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5 thoughts on “Several OFDM candidates arrested”

  3. US and EU ‘back sham democracies’
    By James Blitz, Diplomatic Editor

    Published: January 31 2008 15:03 | Last updated: January 31 2008 15:03

    The world’s well established democracies are increasingly prepared to give credibility to authoritarian regimes, failing to probe how autocracies conduct flawed elections to bolster their international standing, a leading human rights body said on Thursday.

    In its annual survey of democracy across the world, Human Rights Watch argues that the US and the European Union are too quick to support “sham democracies” in states like Pakistan, Egypt, Ethiopia and Kazakhstan, turning a blind eye to their abuse of underlying civil and political rights.

    EDITOR’S CHOICE
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    Kenneth Roth, the organisation’s executive director, said: “It’s now too easy for autocrats to get away with mounting a sham democracy. That’s because too many western governments insist on elections and leave it at that.”

    In the introduction to its report, Human Rights watch listed a string of reasons why western states fail seriously to challenge regimes – such as those in Bahrain, Jordan, Nigeria, Russia and Thailand – when they pose as being democratic.

    One reason why governments in these states get away with such subterfuge, the report argues, is that “democracy” – unlike “human rights” – has no legally established definition.

    The report laments that there is no widely ratified treaty affirming how a state must behave to earn the democracy label. The meaning of democracy lies “too much in the eye of the beholder”.

    The report also argues that today’s autocrats get away with mounting “a democratic facade” because it is in the interests of western states for them to do so. “Because of other interests – energy, commerce, counter-terrorism – the world’s most established democracies too often find it convenient to appear credulous of these sham democrats.”

    President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan is seen by Human Rights Watch as one of the main beneficiaries of this willingness to recognise “sham democracy“.

    The report also condemns the way in which Kazakhstan was last year promised the chairmanship of the Organisation for Security and Co-Operation in Europe, despite holding elections in August 2007 that the report describes as a “fraud”.

    The report argues that Washington left the impression that it would tolerate electoral fraud elsewhere in the world after accepting the results of Nigeria’s February 2007 election, despite “widespread and credible accusations of vote rigging”.
    Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
    Taye

  5. My dear noel,

    The picture we are getting from Kenya is horrifying: tribes killing other tribes, and we don’t want such things to happen in Ethiopia. Ethiopia should never emulate the type of violence our neighbor Kenya is facing; we can defeat any dictator in our country, using non violence. Our weapon is to “overcome evil with good.”

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