gyanendra’s seizure of absolute power last month.

In the capital, Kathmandu, police detained more than 40 protesters who gathered near the Central Secretariat building, shouting slogans such as “Down with autocracy, we want democracy.”

The rest of the people were detained in similar demonstrations in nine other cities across the Himalayan kingdom.

Monday’s protest in the capital was the largest since February first, when the king dismissed the government, declared a state of emergency and suspended civil liberties.

He said he did so to defeat an escalating Maoist insurgency that has claimed more than 10,000 lives since 1996.

But as “For A Democratic Republic Of Nepal” notes, “Gyanendra????????s appointed cabinet has drafted a strategy focusing on corruption and poverty, it has announced no strategy for peace with Maoists.” The INSN has another article on this with a bit more info and quotes.

Still, Nepal????????s main political parties vowed to hold nationwide protests on April 8 to mark the 15th anniversary of mass pro-democracy demonstrations that ended autocratic rule by Nepal????????s kings.

???????We are working on strategies to be bring out the mass protest next week. It will be joint rallies organized by the five major political parties,’???????? said Kashinath Adhikari of the Communist Party of Nepal, the second-largest party.

However, Adhikari acknowledged the low turnout in previous protests, citing a distrust of politicians who are widely regarded as inefficient and corrupt.

Jagdish Narsingh, a youth leader with the main Nepali Congress party, said the protests haven????????t gained momentum because their top leaders are either in detention, exile or hiding.

I found another article which really caught my eye on how protestors are dispersing before being caught.

This is the story of how Democratic National Youth Front (DNYF) organized a pro-democracy rally, let all the journalists and photojournalists capture the moments and decieved the security forces to escape without without any arrests. This interesting story is told to me by photojournalists Bikash Karki.

The organisers invited all the photojournalists and reporters to Hotel Ashok at Bagbazaar at 3:00pm. Around one-and-half dozens were there - all those from major national and international media. The mediapersons were kept at the hotel for half-an-hour (they were served tea nonetheless) until somebody from somewhere phoned one of the activists there.

Until then the mediapersons didn????????t know where the rally was happening. After receiving the phone, the journalists were taken to Bangemuda, near Asan - the rally hub these days, in two taxis (off course those chosing to ride on their vehicle didn????????t sit in the taxies). At Bangemuda, after they arrived, around two dozens activists gathered, took out flags from their pockets and starting moving towards Naradevi, west of Bangemuda, chanting pro-democracy slogans.

The activists rallied in the 200m long road before the leader of it ordered to ???????disperse???????? and all the participants took out the flags from sticks, put it into their pockets and disappeared in the various sides.

???????There was no policeman in sight, so there was no arrest,??????? Bikash told me. These days policemen are not letting anybody rally and are arresting the activists as soon as they begin shouting slogans or take out party flags.

Very inventive, and just goes to show the lengths and morphings these groups will go through in order to resist the king’s oppression.

Before I start, I want to say what a hell Zimbabwe is, and it is all Mugabe’s fault. I have quite a few friends from South Africa, one of which was born and raised in Zimbabwe. There’s a reason he doesn’t live there anymore. And it seems like the people still there are sick of it. There are several stories about this, but I liked this article the best as it highlights in particular the massive electoral fraud.

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (CNS) — Zimbabweans will be “dancing in the streets” when President Robert Mugabe is gone, a Zimbabwean archbishop said.

Describing Zimbabwe’s president for 25 years as “the one big devil,” Archbishop Pius Ncube of Bulawayo said that “everybody is fed up with Mugabe, even the armed forces — but they keep paying the top brass good money so as to silence them in their opposition.”

The archbishop, who has in the past received death threats and been harassed for his opposition to human rights abuses, made his comments in a wide-ranging interview in Cape Town in mid-March with the South African Catholic weekly, The Southern Cross.

