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January 23, 2005
"Elections" Occupation Style
As we approach the event that will be called elections in Iraq, it is pretty much confirmed that there will be no election observer stationed anywhere in the country. Except perhaps a single one, who may or may not show up. Even then, he or she will not be touring polling stations, or anything of the sort. So, the "observation" will probably consist of observing the walls of a room in a hotel in the Green Zone. By a single person. At best:
But in Iraq, where 14 million people are eligible to vote, the elections next week may have only one outsider from the hastily organized International Mission for Iraqi Elections to evaluate the balloting. If reluctant governments change their minds at the last minute about letting their officials go to Iraq, a handful of others may show up. But, even then, none is likely to tour polling stations or to be publicly identified, mission and U.S. officials said....
There will be no neutral outside group deployed across Iraq to determine whether voters are impeded, ballot boxes are stuffed, any party tries to interfere with the process or votes are counted fairly. No congressional delegation will monitor the polls, and the European Union announced last week that it had declined an invitation from Iraq to send observers. The Carter Center, which has monitored more than 50 elections overseas, also decided not to send observers.
All these precious words have now become something akin to brand names: "democracy", "freedom", "liberty", "empowerment." They don't really mean anything, they're just the names attached to things we do. They aren't defined by any intrinsic quality. It's like the reverse of the abuse/torture dichotomy. If we do it, it's "abuse," if anyone else does it, it's torture. If we do it, it's democracy and freedom.
And on that note, I'm turning the blog over for yet another week as I travel to the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. These past two months have been a whirlwind of travel and the WSF will bring this fun but hectic period to a close. I still have so much to write especially about my Venezuela trip, and hopefully after this last trip, I can slowly return to blogging all of that.
Rahul Mahajan of the Empire Notes will be guest blogging this week, the timing of which is quite fortuitous for the blog because he's been a very astute observer of the "demonstration elections" that this administrations has been putting on around the world.
P.S. I sincerely apologize to the person whose comment to the previous entry was accidentally deleted -- I noticed it was gone after one of my routine comment-spam clean-ups. I've been informed of some ways that might help limit the enormous comment spam this blog receives, ranging from the ridiculous to the offensive, and I've been mostly manually deleting them which doesn't take that much time but results in the occasional mishap of a genuine comment being deleted. Hopefully, I'll have time to implement a better system soon.
P.P.S. Any WSF suggestions? This is my first trip to The Event.
Posted by zeynep at January 23, 2005 11:49 PM
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Comments
One complaint I heard from an Indian activist was "People from rich countries are attending anti-mperialist, anti-war sessions, rather than the more important sessions on health and hunger, which were attended more by people from third world"
Please try to correct this imbalance, by your participation. Enjoy while you are there :)
-Krishna
Posted by: Krishna Pagadala at January 24, 2005 12:03 PM
Zeynep, have you heard about this commecial for the VW Polo? I saw the it last week, but apparently the Gaurdian caught it as well and wrote something up about it. "Volkswagen is at the centre of a global row after a disturbing film featuring a Palestinian suicide bomber in a Polo car flew around the world on the internet"
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1394517,00.html
The commercial is here;
http://plaza.ufl.edu/ttoastt/VW_20_b3.mov
Posted by: Micaiah at January 24, 2005 07:15 PM
I'll watch it when I return to a better Internet connection... Suicide bomber in a Polo car? Really?
Posted by: zeynep at January 29, 2005 11:53 AM