The curious case of Benazir Bhutto

Filipinos may find the story of Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto familiar.  Bhutto, to date the only female prime minister Pakistan has ever had, directly opposed the Musharraf regime and was exiled for her party leadership, on charges of corruption.  She returned in December 2007 to run against Musharraf in the 2008 elections, defiant and stubborn about her resolve to come home in the face of assassination threats.

As far as political assassinations go, Bhutto was not the first to go the way that she did.  I wrote my thesis on another assassinated political figure–the Philippines’ Ninoy Aquino, who in 1984 was shot dead as he took his first few steps back in the country from a period of exile.  At the time, Aquino was largely regarded in the Philippines as the leader of the opposition to the martial-law Marcos government, even as he lived for much of the time in prison and in exile.

When Aquino was assassinated, public outrage over the incident was tremendous.  To this day, the downfall of Marcos is  ironically credited to this event as it sparked a national protest culminating in the 1986 Edsa Revolution.

I recall getting a text message from my dad the day Bhutto was assassinated and running to e-mail my thesis advisor, David Eisenhower, about it, only to find that he’d already sent me a note.  Months ago, we had spoken about the similarities between Pakistan under Musharraf and the Philippines under the Marcos regime.  Bhutto, he said, would be assassinated if she went home.  The day that news broke out of her death, we both thought of the conversation and wondered about the wider repercussions.

It is interesting to note that her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, now holds the presidency, just as Corazon Aquino did after the revolution.  And the Philippines, more than twenty years after the revolution and another ousted leader down, continues to be a hotbed of corruption and traditional politicians.  The similarities are chilling.  It is disquieting to think that Philippine politics today remains close to Pakistan’s.

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The AP reports that Benazir Bhutto has just been posthumously awarded the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights.  It is hard to know what to make of this.  While I may admire Bhutto for many things, her human rights record is not one of them.

Filed under: Politics, philippines, south asia

Why study the Internet?

It is difficult to articulate what fascinates me so much about the Internet and politics, the Internet and democracy.   But allow me to dream for a minute.  For months now, I’ve been itching to put together a project or write something — anything — on everything from the initial discussion to the unprecedented election of Obama as president and the role that the Internet had to play in it, even if everyone’s written about it already.

By now, it is a given, uncontested, soberly accepted fact that the key to Obama’s success was not just the message, but the medium.  Marshall McLuhan might have spoken convincingly about light bulbs and television in arguing that “the medium is the message,” but never has this been more clear than in the case of the Internet and Barack Obama.  ”Al Gore may have ‘invented’ the Internet (as his critics occasionally charged) but there is no question that Barack Obama is the first successful presidential nominee to fully exploit the medium’s potential,” reports O’Reilly.

To try to account for the roots of the Obama victory online and see just how far-reaching his message was would entail a massive study into archived Internet matter.  And in the ever-evolving space that is the online commons, who knows how different the world wide web will be when you emerge from the annals of pre-Obama campaign fodder?  By now, we know who won and grasp the significance of the collective efforts that it took to make it happen.

But here’s where it matters — in 2010, the Philippines will elect its next president.  And in this critical election, you have the whole host of characters meeting again and more than just the distant possibility of the country taking more than just a few steps backwards.  But in 2010, there is that chance to make things right.

Where all of this matters, is if the Philippines manages to go the same route — and there’s no reason it shouldn’t, with how technologically savvy and irrepressibly imitative of success we are as a people — then we might actually be able to pull off what just happened here.

I’ve been studying the Internet for different reasons over the past few years.  The first research paper I ever wrote, I did on how the Internet was being used for education, back in the days of Geocities and Yahoo.  But it is the thought of the 2010 elections back home that feeds this interest today.

Filed under: Politics, philippines

The devil is in the details

No doubt the 2008 presidential race will go down in history as one of the most hotly-contested and controversial electoral races in history, in large part owing to the tearing down of the gender and race barriers that the candidates who ran in it represent.  The one on Friday, at the University of Mississippi, promises to be politically charged not just for the history that is about to take place there, but also for the history that it recalls.

In 1962, a man named James Meredith became the face of the movement for civil rights when he attempted to become the first African American student to matriculate at Ole Miss, and caused riots to break out in the university.  The uproar went well beyond the boundaries of Oxford, Mississippi, and made the state a battleground for the movement, as even the state’s segregationist governor opposed Meredith’s entry, to the point that it became necessary for then President Kennedy to send U.S. Marshals to ensure Meredith’s safely.

Having moved to the United States only two years ago, I grew up without knowing any of this.  It was, and it still is, hard to imagine a segregated America only half a century ago, so different from what it is now.  But having grown up with the vestiges of the Spanish-Filipino class struggle still heavily ingrained into the Philippine national psyche, I understood and felt the significance of Meredith’s moment.

But in spite of everything he accomplished for the civil rights movement, Meredith today says “nothing could be more insulting to me than the concept of civil rights. It means perpetual second-class citizenship for me and my kind.”  It seems almost counterintuitive, just as bewildering as it is to think of how Clarence Thomas can vote consistently against affirmative action.  But to understand Thomas and Meredith is to recognize that everyone, no matter what race they belong to, has always had an inalienable right to equal opportunity in this country.  I firmly believe in what the civil rights movement stood for and what it continues to stand for today.  But there is something to what Meredith is saying.

It’s like that episode in West Wing, where Ainsley argues against the Equal Rights Amendment.

Because it’s humiliating. A new amendment we vote on declaring that I am equal under the law to a man? I’m mortified to discover there’s reason to believe I wasn’t before. I’m a citizen of this country. I’m not a special subset in need of your protection. I do not have to have my rights handed down to me by a bunch of old white men. The same Article 14 that protects you protects me. And I went to law school just to make sure.

Meredith makes the same fundamental argument, in his letter to the Department of Justice, that started it all.  As an American citizen, just like the rest, he should not have had to fight to be able to go to school.

That Obama has chosen to keep race out of this election as much as he can is a sign that we are moving in the right direction.  But the fact that he has to watch his back for every single move that he makes that could potentially conjure up the “angry black man” stereotype that have people remembering a time when both races were indeed on unequal footing is sobering.

How far have we really come, if a candidate continues to be identified by the color of his skin or her gender?  When Obama stops being a “black candidate”, and when being a woman becomes less of an important factor for Sarah Palin’s nomination, maybe we’ll have gotten to where King imagined we’d get to.  Certainly, you can’t distance a man from the characteristics that make him who he is.  But while we’re talking about the issues, can we please forget these details?

Filed under: Politics , election, history, Politics