It was also one of the bloodiest elections in the country’s history. At the end of three weeks of campaigning, at least 117 people including election candidates have been killed. Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif began talks on Sunday to form a new government, The New York Times reported.

As the campaigns proceeded, the rift became clearer: the Taliban threatened and attacked specific political parties namely, Awami National Party, Pakistan People’s Party and Muttahida Qaumi Movement, derailing their campaigns to the point where the parties had to shut down their election offices. Even that didn’t stop the terror attacks, as locked and empty political party offices continued to be targeted. The Taliban claimed that the political parties being targeted were secular and worked against the ideology of Islam. Although the Taliban were the biggest perpetrators, they weren’t the only ones: political rivalries and attacks continued throughout the country during campaign time. Only Punjab, one of the country’s largest provinces, remained relatively terror free.

Moreover, the political parties that were not on the Taliban hit list shied away from calling out the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan over the attacks, despite condemning the attacks vocally. Eventually, as a gesture of solidarity, Pakistan Tehreek – e – Insaaf, party led by Imran Khan, announced to it would withdraw all its scheduled events for election campaigning in Karachi.

Violence, Moral Policing and the Constitution

Violent attacks by far have been the biggest deterrent to political campaigning this election, sustaining attacks because of their secular ideology shunned political workers from expressing their views, further bifurcating the already polarised political and social discourse.

But hindrance to freedom of expression began as early as the election process itself. The election commission sparked a huge debate when the nomination papers of a renowned columnist were rejected by the district returning officer, or RO, “for writing against the ideology of Pakistan” in his columns. But even more concerning was the fact that the objection was raised by invoking the constitution’s Article 62 & 63, introduced during the much-reviled dictatorship of Zia-ul-Haq. To paraphrase, the articles made it mandatory for prospective political candidates to have a clean criminal record; of being of noble and sound character reflecting the Islamic beliefs and of not having ever worked against the security and interest of the nation or having criticized the military or the judiciary, amongst other things.

The account of journalist and politician Ayaz Amir was even more revealing: “I was told that in my column I have endorsed liquor drinking. I really don’t know from where the RO has got this impression, as I have not written anything like this.” As fellow journalist Omar Warraich aptly summed it, it seemed Amir was being disqualified for a thought crime. Amir challenged this in the Lahore High Court, which reversed the RO’s decision, allowing Amir to contest elections. However, that hasn’t stopped the much needed debate around Pakistan’s amended constitution, which successfully cripples freedom of speech, expression and even privacy by subjecting it to ‘reasonable restrictions’ from vague terms like ‘glory of Islam’  to a subjective issue of ‘morality’.

The missing voters

It’s hard not to acknowledge the void left by the missing voters — women, the nearly 1.5 million people of Gilgit Baltistan and the four million Ahmadis. Although their plights may vary, the issue remains the same — a significant segment of the society will watch the elections unfold from a distance and not enough has been done to ensure their participation.

The Ahmadiyya community has boycotted the elections process for at least three decades after a law declared them ‘non-Muslims’. This was exacerbated in 2011 when the election commission created a separate voters list for the Ahmadis. This action marginalised them even further. Even though Pakistan’s Supreme Court took the discrimination complaint under serious consideration, it ruled that the court couldn’t over rule a constitutional command.  The past few years have been tumultuous for the country’s religious minorities, the boycott from the Ahmadiyya community might deter other religious minorities from voting.

A report published last year by Pakistan’s Fair & Free Election Network, approximately 10 million Pakistani women were unaccounted for in the draft electoral rolls released in 2011. With the exception of a few, political parties have remained largely negligent of mobilising the women voters. Despite powerful women in the assembly and strikingly powerful stories of women candidates the issue remains: How many women will turn up to exercise their right to vote? Will the stories of candidate Veeru Kohli, bonded labourer from Hyderabad and  Badam Zari of Bajaur inspire more women voters to practice their rights? Reports suggest otherwise.

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Sana Saleem is a Karachi-based journalist and human rights activist working for advocacy group Bolo Bhi.

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Alexander Lukashenko turns up to cast his vote in Belarus’s parliamentary election, accompanied by his son Nikolay

Last Sunday the people of Belarus learnt the new composition of the lower chamber of its parliament. But you can’t really say that members of the parliament were elected. Most observers say that there are no genuine elections in Belarus, and that the parliament is insignificant because the power of the president is almost complete. A large part of the population shares that view.

