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The Week That Was - Bolivian Blogs

Terrorist bombings just don’t happen in Bolivia. That is why all sorts of speculation surfaced when two explosions ripped through two budget hotels in the capital city of La Paz. Two Bolivians died in the tragic crime and two individuals are now in custody. The Bolivian blogosphere started to perform internet research on the various aliases used by the U.S. citizen arrested in the crime. Jonathan Olguin of the Journal of Bolivian Business and Politics was one of the first to find about Claudius Lestat de Orleans y Montevideo aka Tristan Jay Amero, in a comment posted on the MABB blog.

The background of the bomber made it fairly obvious that the bomber had no political motives, wrote Javier in his blog Una revisión de todo un poco (ES). Declarations from President Evo Morales were out of line according to many bloggers, as Morales wondered aloud whether the bombers were sent by the United States. Sebastian Molina of Plan B (ES) writes about several other premature speculations from government officials that another “state” was behind the attacks and that there were attempts to destabilize the government and even derail the trial of former President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. Off Topic’s Alvaro Ruiz Navajas wrote about the reactions from the United States, who was accused of being behind the crime. U.S. officials called the Bolivian embassy in Washington expressing their concern over these accusations.

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Moroccan Arabic blogs opt for the sarcasme and CAIR dare to defend a Christian convert

Farah Kinani · 16:27 · Middle East & North Africa

Moroccan bloggers who choose to blog in another language(Arabic) than Arabic are facing a new wave of criticism(Arabic). “Why don't you blog in Arabic?” (French) Is a question they had to answer last week, and as I told you in my latest roundup, they were many to justify(French) their choice of language(French). So today, we'll pay a visit to the Arabic Moroccan blogs, and we'll try to find out more about them. We'll also see how the Moroccan blogosphere (blogoma) reacted to the headlines news and we'll of course have our usual “Coup de coeur” .

Casablanca..Angel or Demon?

Thanks to the daily updated list of Moroccan blogs offered by Larbi, I had no problems finding the Arabic ones.
My first remark is that they are a minority in the blogoma who obviously prefers French, since even the English ones are a tiniest minority!

Issam is sarcastic. And his latest post is an ironical critic(Arabic) of the way some Moroccan police officers take advantage of their positions to terrorize the “average” citizens..

We hear more and more about a negotiated political solution to the Sahara conflict, and hjiouj is reacting(Arabic) to this new development in his blog called M.S Hjiouj(Arabic).

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Dangdut music and dance in Singapore and all about Home

Preetam Rai · 14:44 · East Asia

Singapore is a good place to explore cultures from all over South East Asia. The blogger at licencetospill took some of her friends to a Dangdut club. Dangdut is a form of music from Indonesia. The blogger explains

the main difference between a DD song and any other indonesian song is the cheesy lyric. there’s a lot of lurrrveeeee and heartbreaking going on in there. numerous mention of “hati” (heart) and “sayanggggg” (loveeee) in the lines. there’s a lot of onomatopoeia like “auu auuuu auuuu”, “aduhhhh aduhhh aduhhhh”, “degappp deguppp deguppp”, all to mimick the sound of a pulsating heart. wakakaka!

Check out the post for a video that demos the moves that go with dangdut:

now, how do you execute a successful DD move? i tell them they can start by doing a slow-motion running movement with their hands. once they have done so, move the shoulders back and forth. then, tilt the shoulders up and down according to the beat. and tadaaaa, a simple DD move for you!

It's not all dancing though. Curious about Sikh culture, a Singaporean Muslim visits a Gurudwara - a Sikh temple and, in contrast to his initial reservation, finds a warm welcome.
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Charles Taylor: As the story unfolds

Chippla Vandu · 13:50 · Sub-Saharan Africa

In August 2003, ex-Liberian leader, Charles Taylor, was flown from Monrovia to Abuja on board a Nigerian Boeing 727 presidential jet. Taylor had just been granted asylum in Nigeria as part of a deal overseen by the African Union, the United Nations (UN) and the United States, which was aimed at ending the Liberian civil war. However, in June 2003, Taylor was indicted for war crimes by a UN court in Sierra Leone, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. The Nigerian government promised to hand Taylor over only when a democratically elected government was in place in Liberia.

January 2006: Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was sworn in as the elected president of Liberia. On March 5, 2006, she requested for custody of Charles Taylor from the Nigerian government (according to information on the website of the State House, Abuja). On March 28, 2006, Charles Taylor was declared missing from his asylum villa by the Nigerian government. A day later, he was arrested trying to flee Nigeria. At the time of writing, he should be on his way to Liberia—the Nigerian government appears to have complied with the request of the Liberian government to finally hand him over.

The English-speaking blogosphere has been saturated with in-depth reports and commentaries on the ex-Liberian leader and indicted warlord. We take a look at some of these, written before it was reported that Mr. Taylor had been captured.

