Zahra's Paradise - Zahra’s Paradise

Zahra's Paradise - Zahra’s Paradise: "- Sent using Google Toolbar"


It is impossible to feel any sympathy for Iran's middle- and upper-classes. They hate Arabs and Palestinians; they hate their government for building hospitals in occupied Palestine; for supporting Hamas and Hezbullah - in short, for supporting the Umma. And, of course, they love the Great Satan.

Let's be precise: according to independent pollsters everywhere, Ahmedinejad would have won the election anyway. It was just the scale that the regime wished to expand. For, the truth is, Iran is split between an America-loving middle-class and an Iran-loving people. An Iranian journalist once asked me "Why doesn't America drop a nuclear bomb on Cuba?" She meant to say that America is so good that it refrains from nuking the small island. And this was a journalist talking. No wonder her paper was banned! America won't use nukes because then others will up the nuclear ante, simple as that. Besides, Cuba's too close to shore...imagine all the noxious radioactivity killing the fish on the Miama beaches.

John Locke observed that revolutions would be rare events, for he was advocating them. He was wrong. Today, revolution has become a habit - and with it coercion. In Kyrgyztan, there have been two revolutions in five years. In Bangladesh, there is perpetual revolution. Thailand is having a long-drawn-out revolution after regime change in 1992. The removal of Estrada in the Philippines was a shabby middle-class triumph.

As for elections, they are there to be rigged. Take the US election of 2000. According to S.E.Finer, rigging elections is one of the pathologies of democracy. In Bangladesh the Carter Center and the EU actively connive at rigged elections. The 1994 election in South Africa was rigged. In Africa today, western governments turn a blind eye to rigging - because there's just too much of it around, and without rigging there would be even more violence.

The Iranian middle-class has plainly become ungovernable. If they want paradise on earth, then they should wait for paradise - including Zahra.

Bangladesh: Stalker kills victim's father

Bangladesh: Stalker kills victim's father: "- Sent using Google Toolbar"




This kind of youth violence has occurred in the past couple of months because the ruling party patronises student and young thugs.

This is how politics is conducted in Bangladesh. When ruling party thugs can get away with any crime, it encourages the others.

This explains why such events are so new - they never used to happen before.

Ershad's rule illegal - like all the others?

Gulf Times – Qatar’s top-selling English daily newspaper - SriLanka/Bangladesh: "- Sent using Google Toolbar"


When Chief Justice Shahabuddin took over the presidency after Ershad's resignation on December 6 1990, he raped the constitution - according to which the vice-president should have taken over power. Therefore, Shahabuddin's reign was illegal, and elections held under him were illegal too. So were the amendments he had passed by parliament - all illegal.


According to Walter Mebane of Cornell*, mathematical analysis has shown that both the elections of 1996 and those of 2001 were rigged - they were, therefore, illegal. Hence every government in the last 15 years has been illegal.

The last caretaker government stayed in power for two years and did not hold elections within 90 days of the BNP handing over power: that was illegal.

There is a wide consensus that the army rigged the election of 2008 in favour of the Awami League - hence, that election was also illegal.


Furthermore, Sheikh Mujib himself trashed the constitution and introduced one-party rule - so he started the entire train of illegal governments.

If every government in our history has been illegal, does it matter? One illegal government is as good as another!



*"One example concerns an analysis of the last three elections in Bangladesh. The 1991 election showed no strange results. For the 1996 election some 2% of results were problematic. And fully 9% of the results in 2001 failed the test. The 2001 election was fiercely contested. Yet monitors from the Carter Centre and the European Union found the election to be acceptably, if not entirely, free and fair. Tests like Dr. Mebane's one could provide monitors with quantitative estimates of exactly how free and fair an election has been.... [The Economist, February 24 2007, p 82]"

Another rigged election?

Did Bangladesh have a free and fair election? Westerners think so...but then they would, wouldn't they?

According to a reliable bureaucratic source, the election of 2001 was rigged in favour of the right-wing Bangladesh Nationalist Party, led by the wife of General Zia, against the Awami League. A brilliant mathematical analysis reveals fraud in two out of three elections: "One example concerns an analysis of the last three elections in Bangladesh. The 1991 election showed no strange results. For the 1996 election some 2% of results were problematic. And fully 9% of the results in 2001 failed the test. The 2001 election was fiercely contested. Yet monitors from the Carter Centre and the European Union found the election to be acceptably, if not entirely, free and fair. Tests like Dr. Mebane's one could provide monitors with quantitative estimates of exactly how free and fair an election has been....*" And that's the last thing that western election monitors in banana republics would want!


