Uncommon Sense

On the job, until the end

Reuters photo

Rest in peace, Kenji Nagai.

Cuba and Myanmar Burma are friends ...

... and like any good repressive dictatorships looking for like-minded allies, they have "a group of agreements to develop cooperation in the areas of commerce, biotechnology, agriculture, sports, sugar culture, health and tourism, among others," to prove it.

The deals were signed earlier this month, during a meeting of the two countries' intergovernmental commission.

The state-run Prensa Latina news agency had all the details, courtesy of Cuban foreign minister Felipe Perez Roque:

Havana, Sept 18 (Prensa Latina) Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said that the visit of his counterpart from the Union of Myanmar, U. Nyan Win, paid to Cuba fostered friendship, respect and mutual cooperation.

During their official talks on Monday, the two diplomats noted the historic ties between the two countries, which have backed each other in the international arena and on issues of interest for common social and economic relations.

Perez Roque thanked the head of Myanmar diplomacy for his country's support for Cuba in its struggle against the US blockade, particularly voting for a resolution that demands an end to that hostile policy at the UN General Assembly.

And this is important to remember, as the world turns on the Burmese military dictatorship for its repression of pro-democracy protests:

(Perez) added that Cuba opposes any kind of pressure on Myanmar against its sovereignty and right to self-determination, and repeated the Caribbean Island's support for Myanmar's efforts to reject foreign impositions.

Once again, you can judge a dictatorship by the company it keeps.

In this case, the stink goes both ways.

Free press under siege in Burma

Whether you know it as Burma or Myanmar, the story is the same in the secretive Asian state: A military dictatorship out for nothing but its own power, represses all of its people's freedoms and rights — including a free press.

The crisis in Burma might be considered off-topic for this blog, but as long as dictators anywhere go unchallenged, dictators everywhere can breathe a little easier. I usually concentrate on the dictatorship in Havana, but at the end of the day, it's all part of the same struggle for freedom.

And in Burma, some of the bravest on the front lines — or in the prisons — are her journalists.

Reporters Without Borders has the background:

As the military junta threatens to crack down on demonstrations by monks and opponents, six Burmese journalists are in jail in the country. Photo-journalist Win Saing was arrested on 28 August while taking photos of activists in the National League for Democracy (NLD) making offerings to monks in Rangoon. After being taken to the Kyaik-ka-san detention centre, he is currently being held at the police station in Thanlyin near Rangoon. He is in danger, as are hundreds of other people arrested in recent weeks, of being mal-treated.

Reporters Without Borders and the Burma Media Association call for his release, along with that of five other imprisoned journalists.

Burma’s best known editor, U Win Tin, age 77, has been imprisoned since July 1989 in a special cell of the notorious Insein Prison in Rangoon. Sentenced to 20 years in prison for anti-government propaganda, he was one of the organisers of the demonstrations in 1988. In 2007, he launched an appeal for resistance to the military regime which imprisoned him. “All political prisoners should be released and the democratic parliament recalled. We should not drop these demands”.

U Thaung Sein, photo-journalist, and Ko Moe Htun, leader writer on the religious magazine Dhamah-Yate, were sentenced in March 2006, to three years in prison for taking photos of the new capital Naypyidaw, a mysterious city rising out of the earth at the whim of the chief general of the military junta. At their trial, the judge did not even bother to call witnesses or to let the two journalists speak in their defence.

Monywa Aung-Shin was arrested in September 2000. Former editorial manager of the magazine Sar-maw-khung (the literary world) banned in 1990, he became during the 1990s one of the publicists of the LND. He was sentenced to seven years in prison under Article 17 (20) of emergency legislation. Ne Min, a former contributor to the BCC, was arrested for having sent news reports to foreign-based media.

Read more of what RSF has to say, here.

And yes, it's Burma.

Give Columbia a break

A lot of energy has been expended this week denouncing Columbia University for allowing Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak on campus. I might have selected a different speaker, or a different event to attend, if given the choice, but it is hard to begrudge school president Lee Bollinger for issuing the invitation. After all, when is the last time, people were talking so much about Columbia University.

There are three primary reasons Columbia should be given a break:

1) Inviting speakers like Ahmadinejad — a newsmaker, a world leader, somewhat controversial — is something universities do, or at least should do. The university did a great service by providing a forum for its students and faculty to listen, and then challenge and denounce every reprehensible thing Ahmadinejad has ever said.

2) President Bollinger took the lead in challenging and denouncing Ahmadinejad, not succombing to his status or weird sort of celebrity. Maybe he played the rude host, but Ahmadinejad had already received the only courtesy he deserved — an invitation. Don't blame Bollinger that Ahmadinejad was not able to sniff out a possible trap. By ignoring the niceties of being a college president and going on the attack, Bollinger displayed an intellectual honesty that is too often rare on today's campuses.

3) This is totally off-topic but, I believe, telling: In 2006, Columbia University awarded an honorary degree to Cuban dissident leader Oswaldo Payá, demonstrating on which side the school and its leadership are on, in the continuing struggle between freedom and the tyranny best represented by the likes of Fidel Castro, Adolf Hitler and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. History has shown many times that the best way to challenge a crazy dictator is head-on, and that's what Columbia did last year, and what it did Monday.

Not a good year for dictators

Pinochet and Stroessner are dead.

Castro is dying.

And Hussein is about to swing from the end of a rope.

Freedom has not come for the people formerly or currently under these despots' thumbs. Some are still waiting. But the demises, natural or otherwise, of these dictators illustrate that the only think inevitable about tyranny is that it cannot survive in the face of brave men and women willing to fight for their liberty.

