5 Mar 2012 | Middle East and North Africa
Two Ramallah-based TV stations were raided by Israel Defence Forces (IDF) troops at the behest of the Israeli Ministry of Communications in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
Wattan TV station director Moammar Orabi described how the channel’s offices were entered at 2am by 30 soldiers. Their broadcast equipment, computers and administrative files were seized and four of their employees detained. All four, comprising two correspondents, one graphics technician and the head of production, were released a few hours later.
Wattan TV, owned by a group of three NGOs including the Palestinian Medical Relief Society, is a well-known leftwing channel, and frequently broadcasts coverage of the weekly protests that occur across the West Bank which often incur violent crackdowns by the IDF.
Orabi told AFP just after the raid: “it was a surprise. We still don’t know why they confiscated the equipment and shut down the station, even though we work in areas belonging to the Palestinian Authority and we have a licence from them.”
The IDF also confirmed that educational broadcaster Al-Quds TV was raided at 3am local time and had their equipment confiscated. Among the material broadcast by Al-Quds TV is Sharaa Simsim, the Palestinian version of “Sesame Street”. Neither station has been able to operate since the raid.
After pressure from a variety of news outlets including AFP and Reuters to explain the reasons behind the raids, an IDF spokeswoman later stated that both the channels, which broadcast exclusively in the West Bank, were “broadcasting illegally” as they use frequencies which she claimed “interfered with aircraft communication” at nearby Ben Gurion airport according to local news agency Ma’an.
However, Suleiman Zuheiri, Undersecretary of the Palestinian Ministry of Telecommunication in Ramallah, told Ma’an that “civil aviation waves, according to international parameters, start at 120 megahertz, while TV frequencies start at above 500 megahertz.”
The Palestinian Ministry of Telecommunication had never been informed that either station had been broadcasting potentially “disruptive” signals, and the Israeli Ministry of Communication had failed to give any advance warning that they intended to close the channels.
Furthermore, Zuheiri also underlined that both stations are registered at the International Telecommunications Union, implying they could not be broadcasting illegally.
The Palestinian Authority said on Wednesday that this action could signal the beginning of a “frequency war” with Israel. The Minister for Telecommunication and Information Technology, Abu Dakka, spoke out at a press conference in Ramallah on Thursday 1 March. Dakka said he felt that the Israeli government had conducted the raids with the express aim of seizing these frequencies for 3G and 4G phones that use the frequencies to get a television signal. In an interview with Palestine radio, his Undersecretary, Zuhairi, went further and emphasised that the recipients of the frequencies are the settlements in the West Bank, who want to receive Israeli broadcast services.
Reporters Without Borders also expressed their “deep shock” at the raid on Friday 3 March: “These arbitrary and illegal operations served yet again to intimidate Palestinian media and journalists, the victims of repeated attacks by the Israel Defense Forces. We urge the Israeli military to return the confiscated equipment and allow the two stations to resume broadcasting.”
5 Mar 2012 | Russia
Vladimir Putin has regained his position as president of Russia after Sunday’s election. According to the Central Election Committee, Putin got 63.82 per cent votes confirming him as winner without the need for a second round of voting. The second highest result was achieved by communist leader Gennady Zyuganov with 17.8 per cent of the votes. The other candidates, oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, LDPR party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky and former Duma speaker Sergey Mironov, all had less than 8 per cent of votes.
Zuganov described the election results as “illegitimate and unfair”, while Mironov, Zhirinovsky and Prokhorov accepted their defeat and recognised Putin’s victory.
Vladimir Putin made a speech in front of his supporters in Moscow’s Manezh Square saying his victory was “clean” and the elections were “a test” that showed “Russian people didn’t let anyone impose their will” to destabilise the country. This statement is in line with Putin’s previous allegations against the opposition. President Dmitry Medvedev said they “won’t give this victory away to anyone”.
Opposition and journalists reported numerous fraud allegations, along with the suggestion that Putin’s supporters were paid to appear at central squares on 4 March for money and were bussed in.
Watchdogs from the League of Voters reported over 3,000 election law violations. The same number was reported by GOLOS association, another independent monitor.
Most violations include ballot-box stuffing and “carousels’ — when a group of the same people vote several times at different poll stations. Carousels often included police officers, plant workers and the military.
Mikhail Gorbachev has said he doubts that “election results reflect real public mood”.
Russian citizens held mass protests against Putin’s third presidential campaign run, and plan to continue protesting. Putin became president in 2000, 2004 and in 2008 he supported Dmitry Medvedev, who made Putin prime minister.
A sanctioned rally against Putin and for fair elections will be held on 5 March on Pushkinskaya Square in the centre of Moscow.
4 Mar 2012 | Russia
Election day is here. And, according to all the signals, it will be as interesting as anticipated.
The first exit polls coming from the far Eastern regions of Russia are quite shocking: preferences for Putin’s United Russia are below 50 per cent, reaching as low as 42 per cent according to certain pollsters. If this is confirmed, a second round will be needed for Putin’s victory. On the other hand, Twitter and Facebook feeds are exploding with videos and pictures documenting “Carousels”, buses with voters sent to cast their votes for United Russia, often more than once.
