9352. wabbit - 5/13/2009 2:02:25 PMA lawyer killed by gunmen over the weekend left behind a videotape saying that if anything happened to him it was at the behest of President Álvaro Colom. “If you are watching this message, it is because I was assassinated by President Álvaro Colom with help from Gustavo Alejos,” the president’s private secretary, the lawyer says in the video. The lawyer, Rodrigo Rosenberg, was shot while riding his bicycle on Sunday, the newspaper El Periódico de Guatemala said. In the tape, Mr. Rosenberg said officials might want to kill him because he represented a businessman who had refused to engage in acts of corruption sought by President Colom. The businessman was killed in March. Mr. Colom appeared Tuesday on national television to reject the accusation, and he called for a United Nations commission and the F.B.I. to investigate the case. I don't know who put the video up on YouTube, but that it is there prevented it from going missing. Whether this case will change anything in Guatemala remains to be seen. It's easy to get people worked up in the heat of the moment, but not as easy to keep them engaged in the long term.9353. vonKreedon - 6/15/2009 10:43:11 PM Hoping to lure Marj into this thread.
Any thoughts on what the recent Congress Party win in India means? In December The Economist said:
The Congress party, which leads India’s ruling coalition and runs Maharashtra, the state of which Mumbai is the capital, is likely to suffer for this...[the Mumbai terror attack]
Yet for most poor Indians terrorism remains a small part of their troubles. To deal with those, Sonia Gandhi, Congress’s leader, will reissue a lot of unkept promises when the election campaign begins: to bring everyone electricity, piped water, schools and jobs. She will say little about what this government has actually done: there hasn’t been much. ...
At home, often stymied by his coalition’s leftist allies, he has done much less well.
But now The Economist says:
REVERSING decades of decline, the Congress party has won India’s month-long general election by a bigger margin than its most optimistic followers had dared dream of.
What up? 9354. Wombat - 6/16/2009 3:28:46 AM Iran, anyone?? 9355. vonKreedon - 6/16/2009 7:41:44 AM Oy, interesting times in Iran right now. Hoping for a velvet revolution. Surprised at the persistence of the opposition. 9356. wabbit - 6/16/2009 1:44:34 PM I was in school with an Iranian student 12 years ago. She was very excited about what was happening then, especially for women. There were high hopes for Khatami.
So now we wait to see what the Guardian Council does about convincing people they just had a fair election. Not everyone thinks the election was stolen. 9357. Wombat - 6/16/2009 2:26:11 PM Leaving aside that the poll the authors took was three weeks before the election, had over 50% undecided or unresponsive, and predicted a narrow Ahmedinejad victory in the first round; nah, it wasn't stolen. 9358. wabbit - 6/16/2009 3:49:58 PM Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't.
It seems unlikely (to me) that Ahmadinejad got twice as many votes as Mousavi, but I haven't seen any actual pre-election polls other than this one. I've read about them, I've heard about them, I just haven't seen them. Flawed and public doesn't make it reliable or accurate, but at least it was public.
I wonder if the votes in Tabriz will be recounted. Even Al Jazeera English seems curious about how normally ethnic voters failed to vote along ethnic lines. 9359. wabbit - 6/16/2009 4:03:02 PM btw, as I understand it, a major flaw with that poll is that, when it was taken, official campaigning had just begun. I wonder how many people polled knew the names and platforms of the opponent candidates. 9360. vonKreedon - 6/16/2009 4:08:18 PM I may be wrong, and am interested in hearing about it if so, but Al Jazeera has seemed like a pretty good source of information. 9361. wabbit - 6/16/2009 4:13:43 PM The other thing that strikes me as being odd is that Iran's population is so young and urban, and I would have thought they would vote against Ahmadinejad.
I'd love to hear PE's take on all this. 9362. vonKreedon - 6/16/2009 5:39:24 PM Yeah, I'd also love to hear from PE on both Iran and India.
Wretchard has an interesting take on how splitting the loot may have led to the split within Iran's ruling elite and opened the door to the reform movement. 9363. Wombat - 6/16/2009 7:25:45 PM Apparently Khameini is detested by Rafsanjani. Rafsanjani has been working very hard behind the scenes to support Moussavi, both during the election campaign and at present.
There are also unconfirmed reports of dissension in the Revolutionary Guards and the Army; both have been neutral so far. If they go, however, it will be Ceaucescu all over again.
VK's source is right about Moussavi. He didn't govern Iran throughout the Iran-Iraq War by being a nice liberal democrat. On the other hand, he is nowhere near as egregious as Ahmedinejad. It's like comparing Bush I with Bush II. 9364. alistairConnor - 6/16/2009 9:36:49 PM I will be bitterly disappointed if the regime allows Ahmedinnerjacket to get away with his coup d'état.
He might well have had a tough election against Moussavi, and he might well have won it anyway. But he clearly stole it, to avoid the risk of losing.
I am perhaps alone here in not regarding the Iran regime as a totalitarian system, up until now anyway. It has been a functioning constitutional democracy in many respects-- not entirely a pluralist one, but one in which progress was possible. It looks like the constitutional authorities initially put their duties as guardians of religion ahead of their duties as guardians of democracy. But it's by no means a monolithic regime, Moussavi himself is an insider and has a lot of support, and now they have ordered a recount... perhaps due process will win the day? 9365. vonKreedon - 6/16/2009 10:08:49 PM I agree that by the region's standards Iran has been a vibrant republic.
I don't think that Ahmedinejad can be fingered as the top guy in this bit of election chicanery; it can not have happened without Khameini's involvement.
What I've read regarding any recount severely constrains why a recount would happen and what would be recounted. Not near good enough. 9366. wabbit - 6/16/2009 11:47:28 PM I read someone describe Khamenei as a Muslim of convenience rather than a true believer like Khomeini. I'll post a link if I can find it again. Sounds like a real politician.
This Al Jazeera article quotes Mahjoob Zweiri summing up the current conflict as between two factions represented by Khamenei and Rafsanjani: "The first one, which is represented by the supreme leader, says Iran should stay a revolutionary state, and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani wants the state to move on - to become a modern state, a pragmatic state."
A brief but interesting interview with author Azar Nafisi is worth reading. 9367. alistairConnor - 6/19/2009 9:16:02 PM About the Somali piracy thing. I was talking to a guy at a party the other day, he was just back from an international piracy conference in Dubai, or somewhere like that. He made the point that the people involved are in fact victims of the statelessness of the zone formerly known as Somalia.
They are simple fisherfolk. Somalia has a fishing zone, just like everywhere else. But no government or navy to defend it. So they get systematically poached by commercial fishing fleets from all over the world, and there's very little left for the locals.
So they start by trying to drive the foreign fishing boats away with shotguns etc. And, well, you can see the rest. 9371. wabbit - 6/19/2009 10:08:36 PM I'm going to delete 9368-70 and repost for vonKreedon, just in case. 9372. wabbit - 6/19/2009 10:09:09 PM 9368. vonKreedon - 6/19/2009 4:29:34 PMRight, they quickly discover that there's little profit to be made in driving rival fishing boats away compared to taking freighters hostage. IMO, that's a significant step beyond poor victimized fishermen to....well...piracy.
Yeah, the Somalis are well and truly fucked, except for those in the Puntland State of Somalia, but they've fucked themselves as much or more than they've been fucked by others. 9373. vonKreedon - 6/19/2009 10:35:25 PM Thanks Wabbit, order is returned to the Mote continuum. 9374. alistairConnor - 6/20/2009 12:18:26 AM I wasn't justifying piracy. Just sociologising it.
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