MOSCOW — Dmitri Medvedev has entered his last week as president of Russia: on May 7, he will hand back the office to Vladimir Putin. Having served just one four-year term, he will be remembered as one of the country’s shortest-lived rulers. He will also be remembered as one of country’s shortest rulers. At no more than 5’3”, and with his propensity to wear huge Windsor knots, he often looks like a fourth-grader trying on daddy’s business suit.
What else will Russians remember of Medvedev? My guess is, nothing. People do not like to remember being made to look like fools, which is exactly what many Russians feel he did to them.
At the outset, Medvedev reached out to liberals and intellectuals. Weeks before his election, in February 2008, he had announced that his guiding principle was, “freedom is better than unfreedom.” People might have worried about a leader who found it necessary to turn this truism into a grand pronouncement, but, having been left out in the cold during the previous eight years of Putin’s reign, Russian liberals were eager to be engaged again. Over 40 people accepted invitations to join a newly constituted presidential council for human rights and civil society. Read more…
Oded Balilty/Associated PressActivists demonstrating against the construction of Israel’s separation barrier in the West Bank village of Bilin in 2005.
BILIN, West Bank — Earlier this month, I finally watched “The Law in These Parts,” a documentary by the Israeli film director Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, at the 7th International Conference for Popular Resistance. The film describes the legal system that Israel has applied in the Palestinian Occupied Territories since 1967, and it does so exclusively through interviews with members of the Israeli military legal corps who wrote and implemented the system.
I saw the film in the Palestinian village of Bilin, just west of Ramallah. This was a fitting setting for the occasion. In 2007, a local councilor secured a rare judgment from Israel’s highest court that ordered the army to reroute the separation wall and return to the villagers hectares of land that had been taken away from them. The wall was moved only last year, and the residents of Bilin continue their struggle to reclaim more land they say is theirs and was allocated to the Jewish settlement of Modiin Illit, on the other side of the rerouted wall. Alexandrowicz’s film was screened in an open area of Bilin only recently returned. Read more…
Nic Bothma/European Pressphoto AgencyAn international court on Thursday found Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
A roundup of opinion and commentary from international media.
On Thursday, a special panel of judges in The Hague found Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, guilty of aiding war crimes in Sierra Leone. Hailed by some as a victory against impunity, the historic verdict is also raising concerns about international criminal justice.
For some, the distance between the setting for the trial (The Hague) and the location of the crimes (Sierra Leone) is another problem. With Taylor expected to serve his sentence (yet to be determined) in Britain rather than Africa, the verdict “will have a far less deterrent effect” than it might have precisely in the region “where the use of child soldiers in local, tribal and national armed forces has gone out of control,” argues Abhijit Pandya in The Daily Mail. Read more…
European Pressphoto AgencyEmpty seats in Myanmar’s Parliament on Monday.
NAYPYIDAW, Myanmar — The 43 seats of Parliament that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the other newly elected members of her National League for Democracy (N.L.D.) were supposed to fill on Monday remain empty. After winning by-elections by a landslide earlier this month, the Lady and her party are refusing to show up for their first legislative session in protest over having to take a pledge to “safeguard” the 2008 Constitution.
Myanmar’s Constitution grants the military vast powers in the country’s purportedly civilian and democratic institutions. Twenty-five percent of the seats in Parliament are set aside for members of the army. Since any change to the Constitution requires a 75 percent majority, the quota in effect gives the military veto power over the amendment process.
The N.L.D. had boycotted parliamentary elections in 2010 partly because of a similar oath of allegiance required under the party-registration law in force at the time. This past November, after consultations with Aung San Suu Kyi and President Thein Sein, Parliament agreed to ask instead that candidates vow to “respect” the Constitution. But it left untouched the oath of office required of legislators.
In this untested quasi-democratic system, Aung San Suu Kyi has few arms but principles and values. But is she overplaying her hand by taking such a firm position on the small, if symbolic, matter of the oath? The tiff is already calling into question whether she and the the N.L.D. stand a chance of changing the system from within and of making headway on more important and more controversial issues. Read more…
Mehmet Aksoy/Associated PressA sculpture, the “Monument to Humanity,” outside the city of Kars, on the Turkish-Armenian border. The statue was intended as a gesture of reconciliation between Turkey and Armenians, but it was dismantled on aesthetic grounds last year by order of the Turkish prime minister.