And if the world is fortunate, tyranny and despotism cannot survive Mother Nature.

Rudolph, the cold-blooded killer

Convicted terrorist Eric Rudolph — the bomber behind attacks at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta and at a women's clinic in Birmingham, Ala. — whines that his Colorado prison is, well, too much like life in prison.

"It is a closed-off world designed to isolate inmates from social and environmental stimuli, with the ultimate purpose of causing mental illness and chronic physical conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and arthritis," Rudolph wrote in a letter to the Gazette newspaper in Colorado Springs, Colo.

Save your sympathy for one of his victims, Emily Lyons, a nurse at the Birmingham clinic left partially blind by Rudolph's bomb.

“I lost my left eye, it damaged my right eye, broke the right side of my face, first, second and third-degree burns on the front of my body, broke my left leg…tore the muscle and skin off the front of my legs, hole in my abdomen – my intestines were hanging out.”

Rudolph got off easy.

Five tough Russian women

About six weeks ago, I wrote about the assassination of trailblazing Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, one of the harshest, most vocal critics of the neo-Soviet regime of President Vladimir Putin — the one man who probably benefited most from her death.

The struggle for human rights, democracy and justice, however, has not been quashed.

Writing at Publius Pundit, blogger Kim Zigfeld has the bios on five journalists/human rights activisits/political activisits — all of them women — now leading the fight.

Zigfeld writes:

Given the Kremlin’s barbaric, neo-Soviet attitude towards the Politkovskaya assassination, the logical question to ask now is: Who’s next? Five targets are readily apparent: Lidia Yusupova, Marina Litvinovich, Svetlana Gannushkina, Yulia Latynina and Yevgenia Albats. Ironically, all are female. There’s no doubt but that the leading voices in favor of democracy in Russia today are women (Russian women are dramatically healthier of body than Russian men, whose abuse of cigarettes and alcohol is notorious and whose average lifespan is shockingly brief, and perhaps this leaves them better equipped in terms of fortitude as well). Outrageously Lidia, widely touted as a contender for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, has only a stub entry in Wikipedia, and the same is true of Yulia (Wiki has requests for assistance with these entries posted) while Yevegenia, Svetlana, and Marina have no entry at all. Publius Pundit readers are asked to consider providing/supplementing these entries to Wikipedia as a first step towards creating the kind of international recognition that these three women deserve, recognition which would not only give them due respect for risking their lives in the cause of democracy but also help facilitate financing their heroic efforts and give them so protection against retaliation. Obviously, more could have been done to recognize and protect Politkovskaya while she was alive, and her killing should serve as a wakeup call for all concerned with the development of democracy.

Read the whole post here.

Et tu, Nicaragua?

Chavez, Ortega

The 1980s were not a good time for the people of Nicaragua.

The deposing of the dictator Somoza was followed by years of dictatorship, lead by Daniel Ortega, repression and civil war, all proped up by the Sandinistas' benefactors in Havana, Moscow and the rest of the Eastern bloc. The regime was a mortal threat to its people and to its neighbors.

Eventually, thanks in part to U.S. support for the contras,, democracy prevailed, and Ortega was booted from office in 1990. Subsequently, he has failed in two attempts for the presidency.

But if they are not careful on Sunday, the 1980s is to where Nicaraguans risk returning their country.

Nicaraguans on Sunday will election a new president, and almost inexplicably — you can thank a divided opposition — the front runner is former leftist dictator Daniel Ortega. He might even get the 35 percent of the vote he needs to avoid a runoff.

The Soviet Union is no more, and Cuba is not what it once was. But Ortega has a new sugar daddy doing all he can to have one of his own at the helm of power in Managua.

His name is Hugo Chavez, the clown of Caracas, who has funneled cheap oil and other bennies to Nicaragua. His goal being to help elect another leader — he failed in Peru and Mexico, but succeeded in Bolivia — that will march lock-step with his leftist, "Bolivarian revolution."

Chavez has been busy with his own re-election campaign — Venezuelans go to the polls next month — but Nicaraguans have a chance on Sunday to reject his buffoonery. And in doing so, perhaps give Venezuelans the courage to the same.

But more importantly, by rejecting Ortega, Nicaraguans have a chance to save their country from an awful return to the future.

For more, read "The Dangers of Daniel Ortega."

A lover's quarrel?

Venezuela's bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council in shambles, Bolivia's Evo Morales says Plan B is for Bolivia to stand for the seat against a rival, and U.S.-backed, bid by Guatemala.

Not so fast, says Hugo Chavez.

Get a chuckle by reading all about it.

A hero's final words

La Russophobe has the latest on the murder last week of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, including a link to the unfinished story about the use of torture by the Russian military that she was working on at the time of her death and a transcript of the eulogy given at her funeral by Irene Kahn, the head of Amnesty International.

In part, Kahn eulogized:

Amnesty International believes that Anna Politkovskaya was targeted because of her work as a fearless journalist and human rights defender. We have called on the Russian authorities to investigate this appalling crime promptly, thoroughly and impartially, to make the findings public and to bring the suspected perpetrators to justice.

Anna Politkovskaya’s death is a serious blow for freedom of expression in Russia. Her murder sends a chilling message about the dangers that face all those in Russia who dare to speak out as she did. It makes it all the more imperative for all of us to press the Russian authorities to recognise the legitimate and important role of civil society, and in particular human rights defenders and independent journalists in Russia, and to insist that they are protected from harassment, intimidation and threats. Such attacks are unacceptable and must stop.