The blog GlobalLawAndPolitics laments in the article “The Rise and Fall of International Law in Africa–March 2006” about how “big men” of Africa continue to have their way, fueling a “culture of impunity and corruption that is eroding the continent.” It challenges African leaders to fulfill their human rights obligation by refusing to give refuge to Mr. Taylor.
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DRC: A Chat with Blogger Tony Katombe

Alice Backer · 09:24 · Sub-Saharan Africa

Anthony Mica Katombe (Tony for short) is a blogger from the DRC who’ll “turn 39 April 13”. He has a degree in English and African Cultural Studies Education from a Congolese University. He owns Le Blog du Congolais and co-edits Le Prince du Fleuve Congo, a group blog. On the morning of our messenger chat, gunmen were surrounding his hometown of Kinshasa. And Kofi Annan was visiting in person to check in on a rocky electoral process. Oh and a brief blackout punctuated our messenger chat. But we carried on — in Tony's native French.

AB: Vocal members of political parties are quite active in the DRC blogosphere. A Belgian chapter of opposition party UDPS has its own regularly updated blog, UDPS Liege, for example. Do you belong to a political party?

TK: I don’t and there are two reasons for that. One, I like to maintain my freedom of opinion and I have no intention of negotiating it with a party. Parties these days are based on their leaders’ personalities or on ethnico-tribal belonging… not on ideology. They only say they’re neo-liberal or socialist for show. Two, I’m a right-winger, a neo-liberal. But in the Congo all the neo-liberal parties are pro-Mobutu. Can you imagine being pro-Mobutu? For now I want to be close to all freedom fighters so I sometimes use my blog to relay UDPS’s struggle. I think they’re good, serious people. But they’re socialists and I’m a liberal.

AB: Why did you start blogging?

TK: I started blogging in August 2005 after visiting Renouveau Congolais, a [DRC] blog edited by Etienne Ngandu. I figured through a blog I could keep communicating my analyses that I had been publishing in a print publication called Le Phare but with a wider audience. I’d say my blog is more accessible to international readers while Le Phare remains most accessible locally, partly because they rarely update their website.

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March 24 in the Argentinean Blogosphere

Jorge Gobbi · 00:16 · Americas

Last friday, march 24, marked 30 years since the beginning of the last military dictatorship in Argentina. There were plenty of reasons to remember this date, which stated the beginning of a political period marked by violations of human rights, the murdering of political opposition to the dictatorship, the use of the state apparatus to commit crimes, and the implementation of an economic policy that destroyed the country's productive infrastructure.

The vast institutional gravity of what happened 30 years ago is not hard to express: for a long time, the Argentinean state became an organized machinery of law violation. That is, the one who had to guarantee the fulfillment of the norms, was openly dedicated to violate them and soon organized a complete apparatus of concealment. A good part of Argentine society at the time supported the coup and gave it a social foundation. But, after three decades, to remember this period is part of a political bet so that nothing like this could happen again. Part of this includes not to reduce everything to “two sides,” as if we still were under a military vision of the world; not to replicate the theory of the both demons; not to lose sight of the economic motivations of the coup; not to forget the support (to the dictatorship) by a good part of the society, as well as the complicity of entrepreneurial organizations and of the Argentinean church. Nor to abandon the fight for the end of all legislation - such as amnesties, the Punto Final and the Obediencia Debida- that has allowed many violations of human rights to go without prosecution.

In order to commemorate the 30 years, a massive concentration in Plaza de Mayo took place, attended by more than 100,000 people, according to the media. The journey was, for the first time, a national holiday in Argentina, a decision taken by Kirchner's government, which has provoked many criticism by several human rights organizations. This first year the holiday fell on a Friday, which, instead of encouraging meditation or discussion on the subject, many people took advantage of with a long weekend vacation. Furthermore, during the march some incidents took place, such as when the Madres y Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo - quite close to the government - rejected the terms of a long document that was being read which was quite harsh on Kirchner's government.

But beyond the precise events of this 24 of March, a long series of blogs made reference to the subject. This text only intends to be a summary of what's been published which has been plenty and varied. For that reason, it will not open too much discussion over what has been written, to avoid further extension of this text which does not want to be an opinion column, but a listing of references. Each of you can reach any of the mentioned links, and leave your opinions in the respective blogs, since most of them allow comments. I clear this up because this it is a subject that can cause much discussion on recent Argentine history, and because the idea is not to start long discussions here, but to raise conversations in the different blogs mentioned. All this is independent of my position on the matter. Throughout the text, in addition, there will be some photos that I took in the march of Friday, and a brief video for you to see a little of the atmosphere of the Plaza de Mayo. The video quality is bad, but the idea is, simply, to illustrate what happened there, far from the scene where most of the television cameras were.

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