Tag Archives: protests

Bosnia/Herzegovina

Will Bosnian protests be the final straw for the Dayton accords?

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The Dayton accords ended the conflict among Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995, and established a nearly unworkable tripartite system of governance for the country of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosnia-Herzegovina

Though the structure established by the Dayton accords was always meant to be temporary, the country is crumbling nearly 20 years later under the weight of corruption, a stagnant economy, massive unemployment and the ridiculous state of tripartite government at the national level, with another layer of governance within the two subunits that comprise the country the (confusingly named) Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, home to most of the country’s Bosnian Muslims and Croats, and the Republika Srpska, home to most of the country’s Serbs.  Within the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, arguably more political power rests within 10 sub-sub-national cantons.  Moreover, the High Representative, an internationally appointed officer designated to oversee the Dayton process, now undermines whatever legitimacy the central and subnational governments have.

Protests provide some glimmer of hope that everyday Bosnians from all ethnic groups are ready to jettison the Dayton system for a more workable model of governance.  The protests began in Tuzla earlier this month over job losses resulting from the privatization of local businesses.  But the protests took on a national character after the protests turned violent, and they’ve now moved from Tuzla and other cities to Sarajevo, the capital.  Since the protests began, at least three of the canton-level prime ministers have resigned, including in Tuzla and in Sarajevo.  Though Bosniaks (and not Croats and Serbs) are mostly leading the protests, the problems they are highlighting are just as dire for the country’s other ethnic communities.  It’s not coincidence that the current protests are taking place simultaneous to the process of the first census in the country’s post-independence history, the results of which could fundamentally shift political reality in the county.  Preliminary results show that the population fell from 4.4 million in 1991 to 3.8 million today, a significant drop.  If the Croat population falls below 10%, for example, or if it’s dispersed much beyond Herzegovina and western Bosnia, it will undermine the political status of Croatians and the possibility of a third Croat-based entity.  If Serbs comprise even more of the Republika Srpska, for example, does it mean that its leadership will push for independence?

So if any country needs a restart, it’s Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the Dayton Accords have perpetuated a system of patronage and corruption that’s effected in triplicate.

As Jasmin Mujanovic wrote last week for Al Jazeera, Bosnia and Herzegovina faces huge difficulties:

For nearly twenty years, Bosnians and Herzegovinians have suffered under the administration of a vicious cabal of political oligarchs who have used ethno-nationalist rhetoric to obscure the plunder of BiH’s public coffers. The official unemployment rate has remained frozen for years at around 40 percent, while the number is above  57 percent among youth. Shady privatisation schemes have dismantled what were once flourishing industries in Tuzla and Zenica, sold them off for parts, and left thousands of workers destitute, with many still owed thousands of dollars in back-pay. Pensions are miserly too; the sight of seniors digging through waste bins is a regular one in every part of the country, while the wages of BiH’s armies of bureaucrats and elected officials have only grown.

After the general elections in 2010, it took sixteen months for a state government to be formed, one which collapsed almost immediately thereafter. Since then, on the rare occasion that Parliamentary sessions have actually been held, the members of this body have mostly concerned themselves with calling for the ouster of their political opponents. Zivko Budimir, for instance, the president of the Federation entity, was arrested in April of last year on suspicions of corruption and bribery. He was released shortly thereafter for “lack of evidence” and has since returned to his post. As Sarajevo burnt on Friday, Budimir declared that he would resign if the people insisted – apparently refusing to look out his window as he spoke.

Since 2008, the country has struggled with low growth and contraction.  As of July 2013, the unemployment rate was 44.6%, and its GDP per capita fell behind every country in the region except Kosovo (including Albania, Serbia, and Macedonia).  ethnicity-based corruption and inefficiency plague state-owned enterprises, and when (or if) they’re privatized, it’s done in the most disruptive (and often corrupt) manner possible.  So it’s no wonder that everyday Bosnians are angry.

Two parties in the governing coalition have already called for snap elections, which were already scheduled for October of this year.

But the elections are a choreographed waltz — not unlike elections in the religion-based ‘confessional’ system of Lebanese politics —  predetermined to balance the Croat, Bosniak and Serb communities at every key level of government.  Each rung of the ladder, however, is an opportunity for corruption, inefficiency and bloat. Continue reading Will Bosnian protests be the final straw for the Dayton accords? →

Turkey

Who is Bülent Arınç? And why is he the man of the hour in Turkey?

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arinc

It’s Wednesday, and Turkey’s pulled back from the brink of political chaos that engulfed it over the weekend.
Turkey

That’s in large part to the efforts of Bülent Arınç (pictured above), Turkey’s deputy prime minister, whose attempts to bring the level of confrontation between Turkey’s government and protesters in Gezi Park near Istanbul’s Taksim Square and beyond have been successful where the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has failed.