Johan Perera reported form Sri Lanka that “it seems the ritual of voting in the Third World is not so much for the purpose of democracy, but is rather for the purpose of legitimising stable government.” His observation was based on what had been happening in Sri Lanka’s 2000 elections. “Election observers attached to the local monitoring bodies, People’s Action for Free and Fair Election (PAFFREL) and the Centre for Monitoring Election Violence (CMEV), expressed shock and revulsion at what they saw happening in the Kandy district on the day of the election. They saw armed gangs of 20 to 100 going about from polling station to polling station....The rigging of the election that took place in the Kandy district extended to many other parts of the country. In the election monitoring offices in Colombo, telephone calls and faxes came in a flood from the election observers in the field. They gave detailed accounts of what was happening....In a post-election statement, the Election Commissioner stated that in the context of the conditions that apply in the Third World the election should be considered satisfactory....Unfortunately, it was not only a chastened election commissioner who thought this way. The teams of foreign observers from the European Union and British Parliament seemed to think that way too.”**


* The Economist, February 24 2007, p 82
** Report published in Holiday, Dhaka, Bangladesh, October 20th, 2000, page 4

US Ambassador Votes in Bangladesh Election

Why did the US Ambassador to Bangladesh, James Moriarty, want the nationalist (described fallaciously as 'secularist') Awami League to win the election of 2008 – which they did, with a two-thirds majority?

This is not the first time that an election has been rigged on the sly – the last election of 2001 was rigged in favour of the BNP and its cronies, according to a reliable bureaucratic source (as well as mathematical analysis, see http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_RSPPSQS) .

After all, it was the United States (plus Europe) that wanted the two banshees – I mean, begums – out of power, permanently. This was the famous "minus-two formula", backed by the western donors and the army (itself backed by the donors). After all, these two women – Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia – were giving democracy a bad name and creating another failed, Muslim state: the last thing the west needed.

But the minus-two plan backfired: there can be no alternative leaders in Bangladesh because there can be no democracy in Bangladesh. The old dynasties were destined to remain, as in India and Pakistan.

So, Plan B, it seems, was to allow elections, but make sure the anti-mullah Awami League won a landslide (like the pro-mullah BNP did in 2001): the world can still be shown that Islam and democracy are not oil and water.

The 2001 experiment – allowing the pro-mullah party and indeed quite a few mullahs to win – had not worked. The idea then was to co-opt the mullahs into the democratic process: but the best-laid plans....

Now what?

Militants have sworn to assassinate Sheikh Hasina. Perhaps the west will allow that to happen, and then ask the army to take over (again). That would be a Machiavellian minus-one policy.

At any rate, westerners know that democracy will never work so long as these two women are there, with their blindly loyal followers. Not that George Bush is out, will Barack Obama continue to try and spread democracy? Or is he pragmatic enough to realise that some things just aren't possible? After all, it was under Bill Clinton that Pervez Musharraf took over power in Pakistan. His team is back in Washington, and they do not appear to have an evangelical passion for the worldwide expansion of democracy.


At any rate, it all depends on Washington – not the people of Bangladesh.

China, and democracy in Africa

"Western-style democracy simply isn't suited to African conditions but rather it carries with it the root of disaster. The elections crisis in Kenya is just one example."

These words from the Chinese government were greeted with the usual derision by the western media, including the Economist (from which they have been taken, February 9th 2008, p. 41).

Interestingly, two highly respected and intelligent anthropologists – Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz – made the same observation in their contemporary classic "Africa Works" (Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument, (Oxford: James Currey, 1999))

Chabal and Daloz say: “Indeed, the wholesale adoption of a political vocabulary issued from the Western democratic experience is eminently misleading: the words do not correspond to the realities which they are supposed to embody...The vote is not primarily a token of individual choice but of a calculus of patrimonial reciprocity based on ties of solidarity. ”(pp. 38 – 39) (Emphasis added.)
Again: “Democracy...simply has no proper role for political losers in Africa....Politicians are expected to represent their constituents properly, that is, to deliver resources to them. It is, therefore, comprehensively useless to be an opposition politician....” (p. 56).
The individual is part of the patron-client nexus.
It should be natural – and rational – for Mwai Kibaki to rig the election for himself; similarly for Robert Mugabe. In a personal e-mail to the author, Patrick Chabal observed that the breakdown of the neo-patrimonial state in Africa has dire consequences.
The Chinese would agree.

ELECTIONS AND MURDER: The Case of Nixon and Kissinger

'[Nixon AND Kissinger were] willing to see lives sacrificed for domestic political advantage. In late 1970 Mr. Kissinger believed that America could get out of Vietnam any time it wanted and that it would do so before the 1972 election. The president wanted to plan the removal of all American troops by the end of 1971. Mr. Kissinger counselled against that idea because, if America's South Vietnamese allies were then destabilised, it might hurt Nixon's re-election campaign. He recommended a pullout in the autumn of 1972, "so that if any bad results follow they will be too late to affect the election". Nothing was said about how many Americans, or Vietnamese, would die in Vietnam. '

Book review of "Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power" (author: Robert Dallek), The Economist, May 19th 2007, page 83

A Modest Proposal

Since we in South Asia in general, and Bangladesh in particular, are addicted to dynastic democracy, may I make a modest suggestion?

In Bangladesh (and the model may be worthy of emulation), we should try and bring the 21st century into our politics by cloning our dynastic leaders. They will then look exactly like the real thing, and the people will be no whit wiser.

At the same time, we should apply modern genetic technology to remove aggressive genes from the clones, and make our leaders less assertive and violent.

This way, the two dynasties would be able to coexist in harmony, and we’ll have a virtual national government, with each bowing out gracefully after every election. They can then dispense with their thugs, armed students and violently faithful teachers and bureaucrats.

And if any nasty atavistic, recessive gene turns up, well, we can simply clone the clones and remove that gene.

There will be only one problem, albeit a minor one: what to do with the real McKoys?