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This week, we introduced a new feature that brings the technology of Google Squared right to your search results. Squared makes it easier to highlight answers for fact-based queries, so you can get more accurate answers, faster. Now, you'll see these answers right at the top of your search results, brought to you from across the web. And, we've also made sure this feature works great on mobile browsers.
MOSCOW — A chaotic day of deadly street violence in southern Kyrgyzstan ended Friday with the interim government retaking control of administration buildings in two southern cities.
The buildings were overrun a day earlier by followers of the former president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who was toppled in an uprising a month ago. The interim government established in the wake of that unrest has consolidated power in the capital, Bishkek, but still has a tenuous hold on the south, the homeland of Mr. Bakiyev.
At least one person was killed and 37 were wounded Friday in exchanges of gunfire between supporters of Mr. Bakiyev and those backing the interim government. Crowds on both sides included dozens of armed men, witnesses said.
The interim leader, Roza Otunbayeva, blamed Mr. Bakiyev for the uprising in the south, the most serious challenge yet to the new government. A former adviser of Mr. Bakiyev was arrested and accused of fomenting unrest.
“The former president again spilled the blood of Kyrgyz citizens,” Ms. Otunbayeva said in a statement carried by local news media.
Government officials said Thursday that they would not use police force, but instead would encourage supporters to swarm into the buildings held by armed followers of Mr. Bakiyev. The result was a strange tableau of violence as the pro-government groups — some peaceful and some armed with sticks, rocks and rifles — storming the government buildings while uniformed police officers and special forces largely stayed on the sidelines, witnesses said. The loyalty of those forces in the south has been in question.
Kyrgyzstan, in Central Asia, is the home of a base used to supply the United States-led war in Afghanistan.
The turmoil seems likely to continue. The violence is emblematic of the challenges facing the small group of people who proclaimed themselves the interim government. They are unelected and have no formal legitimacy, and it remains unclear whom the police and the army are siding with, particularly in the south.
The danger of violent uprising is heightened because the population is bristling with guns. Legal gun ownership in Kyrgyzstan is restricted to hunting firearms, but many households in rural areas keep Kalashnikov rifles owing to a history of ethnic fighting in the region. Also, an Interior Ministry arsenal was looted during the April 7 uprising, scattering hundreds of small arms.
The worst violence on Friday unfolded in Jalal-Abad, near the former president’s home village.
The first shots there were fired as a group of pro-government protesters walked toward the administration building, Asylbek Tekebayev, a supporter of the interim government, said in a telephone interview.
Mr. Tekebayev said the two sides shot at each other across the city’s central square in front of the administration building, at a distance of about 150 yards.
“It was horrible,” he said. “The bullets were hitting people in the back, in the side, they were falling and tripping, and everybody started to run.” By late afternoon, the crowd, which Mr. Tekebayev said included at least half a dozen men with rifles, regrouped.
The opposing groups also exchanged fire over control of a university building where the pro-Bakiyev group had positioned snipers, according to news agencies, which reported three wounded in that shootout.
The Kyrgyz Health Ministry said hospitals in Jalal-Abad admitted 37 people wounded in the fighting. The ministry said one man had died from gunshot wounds and five were in grave condition.
A political party leader in the south who is loyal to the interim government, Batyrbek Abdrazakov, said that by the evening pro-government groups had full control of the government building, the Interfax news agency reported.
The United States Embassy in Bishkek issued a statement urging restraint on both sides.
“We continue to encourage all parties to refrain from violence and express hope that Kyrgyzstan can move forward on a productive and democratic path,” the statement said.
After the buildings were stormed on Thursday, a committee that said it represented Mr. Bakiyev’s supporters issued a statement in which it claimed to have wide support in the south and called for his return to power.
Demonstrators had shoved their way into buildings not only in Jalal-Abad, but also in Osh and Batken. The three cities are the regional capitals of southern Kyrgyzstan, which is separated from Bishkek and the north of the country by a rugged mountain chain. In Batken, the protesters eventually left the building, though the circumstances were unclear.
After taking over the government building in Osh on Thursday, demonstrators escorted the former governor, Mamasadyk Bakirov, back into his office, which had been occupied by the appointee of the interim government, Sooronbai Zheenbekov. By Friday afternoon, Mr. Zheenbekov was back in his office, the Kabar news agency in Kyrgyzstan reported.
To try to re-establish control over the south, the defense minister, Ismail Isakov, was sent to Osh and granted new powers as a governor general for the three southern districts, according to Edil Baisalov, the interim government’s chief of staff.
After protesters seized government buildings last month in Bishkek, including the president’s office, Mr. Bakiyev fled to the south before going into exile. During that takeover, 86 people died when police officers and soldiers guarding the government buildings in the capital fired at protesters, some of them also armed.
Gulaiym Ashakeeva contributed reporting from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.
Less than a month after signing the nation’s toughest law on illegal immigration, Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona has again upset the state’s large Hispanic population, signing a bill aimed at ending ethnic studies in Tucson schools.