As Zimbabwe prepared for parliamentary elections March 31, Archbishop Ncube said the poll would not be free and fair. The opposition Movement for Democratic Change “will be cheated right, left and center,” he predicted.

“The electoral supervisory commission is handpicked by Mugabe. The oppressive laws are still in force. The government has persecuted the journalists and chased away the international press,” he said.

“Public meetings are banned without police permission,” except for church services, he said; unauthorized meetings are broken up violently, often with tear gas.

Archbishop Ncube alleged that the government had registered voters properly only in the rural areas, the party’s stronghold.

“In the towns we hear of people having been removed from the voters’ roll,” he said.

“Then there are almost 2 million ghost voters. Of those, 800,000 are dead, 300,000 don’t exist — if you go inquire at the listed address, the residents will never have heard of them — and 600,000 are duplicate voters who are listed in different constituencies. So, out of a population of 5.6 million voters, 2 million are fake,” he said, adding that public access to the voters’ roll is restricted.

Archbishop Ncube also repeated his claim that Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party had been using food aid as a political weapon.

“They are going up and down the country telling people, ‘If you don’t vote for us, you don’t get any food, and then we’re going to come back and burn your houses,’” he said.

Noting that large areas of Zimbabwe were experiencing a drought, the archbishop said that the government had obstructed international agencies from distributing food. Poor management of farms after a controversial land redistribution program exacerbated the country’s food crisis, he said.

“Meanwhile, the gap between rich and poor is absolutely unspeakable. Some people are stinking rich … while others stay three, four days without food. Some women come weeping to me with their babies. They tell me, ‘I haven’t eaten for three days, and my breast has no more milk,’” he said.

Last June Mugabe told a British TV station that Archbishop Ncube was an “unholy liar” for making claims of extreme food shortages and famine.

“But we know. We have a church hospital, we have clinics, and we know that people have died of malnutrition,” the archbishop said. Based on figures in Bulawayo, he estimated that 8,000 Zimbabweans had starved to death under Mugabe.

Asked whether he was concerned for his safety in light of his outspoken political views, Archbishop Ncube said he prayed every morning for his well-being.

“But I will not allow them to intimidate me,” he said. “Zimbabwe is my country, I have a right to it. I have a right to speak for my people who are being oppressed. I have the right to be sensitive to the suffering of my people. My position as churchman demands that I stand up for the rights of the people.”

He said he had received greater solidarity from the bishops of South Africa than he had from the Zimbabwean bishops, whom he said had “gone in for quiet diplomacy,” rather than outspoken criticism.

The Zimbabwean bishops’ conference has asked its southern African counterpart not to make statements criticizing the Mugabe government, so the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference has criticized the South African government for its policy of “quiet diplomacy” or appeasement.

Archbishop Ncube said that the policy might have worked “if the Zimbabwean government and Mugabe were honest people … but they are tricksters, saying one thing but doing another.”

“Quiet diplomacy can work with people who listen and who are sensitive to the people’s suffering, who look for solutions. But Mugabe’s attitude is that he’s the one in power, and nobody can tell him anything,” he said.

He said he does not believe that Mugabe, a baptized Catholic and reportedly regular churchgoer, should be excommunicated, a call voiced by many opponents of Mugabe within the Catholic Church.

“I don’t think it would help. He is so stubborn and power hungry, it might only worsen the man. It wouldn’t do any good,” he said.

However, he said he would not “feel at ease” administering Communion to Mugabe should he present himself. “I’ll let others do it.”

Asked what areas of ministry he would have liked to concentrate on instead of politics, Archbishop Ncube pointed out that he “never planned to be outspoken.”

“I’d very much like to fight the AIDS crisis. In Zimbabwe it is extremely pernicious and destructive. Every day 700 Zimbabweans are dying of AIDS. That’s a quarter of a million a year. So I’d like to work on stopping this whole madness and preach the Catholic ethos to change people’s behavior,” he said.