Erdoğan, who is out of the country this week, flew to Morocco on Monday and will be in Algeria and Tunisia until Thursday, may have been lucky in his timing, as Arınç has been acting prime minister this week.  His absence from the country has been fortuitous, given the fact that his statements in response to the weekend’s crescendo of protests has been defiant in virtually every respect after turning police onto protesters in Taksim Square with brute force and tear gas before ultimately pulling police back.  Whether it’s a concerted ‘good cop / bad cop’ venture or not, it’s a welcome breather in what had until Monday had been some of the most difficult moments of Erdoğan’s government since his first election in 2002.

Arınç, in contrast, has made all the right moves to protesters that Erdoğan could not last week and through the tumultuous weekend that saw two deaths and around 1,000 injuries in protests that expanded from Taksim Square to all of Turkey.  He’s apologized on behalf of his government for excessive police force, he’s admitted that the initial protests were ‘rightful and legitimate.’  Though DİSK (Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey) and KESK (Confederation of Public Workers’ Unions), two of the four major labor unions in Turkey, will officially join the protests today with strikes, Arınç has for the time being successfully defused the political crisis.  The protests will continue, but by acknowledging the fundamental rights of Turkish protesters to gather, Arınç has averted Turkey from a wider confrontation — for now.

Arınç helped found the current governing party, the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP, the Justice and Development Party), an Islamist and socially conservative, albeit economically neoliberal, party.  He was the speaker of Turkey’s Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi (Grand National Parliament of Turkey) from 2002 to 2007, and since 2009, he’s been a member of Erdoğan’s cabinet as one of three deputy prime ministers and the minister in charge of Turkey’s state radio and television company.

The conciliatory steps came largely in concert with the statements of Turkey’s president, Abdullah Gül, himself a former foreign minister and top official in Erdoğan’s past governments.  In recent days, Gül has also taken a more conciliatory view of the protests, in contrast to Erdoğan, who hopes to succeed Gül next year in Turkey’s presidential election.  Though Gül cannot run for reelection, Erdoğan hopes to transition from leading the Turkish government to assuming a presidency with enhanced powers.  Though Gül, Erdoğan and Arınç are allies, Gül and Arınç have obviously chosen to respond to the protests in a manner quite differently than Erdoğan, and they are set to meet some of the protesters later this week while Erdoğan remains in North Africa.

Gül on Monday essentially praised the protesters for asserting their rights, and he noted that democracy means more than just the act of voting a government into power, adding that Turkey’s leaders had received the message.

Despite their statements, Erdoğan remains the prime minister, and others remains unconvinced, with good reason, of Arınç’s mea culpa, during which he noted that the Turkish government could have shut down Twitter (but judiciously chose not to), demonstrating that Arınç may not have quite fully taken on board the message of Turkey’s protesters.  Arınç is certainly no liberal, and he may well be taking his stance solely due to internal AKP politics — the events of the past week in Taksim Square and Erdoğan’s response have put a damper on his presidential plans.  The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the next key moment is Friday, when Erdoğan returns to the country.  Even though the demonstrations and strikes will continue today and tomorrow at a relatively reduced tension, and Erdoğan’s opponents have truly substantive critiques about the level of freedom (especially with respect to political expression and a free press), it will be intriguing to see if Erdoğan responds with the same tone that Gül and Arınç have now adopted.

arincyou

Continue reading Who is Bülent Arınç? And why is he the man of the hour in Turkey? →

Turkey

Hand-wringing over Erdoğan is alarmist, but Turkey’s still trapped in a perilous standoff

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taksim

The images from Taksim Square over the past week, culminating in conflict between protesters and Turkish police authorities, have stunned a global community that’s used to thinking of Turkey — and, in particular, Istanbul — as a relatively tranquil secular meeting point of East and West.Turkey

Although I’ve not written much about Turkey through Suffragio, it’s a fascinating country that I was delighted to visit in 2010, at the height of the glory days of the government of its current (and now embattled) prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Ultimately, there are two questions at issue here: how to evaluate Erdoğan’s performance prior to the recent protests, on the one hand, and how to evaluate Erdoğan’s performance during and in response to the protests, on the other hand.

Although Western commentators have increasingly argued of Erdoğan’s move toward increasing Islamization and authoritarianism, I worry that those calls misunderstand the depth of Erdoğan’s support and the nature of what modern Turkey (it is, after all, a country that’s over 98% Muslim) has become today.  But it is impossible to watch Erdoğan’s repression of basic political freedoms, such as his government’s recent moves to disrupt a planned May Day protest, and the ongoing brutal police response to the Taksim Square and increasingly, nationwide, protests without admitting that whatever legitimacy Erdoğan once enjoyed is rapidly dissipating, and Erdoğan, his government, Turkey’s president, Turkey’s military, and Turkey’s awakened — and rightfully angry — protest movement, are all trapped in a suddenly perilous standoff.