The Belarus authorities claim that elections in Belarus are transparent. Journalists joke that they are so transparent that they are almost invisible. Although the Central Election Commission claimed that 72.3 per cent of voters went to the polling stations, independent observers say that turnout was no more than 35-40 per cent. The authorities falsified the turnout to give the elections the veneer of legitimacy.

There are no surprises in the composition of the new parliament. Most of the democratic opposition boycotted the election in different ways. Some parties — European Belarus, the Christian Democrats and the Belarusian Movement — announced from the start that they were not participating in the farce. Others, including the United Civil Party and the Belarus National Front, decided to get candidates registered to give themselves a platform but later withdrew,  denouncing the election as a fraud. Some opposition parties ran candidates all the way through to election day — but predictably without any success.

The lack of unity of approach among the opposition was criticised by civil society groups. “All of the opposition was really in favour of a boycott,” said Uladzimir Matskevich, chair of the coordination committee of the National Civil Society Forum.  “Even those people who called for participating in the campaign until the bitter end did so only in order to use the opportunity for publicity. So why not agree about a common strategy from the very beginning?”

The disunity of the opposition meant that it failed to send a clear message to voters. If ordinary people boycotted the election it had little to do with activities of oppositional groups and a lot to do with a general sense that the National Assembly has no real influence because of the overwhelming power of the president.

“We don’t have public politics in Belarus,” said Zhanna Litivina, chair of the Belarus Association of Journalists (BAJ). “Even when we had election debates on TV, it was obvious the candidates themselves did not really care about them.”

A BAJ analysis of election media coverage shows that the state media, which are dominant in the country, misrepresented the campaign, focusing on the Central Election Commission rather than candidates or their programmes. There were cases of direct censorship as state TV refused to broadcast candidates’ statements. Debates were never live but always pre-recorded. No appeal for a boycott of the elections ever appeared in the state media.

The official explanation from Lidzija Yarmoshyna, the CEC chair, was that airtime was dedicated “to campaigning, not boycotting”. According to the chair of the United Civil Party, Anatol Labiedzka, 32 addresses by the party’s candidates were not broadcast and state-owned papers refused to print 11 of its candidates programmes.

“The purpose of the bleak campaign coverage and the censorship of the candidates’ media appearances was to undermine electoral competition and depoliticise the elections,” the BAJ report (pdf) states.

There were several instances of physical attacks and detentions of journalists. The worst was on 18 September, when seven journalists (Aliaksandr Barazenka, Sergei Grits, Vasil Fiadosenka, Tatsiana Ziankovich, Vasil Padabed, Dzmitry Rudakou and Aliaxey Akulau) who covered a peaceful street performance of opposition in Minsk were seized; Grits, an Associated Press photographer, received a serious facial injury during the attack. This was a clear and gross violation of journalists’ rights, in direct contravention of the law that makes it a criminal offence to interfere with journalistic activities. But few expect that officials will investigate the case and call those responsible for the attack to legal account.

Opposition websites reported that they were temporarily blocked during election day, and foreign journalists were denied visas to cover the elections — among them Swedish reporters Stefan Borg, Erik Von Platen and Gustaf Andersson and German reporters Anne Gelinek and Gesine Dornblüth. [Editors note: Von Platen and Andersson were eventually granted visas after initially being refused]

Many of the formal procedures for democratic elections are in place in Belarus — but genuinely free elections are not simply about formal procedures: they are about discussion of different political programmes. In democracies, free media provide a public platform for debate. In an authoritarian state like Belarus, where media freedom is severely restricted, elections can never be free. The electoral code can be amended, observers can be allowed to see the vote count, the ballot boxes can be transparent – but if there is no freedom of the media, none of this counts for anything.

 Andrei Aliaksandrau is the Belarus and OSCE Programme Officer at Index on Censorship

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Last weekend was a real holiday for some Belarusians as the Orthodox Easter was marked with truly good news of the release of two political prisoners. Andrei Sannikov, a former presidential candidate, and one of his main campaign aides, Dzmitry Bandarenka, stepped out of the jails they had been kept in for 16 months each. The long-awaited deep breaths of freedom, although still limited, for the opposition activists themselves, their families and friends were welcomed by all democratically-minded Belarusians and their supporters around the world.