Archbishop Ncube said that he would like to retire when he reaches his mid-60s, “to live a life of contemplative prayer.”

“I would have liked to do that when I was young, before I became a student. But you can’t live twice — unless you’re James Bond,” he said.

And in retort, the ever-so-eloquent Mugabe responds…

Archbishop Ncube has accused 81-year-old Mugabe of starving opposition supporters in order to win Thursday’s polls. The country is in deep economic turmoil and there are widespread food shortages.

Mugabe said: “I don’t know to which God he prays. His prayers are not as pious as his name suggests apparently. He is..a half-wit. I don’t know why the Vatican tolerates prayers of that nature.”

What a classy guy. With the elections campaigning coming to its peak, Mugabe and the opposition opponent Tsvangirai are campaigning in one of the largest electoral districts — where Mugabe murdered tens of thousands.

BULAWAYO - Mugabe and Tsvangirai take their election campaigns to an area where tens of thousands of people were killed by the president’s troops.
President Robert Mugabe and his key opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, both took heir election battles last weekend into a province where a crack army unit directly answerable to Mugabe slaughtered an estimated 30,000 men, women and children 20 years ago.

To this day the Mugabe government has not acknowledged the tens of thousands of murders the Fifth Brigade committed in Matabeleland, nor have those responsible been called to justice. General Shiri, who was known as “Black Jesus”, was promoted to head of the air force and remains one of Mugabe’s closest supporters.

The impact of the Gukurahundi on Matabeleland has proved ineradicable. It has left a huge, raw, unhealed wound among the people of the region who remember the many massacres.

Another good article, with more electoral information.

I’ve been watching this blog since A.M. Mora y Leon posted it. Here is an interesting story regarding tear gassing at a rally.

I was part of the large and peaceful crowd that attended the MDC Rally at White City Stadium, Bulawayo, on Saturday. While seated on the grass waiting quietly to hear Morgan Tsvangirai speak I noticed a group of people running in my direction, obviously in some distress. It turned out that they had been tear gassed. Their eyes were streaming and they were in great discomfort. Fortunately I had brought with me some water and I and others nearby used that to relieve some of the worst symptoms of the tear gas.

At this point I noticed there were some members of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission watching the commotion from just a few meters away. I picked them out by the insignia they were wearing. It struck me that they should be doing something about this unwarranted attack upon innocent members of the public who gathered lawfully and peacefully to hear the opposition leaders.

I walked up to the nearest member of the ZEC, and said to him: “Why are we being tear-gassed? What have we done that is wrong?”

The man did not say one word in reply. Instead he glared at me, giving me one of the most cold, evil and menacing looks I have ever seen.

So much for the neutrality and independence of Zimbabwe’s electoral commission!

Indeed. Read this rest — they seem like very good people. There is an entry mentioning how they will try to live up to being compared to the freedom fighters of Ukraine. If you haven’t read the rest of the blog roundup that A.M. Mora y Leon did, check it out here.

The New York Times ran a surprisingly good piece the other day about the underground resistence movement.

HARARE, Zimbabwe, March 26 - She is in her 40’s and the mother of four, though in the dappled sunlight of an outdoor restaurant here, clad in a floppy hat and a thin cardigan, she looks too young to be either. Nobody would see her as a provocateur, much less a revolutionary.

But when Rebecca took one child to the doctor on a recent morning, she left behind a clinic restroom plastered with stickers urging resistance to the 25-year reign of Zimbabwe’s president, Robert G. Mugabe. Later, she littered her bus seat with condoms emblazoned with a large Z and a call to “Get up! Stand up!” against the government.

“There are more than 10,000 of us,” she said. “And every one is excited, because you know you are playing a part in something you believe in.”

The Z stands not for Zimbabwe, but for Zvakwana, an underground movement that aims to resist - and eventually undermine - Mr. Mugabe’s authoritarian rule. With a second, closely related group called Sokwanele, Zvakwana’s members specialize in anonymous acts of civil disobedience - a meld of guerrilla theater and the philosophies of Gandhi and King.

