Chisinau burning - Photo OpEd News
[PoliticsOnline sends out this cheery, high-tech affirmation. Is the National Endowment for Democracy anywhere in this picture? Moldova and Belarus have long been on the American agenda for destabilization (aka democratization from the outside). Protests against electoral fraud by groups of students is the beginning of a familiar, colour-revolution pattern that we haven't seen since Kyrgyzstan. Keep an eye out for a Canadian non-governmental organization created and funded by and answerable to Parliament called Rights and Democracy and the Canada Corps.
Meanwhile, Evgeny Morozov's discussion of Revolution 1.0 in Moldova was reproduced by Foreign Policy magazine. For the latest update on the success and wisdom (or neither) of Georgia's Rose Revolution, which Morozov compares to the events in Moldova, the BBC reports that anti-government protests have carried on for a third day in Tbilisi. -jlt]
Sorry for my bad English. I will start from beginning. Please read all. I want to say S.O.S. All of you there don't know what is happening here.
This excerpt is from an email sent to POL from a Moldovan blogger who recapped massive protests which happened on April 7th in Chisinau, the capital city of Moldova. The picture shows 23,000 protestors in front of the House of the Parliament, courtesy of unimedia.md.
Gathering in from of Moldova's Parliament building, protestors claimed that fraud and forgery were at the heart of the Communist Party's victory in last Sunday's election. Initial credit for the explosive movement of young activists surrounding this election, at one point 30,000 crowded the streets in protest, was given at first to the micro- blogging site Twitter for aiding tech-savvy Moldovan youths.
Although initial organization, was spread over Twitter and Facebook, Twitter did not play as large of a role in mobilizing activists as thought. Twitter's current sex appeal and popularity, as shown by the 700 percent increase in users within the last year according to comScore, no doubt won it bylines in international papers; however, to give credit where credit is do, social media and specifically social networking sites such as Facebook played the leading organisational role in the protests.
POL Contributing Editor Cristian Bulumac has been reporting on the actions taken by Moldovans that were sparked by SMS and continued on Twitter, Youtube and Facebook. "The online way of mobilizing people was proven successful," he said. "Still, brick and mortar politics, or maybe KGB style politics, are prevalent these days in Moldova...What remains behind are the SMS, the #pman, #Moldova and #Chisinau channels on Twitter, the ocstudio and jurnaltv.md channels on Youtube, and the unimedia.md pictures all over Facebook."
The myth of the Moldova 'Twitter revolution'
Media's Coverage of the 'Twitter Revolution'Recommend this Post
0 comments:
Post a Comment