Still, the good news does not sparkle a lot of hope for the country as a whole. Despite Sannikov and Bandarenka now being on the other side of jail bars, Belarus is still far away from freedom.

Two men of courage and civic stand freed, families re-united: no doubt the event is positive and encouraging. But — and there is no doubt about this either — it does not highlight any change of the situation inside Belarus, nor of the usual habits of the Belarusian authorities that have a long “tradition” of trading political prisoners to the West for economic benefits.

According to Belarusian human rights defenders, 13 more political prisoners are still behind bars in the country, including one more former presidential candidate, Mikalay Statkevich, and one of the leading human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Ales Bialiatski.

Listen to Index’s Mike Harris and Belarus Free Theatre’s Natalia Koliada discuss Sannikov’s release on the BBC’s The World Tonight here (at 27 minutes)

Sannikov and Bandarenka are still considered to be criminals. Officially they were freed as the result of a pardon they had asked President Aleksandr Lukashenko for. Sannikov told journalists on Monday he will spend eight more years under police supervision. His wife, well-known Belarusian journalist Irina Khalip, was not able to meet her husband when he arrived at Minsk train station Sunday night: according to her own sentence received after the anti-government protests of 19 December 2010, she must obey a daily curfew of 10pm. So, freedom in Belarus is quite a relative notion.

Quite a number of Belarusian analysts have pointed out that the release of Sannikov and Bandarenka was the result of solidarity actions within the country’s civil society, campaigning led by international organisations, and European Union sanctions (namely a travel ban for Belarusian officials responsible for human rights violations and pointed economic restrictions against some enterprises considered to be “purses of the regime”). But there is for sure one more component of this equation, which is Russia.

It is clear that the release of the two political prisoners is a kind of invitation to the EU to normalise its relationship with Belarus. It is clearly a signal to Brussels, but there is no real intention of change behind it: just the same old game.

President Lukashenko’s simple — yet quite successful — strategy is to balance between Russia and the EU, and try to gain economic benefits (like loans or cheap gas prices) by making use of the geopolitical contradictions between them. Worsening of relations with Moscow once it gets tired of subsidising Lukashenko’s ineffective economy and his pathological unwillingness to stick to his promises usually leads to a change in anti-Western rhetoric and simulation of dialogue attempts with the EU.

This is exactly the case now. Lukashenko seems to lose the momentum of unconditional support from Kremlin as its “old new” leader Vladimir Putin gets very clear about the rules of the game. Russia clearly keeps away from backing Lukashenko in his “diplomatic war” with Europe, and it is obvious that the conflict with Brussels reached its climax with all EU ambassadors leaving Minsk at the end of February. The lack of support from his eastern neighbour makes Lukashenko seek attempts to normalise his relations with Europe — well, to the extent his own understanding of “normalisation” goes. Sannikov and Bandarenka’s release is a test of how the EU will react. For the same “testing” purposes the Belarusian President also postponed his official annual address to the Parliament, previously planned for 19 April. The official reason was Lukashenko’s alleged “disagreement with excessively harsh measures of reaction to the problems in relations of Belarus with its partners.”

Yet, Europe shows quite a strong stance on this situation. The Chairman of the European Parliament, Martin Schultz, High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Catherine Ashton, and EU Commissioner, Stefan Fule, all welcomed Sannikov and Bandarenka’s release. But they pointed out it is only the first step, as all the political prisoners must be released and also rehabilitated, with a clear understanding the authorities of Belarus can fulfil the former, but will never agree on the latter.

The diplomatic “dance” to follow is surely one Lukashenko will try to lead. And it will be the real test of the consistency of the EU policy and the firmness of its position — with a clear temptation of declaring “a breakthrough to a dialogue” too soon, and a threat of the situation to worsen again if the response is too disengaging. Finding the right balance is a tricky mission — but one gets additional advantage, when one’s counterpart is trying hard to get his balance right as well, both in political sense and on accounting sheets of struggling budget.