Under the law signed on Tuesday, any school district that offers classes designed primarily for students of particular ethnic groups, advocate ethnic solidarity or promote resentment of a race or a class of people would risk losing 10 percent of its state financing.
“Governor Brewer signed the bill because she believes, and the legislation states, that public school students should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people,” Paul Senseman, a spokesman for the governor, said in a statement on Thursday.
Judy Burns, president of the governing board of the Tucson schools, said the district’s ethnic studies courses did not violate any of the provisions of the new law and would be continued because they were valuable to the students.
“From everything I’ve seen, they empower kids to take charge of their own destiny, gain a sense of the value of their own existence and become more determined to be well-educated contributing members of society,” Ms. Burns said.
The new law, which takes effect at the end of the year, is a victory for Tom Horne, the state superintendent of public instruction, who has fought for years to end Tucson’s ethnic studies programs, which he believes teach students to feel oppressed and resent whites.
“The most offensive thing to me, fundamentally, is dividing kids by race,” Mr. Horne said.
“They are teaching a radical ideology in Raza, including that Arizona and other states were stolen from Mexico and should be given back,” he continued, referring to the Mexican-American studies classes. “My point of view is that these kids’ parents and grandparents came, mostly legally, because this is the land of opportunity, and we should teach them that if they work hard, they can accomplish anything.”
Mr. Horne, a Republican who is running for state attorney general, said he also objected to the textbook “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by Paulo Freire.
The schools in Tucson, where about 56 percent of the students are Hispanic, offer Mexican-American studies classes in history and literature and African-American literature classes. Although the classes are open to all students, most of those who enroll are members of the ethnic or racial group being discussed.
In June 2007, in an open letter to the residents of Tucson, Mr. Horne said, “The evidence is overwhelming that ethnic studies in the Tucson Unified School District teaches a kind of destructive ethnic chauvinism that the citizens of Tucson should no longer tolerate.”
In that letter, he said he believed that students were learning hostility from La Raza teachers, citing an incident in which students at the Tucson High Magnet School walked out on a speech by his deputy, a Republican Latina, who was trying to refute an earlier speaker who had told the student body that Republicans hate Latinos.
Sean Arce, director of Tucson’s Mexican-American studies department, said the ethnic studies courses do teach students about the marginalization of different groups in the United States through history.
“They don’t teach resentment or hostility, in any way, shape or form,” Mr. Arce said. “Instead, they build cultural bridges of understanding, and teach the skills students need to understand history.”
Furthermore, Mr. Arce said, the ethnic studies courses have been highly effective in reducing students’ dropout rates and increasing their college matriculation well above the national average for Latino students.
Mr. Arce and Ms. Burns said that they had repeatedly invited Mr. Horne to visit the ethnic studies classes, but that he had declined the invitations.
“We wish he’d come see it, so he’d know what we do, and not just go on hearsay,” Ms. Burns said.
Mr. Horne acknowledged that he had never sat in on a class, but said he did not believe that what he would see would be representative of what regularly took place.
BANGKOK — A renegade major general who allied himself with the protesters who have paralyzed Bangkok for weeks was shot in the head and critically wounded here on Thursday as the military began sealing off a barricaded encampment of antigovernment protesters.
The general, Khattiya Sawatdiphol, 58, had become a symbol of the lawlessness and impunity that have torn Thailand apart as the protests have pitted the nation’s poor against its establishment.
He was shot during an interview with a reporter for The New York Times about 7 p.m., one hour after the military announced the start of a blockade and cut off electricity and water to a tent city of thousands of protesters.
The reporter, who was two feet away and facing the general, heard a loud bang similar to that of a firecracker.
The general fell to the ground, his eyes wide open, and protesters took his apparently lifeless body to a hospital, screaming his nickname: “Seh Daeng has been shot! Seh Daeng has been shot!”
He was later reported to be on life support. Within hours, protesters were clashing with security forces in Lumpini Park in Bangkok.
The general rankled both the government, by joining the so-called red-shirt movement, and many protest leaders, for his refusal to back down. The government accused him of a role in the violence that has taken more than two dozen lives since the protests began in mid-March. In the interview on Thursday, he described other leaders of the protesters as cowardly “idiots.”
Nonetheless, the general had assumed control of security for the protesters, placing his own black-shirted paramilitary fighters at entrances in the makeshift barriers around their encampment, and he claimed the loyalty of a small but intense group of protesters.
Although the government called him the main impediment to peace and suspended him without pay, he was allowed to move freely, exposing the impotence of the authorities here.
“I deny!” he cried in English, with a laugh, when asked in an interview on Sunday about the dozens of bombings that have set Bangkok on edge and about the mysterious black-shirted killers who escalated the violence on April 10 that killed 26 soldiers and civilians. “No one ever saw me.”
The military, which has held back from clearing out the protesters for fear of bloodshed, now appeared ready to crack down. The general’s last words before being shot were, “The military cannot get in here.”
But even as the military moves to seal off the area, it remains stymied by the likelihood of resistance that could expand outside Bangkok into rural areas that are the heartland of the opposition.
