The Democratic Piece

In a surprise move by the Polish Foreign Ministry yesterday, a spokesman announced that an OSCE observation mission would not be welcome for next month’s parliamentary elections. As reported by the BBC, the OSCE’s Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, which oversees election monitoring activities and is ironically enough based in Warsaw, committed a ‘faux pas’ by requesting permission to observe rather than waiting for a formal invitation by the Polish government.

“The OSCE asked Poland to admit observers for the election but Poland rejected the proposal, underlining that Poland is a democracy,” Polish Foreign ministry spokesman Robert Szaniawski said in a statement made over the weekend.  While plainly against the principles of transparent government that are at the heart of OSCE agreements, it remains uncertain whether or not Poland’s rejection of election observers will serve as a model for more authoritarian regimes to utilize in the future.  What Russia decides to do in the coming months, as its elections approach, will potentially be a good indication of the future of OSCE-type election monitoring.

So things really seem to be escalating in Burma. As I noted yesterday, a procession of Buddhist monks approached and paid their respects to Aung San Suu Kyi.

Today the NYTimes is reporting that the protest movements have swelled to 10,000 in the capital of Rangoon.

Protests at this level have been unheard of in Burma for almost the past twenty years. The regime has yet to show any use of force against the Buddhist monks. Meanwhile, members of the general public have become emboldened and begun to march with the monks through the streets.

According to the NYTimes article, people are beginning to openly photo and film the protests. I stumbled across this blog that tracked down some footage of the protests on Youtube.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that an underground network of Buddhist monks named the “Alliance of Burmese Buddhist Monks” has called for the citizens to join hands and openly march with the monks. The article notes that this is an organization of mostly younger Buddhist monks, so far the older ranks of the clergy has withheld comments regarding the growing protest.

This is a classic example of nonviolent escalation. We will see what tomorrow brings, but so far it seems that the regime is very hesitant to quash this movement. It will be interesting to see how this games out, especially because the junta has relocated the seat of power from Ragoon to a new city 300 miles called Naypydiaw. Perhaps there are not rifts growing within the regime, but they feel that could wait out any mobilization from within their stronghold.

Various aspects of The Piece will be under construction. This should not interrupt your ability to read and comment.

On behalf of the Management,
Jack

There is a bill on Gov. Schwarzenegger’s desk to legalize the single transferable vote for use in California’s municipal elections. San Francisco already uses it (albeit a single-winner variant), and there’s a formidable reform movement in the state centered around the Californians for Electoral Reform. But, for most towns, STV is illegal.

This bill is important in that most local jurisdictions are not able to use ranked voting systems under current law, and this bill would permit them to do so. Today only charter counties or charter cities can use IRV, but over three-fourths of cities and counties are general law jurisdictions and don’t have these options. Over half of Californians live in a general law city, a general law county, or both. AB 1294 would give these jurisdictions these additional options, but would not mandate that any jurisdictions use these systems. In other words, it is simply permissive and gives local governments the tools they need to respond to the wishes of their voters.

STV, often called choice voting and, for single-winner elections, instant runoff voting, has an interesting history in the United States. By the end of the Progressive Era, some two dozen municipalities were using it to elect their local councils. By the 1950s, opponents began capitalizing on racism and McCarthyism in a series of repeal measures. STV as an available city plan was shortly eliminated from the Massachusetts state constitution with Cambridge grandfathered in. Following elimination of the New York City school board in 2002, Cambridge became the last STV town in America.

Residents of Davis, CA supported STV/choice voting by 55% in an advisory referendum last November. By signing California’s AB 1294, Governor Arnold can reopen a long-closed wing of America’s democracy laboratory.

I really want to commend all citizens for a job well done.

Those were the words of Ernest Gborie after the recent presidential elections in Sierra Leone.

Earlier in the week I posted a brief item on the Sierra Leone election results. I really have to hand it to the BBC sometimes in terms of the coverage they provide on some stories that do not normally even get picked up by America’s best sources for international coverage.

I recommend checking out their page on the Sierra Leone election, they just posted some interviews with ordinary citizens about the recent election results and process. They interviewed these people before and after the election poll to give a snapshot of local views about the contest.

Protests lead by Buddhist monks have continued all week and gradually grown. Remarkably, the military junta that rules Burma has not responded to the growing protest movement, at least in Rangoon. In a stunning move yesterday, 1,500 monks were able to pass through a baracade in front on Aung San Suu Kyi’s house. Aung San Suu Kyi is the leading force of Burma’s long repressed democracy movement. She has spent 11 of the last 18 years either in prison or under house arrest.

