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Brazil: Lula's Victory

The presidential election results in Brazil showed, despite dire opposition predictions that victory for Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva would produce an untenable political situation, that Lula indeed has the political capital needed to lead Brazil for the next 4 years. Speculations about a divided country and the possible governance problems vanished in the face of the final results, which gave Lula 5.5 million more votes than in the 2002 election when he won his first term. In the first week after victory, blogs were still analyzing the election statistics to assess the new political landscape.

As primeiras 48 horas posteriores ao segundo turno mostraram que estavam equivocados aqueles que apostavam num recrudescimento da crise política no caso da reeleição de Lula. A expressiva votação do presidente e sua forte recuperação no Sudeste, onde venceu, e no Sul, onde perdeu por pouco, sepultaram as teses aventureiras do “terceiro turno” e da “eleição sub-judice”.
O clima em Brasília já é outro - Conxão Política | Franklin Martins

The first forty eight hours after the second round has shown that all who bet on a exacerbation of the political crisis in case of Lula's reelection were wrong. The President's significant vote and his strong recovery in the Southeast, where he won, and in the South, where he lost small, have doomed the audacious thesis of a ‘third round' or that the election could face legal challenge.
Brasília's mood is already changed - Conxão Política | Franklin Martins

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24-hour demonstration against Internet censorship

Ethan Zuckerman · 18:32 · Announcements

Our friends at Reporters without Borders (often called “RSF” - Reporters sans Frontières) are organizing an online demonstration against Internet censorship, beginning tomorrow at 11am (Paris time) and continuing until 11am on Wednesday, November 8th.

The goal of the demonstration is to draw attention to online censorship in the thirteen nations RSF terms “Internet black holes” - by clicking on a map of these nations, users register their protest against Internet censorship and for the release of over 60 cyber-dissidents currently under arrest for writings on their blogs.

The protest takes specific aim at Yahoo!, inviting users to record messages for the company's founders. Yahoo! is a special target for RSF because the company's has cooperated with Chinese authorities in investigations of journalists, supplying information that helped lead to the arrest of Shi Tao, a journalist serving a ten year sentence for “divulging state secrets abroad.”

RSF is also inviting visitors to the site to start blogs hosted by the organization - RSF will feature opinions from these blogs on in a weekly section titled “The Blog View of the World”. Finally, RSF will be launching a version of their site in Arabic, complementing the current versions in French, Spanish and English.

We're very grateful for the hard work that RSF does to promote online freedom and openness. Please visit their site today and show your support for their efforts.

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Reactions to the Burmese “Royal” Wedding Video Clip

Preetam Rai · 14:17 · East Asia

A clip from a leaked video of Myanmar's (Burma) military ruler Senior General Than Shwe's daughter's wedding was posted online last week. People who have seen the video are appalled by the vulgar display of wealth.

Myanmar blogger Myouez at Blog of Nyen Chan Yar writes.

People of Myanmar want to watch that video because we want to see how dictator Than Shwe and his family is wasting country’s money as their own wealth and how they were accepting bribe as “wedding gift”.

Bhojman sums up the reasons why the ordinary Myanmar citizens are angry.

The lavishness of the event is in stark contrast to the poverty and suffering being endured by most of the country. If it's true the couple received $5o million worth of wedding gifts then I am truly distressed.n Most do not earn enough to even feed their families, minority groups are continually on the run from the Burmese military, their crops and homes destroyed, their women raped and many forced into slave labour to build roads or be porters for the military.

Nicholas Farrelly at the New Mandala blog wonders if there is any political intrigue behind the leaking of the video

Real questions remain about the video’s appearance on the Internet, and its relationship to power politics within the Burmese regime’s inner-circle. If anybody has any potential answers, don’t be shy about posting comments. It would be great to get some discussion going on Burma’s military elite and the implications of this video.

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Arabisc: How did Arab bloggers react to Saddam Hussein's verdict?