And the protests themselves are only the latest and most dangerous manifestation of what seem to be irreconcilable differences in the country. Thailand’s social contract has frayed, posing a challenge to an entrenched hierarchical system with a constitutional monarch at its core.
There are several levels to the protesters’ demands, including the return of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted in a coup in 2006 and is now abroad evading a corruption conviction, and a desire for a more equitable democratic system in which their voices would carry greater weight.
The protesters first accepted and then refused a government offer to hold an election in November in return for an end to their sit-in. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva withdrew that offer. He previously called General Khattiya a terrorist.
The reversal of the agreement with the government was a sign of growing factionalization of the protest movement — the Thai news media reported that a number of the leaders stepped down on Thursday — and raised fears that even if some of them agreed to break camp, others would hold their ground.
General Khattiya’s involvement with the protest movement underlines fractures in the military, and more broadly in Thai society, after four years of political turmoil.
“The people won’t go home,” the general said on Sunday night, as admirers crowded around him at a McDonald’s restaurant in the heart of the protest area. “Just stop? Compromise? All these people, the hard core, they want to stay longer.”
When the bullet struck him on Thursday, General Khattiya was facing a road, an overpass and a business district with several tall buildings.
In the minutes afterward, more gunshots were heard, and there were later reports that 20 people had been injured, though the cause of their injuries was unclear.
The protesters clustered around a high fence surrounding the park, throwing stones and firing slingshots and possibly shooting firearms at soldiers inside. One protester was shot in the head and was taken away by an ambulance, even as gunfire from within the park continued. He was later reported to have died.
Still later in the night, gunshots and explosions could be heard.
General Khattiya reveled in the attention he was receiving, from the prime minister, the press and the protesters, who he said “believe that because Seh Daeng is here they won’t die.”
“That’s why everywhere I go people cheer me and ask for my autograph,” he said. Along with a knife and a canteen, he carried a blue marker pen and wrote his name on shirts and caps as he posed for pictures with his admirers.
Before he was shot, the government had announced that armored personnel carriers would be used to cordon off the area in what appeared to be the beginning of an operation to disperse the thousands of protesters who were camped out outside shopping malls and luxury hotels.
A half-hour before he was shot, General Khattiya was addressing a scrum of reporters at sundown at the barricades. Most peeled away, leaving the general in a conversation with the reporter.
The general commented on his uniform, saying it was the one he had worn when fighting communists three decades ago. He spoke about working with the protesters and about how it was different from his previous military missions.
He described himself as leading a “people’s army” that was bracing for a crackdown by the military.
This clash would be “free form,” he said, adding, “There are no rules.”
She taps out her grocery lists, records voice memos, listens to music at the gym, tracks her caloric intake and posts frequent updates to her Twitter and Facebook accounts.
The one thing she doesn’t use her cellphone for? Making calls.
“I probably only talk to someone verbally on it once a week,” said Mrs. Colburn, a 40-year-old marketing consultant in Canton, Mass., who has an iPhone.
Jodi Hilton for The New York Times
Liza Colburn and her 12-year-old daughter, Abigail, use their cellphones for many tasks, but make relatively few phone calls.
For many Americans, cellphones have become irreplaceable tools to manage their lives and stay connected to the outside world, their families and networks of friends online. But increasingly, by several measures, that does not mean talking on them very much.
For example, although almost 90 percent of households in the United States now have a cellphone, the growth in voice minutes used by consumers has stagnated, according to government and industry data.
This is true even though more households each year are disconnecting their landlines in favor of cellphones.
Instead of talking on their cellphones, people are making use of all the extras that iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smartphones were also designed to do — browse the Web, listen to music, watch television, play games and send e-mail and text messages.
The number of text messages sent per user increased by nearly 50 percent nationwide last year, according to the CTIA, the wireless industry association. And for the first time in the United States, the amount of data in text, e-mail messages, streaming video, music and other services on mobile devices in 2009 surpassed the amount of voice data in cellphone calls, industry executives and analysts say.
“Originally, talking was the only cellphone application,” said Dan Hesse, chief executive of Sprint Nextel. “But now it’s less than half of the traffic on mobile networks.”
Of course, talking on the cellphone isn’t disappearing entirely. “Anytime something is sensitive or is something I don’t want to be forwarded, I pick up the phone rather than put it into a tweet or a text,” said Kristen Kulinowski, a 41-year-old chemistry teacher in Houston. And calling is cheaper than ever because of fierce competition among rival wireless networks.
But figures from the CTIA show that over the last two years, the average number of voice minutes per user in the United States has fallen.
Still, even the telephone design industry has taken note. Ross Rubin, a telecommunications analyst with the NPD Group, said cellphones outfitted with numerical keyboards — easiest for quickly dialing a phone number — were no longer in vogue. Touch screens, or quick messaging devices with full “qwerty” keyboards, on the other hand, are. On the newest phones, users must press several buttons or swipe through several screens to get to the application that allows them to make calls.
“Handset design has become far less cheek-friendly,” Mr. Rubin said. Mr. Hesse of Sprint said he expected that within the next couple of years, cellphone users would be charged by the data they used, not by their voice minutes, a prediction echoed by other industry executives.
