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| Syria Uprising |
 IN
an interview with The Wall Street Journal in January, Syria´s
president, Bashar al Assad, said that his main objective was
to address his people´s "closed-mindedness".
He made it clear that this alone impeded reform, and it might
be another generation before Syria is ready for real change.
Dictators (including Assad´s father, Hafez) have long
presented themselves as suppressors of extremism in the region
generally, and Syria in particular. They said democracy would
usher in fundamentalists inherently opposed to modernity, civil
dialogue, international community legitimacy and civilised human
political and economic relations. Perhaps because of this fear... |
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| THE POWER OF MOCKERY |
| THE juiciest story behind the Middle East
uprisings doesn´t concern Colonel Moamer Qadhafi´s
"voluptuous" Ukrainian nurse or CIA bags of cash.
Rather, it´s the tale of how a nonviolent revolutionary
strategy crafted by Serbian students and an octogenarian American
scholar came to challenge dictators in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain
and many other countries. This "uprising in a bottle"
blueprint was developed by the Serbian youth movement, Otpor,
to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. One of Otpor´s
insights was that the most effective weapon against dictators
isn´t bombs or fiery speeches. It´s mockery. Otpor
activists once put Milosevic´s picture on a barrel that
they rolled down the street, inviting people to hit it with
a bat. Otpor´s strategy mirrors... |
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Ivory Coast civil servants ignore govt call to return to work
AFP
ABIDJAN FEW civil servants heeded an appeal from Ivory Coast’s new government to return to work on Monday, leaving the organs of state still paralysed a week after the fall of strongman Laurent Gbagbo.
New President Alassane Ouattara’s minister for civil servants was himself late for work, while elsewhere in main city Abidjan government employees complained of looted office equipment and rotting bodies in the street.
Ouattara, a former International Monetary Fund official and long-time opposition figure, took charge on April 11 of the world’s top cocoa grower when his forces stormed the presidential palace in Abidjan and seized Gbagbo.
At around 9:00 am (0900 GMT) on Monday, a few people waited in front of the Post and Telecommunications building which remained closed despite Ouattara’s call for civil servants to “imperatively” get back to work from 7:30 am.
“I’ve just got to work, the convoy was delayed,” said Civil Service Minister Konan Gnamien, who arrived at his ministry at around 9:30 am from the Golf Hotel that has been his government’s headquarters since late November.
A civil servant at the parliament said that when he arrived at work “there was a decomposing body” at the building’s entrance.
“Looters have stolen all the computers, they’ve turned everything upside down,” the worker said, asking not to be named.
“I don’t know if we’ll be able to get back to work for two or three months.” Nevertheless, taxis and public buses filled with people could be seen travelling around the central Plateau business district that is also home to the presidential palace and government offices.
The area saw some of the fiercest fighting during 10 days of clashes between the rival presidents’ forces ahead of Gbagbo’s dramatic arrest in an operation backed by French and UN forces.
Troops from Ouattara’s Republican Forces (FRCI) set up checkpoints at some crossroads, searching cars, an AFP journalist reported, with a few gunshots still heard on Monday morning as FRCI troops sought to scare off looters.
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