3pm deadline looms as death toll rises – The Irrawaddy/RTÉ News at One/Newstalk Breakfast Show
May 17th, 2010
http://www.irrawaddy.org/highlight.php?art_id=18481
http://www.rte.ie/news/2010/0517/news1pm.html
http://irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/world/bullets-fly-in-battlefield-bangkok-457889.html
Most of the women have so far decided against leaving the rally site. Some are making the move back home however. (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
BANGKOK – “I’m going home, back to Chiang Rai”, said one redshirt, refusing to give her name, as she wheeled her suitcase along under the shelter of a rail overpass running over the main rally stage. By Sunday evening, a small number of the estimated 5000 protestors had left, with more heading for the Red Cross-managed sanctuary established at a nearby Buddhist temple.
The Thai Government wants redshirt protestors to evacuate their main rally site at Rajaprasong by 3pm Monday. But as street fighting leaves 35 dead it is unclear whether or not the bulk of women and children at the Rajaprasong rally site will leave. Redshirt leaders have said that the protestors can leave the site. The Thai PM has defended the crackdown, despite the death toll so far, putting the blame for the violence on the redshirts. Army spokesman Col. Sansern Kaewkamnerd said that “If the protesters will not end the situation, we will have to enter the encampment.”
Pointing up at what she says are army snipers prowling the roof of a nearby high-rise, Manissa, who says she works at Bumrungrad Hospital, scoffed at the thought of leaving. “I’m staying here, and I think most people will. We’re here 2 months now”. Back at the rally area, a mostly female crowd, many middle-aged and above, listened and cheered as speeches were given in the draining 85% humidity and 35 degree heat.
Most of the men seem to be at the frontiers of the protest site, clashing with soldiers as gunfire and explosions rang out across the city. Some have pushed the boundaries, literally. (more…)
Smoke over Bangkok as fighting continues – Sunday Business Post/Fox News
May 15th, 2010
http://www.sbpost.ie/news/world/death-toll-still-rising-as-bangkok-protests-continue-49245.html
BANGKOK – By Saturday afternoon eighteen people had died in three days of street fighting at various locations across the sprawling capital. Plumes of smoke rose over high-rise hotels and offices, as gunfire and explosions were heard at a number of fronts around the commercial center of the city. The Thai Government declared certain locations as ‘live fire’ zones, saying that the army could not guarantee the security of people present.
After series of shooting and explosions on Sat. afternoon, protestors run out to taunt the troops from behind the smokescreen. (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
On Saturday afternoon soldiers shot at protestors on the Rama IV highway, after grenades exploded close to a Thai boxing stadium, where soldiers sheltered at the roadside. This correspondent was among a group of journalists scurrying for cover amid the maelstrom. A Canadian reporter working for France 24 was seriously wounded by army fire during the previous day’s street fighting, after a Japanese cameraman working for Reuters was shot dead during deadly April 10 clashes, when the army last tried to disperse the two-month old demonstration. Shooting continued sporadically at the flashpoint, with protestors rolling burning tyres at the army lines. (more…)
Bullets over Bangkok – The Irrawaddy/CBS Radio
May 15th, 2010
http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=18478
BANGKOK – Thailand’s capital has been a warzone since late Thursday night, as soldiers and police do battle with redshirt protestors on some of the main thoroughfares in the heart of the city. 16 people have been confirmed killed and 157 injured during clashes that are speading across the city.
Redshirts crouch as shots ring out close to Chulalongkorn Hospital on Saturday afternoon. (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
Since an as-yet unexplained hit on controversial Major-General Khattiya, known by his nom de guerre Seh Daeng, on Thursday evening, the combat zone has widened to take in new flashpoints across the city. The Rama IV highway has been blocked off, as redshirts try to stop soldiers from moving up the road to get closer to the main protest area. After bus-burnings early on Friday, soldiers and protestors clashed into the night and on Saturday morning. (more…)
Population Control in the Philippines – NC Register
May 13th, 2010
http://www.ncregister.com/register_exclusives/population_control_in_the_philippines/
Wrangle Over Legislation set to roll on After Election
Mass at Greenbelt, Makati City. (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
MANILA – It is 6pm in Greenbelt, one of Manila’s high-end shopping malls. Elsewhere, commuters are stopping-off for a post-work coffee or browsing through the array of boutique names next door to the chapel. But bang-in-the-middle of the mall, a dome-shaped part-open church is packed for evening Mass – one of four celebrated there each day. Passers-by genuflect or bless themselves, gingerly laying down their shopping as they pause on their way.