When people do talk on their phones, their conversations are shorter; the average length of a local call was 1.81 minutes in 2009, compared with 2.27 minutes in 2008, according to CTIA. For some, the unused voice minutes mount up.
“I have thousands of rollover minutes,” said Zach Frechette, 28, editor of Good magazine in Los Angeles, who explained that he dialed only when he needed to get in touch with someone instantly, and limited those calls to 30 seconds. “I downgraded to the lowest available minute plan, which I’m not even getting close to using.”
Mr. Frechette said part of the reason he rarely talked on his phone was that he had an iPhone, with its notoriously spotty phone reception in certain locales. But also, he said, most of his day was spent swapping short messages through services like Gmail, Facebook and Twitter. That way, he said, “you can respond when it’s convenient, rather than impose your schedule on someone else.”
Others say talking on the phone is intrusive and time-consuming, while others seem to have no patience for talking to just one person at a time. They prefer to spend their phone time moving seamlessly between several conversations, catching up on the latest news and updates by text and on Facebook with multiple friends, instead of just one or two.
“Even though in theory, it might take longer to send a text than pick up the phone, it seems less disruptive than a call,” said Jefferson Adams, a 44-year-old freelance writer living in San Francisco. By texting, he said, “you can multitask between two or three conversations at once.”
Nicole Wahl, a 35-year-old communications manager at the University of Toronto, estimates she talks on her phone only about 10 minutes a month.
“The only reason I ever call someone anymore is if I don’t have their Twitter handle or e-mail address,” Ms. Wahl said. “Like my hairdresser to see if she has a last-minute appointment or my parents to say I’m dropping by.”
American teenagers have been ahead of the curve for a while, turning their cellphones into texting machines; more than half of them send about 1,500 text messages each month, according to a recent study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project.
Mrs. Colburn, from Massachusetts, said she caved to the pleading of her 12-year-old daughter Abigail for a cellphone to send text messages with her friends after she and her husband discovered it was hindering her from developing bonds with her classmates.
“We realized she was being excluded from party invitations and being in the know with her peers,” she said.
Mrs. Colburn said texting had also become a much easier way to stay in touch with her daughter and receive quick updates about after-school plans.
“The other night she texted me from upstairs to ask a vocabulary question,” she said with a laugh. “But I drew the line there. I went upstairs to answer it.”
The seemingly empathetic nurse struck up conversations over the Internet with people who were pondering suicide. She told them what methods worked best. She told some that it was all right to let go, that they would be better in heaven, and entered into suicide pacts with others.
But the police say the nurse, who sometimes called herself Cami and described herself as a young woman, was actually William F. Melchert-Dinkel, a 47-year-old husband and father from Faribault, Minn., who now stands charged with two counts of aiding suicide.
Mr. Melchert-Dinkel, whose lawyer declined an interview request on his behalf, told investigators that his interest in “death and suicide could be considered an obsession,” court documents say, and that he sought the “thrill of the chase.” While the charges stem from two deaths — one in Britain in 2005 and one in Canada in 2008 — Mr. Melchert-Dinkel, who was indeed a licensed practical nurse, told investigators that he had most likely encouraged dozens of people to kill themselves, court documents said. He said he could not be sure how many had succeeded.
Mark Drybrough at his home in Coventry, England, in 2005.
Associated Press
Nadia Kajouji, 18, disappeared from her college in Ottawa, Canada, in 2008.
The case, chilling and ghoulish, raises thorny issues in the Internet age, both legal and otherwise. For instance, many states have laws barring assisting suicide, but rarely have cases involved people not in the same room (much less the same country) or the sharing of only words (not guns or pills).
The case also brings up questions about the limits of speech on the Internet: How does one assign levels of culpability to someone who shares thoughts with people who say they are already considering suicide? And for some who counsel against suicide, it points to a growing area for worry, an online world where the most isolated and vulnerable might be touched in a way that they would not have in the past.
Groups that work to prevent suicide compare suicide chat rooms to “pro-ana” sites, Internet sites that portray anorexia as a lifestyle as opposed to a disease. Anti-suicide advocates say that there has been more than one instance recently where a person killed himself on a Webcam as others watched. Papyrus, a charity in Britain that works to stop young people from killing themselves, says it has tracked 39 cases in that country alone where young people committed suicide after visits to “pro-suicide” chat rooms.
It was the untrained, unpaid Internet sleuthing by Celia Blay, a 65-year-old from a tiny community in Britain, that helped lead to charges in April against Mr. Melchert-Dinkel. “He was practically invisible,” she said. “I tried to talk to any police I could, and most of them would have nothing to do with it. The first one I talked to told me, ‘If it bothers you, look the other way.’ And that really bothered me, because by then I was pretty sure people had died.”
About four years ago, Ms. Blay, who describes herself as a “computer illiterate,” became friends online with a young, depressed woman who had entered into a suicide pact. Ms. Blay persuaded her not to proceed, but the incident sent Ms. Blay searching for the other member of the pact. It was someone who called herself Li Dao, another screen name that the police later said Mr. Melchert-Dinkel used.