The first recent wave of protests began in August as sporadic displays of dissent by small groups of people in response to rapid price increases on fuel and other goods by the junta. During those protests, a number of monks were arrested, beaten, and publicly humiliated by soldiers. In response to this, the monks of Burma demanded a public apology by September 17th, which the junta refused to acknowledge. The monks began to refuse religious rites to soldiers and their families and initiated daily public marches.

International observers have been stunned as the regime has failed to crack down on this movement. It has gradually grown to more than 1,500 monks and a number of private citizens. We will watch in the coming days to see if the junta can resolve this growing challenge to their authority.

My guess is that inaction can be attributed to significant splits developing within the military junta. The head general is 74 years old and reportedly very ill. Last year he went to Singapore for medical treatment for an undisclosed disease and failed to make an appearance at this year’s independence day celebrations, an event at which he has always played a prominent role. As positioning for succession takes place, it could get bloody and perhaps allow for a  negotiated transition between military soft-liners and opposition parties.

(This piece has been since been revised for the purposes of clarity.)

Two weeks have passed since the Moroccan elections and, to my surprise, the Interior Ministry has posted the electoral statistics on the Internet. To be sure, this is a step in the direction of transparency. It remains, however, that as world leaders complement the Kingdom for its progressiveness, the stark truth of a flawed electoral process must not be overlooked. It is hardly too early to suggest that these relatively “free and fair” elections have failed to generate a legislature with the capacity to govern responsibly (to put the mis’oul in the mis’ouleen).

In these elections, Morocco demonstrated that rigging elections can be done without stuffing ballot boxes and intimidating voters. Rather, the Interior Ministry ensured a friendly outcome by designing an electoral system that would prevent competing parties from obtaining enough parliamentary seats to exert the institution’s powers and thereby govern. The overall impact of such a “balancing” act is to reinforce societal divisions and, ultimately, the status quo power structures.

For those of us who do not follow Moroccan politics, Morocco has a weak Parliament with few decision-making powers. Since its instillation in the mid-1960s, the Parliament has functioned mainly as a mechanism to divvy up state resources and co-opt potentially threatening political actors. The Parliament also works to ensure that no single social force can muster the credibility to challenge the authority of the King and the makhzen, an elite institution of rules, procedures, and individuals that serve the Monarchy and the extant power structure. While the King has recently expressed his desire for the Parliament to play an increasing central role in the affairs of the state, such a wish is hardly sufficient to reverse what has already been done. The Parliament’s powerlessness and corruption have become institutionalized.

The Moroccan political system features what can be classified as a closed-list proportional representation (PR) electoral system. PR systems of various types are often employed in countries in which excluding particular societal forces can drive these groups to work toward overthrowing the entire political system. By handing out seats in roughly the same proportion to the popular vote attained by each party, PR systems usually emphasize inclusiveness – perhaps even giving the 10^th ranked candidate a seat in the legislature, which allows small parties to compete – over other qualities, such as alliance building.

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Australia’s Foreign Minister released a statement last week announcing that long-time diplomat and democracy advocate Roland Rich has been appointed as the new Executive Head of the United Nations’ Democracy Fund (UNDEF), and is expected to take up his post early next month.  Mr Rich was the founding director of Canberra’s Centre for Democratic Institutions, and has 30 years’ experience in diplomacy and international law.

In an interview released today by Radio Australia, Mr. Rich characterizes the somewhat controversial UNDEF as working “at the level of the people of a nation, not at the level of international relations,” in response to a question regarding the recent use of democratic rhetoric as a political and diplomatic weapon by China, among other savvy, non-democratic states.

It remains to be seen how effective the UNDEF will become under Mr. Rich, who sees the main challenge for the Fund as effectively using “the legitimacy that the UN brings to be involved in countries where bilateral democracy promotion projects are finding it difficult to be effective.”  Given that these countries will also be sovereign members of the U.N., and will most likely resist any international efforts for reform, the challenge Mr. Rich identifies could be a great one.  Despite these serious challenges, however, the UNDEF represents a welcome alternative to the current perception of democracy promotion as an American enterprise, or even as a pet project of President Bush.  Hopefully the UNDEF under Mr. Rich will indeed be able to bring the substantial legitimacy offered by the United Nations to bear on states that have to date been recalcitrant political reformers.

Two weeks ago, Palestian President Mahmoud Abbas decreed the country’s multi-member plurality districts out of existence. According to poll results released yesterday, a majority support the change to elections under full proportional representation. Opponents call it a smack at Hamas.

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So I guess there really are blogs about everything. Today while perusing the internet (wasting time not reading before class), I stumbled across this blog about dictators.

I suggest checking it out, the guy has some pretty interesting posts and does a good job keeping up with the lives of some of the worlds biggest megalomaniacs. The site features some regular content and picks up some stories I even miss in my massive daily news reading. Such as this about the dictator of Fiji’s paranoia about a potential Australian invasion!