Amira Al Hussaini · 12:34 · Middle East & North Africa

While Arab bloggers writing in English jumped on the opportunity to comment on Saddam Hussein's death sentence, those writing in Arabic seemed to be slower to react.

Among the few commenting on the story making the headlines yesterday and today, Batir Wardam from Jordan, says what is more important than hanging Saddam Hussein now is protecting Iraq.

ربما يستحق صدام حسين الإعدام في مقياس العدالة المجردة فقد تسبب في قتل آلاف الناس وتدمير حياة آلاف الأسر، ولكن هناك من تسبب بقتل 650 ألف عراقي في ثلاث سنوات وهناك من تسبب في نهب الثروة الطبيعية للعراق وهؤلاء يجب أيضا أن يقدموا للمحاكمة وهم يزيدون سوءا وإجراما عن صدام حسين لأنهم تسببوا في تدمير دولة ومجتمع كامل.

للأسف ستكون الأيام القادمة مليئة بحملات تأييد ودعم لدكتاتور روع آلاف الناس في العراق، وسيستمر احتلال العراق وقتل مواطنيه والصراع الطائفي والعنف الانتقامي من التنظيمات البعثية، وفي النهاية سوف يدفع المواطن العراقي وحده الثمن. المواطن العراقي العادي هو الذي دفع ثمن سكوت العالم العربي على جرائم صدام وهو الذي يدفع الآن ثمن الاحتلال الأميركي ووحشية التنظيمات الطائفية، والعراق الذي هو أهم مليون مرة من صدام حسين معرض هو الآخر للإعدام فهل يمكن لأحد أن ينق

“Saddam Hussein perhaps deserves to be hanged because in the eyes of abstract justice he was instrumental in murdering thousands of people and destroying the lives of thousands of families.
“But there are others who have caused the death of 650,000 Iraqis in three years as well as those who stole Iraq's natural wealth and those too should be put on trial as they are more criminal than Saddam Hussein. After all, they are responsible for the destruction of a country and an entire community.
“It is a pity that the next few days will be full of support for a dictator who has struck fear in the lives of thousands of people in Iraq but the occupation of Iraq, the killing of its people, the sectarian strife and the retaliation against the Baathist organisations will continue.
“At the end of the day, it is the Iraqi citizen who pays the price. It is the ordinary Iraqi citizen who pays the price of the silence of the Arab world on Saddam's crimes and it is that citizen who is now paying the price of living under American occupation and the brutality of sectarian organisations. Iraq, which is a million times more important than Saddam Hussein, is being hanged too so is there anyone willing to rescue it?” wrote Wardam.

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Former Yugoslavia: Can video play a part in truth, justice and reconciliation?

Gavin Simpson · 10:38 · Middle East & North Africa , Sub-Saharan Africa

It fell to the controversial figure of Carla del Ponte, prosecutor at the UN war crimes tribunal in the Hague, to lament the slow progress of justice in the Former Yugoslavia in a lecture she delivered last week. del Ponte picked out Serbia as a country “removed from the European values”, arguing that truth and justice remain “relative concepts, rather than absolute values”.

In the wake of these comments, the time seems ripe to consider how video fits in to the quest for post-conflict justice. How does the use of video relate to such concepts as truth, reconciliation and accountability? It's an especially interesting question in a region like the Former Yugoslavia, where the population remains so starkly divided in its interpretations of the recent past.

As the Institute of War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) noted, video of historical atrocities is being used as part of the continuing propaganda war in the Former Yugoslavia, and few debates around video footage in 2006 have been as highly-charged as the one that accompanied this video clip, first broadcast by Serbia's B92 television station in August 2006.

Warning: the following video contains graphic imagery of human rights abuse

The video depicts events that took place during so-called “Operation Storm” in August 1995. It came to light almost exactly eleven years later - the most recent example of video footage apparently released to coincide with the anniversaries of major atrocities committed by different sides in the Balkan wars.

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