ISTANBUL — The other day Taraf, a Turkish language newspaper for which I write, ran a quarter-page ad depicting a pomegranate with a deep slash and the legend: “Some wounds do not heal with time.” The pomegranate is a symbol of the Armenian people, and in fine print you could make out the endorsement of many prominent Turkish Armenians for a gathering in Istanbul’s Taksim Square. The ad didn’t bother to explain the purpose of the assembly, leaving the date and time — April 24, 19:15 — to speak for itself.
On Tuesday at the anointed hour, about 3,000 Armenian Turks and others sympathetic to their pain met to commemorate events from 97 years ago. Back then, another group of eminent Armenians was also rounded up in Istanbul, and that incident is remembered around the world as the start of a plan to eradicate the Armenian presence in Anatolia.
Sebastian Scheiner/Associated PressIsrael’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, above at Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial museum, in Jerusalem on April 18. He has repeatedly used the atrocity to characterize Iranian threats.
JERUSALEM — The seven days between Holocaust Memorial Day (last Thursday) and Independence Day (this Thursday) are packed with national symbolism. Seven days to remind the Jews of Israel of their trajectory from near annihilation to sovereign revival. Seven days for much sorrow and much pride.
And seven perfect days for political messaging.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened the season last week by dismissing those who “prefer that we not speak of a nuclear Iran as an existential threat” and “do not like it when I speak such uncomfortable truths.” These “truths” are in fact a matter of much debate, and yet Netanyahu can’t really go wrong asserting them as fact. However remote the possibility that a nuclearized Iran would actually spell calamity for Israel, that outcome is too serious not to strike fear. Read more…
Carlos Garcia Rawlins/ReutersPresident Hugo Chávez of Venezuela
MONTREAL — It happened every week. On Friday mornings, Venezuela’s top prosecutor, the justice minister, the solicitor general, assorted Supreme Court justices, police chiefs and top officials would meet in the vice president’s office to review politically sensitive court cases and decide how they should be handled. In each instance, the vice president had the last word: dismissal, acquittal or conviction.
Venezuela’s entire criminal justice system, it turns out, is an elaborate pantomime — a farce in which politicians bark orders and judges carry them out, no questions asked, or pay for their insolence with their jobs or even their freedom.
This is an account of Venezuela you might expect to hear from one of President Hugo Chávez’s right-wing opponents. In fact, it comes not from some aggrieved party but from one of the principals: Eladio Aponte, formerly the president of the Venezuelan Supreme Court’s Penal Chamber — the country’s final arbiter in all matters criminal — who gave a tell-all interview last week to a Venezuelan journalist working for the Miami-based television channel SOiTV. Read more…
Sam Panthaky/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNarendra Modi in January 2010.
NEW DELHI — Narendra Modi, the leading figure of India’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.), didn’t make Time magazine’s list of the 100 most powerful people in the world this year. Midway through the online polling, after Modi’s stock had started to surge, liberals in India organized a counter-campaign. In the end, 256,792 votes were cast for him and 266,684 votes against.
Too bad for Modi: it’s an election year in the state of Gujarat, where he is chief minister, and he is known to be eyeing the country’s prime minister slot. But I, for one, am relieved: finally a defeat for Modi’s formidable PR team, which routinely manages to whitewash his responsibility for fueling sectarian strife and oversells his economic accomplishments, especially to Western journalists. Read more…
Ian Langsdon/European Pressphoto AgencyMarine Le Pen on Sunday. The National Front candidate got 18 percent of all the votes in the first round of France’s presidential election.
A roundup of opinion and commentary from international media.
The Socialist candidate François Hollande and President Nicolas Sarkozy may be the ones who qualified for the second round of the French presidential election, but the big winner in Sunday’s first round was Marine Le Pen, of the far-right National Front. Though she won only third place, she garnered 18 percent of all votes, a record for her party.
KUTAISI, Georgia — It took me more than three hours last Thursday to get from the center of Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital and commercial and cultural hub, to the country’s brand new Parliament building, a stadium-sized oyster-shell-shaped building enmeshed in steel netting. That’s because the Georgian Parliament is being relocated to Kutaisi, this small country’s second-largest city, some 150 miles west.
Parliament’s official move, which was announced last summer, is expected to take place this year, perhaps as early as next month. The measure is ostensibly designed to encourage decentralization, relieve Tbilisi’s strained infrastructure, provide an economic bolster for Kutaisi and symbolically connect the country’s two historic halves. But it seems destined to further weaken Georgia’s already-feeble legislative branch just as the country enters a period of electoral instability. Parliamentary elections are scheduled for October, and presidential elections, which could bring Georgia’s first democratic transfer of power, are expected next year. Read more…
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