Making inquiries on a Web site aimed at people talking about suicide, Ms. Blay said she found at least half a dozen people who had similar pacts with Li Dao, a name that popped up on all sorts of suicide Web sites. She and a friend uncovered Mr. Melchert-Dinkel’s name and e-mail address after setting up a sting in which her friend posed as someone preparing for suicide and was, she said, approached by Mr. Melchert-Dinkel.
By then, the police in Minnesota say, Mr. Melchert-Dinkel had already aided the suicide of Mark Drybrough, 32, of Coventry, England. A coroner’s report found that Mr. Drybrough, who was suffering from a psychiatric illness, hanged himself from a ladder in his home in July 2005. His computer showed that he had posted a question in a suicide chat room about how to hang oneself without access to something high to tie a rope to, and that Li Dao — Mr. Melchert-Dinkel, the police say — had offered details on how to use a door.
In March 2008, Nadia Kajouji, 18, disappeared from her college in Ottawa. The Canadian authorities investigating her disappearance searched her laptop and discovered that she had been talking online with a person who used the screen name Cami. In e-mail messages, the authorities say, the pair agreed to a pact in which Ms. Kajouji would jump from a bridge into a river (to avoid, at Cami’s suggestion, the police say, creating a mess) and Cami would hang herself a day later. In April 2008, Ms. Kajouji’s body was found in the Rideau River.
Around the same time, Ms. Blay contacted the St. Paul Police Department through an acquaintance in Minnesota. By then, she said, she had grown frustrated with what she described as the authorities’ unwillingness to study the huge file she had amassed with the stories of 20 to 30 people who had been approached online. Over time, she said, she had tried to tell the story to a police department near her home, a member of parliament and even law enforcement in the United States.
Since at least the 1970s, many states have barred assisted suicide, though criminal charges are rarely filed. Physician-assisted suicide is allowed under certain conditions in Oregon and Washington.
In Minnesota, 12 charges of aiding suicide have been brought since 1994, when the state began keeping track, and about half of those have resulted in convictions. That state’s law, a felony, applies to “whoever intentionally advises, encourages or assists” another in taking his or her own life; convictions carry sentences of up to 15 years in prison.
Barbara Coombs Lee, the president of Compassion and Choices, who has advocated for laws like the one in Oregon, said she found it “perfectly appropriate” that Mr. Melchert-Dinkel faces such charges. “This is so egregious, so clearly wrong, that I’ll be very disappointed if assisted-suicide statutes do not reach this,” she said. “There is a bright line between aid in dying and assisting in suicide like this.”
Terry A. Watkins, a lawyer for Mr. Melchert-Dinkel, said it was premature to describe what defense he intends to present but made it clear that he had questions about the law itself, as well as the dissection of causes that lead to any suicide. “As a society, we need to be careful when we start putting together laws that prohibit things like ‘encouragement’ without a really clear definition of what in God’s name you’re talking about,” he said.
Mr. Melchert-Dinkel, who is scheduled to be arraigned on May 25 in Rice County District Court, has had his nursing license revoked. He had held it since 1991, despite a record that included repeated discipline for complaints of leaving a nursing home patient unattended, being too rough, sleeping on duty, failing to take vital signs and failing to track a patient’s medications.
But Mr. Watkins said his client was basically a good person. “This is not a monster,” he said.
Shortly after the police interviewed Mr. Melchert-Dinkel last year, he checked into a local emergency room, state records show, saying that he was dealing with an addiction to suicide Internet sites and feeling guilty over advice he had given to people to end their lives.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning.
Publisher:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Issue Date:
2009
Abstract:
The failures of post-violent conflict development projects have so far outweighed the successes. In response, international aid organizations have deepened and broadened their dedication to state-building projects across all aspects of institution-building, to include economic, social and political. I chose to examine the implications of this commitment by looking at Timor-Leste's first local governance project and studying the relationship between its two main actors: the World Bank and the National Council of Timorese Resistance. While largely panned as a failure by NGOs, donor organizations and the government of Timor-Leste itself, this project brought the traditional local leadership closer to having a true role in governance than similar efforts by any other actor working in Timor-Leste. A historical analysis of the application of traditional Timorese relationships with outsiders reveals parallel stories of similar partnerships. When in Timor, local leaders described to me an interesting story in the Frente Clandestina, the resistance movement that formed the core of Timor-Leste's proto-government structure. Counterintuitively, this organization was built on a foundation of weak relationships and distrust in order to function as an effective military logistical operation fighting an occupation government. This challenges the literature on social capital, social cohesion and trust which inadequately describes its relevance to recent events.(cont.) Unfortunately, the collapse of this project demonstrates that divergent agendas, inaccurate assumptions about state-building by the international community, and the misuse of terminology such continues to be a fundamental problem. Outbreaks of violence in recent years have highlighted the problems of ineffective institutional construction. Timor-Leste was hailed as a model state "built from scratch", but those rosy predictions have not endured. Its first 10 years of independence can teach us a lot about the principles of legitimacy, democracy and dignity in the post-violent conflict development experience of building institutions.
