Posts Tagged: democracy

Aktualisiert am 28. Okt. 2016 Von gast Kommentieren

Ethiopia’s dangerous crisis of confidence

by Alexander Quint

As part of her tour of Africa, German chancellor Angela Merkel recently (Tuesday, 11 October 2016) visited the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, which is also home to the headquarters of the African Union. During a joint press conference with Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, Merkel urged the Ethiopian government to open up politics and halt violent behaviour by police in response to peaceful demonstrations.

Since early August, over a hundred civilian protesters have reportedly been killed by security forces in Ethiopia’s Amhara and Oromiya regions as well as in Addis Ababa. These crackdowns on generally peaceful demonstrations follow the same pattern as the violently repressed protests that started in October 2015 and which lasted several months. Human Rights Watch estimates that overall, more than 500 people have been killed since then, in addition to tens of thousands of arrests. Last year, the protests took place almost exclusively in Oromiya. Now they have also spread to Amhara. The regions are inhabited mostly by ethnic groups of the same name. Both Amhara and Oromo are citing dissatisfaction with the government’s track record of economic, social and security policies, saying that they are discriminated against and left in a general state of disadvantage by Desalegn’s predominantly Tigrayan regime.

Aktualisiert am 15. Jan. 2016 Von gast Kommentieren

The Controversy of Blasphemy in Egypt

by Hakim Khatib

What’s that again? Blasphemy law?

An Egyptian court sentenced the Islamic scholar and theologian Islam Al-Buhairi to one year in prison for blasphemy. Al-Buhairi was accused of insulting Islam in his TV show “With Islam Al-Buhairi” on “Al-Qahira wa Al-Nas” channel. Al-Buhairi questioned the “Islamic heritage”, which angered the Al-Azhar scholarship.

Confused to say luckily or sadly, this sentence against Al-Buhairi was softened from five years to one year. Al-Buhairi’s lawyer Jamil Saad told AFP: “Islam Al-Buhairi didn’t insult religions because the pillars of Islam are the Quran, Allah and the Day of Judgment and he didn’t come close to these circles at all.”

Engaged in a demonstration of Egyptian liberal intellectuals against the conviction of Al-Buhairi, Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah Nasr said: “Blasphemy is a fascist law. It is a legacy of the Spanish inquisition courts.”

But what did Al-Buhairi really do?

Aktualisiert am 20. Jan. 2015 Von Martin Kommentieren

Peace is more than the absence of hacks

by Martin Schmetz

Part V of our series on cyberpeace
^{Cyberpeace-Logo Taube ‘digital’: CC BY-SA 3.0 mit Nennung “Sanne Grabisch ideal.istik.de für die Cyberpeace-Kampagne des FIfF cyberpeace.fiff.de“}

With everybody focusing on cyberwar, our blog has decided to discuss cyberpeace instead. So far we have seen musings on war and peace, the meaning of the term “cyberpeace” itself and how we construct it discursively and calls to end cyberwar by focusing on the technical aspects again. All of these points are valid. But I feel that they are limited in their scope, because they focus too much on the adversarial: The hacks, the malware, the evil hackers from North Korea. But peace is more than the absence of war – and, in our case, more than the absence of hacks. If we want to be serious about cyberpeace as a societal goal, we have to pay more attention to how we handle our data because this data has a huge impact on the peace within our society.