Out of 92 million people, 85 percent of Filipinos are Catholic, and the country is well-known for eye-catching displays of public devotion. During the election season, daily vigils and prayer services were held all over the country. Inside the election commission hq, statues of the Virgin Mary and posters exhorting the recitation of novenas sat between nuts-and-bolts election information for parties, voters, candidates and media.
An ongoing battle over a ‘Reproductive Health’ Bill looks set to roll on into the new administration. Winning Presidential ticket Benigno ‘Noynoy’ Aquino III opposes the Church position on the bill. At time of writing, with 90% of votes counted, Aquino had 40% % , with former President Estrada, who also backs the RH bill, second on 25%. Early front-runner and business billionaire Manny Villar finished a distant third on 11%. He publicly-backed the Church’s take on RH, but well before he spoke out his popularity was on the slide due to corruption allegations. (more…)
Aquino set for office, but will he be in power? – The Irrawaddy
May 12th, 2010
http://www.irrawaddy.org/highlight.php?art_id=18457
MANILA – Despite an almost-certain landslide win for Benigno ‘Noynoy’ Aquino III in Monday’s presidential election, it is not clear whether this will translate into a mandate for the anti-corruption and reform measures he promised on the campaign trail. He was elected in what is being deemed a clean election, though ten people died on polling day itself, after well over one hundred more candidates and election workers were killed during the campaign.
Liberal party/Aquino supporters at their final campaign rally, Quezon City last Friday. (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
After a last-minute panic over the viability of the computerised counting system, the election is being depicted as a success, all things considered. The technical armageddon never materialised, and “on the whole, the election went well by national standards”, says Telibert Laoc, who works with the National Citizens Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL).
Mr Laoc told The Irrawaddy that the most serious nationwide problem with the elections was a de facto “absence of a real secret ballot”. At five different polling stations in the Manila metropolitian area, The Irrawaddy saw voters sitting side-by-side in the open, in the middle of polling stations where they were surrounded by hundreds of other voters, poll watchers and officials. The sole impediment to this correspondent taking photos of the voter as he or she marked the ballot. was the voter’s own willingness to photographed.
Voter respite from Philippines prison blues – Global Post
May 10th, 2010
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/philippines/100510/makati-prison-inmates-voting-rights-election
In a landmark event for the Southeast Asian country, prisoners were allowed to vote in today’s national elections.
MAKATI CITY, Philippines — “They’re probably drinking coffee and smoking big cigars,” sings the jailed protagonist in
Janet, 27, was first to vote. Here she has her finger daubed with indelible ink, a measure to prevent multiple votes being cast by one person. (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” imagining his well-to-do counterparts living it up on the outside.
Inmates in the Philippines got a taste of life outside of jail today. In a landmark event for the Southeast Asian island nation, prisoners voted in the country’s national elections.
Final results for the overall election are still forthcoming, but unofficial tallies of 57 percent of votes cast showed presidental favorite Beningo “Noynoy” Aquino well in front with 40.6 percent, ahead of former President Joseph Estrada in second place.
First up to cast her ballot this morning at Makati City Jail in Manila was a 27-year-old who gave her name as Janet. Appearing non-plussed, she told GlobalPost that her voting experience “felt OK. I knew who I wanted to vote for, so it was no big deal.”
Inmates received voter education from a number of NGOs in recent weeks. “They all had a couple of dry runs,” said prison guard Bautista, watching as inmates were called up one by one from the holding area behind an iron gate. The warden’s office — temporarily converted into a polling station for the 481 inmates — filled up with prisoners who collected their ballot papers before sitting down to mark their choices.
Prisoners then returned their paper before having their right index finger marked with indelible ink. This is a staple of election transparency in many countries, aiming to prevent multiple votes being cast by one person. International electoral observers kept a close eye on the proceedings and prisoners were quickly shuffled back to their cells. (more…)
Philippines votes in the shadow of gunmen – Asia Times
May 10th, 2010
http://atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/LE11Ae01.html
MANILA – The ever-present shadow of violence and intimidation hangs over the 50 million voters going to the polls at the Philippines’ presidential, legislative elections and local elections on Monday. The prospect of a fully free and fair election is also in question, with well-documented worries over a new partially automated voting and counting system and vote-buying seemingly omnipresent – boxing champion Manny Pacquiao last week offered 500,000 pesos
(US$10,980) to a village in Mindanao if it backed his campaign for a congress seat.
The number of political killings has surged during the electoral campaign, with local clans and politicians eliminating their electoral rivals. The single worse incident came last November, when an unprecedented 57 civilians were murdered in Maguindanao in the restive southern Philippines.