Description:
Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2009."June 2009."Includes bibliographical references (p. 95-101).
I joined Facebook (FB) several years ago with simple aims. I wanted new, real-name private sources about Indonesia and Timor-Leste, subjects of two list projects I ran on Yahoo Groups. I was also frustrated about the limited options for private presentation of self (for myself and others) and direct communication on Friendster, then a key social networking player. For a while, FB managed to meet these needs to a partial degree which made it seem worth investment of my time.
This only occurred after a dismaying start, in which my account was quickly suspended, twice, for 'spam-like' activity (simply adding a few friends and posting a few links). FB's then spam detection robot was very amateurish. Finding relevant friends was hampered severely by a then requirement to join a single geographical network -- searching for friends outside was not permitted. (This lame attempt to create 'community' was later eliminated.) I did create several FB 'groups' akin to my Yahoo lists on Indonesia and Timor-Leste. Groups were open to all and adding members was all too easy -- friends on FB longer could simply invite all their friends to join a group. Through friending group members, I was slowly able to build my preferred network on FB, even though, as on Yahoo, few persons besides myself contributed to these 'groups.' On the other hand, I was besieged with requests to join 'fun' game applications.
In retrospect, I should have learned more from these early strange patterns which ultimately turned FB into the deeply flawed, dangerous and specious social networking site it has now unfortunately become.
1) The site owners and admins change the user interface capriciously and too frequently, often without announcement and without first ascertaining, through trials, user feedback. New users cannot possibly master the site even in a month and as a result wind up with settings they would not otherwise approve, even if they have the patience to locate and examine them. The link to the well-written help pages is so poorly placed that few know it exists. In any case, the help pages have grown to almost book-length size, a deterrent to their use.
2) The quality of the main programs which define and maintain the site is too often very poor, too slow, or too inclined to fail. Applications especially lose their original attractive simplicity as they monetize, and they sometimes simply are suddently drastically modified, abandoned or made to disappear. This includes even a major native FB app like the one controlling 'groups.' I had to re-write and adapt text for all the six groups I created and maintained on FB, an onerous task. Redundant and fad apps now are overwhelmingly numerous. It has become very hard to get enough friends to coordinate their apps.
3) On-site search of FB itself now ranges far and wide, revealing much private information of almost everyone on the site. Worse, recent major site revamps reproduce much of this information on the public internet through simple Google searches. All current users should try such external searches to gauge whether what they intended to remain private within a closed community is now public even to persons who are not FB members.
4) In its recent mandatory use of Microsoft's Bing to change words on the personal Info tab of user profiles into clickable links, everything on that tab is now publicly visible on the net. The only way to keep such material private is to write nothing there, or delete what one has already written there. This is a truly egregious violation of the presumption of privacy most people bring to social networking sites. Otherwise put, much of the 'social' part of one's profile must be self-destroyed if privacy is to be preserved. If this is not done and those public links are allowed to stand, one is no longer networking but broadcasting to all the major search engines. Worse, the links automatically generated are almost always repetitive, more often than not inappropriate, and grossly distort the presentation of self on which most social networkers initially focus. The main purpose of this change, expanding by at least a factor of three what is visible to the public from just the Info tab, is mainly to allow FB more room for the paid ads on which it depends. An irony advertisers have likely not yet realized is that personal profiles are generally just briefly scanned by new friends, then forgotten, with such social interactions as do occur originating mainly from the overwhelming News Feed. That in turn turns the site into the breeding ground for social trivia it is today.
5) I left FB with over 2,600 'friends.' This network could in theory be very valuable. But only a small fraction of these 2,600 friends ever read what I post on my Wall. That, for the longest time, was mainly information in the form of links. These postings do not appear in the news feeds of most of my friends. Few FBers post or read mainly substantive content, esp on the order of 5-15 per day from a friend like me. Instead, since they are there mostly to socialize, not to get subtantive information, they make use of a Hide Friend option in their news feeds on the default Home page, so that everything I do never appears in their feeds. A large majority of FBers have too many friends, often in the hundreds and upward, making Hiding Friends almost a necessity to keep one's sanity at the overload of stuff thrown at people while using the site. FB does not help matters by suggesting new friends to add during every new visit to Home. The more friends FBers have, the more opportunities FB has to sell ads and make more money.
FB resembles a good social networking site less and less with each passing day. It has become a money machine. Its socializing has become trivialized, and it is hostile to enough exposure for substantive content. In numerous ways, just a few remarked on here, it has deliberately gradually breached the privacy of all its members' data to the point that by now most of that data is public. The best way to protect yourself, and your friends, from further inevitable FB admin mischief is to delete your account.
When he was arrested again two years ago, Ravshan Gapirov was not surprised. A popular defense lawyer for Muslims charged with extremism, Gapirov had long angered authorities in Kyrgyzstan who see Islam as one of the greatest dangers to the country's stability. He spent most of 2008 in prison, accused of supporting a banned pan-Islamist group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, and collaborating with his extremist clients.