After a few very calm days, perhaps the calm before the storm, there were several worrying episodes of opposition activists attacked and arrested in Moscow in the late hours of yesterday. Several members linked to the all-girl punk band Pussy Riot, who perform anti-Putin songs dressed in bright mini-skirts and coloured balaclavas, were arrested on charges of hooliganism following an impromptu performance at a cathedral on 21 February. At Kropotkinskaya metro station, two Solidarnost activists and one Novaya Gazeta photo reporter were held. A member of the Committee for Fair Elections, Aleksandr Bilov, was attacked in his home’s entrance and arrested after he fought back the attack.
Early this morning, an army of nearly 30,000 election observers marched towards the polling stations assigned to them, gathering there by 7:30am. Most were well equipped with smart phones, video cameras and guides to correct electoral procedures. As announced in December, Putin installed £320m worth of web cameras around polling stations to contribute to the fairness of the elections, but this did not reassure his opponents much. If proof was needed to confirm that a wave of civil activism has hit Moscow, then this army of election watchers is the final one. Tweeting by observers has already gone viral with the Twitter hash-tag #выборы2012.
Putin is expected to win, eventually, but the question is by how much. His ratings are still extremely high in the countryside, where “any desire of living better is outweighed by a persistent fear of living worse”, the NYT reports. Besides that, none of the other candidates pose an actual threat to him. The only real new entry is the liberal businessman Prokhorov, whose campaign was too short to be able to gain a significant amount of followers. Zyuganov and Zhirinovsky are two “professional opposition candidates” at the opposite ends of the political spectrum, who are today little more than caricatures of themselves, while Mironov… who is Mironov? An anonymous long-time Putin backer, hardly taken seriously by anyone. Yavlinsky, Yabloko leader and most serious counter-candidate, was not allowed to run in the elections because of alleged irregularities in the collection of signatures.
The main person to watch in the opposition spectrum remains Aleksey Navalny. The anti-corruption blogger and lawyer has rapidly risen to political stardom over the past few months. He is a controversial figure — concerns are often raised about his nationalistic views and his “prima donna” attitude. He is very popular among the younger generations for his open way of interacting on the web. It will be interesting to observe his public appearances in the next few days: much of his political future may depend from it.
Among the opposition forces nobody dares say it out loud, but many think that Putin’s defeat would not be a good thing right now. The opposition is too young and fragile to be effective. Until only some months ago, there was nobody to listen to it. Suddenly, Moscow is buzzing with political talk and desire for change, but until a couple of years (if not months) ago, the only people you could find speaking about Russian politics were foreigners. A potential new Russian leader needs a basis of consensus which is still in development, and an all-encompassing programme that it is still lacking.
Demonstrations have already been announced for tomorrow, 5 March. Opposition will gather at 7pm in Pushkin square, while the nationalist group Nashi will be in Manezh square at 4pm. The opposition wants to take the protest to the Red Square but authorities have not allowed this action, though it may still go ahead. Rumours say that the action at the Garden Ring last week was been the last peaceful demonstration, but it could be counterproductive for Putin to crack hard on the protesters.
The carrot-and-stick Medvedev-and-Putin political model gone, it is now time for Vladimir Putin to reveal which one of the two methods is he going to choose in his next term as president of the Russian Federation — which might begin later than expected.
2 Mar 2012 | Uncategorized
A Paris university closed its doors for two days this week after members of Collectif Palestine Paris 8 threatened to hold an unauthorised conference on the campus. The conference, entitled “New sociological, historial and legal perspectives on the boycott campaign: Israel, an Apartheid State?”, was scheduled to take place on 27 and 28 February at the University of Paris 8, in the northern suburb of St Denis. However, the university’s president, Pascal Binczak, who had originally agreed to the conference taking place within the university’s precincts, withdrew permission several days earlier.
The closure of the university was ordered by Binczak after Collectif Palestine Paris 8 announced that the conference would still take place at Paris 8 in spite of Binczak’s announcement. Students arriving on Monday morning found the gates locked and all lectures cancelled. Photocopied leaflets and volunteers directed conference participants to another venue nearby.
In an article published on 24 February in Le Monde, Binczak justified his decision, citing security concerns and objecting to the unbalanced nature of the conference which breached laws concerning objectivity and diversity of opinion on university campuses. Binczak strongly objected to claims that he had bowed to pressure from the CRIF (Conseil Representatif des Institutions Juives de France), the official Jewish umbrella organisation of France, which had raised concerns about the conference some days before the decision to withdraw permission was taken by the university’s administration. In an article published on the CRIF website on 14 February, Marc Knobel claims that calls for a boycott, whether cultural or academic, incite discrimination which is illegal within the precincts of a university.
In a strongly worded response to Binczak, also published in Le Monde, the conference organisers accused the university of censorship and argued that the cancellation amounted to a serious attack on freedom of speech. An open letter to Pascal Binczak on Mediapart, an independent online news outlet founded by a former editor of Le Monde, has garnered several hundred signatures from academics both in France and abroad.
Three professors from Paris 8 responded to the petition with a further article published in Le Monde on 27 February explaining why they refused to sign the open letter. Objecting to what they consider the instrumentalisation of political dogma and propaganda in the guise of academic debate, they point out that without free dialogue there can be no freedom of thought, and counter claims by the organisers that the two-day programme could be considered a conference, given the absence of genuine debate from all sides.
Natasha Lehrer is a writer and translator. She lives in Paris.