Then there is the most important component of the equation. Andrei Dmitriev, one of the leaders of Tell the Truth campaign and a former political prisoner himself, wrote on his Facebook page on Monday that he was surprised so few people came to meet Sannikov in Minsk: half of the small crowd that gathered in front of the train station on Sunday night were journalists. Almost no leaders of other oppositional forces were there to great their colleague. The opposition is still recovering from the severe crackdown after December 2010 with continuous nightmare of searches, interrogations, courts and torture that followed. It surely needs to unite forces and summon their strengths to prove the regime is wrong thinking the democratic movement of Belarus is crashed. The upcoming Parliamentary election campaign scheduled for 2012 will be a good time for that.

Just let the weekend smiles of Andrei Sannikov’s family give us some hope.

Andrei Aliaksandrau is the vice chair of the Belarusian Association of Journalists

Index is campaigning with the Belarus Committee to liberate the 13 remaining political prisoners in Europe’s last dictatorship. Find out more here.

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Tuesday’s expected declaration of Tunisia’s election results will say much about the main players in its great adventure in democracy building. But it won’t reveal much about what those players plan to do with with their unique mandate. For that you’ll need an independent Tunisian media, in print, on air and online.

In turn that means a new legal and institutional framework based on freedom of expression, swifter development of the broadcast and print media sectors and protections for the the internet against the resurgence of censorship.

Tunisia’s Sunday elections will establish a 217-member constituent assembly to draft a new constitution and give legitimacy to an interim government ahead of full parliamentary elections.

The extraordinary turnout, estimated at an astounding 90 per cent, gives both authority and diversity to the new assembly. It increases the chances that the assembly will allow space for women, rural and inland industrial communities and a proportional voice for minorities — a priority of the Ben Achour Commission that led the election’s organisation.

It also finally gives some kind of true measure to Islamist political influence and brings members of the old regime still in politics out of the shadows.

The stage is set for a complex debate that will test the Tunisian media and its capacity to communicate the works of the new assembly. But despite solid efforts by the country’s post-revolution National Authority to Reform Information and Communication (INRIC) — the media landscape evolution has been slow.

To meet the challenge the new assembly must promote strong constitutional and legal guarantees for freedom of expression rights and access to information. There will need to be a properly supported successor to INRIC, an independent regulatory body that can effectively promote the independence and growth of the media.

The new body and the regulations that it implements will have to guide public service broadcasting as well as private, commercial and community broadcasting and empower and protect journalists dedicated to quality journalism that can serve and inform the public at large.

Just voted, photo by ze_dach on Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

These points were raised this month by the International Freedom of Expression Exchange Tunisia Monitoring Group (IFEX-TMG), currently chaired by Index on Censorship.

Based on the results of a two-day strategy workshop of Tunisian media and legal experts held in Tunis on 27 and 28 September, its report also calls for the promotion of a digital culture, by supporting blogging, online activism and citizen journalism.

It’s not clear how the assembly will handle new legislation, or how it will deal with current draft decrees that will have force of law but in the case of the print and broadcast sector have proven highly contentious in their drafting.

An increasingly heated debate between Islamists and secularists in Tunisia led to a street protest by thousands of liberal demonstrators the week before the vote. On 9 October, over 300 pro-Islamists tried to attack the HQ of Nessma TV after a showing of the film Persepolis, which takes an acerbic view of Islamists in Iran.

That was followed by the filing of a claim signed by 144 lawyers alleging breaches of the still valid pre-revolution media law by Nessma TV head Nabil Karoui and articles 226 and 226 (b) of the criminal code prohibiting offences against religion and public decency.

Sami Ben Abdallah, a Tunisian blogger resident in France, was banned from leaving Tunis airport in September and questioned for allegedly sending insulting SMS messages. His family told Reporters sans Frontieres they linked the harrassment to his investigations into a businessman close to the former regime.

These and other incidents suggest that the rights of the independent media in Tunisia is built on much less stable foundations than its citizens expect and demand, especially given its responsibilities in the months to come.

Click here for tweets, links and features from the opening hours of the 23 October constitutional assembly elections in Tunisia on Storify.

Rohan Jayasekera is Associate Editor at Index on Censorship, which currently chairs the IFEX Tunisia Monitoring group of free expression advocacy organisations.

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