Gapirov, director of the Justice and Truth Human Rights Advocacy Center in the southern town of Osh, struggles against a confounding system: because of Central Asia's strategic proximity to Afghanistan, the United States and Russia have supported dictatorships that, by banning even peaceful expressions of Islam, have pushed ordinary disaffected Muslims into the arms of radicals, some based in Afghanistan.
On April 7, after his security forces fired into a mob, leaving more than eighty dead, President Kurmanbek Bakiyev fled the capital, Bishkek. For the five years of his increasingly corrupt reign, he had attacked Islam as both a security and political threat. But he also hosted a US air base at the Manas airport outside Bishkek, established shortly after 9/11, and thus had an unflinching ally in his campaign, one that was willing to put aside its democratic ideals for a short-term strategic gain.
In Bakiyev's sudden and unexpected absence, former opposition leaders from disparate parties announced an interim government and slowly took control. But many of those leaders are tainted with scandal, having previously served with Bakiyev before leaving to form their own personality-driven opposition parties. The acting chair, Roza Otunbayeva, is loved in the West for her grandmotherly demeanor and fluent English, but she is suspected at home of being ineffectual. Other interim ministers are split on where their allegiances lie: with Russia, the former colonial master and driver of Central Asian economies, angry over the presence of American troops in its "near abroad"; or the United States, which most Kyrgyz see as primarily interested in keeping its air base.
Washington was quiet as Bakiyev murdered opponents, shut down media outlets, rigged elections and drove even moderate Muslims, afraid they would be targeted as terrorists, to practice their religion in secret. In private conversations, US officials acknowledged Bakiyev's appalling human rights record, but publicly they offered only tepid criticism and continued training his elite military units. Like other Central Asian despots, Bakiyev received lucrative American rewards for highlighting, or even exaggerating, the threat of terrorism.
US Ambassador Tatiana Gfoeller underscored this support in October, at the opening of a Kyrgyz special forces complex in Tokmok, where she said, "Brand-new, modern military equipment--trucks, tactical gear, ambulances, night sights, body armor and much more--are arriving in Kyrgyzstan daily and being distributed to Kyrgyzstan's armed forces."
Central Asia is a region of varied religious traditions. Islam took root late among the Kyrgyz nomads and fused with local animist and mystic beliefs. But devotion to conservative forms is growing in the Ferghana Valley, a fertile basin of twisting, arbitrary and contested borders and overlapping ethnic groups: Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan wrap around one another in puzzle pieces fashioned by Joseph Stalin in the 1920s. The Kyrgyz portion of the valley is home to a large, alienated Uzbek minority. In the 1990s hundreds died in ethnic conflicts. Tensions endure.
Judging by the crowded mosques on Fridays and the number of women wearing hijabs on the streets, the valley is more observant than elsewhere in Central Asia. But locals here, like elsewhere, are still more likely to enjoy their vodka than their prayer, or see no problem indulging in both. Nevertheless, Central Asian governments are paranoid, full of atheist apparatchiks trained in the Communist Soviet Union. Only the Islam espoused by a network of state-appointed mullahs is tolerated.
From Bakiyev's perspective, "all Muslims are extremists," said Kara-Suu Imam Rashad Kamalov, whose father was gunned down in 2006 in an attack human rights observers attribute to the state security services. Because of the oppression, "more Kyrgyz are devoted to the religion and practice Islam," he told me. But tyranny will not work forever, he added. "After someone has experienced fear once, the fear disappears."
Already there is a precedent for radicalism and violence in the Ferghana Valley: the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, bent on destroying the corrupt, despotic regime of Uzbek President Islam Karimov. Karimov's fierce crackdown in the 1990s drove the militant group, which grew out of a political movement, to Afghanistan and an alliance with Al Qaeda. IMU members fought alongside militants during the US invasion in 2001. The IMU's core membership is thought to be hiding in the tribal areas of Pakistan, waiting and plotting a return to Central Asia and their traditional base in the Uzbek portion of the Ferghana Valley. Some are probably hiding in Kyrgyzstan.
Pointing to the IMU, Bakiyev repeatedly said Kyrgyzstan faces a growing threat from international terror. With insecurity spreading into the previously quiet northern Afghan provinces, attacks throughout the Ferghana Valley have been on the rise, such as an assault in May 2009 on a police station in Khanabad, Uzbekistan, on the Uzbek-Kyrgyz frontier, and an alleged suicide bombing in nearby Andijan the following day.
Heightening the fear, the compliant Kyrgyz press eagerly reports the arrest of alleged activists, often those associated with Hizb ut-Tahrir (Party of Liberation), a transnational group that seeks to establish a caliphate. While the movement forswears violence and has never been implicated in any violence, it is banned not only in Kyrgyzstan but throughout Central Asia, forcing members to practice underground. Observers such as Osh native Alisher Khamidov, a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins, fear that, hidden from view, Hizb ut-Tahrir could prepare people to join violent groups if it is unable to offer a political solution. There are no accurate figures on membership, but informed estimates say it is 8,000 in Kyrgyzstan alone.
"If the state repression of religion continues at this pace and there are not political channels for representing Muslim grievances, we are likely to witness radicalization," Khamidov said, adding, "the Kyrgyz government is definitely exaggerating the threat of radical Islam."