In ideology, and sometimes even in identity, Zvakwana mirrors grass-roots efforts in any number of authoritarian nations. From Zubr in Belarus to Ukraine’s victorious Pora to nascent groups in Egypt and Lebanon (whose names, in English, mean “enough”), such civic movements may be the hottest phenomenon in global democratic politics. Many take their inspiration from Otpor, the movement that played a major role in ousting Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia.

The groups sprang to life here three years ago, shortly after Mr. Mugabe won a re-election campaign that many international election observers said had been stolen from his democratic opponents. Their rationale is embodied in their names: in Shona and Ndebele, Zimbabwe’s two main languages, both names also mean “enough.”

That the groups truly number 10,000 seems doubtful. Yet the government is nettled enough to paint over much of their graffiti, and news media reports say the police assembled a team of senior investigators 14 months ago to find and destroy Zvakwana.

The police have failed. In fact, one Zvakwana member in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second-largest city, said members of the movement stole into a police station in January to slip antigovernment messages under supervisors’ doors.
…
Although many speculate that movements like Zvakwana are Western inventions, Mr. McFaul said the opposite appeared to be true, at least for the moment.

In Lebanon, “They’re modeling what they’re doing on the Ukrainians,” he said. “And they’re watching the Ukrainians on Al Jazeera, of all places. It’s not an American-centric thing that’s being channeled through the White House. It’s more global.”

Some movements do receive foreign money, but no amount of money will sustain a democratic movement, he added, if a nation’s dissidents lack the passion and numbers to carry the battle on their own.

Read the rest, I love it when they run good, good articles like this.

Those in the United States and elsewhere who are pushing hard for the spread of democracy around the globe (including Publius Pundit) may soon get their toughest test yet. Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak recently made a much publicized announcement that the constitution was to be amended to allow for genuinely competitive presidential elections. Today the Muslim Brotherhood, which is banned in Egypt but is nevertheless highly organized and motivated, held protests demanding that they be given a chance to run in an open election. Dozens were arrested, and judging from what I saw on Al-Jazeera today the demonstrations were pretty forcefull (I watch Arab satellite TV over the internet but don’t own a TV, so I don’t know what everyone else in the U.S. saw, if anything, about this).

If the Brotherhood gets to compete fully, those who advocate that democracy is the solution to terrorism will get their strongest test yet. The argument against pushing too hard for democracy in the Arab world has always been that it would lead to elections won by Islamists, and that they would then shut down the democratic process and begin to use the resources of the state to promote Islamic terrorism. The Bush administration rejected this line, and is pushing democracy everywhere.

I say that Egypt, not Iraq, may be the democracy movement’s toughest test because of the difference between the two countries. Iraq’s most prominent religious figure, the Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has long been a genuine democracy advocate. So it is not so surprising that the United Iraqi Alliance, which ran with his endorsement, would show its democratic bone fides after winning an election, as they have now. But in Egypt the Brotherhood is by far the most powerful Islamist movement, and the most powerful and well-organized opposition group in the country. While the Brotherhood has renounced violence as a means of taking power in Egypt, they consistently push for Egypt to abrogate its peace treaty with Israel and go to war, and is brimming with enthusiasm for jihadism in the Al-Qaeda mode.

Of course, it is not certain that the Brotherhood would win. Mubarak might win a free election, and there is also a non-Islamist opposition movement whose most prominent leader, Ayman Nour, was recently released from prison. The belief that the Brotherhood can win is based largely on their repeated success in winning professional and student association elections (lawyers, teachers, etc.). But perhaps their organizational advantage would be less key in a national election. I will simply note that if there is a free election and the Muslim Brotherhood does win, the world could face its first democratically-elected terroristic government - since 1933.

Contributed by Kirk H. Sowell at Window on the Arab World, and More!