Discussion of All Things Political

On February 11, 2011 Egyptians toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak. Blogger and viral video producer Aalam Wassef was one of the many people who worked for years to make it happen. This is first in a series on the daily life of
Egypt's revolution. It's a manual on how a civil resistance was built to win.

El 11 de febrero de 2011, el pueblo egipcio derrocó al dictador Hosni Mubarak. El bloguero y productor de video viral, Aalam Wassef, fue una de las muchas personas que trabajaron por años para que esto sucediera. Este video es el primero en una serie sobre la vida cotidiana de la revolución egipcia. Es un manual sobre cómo una resistencia civil fue construida para triunfar.

In order to better understand the origins of the current political crisis in Côte d'Ivoire, it is necessary to place recent events within the context of the post-colonial era.

Post-Colonial Politics

Félix Houphouët-Boigny was the first president of Côte d'Ivoire from its independence in 1960 to his death in 1993. Henri Konan Bédié, president of the national assembly succeeded the deceased president in accordance with the Ivorian constitution. In 1995, Henri Konan Bédié remained in power, having been elected with 96.44% of the vote.

Politician Laurent Koudou Gbagbo called a boycott of this presidential election due to reforms that had been implemented to the electoral code. He was elected as a member of parliament in his constituency after his party, the FPI (Ivorian Popular Front), won five of the eight seats in the elections.

General Robert Guéï overthrew President Bédié on December 24, 1999, after the latter attempted to change the constitution in his favor.

Presidential elections were then held in 2000 and Guéï was beaten by Laurent Koudou Gbagbo. The elections were marred however, by the elimination of several candidates by the Supreme Court including former president Bédié and politican Alassane Ouattarabecause of ”dubious nationality”, forgery and use of a false identity. During Ouattara's prime ministerial rule under President Houphouët-Boigny, Gbagbo was imprisoned as a political opponent in1992 and sentenced to two years in jail, although he was released after seven months.

The result of the contest was strongly contested by Guéï and some clashes marred this period; he eventually recognized the legitimacy of Gbagbo, thus winning FPI a majority of 91 seats in parliament (against 70 and 16 to the opposition).

While Gbagbo was abroad in September 2002, soldiers made an attempt to overthrow him. During the coup, several assassination attempts took place against political figures including Alassane Ouattara, and several difficult years in Ivorian politics ensued.

Bitter Context for 2010 Elections

It is within this context that elections were organized by the international community in December 2010.

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The announcement by the New York Times that one of the supposedly prominent Taliban with whom the Karzai government has been negotiating turns out to be an impostor is only the latest depressing indication that the whole Afghanistan boondoggle is shot through with flimflammery. ...

The incident set me thinking about all the impostures of that war, which are legion. Let us begin with the frankly dishonest discourse about it of both our twenty-first century presidents, who maintain that the US is fighting “al-Qaeda” in Afghanistan. But there is no al-Qaeda to speak of in that country, if by the term one means the mainly Arab Pan-Islamic International that sees Usama Bin Laden as its leader. US forces in Afghanistan are fighting disgruntled Pashtuns, for the most part. Some are from Gulbuddin Hikmatyar’s Islamic Party. Others from the Haqqani family’s Haqqani Network. The Reagan administration and its Saudi allies once showered billions of dollars on Hikmatyar and Haqqani, so they aren’t exactly eternal adversaries of the US. Some insurgents are from the Old Taliban of Mullah Omar. Still others are not so much terrorist cartels as tribes and guerrilla groups who are just unhappy with poppy eradication campaigns, or with the foreign troop presence (they would say ‘occupation’), or with how Karzai has given out patronage unequally, favoring some tribes over others. The insurgency is almost exclusively drawn from the Pashtun ethnic group.
So the war is not about al-Qaeda.



...

So what IS the war about?

This information vacuum is why a British diplomat even thought the public might buy as plausible his assertion that children in Kabul are safer than those in New York or London.
Aljazeera English has a report on the ensuing controversy:
...

Quite apart from the bombings in the Afghan capital, far beyond anything in Western capitals, some 1,795 children were killed or wounded in conflict-related violence from September 2008 to August 2010 (admittedly in the whole country and not just in Kabul). Moreover, there are powerful crime syndicates and kidnapping rings in the capital and drug addiction is spreading among even children and youth. He wasn’t speaking of infant mortality, so it isn’t fair to slam him on the grounds that a fifth of Afghan children die before reaching age five. But knowledge of the truly horrific health statistics of Afghan children might have instilled some caution about making Panglossian statements.
Aljazeera English has video on drug addiction even among the very young in Kabul:
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Against a backdrop of declining media businesses and emerging online media outlets, the internet has altered the balance of power as to who exactly controls the news. Increasingly, it's starting to look like citizens do. It's not just blogs that are providing alternative sources of news, but anyone with a mobile phone and a social media network account.
A recent example in Malaysia was when the 30 Sept 2009 earthquake in Padang, Sumatra, caused tremors and buildings to sway in Kuala Lumpur and Petaling Jaya. Instant updates were immediately posted on Twitter and Facebook from people who felt the tremors and had to evacuate their buildings.

The AYM summit showed that these social networking tools have also been used in other parts of the world to mobilise millions to demonstrate and overthrow governments. For example, the Facebook group "One Million voices against the FARC" succeeded in just one month to rally over 12 million people on the streets on 4 Feb 2008 against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The coordinated mass protest took place in 200 cities across 40 countries, making it the largest protest ever against a terrorist organisation. Group founder Oscar Morales told The Nut Graph, "The result today is that FARC has released some kidnapped hostages and members are leaving the group when they realise that they have no more public support."

In Moldova in April 2009, a young reporter named Natalia Morar organised her friends on Twitter to protest against election results which returned the communist government to power. Twitter's reach resulted in thousands more protestors than expected turning up on the streets. The protests forced fresh elections in which the opposition formed the new government.
There were dozens of other inspiring stories from AYM, examples which show that people can define what is news for themselves, even becoming the news in the process. Perhaps the closest Malaysian example is the Bersih rally for electoral reform in November 2007 which was also organised through text messaging and blogs.

Citizen journalists
The violent aftermath of Iran's elections in June 2009 and the monks' protest in Burma in 2007 are but some of the more popular examples of citizen journalists posting video reports on YouTube. When governments crack down on traditional media, or even shut down the internet, what's evident from the Iran and Burma cases is that such efforts are futile.

Protester holds up a photo of a bloodied
protester in Tehran, June 2009
(© Milad Avazbeigi / Flickr)

In a similar vein that illustrates the emergence of competing news sources, newsmakers themselves can break their own versions of an event, and real-time at that. This is what happened during the 7 May 2009 Perak assembly sitting. Assemblypersons inside the chaotic House tweeted their take on the political fracas which culminated in the physical removal of Speaker V Sivakumar, of Pakatan Rakyat, from his chair.

In other instances, Members of Parliament do occasionally tweet on the goings-on inside the Dewan Rakyat. Politicians on the stump in many of the recent nine by-elections also kept followers updated about their movements and opinions as they went about the campaign trail.MORE