The town of Kara-Suu is a natural hub for Hizb ut-Tahrir. Home to one of Central Asia's largest bazaars, it is divided by the Uzbek-Kyrgyz border. Crossing it is difficult, even for ethnic Uzbek families separated by the border, and business is hurting. Moreover, little political opposition remains to offer ideological variety.
"They mention Hizb ut-Tahrir on television every day," a Hizb ut-Tahrir recruiter told me a few weeks before Bakiyev's overthrow. "One of our tasks is promotion, and this is a natural advertisement for us." He was hiding in the back of a station wagon with tinted windows, sandwiched between stacks of shipping containers in the Kara-Suu bazaar. "Our ideology is spreading, and people are becoming more energetic because Bakiyev has moved away from the principles of democracy. It's a victory for us; we benefit from this."
While Hizb ut-Tahrir does not have an anti-Western agenda, he said, Western support for repressive governments in the region is boosting anti-Americanism and providing fertile ground for recruitment.
"They say they are building a democratic country, but at the same time they are violating the principles of democracy: freedom of belief, freedom of the press," said a Hizb ut-Tahrir member in Osh in March. "If they find a book they don't like in your house, they take you to jail. What kind of freedom is this?"
"We don't have machine guns; we have only ideas," said the Kara-Suu recruiter, explaining the group's methods and comparing Central Asia to czarist Russia in the years before the Bolsheviks seized power. "Who is in prison? Those who have been prosecuted and arrested by the government. And of course these people support us. Many revolutions started in prisons."
In October 2008 residents of Nookat organized the Eid al-Fitr festival marking the end of Ramadan, a holiday widely celebrated throughout Kyrgyzstan with the slaughter of sheep--and often a lot of vodka. Villagers say the mayor's office gave permission to celebrate in the town's stadium. Instead, town officials prohibited the celebration and dispersed the crowd. A protest followed in which villagers allegedly threw rocks, breaking windows in a government office. Thirty-two were convicted of inciting unrest and fomenting religious enmity. Sentences ranged up to twenty years.
"The authorities interfered in the process of investigation and in the courts. There was no evidence against the convicted. Witnesses were mostly people from law enforcement bodies. It was obvious that they were ordered" to testify, said an Osh-based lawyer who has represented defendants in extremism trials, including the one in Nookat.
Several unexplained killings in Uzgen and Jalalabad last summer further rattled Muslim communities and tested the state's credibility. Authorities say they liquidated terrorists infiltrating from Uzbekistan--perpetrators of a suicide bombing by an IMU splinter group in Andijan--yet provided little proof. Human rights activists allege the security services tortured and killed innocent farmers in a botched raid and elaborate cover-up. That several foreign human rights activists investigating the events in Nookat were expelled from Kyrgyzstan in 2009 further undermined faith in the authorities' version of events.
Yet while these abuses continued, the United States maintained its support for Bakiyev, calling him a partner in the "war on terror." Earlier this year Washington announced it would build a $5.5 million anti-terrorism training center in the Ferghana Valley. Activists saw a connection between the US aid and Bakiyev's mounting crackdown. "The authorities don't care about their citizens' rights, about absolutely innocent people," said the Nookat defense lawyer, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. The crackdown is "to show that we have a problem with religious extremism and terrorism, because a lot of money is being allocated for that.... The money is being given to the Kyrgyz government by the United States and by the Russians."
Moscow and Washington, both concerned about Islamic terrorism, look the other way while repression continues apace in Central Asia. Moscow is also vying to build an anti-terror training center in the Ferghana Valley, and in this competition for strategic influence, the two are willing to overlook odious behavior. For the United States, that could be a mistake, warns a March report by the conservative Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. It argues that the Central Asian governments' overreaction is promoting radicalization, because "ongoing state-sponsored violence has almost certainly claimed more lives, and surely maimed more fates, than the sporadic actions of a handful of terrorists." The report cautions that US interests in the region, such as the base at Manas and overland transportation networks used to supply American troops in Afghanistan, make tempting targets.
Since the violent uprising of April 7, that message has gone unheeded. Washington appears most concerned about keeping the base open, worriedly courting Kyrgyzstan's interim government of bickering former officials and apparatchiks. Many of these figures led the so-called Tulip Revolution of 2005. Now they are struggling to define their legitimacy. Some are angry with the United States for not speaking out against Bakiyev's human rights abuses and have openly said Manas must be closed. It's too early to tell how they will approach human rights, but already power struggles are apparent, and friends have told me they fear the recent upheaval just delivered more of the same, as the new leaders are all recycled from past governments.
Bloodshed is on many people's minds these days--not just the kind Bakiyev left on the streets of Bishkek as he fled. "The authorities don't know what they want to achieve. But in my opinion, it will lead to a very bloody revolution if it goes on like this. I am convinced that such a revolution is inevitable," Gapirov, the human rights lawyer, told me a few weeks before Bakiyev's downfall. When it comes to human rights and Islam, in a country known for its spontaneous uprisings, the new government and its foreign backers would be wise to listen.
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