It’s all the more fragile given the ongoing civil war in Syria.  Not only has the Erdoğan government been unsuccessful in persuading one-time ally Bashar al-Assad to pursue a more moderate course, the growing number of refugees from Syria within Turkey’s borders means that Turkey risks being drawn into a wider regional conflict (though, in one of the few humorous asides to the ongoing protests, Syria has now issued a travel warning for Turkey).

Erdoğan’s initial position was legitimate and democratic

When Steven Cook wrote in The Atlantic earlier this month, that ‘while Turkey is perhaps more democratic than it was 20 years ago, it is less open than it was eight years ago,’ I had two initial reactions.  First and foremost, shouldn’t we care more, from a pure governance standard, that Turkey’s government is representative and responsive to its electorate than it hews to some Westernized standard of ‘openness’? What does ‘less open’ even mean? Secondly, when Cook laments Turkey’s ‘less open’ nature, he doesn’t equally lament that the European Union virtually slammed the door in the face of Turkey’s application to join the European Union in 2005, when despite the opening of negotiations for Turkish accession, it became clear any road for Turkey’s EU membership would be long and arduous.  It may be difficult to remember today, but it’s a push that Erdoğan’s government made even more passionately than the governments that preceded it.

Turkey, let’s be clear, didn’t leave Europe.  Europe left Turkey, which has focused on becoming a more important regional player in the Middle East in recent years.

More importantly, from a day-to-day perspective for most Turks, Erdoğan ushered Turkey into a new era of economic reform and modernity, partly due to his enthusiasm to enter the European Union in his first term.  But despite the futility of Erdoğan’s initial rationale, Turkey’s economic gains are real, the country certainly remains under much better economic stewardship than Greece or much of Europe:

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But Cook, and similar analysts, I fear, are not placing enough weight on the fact that Erdoğan has delivered Turkey’s most responsive and democratically accountable government since the foundation of the modern Republic of Turkey in 1923.  And when I read critiques of Erdoğan that cast him as a modern-day ‘sultan,’ I have to cringe because it’s intellectually lazy for opponents to slap Orientalist labels on Erdoğan simply because they disagree with his policy choices.

The Economist on Sunday trumpeted a foreign diplomat who argues that ‘this is not about secularists versus Islamists—it’s about pluralism versus authoritarianism,’ though the question remains — pluralism compared to what? The governments that came before Erdoğan?  Some Western fantasy of what Turkey’s government should be?

Erdoğan is neither a sultan nor a dictator, but the duly elected leader of Turkey’s government for over a decade, enjoying the repeated success of consecutive democratic victories in election after election.

Continue reading Hand-wringing over Erdoğan is alarmist, but Turkey’s still trapped in a perilous standoff →

Russia

Putin inaugurated for third term, announces Medvedev as PM, amid Moscow protests

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Vladimir Putin was sworn in as president today, amid protests across Moscow, following his election on March 4 in a vote widely seen as problematic and fraudulent.

Putin, whose term will run through 2018, also appointed former president Dmitri Medvedev as his prime minister — the appointment had been expected, but was not entirely certain.  Medvedev served as prime minister previously under Putin until his election in 2008 as president.  Putin, in turn, had served as prime minister during the entirety of Medvedev’s presidency.

Perhaps the more important story, however, are ongoing protests in Moscow, which flared over the weekend and drew tens of thousands in protest of Putin’s inauguration:

A number of demonstrators were injured by riot police, who wielded batons in clearing crowds from Bolotnaya Ploshchad, the site of a planned opposition rally Sunday evening to protest Monday’s presidential inauguration. Seventeen people requested medical care for injuries sustained during the event, a hospital source told Interfax.  Around 450 protesters and opposition leaders Alexei Navalny and Sergei Udaltsov were arrested, police said….

Despite the event’s ambitious name, “March of Millions,” organizers did not expect Sunday’s event to draw the estimated tens of thousands who attended.  City Hall had given advance approval for 5,000 participants to take part in the march  and rally.

Protestors came out in force after last December’s blatantly fraudulent parliamentary elections, as well as in the days leading up to and immediately following the March 4 presidential vote, although a show of force on the streets of Moscow on March 5 had appeared to stall the momentum from any such protests — until this weekend.

Ironically, as police were clashing with protestors who were demanding a more democratic Russia, Putin promised in his short inauguration speech to ‘strengthen Russian democracy.’