Voters line up at Valenzuela precinct, 5 hours into polling. Many had queued all morning as the temperature reached 37 degrees. (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
By April 14, the latest date for which figures are available, 38 election candidates had been killed during the January to mid-April campaign period, according to Felix Vargas, spokesman for the government’s task force on elected government officials. The figure does not include campaign workers and candidates’ assistants who were killed.
Professor Rommel C Banlaoi, the director of the Philippine Institute for Peace, Violence and Terrorism Research (PIPVTR), told Asia Times Online that “cases of election related killings from the use of illegally armed groups have been recorded and to date numbers more than 100″.
The Maguindanao atrocity made international headlines due to its grisly details, but also because it was the largest recorded mass killing of journalists in a single incident. The massacre was carried out to deter an opposition clan, the Mangudadatu family, from running in the elections against the government-backed Ampatuan clan. This case and less well-known clashes in the southern Philippines and elsewhere illustrate how elections raise the stakes for volatile local bigwig rivalries. With patronage links to the center at stake, the prospect of elections intensifies rido, the term for honor-driven violence and vengeful clan feuding in the region. (more…)
No Deus ex Machina in Manila – ISN
May 7th, 2010
http://www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Current-Affairs/Security-Watch/Detail/?lng=en&id=115980
A Presidential race depicted as a run-off between a saint, a CEO and a faded movie-star is being overshadowed by worries over a computerised vote-counting system.
On the way out: Arroyo billboard near old city of Intramuros in Manila (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
Simon Roughneen in Manila – In a first for The Philippines – a country with intermittent electricity supply and a history of electoral fraud – a computerised system is being used instead of the manual count used in most other countries. Despite 11th-hour glitches meant the recall and re-programming of 76000 flash cards used to scan votes in the optical scan machines, the electoral oversight body (Comelec) remained confident that “the elections will go through”, according to Comelec chair Jose Melo.
Whether the equipment will be ready and distributed across the whole archipelago in time, remains to be seen. However Comelec is resisting calls from candidates and media to conduct a manual count in parallel and as a back-up to the computerised alternative.
The ‘saint’ in question is Benigno ‘Noynoy’ Aquino, son of former President and democracy icon Cory, who died in August 2009. A poll published this morning Friday put Mr Aquino on 41%, over double that of the second-place candidate. Aquino has capitalised on the family lineage – an aura of martyrdom, heroism and clean hands that dates back to the 1986 People’s Power Revolution – in a country listed by Transparency International as more graft-prone than Pakistan or Liberia. (more…)
Makeovers and Takeovers in Burma – ISN
May 5th, 2010
Burma’s military elites are ditching their uniforms so they can run as civilians in elections scheduled for later this year. That makeover might be just cosmetic, but is likely to guarantee continued army rule in what is being slammed in some quarters as a ‘military election’.
The junta is encountering problems, however, in its takeover bid with the country’s ethnic militias, the largest of whom have defied five deadlines to stand down and become part of the country’s border guard forces.
Since June 2009, the stakes have been raised by army attacks on rebel-held areas, in some cases carried out in partnership with proxy militias working with the regime. These attacks drove thousands from their homes, with Karen refugees fleeing to the jungle or across the border to Thailand, in a grisly re-enactment of large-scale displacements during the 1990s and later.
In August, the junta’s army made light work of a small ethnic Chinese or Kokang militia, but angered Beijing in the process. This was seen as a test run and a warning shot – aimed at unsettling the larger militias such as the United Wa State Army (UWSA), the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO) and the Shan State Army – North (SSA-N). However these groups would be unlikely to cave in so quickly. Threats from Napyidaw, the new isolated jungle capital built by the regime, have prompted talk of a multi-ethnic alliance if the junta tries to settle the border guard issue by force. (more…)
Sunlight creeping through the Bangkok gloom? – The Irrawaddy
May 4th, 2010
http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=18376
Redshirt protestors have conditionally-accepted the Government’s new peace plan. However, looking at these developments in the context of Thailand’s four+ year long cycle of protests, it might be premature to conclude that a long-term solution to Thailand’s political divisions has been found.
Dwindling numbers of redshirts listening on Tuesday morning, May 4 (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
themselves from the dank heat as a rainstorm loomed overhead, while others slept on the overpass running above the rally site. On the eve of Thailand’s Coronation Day, it has been almost two months of non-stop speeches, interspersed with three incidents of serious political violence – deemed as terrorism in some quarters – since the red shirts commenced their optimistically-named ‘Million Man March’ on March 12. (more…)
