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Tag: democracy

  • Muslim Jakarta Governor Candidate Ahead In Election, Early Count Shows

    Muslim Jakarta Governor Candidate Ahead In Election, Early Count Shows

    Former Indonesian education minister, Anies Baswedan, was slightly ahead of Jakarta’s incumbent Christian governor in the race to lead the Indonesian capital, unofficial early counting by a private pollster showed on Wednesday.

    Baswedan had secured 51.93 per cent of the votes, just ahead of Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, known as “Ahok”, on 48.07 per cent, based on a quick sample count of around 5 per cent of the vote by Indikator Politik.

    A candidate needs a simple majority to win. The national elections commission will announce official results in early May.

    The Jakarta poll has been overshadowed by religious tensions, with mass Islamist-led protests against Purnama, and is being widely seen as a proxy battle for the presidential election in 2019.

    Purnama is backed by President Joko Widodo’s ruling party. Baswedan is supported by a conservative retired general, Prabowo Subianto, who lost to Widodo in a 2014 presidential vote and may challenge him again.

    But the election is also viewed as a test for Indonesia’s young democracy and record of religious tolerance, with both sides raising concerns about intimidation and voter fraud.

    The campaign featured mass rallies led by a hardline Islamist movement, which has strengthened in recent years in a country long dominated by a moderate form of Islam.

    Police said 15 people were detained following reports of disturbances at several polling stations in the city of 10 million people, after what the Jakarta Post this week dubbed “the dirtiest, most polarising and most divisive” election campaign the nation had ever seen.

    “Political differences should not break our unity,” President Joko Widodo said in a statement after casting his ballot at a central Jakarta polling station. “We are all brothers and sisters. Whoever is elected, we must accept.”

    LIGHT SECURITY

    “Don’t let any cheating happen, because the future of Jakarta is determined by the election today,” Purnama, 50, told reporters after voting with his family in North Jakarta.

    His rival, Baswedan, 47, said as he voted in the south of the city that the election was being closely watched at home and abroad, so it was important to avoid an atmosphere of tension.

    Polls closed at 1pm (0600 GMT) with 7 million people eligible to vote. Security appeared light at several polling stations, though police said 66,000 personnel were deployed across the city.

    Police in neighbouring provinces on Java island searched private cars and public buses heading for Jakarta on Tuesday to look for sharp objects and explosives.

    Jakarta police spokesman Argo Yuwono said police had stopped and searched vehicle heading for Jakarta on Tuesday to ensure “no movement of masses toward the capital”.

    Religious tensions have been an undercurrent in the campaign, with Purnama on trial for blasphemy over comments he made last year that many took to be insulting to Islam.

    Hundreds of thousands of Muslims took to the streets late last year to call for his sacking and to urge voters not to elect a non-Muslim leader. One person died and more than 100 were injured after one protest turned violent.

    Police fear Islamic leaders could incite a fresh bout of unrest if Purnama wins the election.

    CONTESTING THE RESULTS

    Purnama faces up to five years in jail if convicted of blasphemy. His trial will resume on Thursday, when prosecutors will submit a sentence request.

    “We are worried things could be hotter if the results are quite close,” said Isabella Hariyono, a 30-year-old voter in North Jakarta. “We hope things don’t heat up. The police and military are ready but we never know.”

    Private pollsters, approved by the national elections commission, are expected to announce an unofficial tabulation of a sample of votes, known as “quick counts”, within a few hours of polls closing. The elections commission is expected to announce official results by the first week of May.

    The loser can contest the results in the Constitutional Court, which could prolong political uncertainty for weeks.

    Citigroup said in an investor note that, despite the potential for renewed protests if Purnama won, it was maintaining a Jakarta stock index target of 6,150 by the end of 2017, representing an 8 per cent upside.

    “As long as there are no security issues, the election outcome should not significantly stall the reform programme of the national government, in our view,” it said.

     

    Rilek1Corner

    Source: http://www.channelnewsasia.com

  • K Shanmugam: Terrorist Threat In Singapore’s Backyard Is Growing

    K Shanmugam: Terrorist Threat In Singapore’s Backyard Is Growing

    With Islamic State (IS) losing ground in Iraq and Syria, Law and Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam on Tuesday (April 4) underscored the growing terrorist threat in Singapore’s backyard, and warned that an area less than a four-hour flight away is becoming a sanctuary for returning fighters from the Middle East and where attacks could be launched on South-east Asia. And he stressed that this could become a problem not just for the region but for the rest of the world as well.

    “The potential locus of the threat could move to Southern Philippines, which is becoming an area that is difficult to control, despite the best efforts of the government … It can be a place where would-be terrorists, and those who are radicalised from this region, can go to get trained,” said Mr Shanmugam, who was speaking at an international exhibition on homeland security held at Marina Bay Sands.

    “Arms seem to move fairly easily into that region, and from there as a base, they can spread out again to attack this region. So, newly radicalised, would-be fighters, battle-hardened, veterans from the Middle East, and people who are released from prisons, who have not yet been rehabilitated, can all gravitate there. At the right time and opportunity, they may well attack.”

    In August last year, Mr Ahmad El-Muhammady, an adviser to the Royal Malaysia Police on terrorist detainees, said the area controlled by IS is shrinking, and in order to maintain support among its fighters, the terrorist organisation is growing its presence in “the second ring of conflict, that is their neighbouring countries, or the third ring of conflict, that is South-east Asia”.

    Referring to Mr Ahmad’s remarks, Mr Shanmugam reiterated that the people who come back to the region will be “hardened ideologues, hardened fighters and willing to give up their lives”. He added: “This region is not very far from any other region, so it doesn’t take very long to get anywhere else. It’s not a local problem, it’s not a regional problem. It’s a problem for all of us.”

    Mr Shanmugam noted that South-east Asia, which has the world’s largest Muslim population, has been of “considerable interest” to IS, which has set up a Malay Archipelago Unit in Syria and Iraq, called Katibah Nusantara. The unit is actively reaching out to the Malay-speaking population in this region, using propaganda videos and newspapers in Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Malayu to recruit new members.

    Across the Causeway, Malaysia has made several arrests of IS supporters in recent months. IS’ worldview consists of “Malaysia, Indonesia and obviously Singapore, which is in the middle of it, Southern Philippines, as part of a larger caliphate ruled by a caliph, it cannot be by a system of governance, governed by anything other than the rule of God”, Mr Shanmugam said.

    “So there cannot be elections, there cannot be a democratic system. If you have instability along these lines, in this region, it leads up to the rest of South-east Asia and all the way to China, and of course South Asia. So it’s a pan-Asian problem, and given the connectivity, no region is really very far from any other region. Then that is an issue for the rest of the world as well, with a strong centre here.”

    Mr Shanmugam also spoke on the changing nature of terror attacks. Citing recent incidents in Nice, Berlin and London, he noted that “anything can become a weapon” today. Referring to the case of a young man who was nabbed after he wanted to “take a knife and kill our President and Prime Minister”, Mr Shanmugam noted that Singapore’s laws allow the authorities to “move in very early and we can detain people”. “A terror attack can take place any time, any place, and they can attack and impact on anyone — with a possibility of a loss of lives, within a short period of time, with little or no warning,” he said.

    However, he stressed that terrorists will not prevail. “Because I think the nature of human beings is that we look for progress, and I do not believe that any culture, or system, or people or civilisation can be held back … progress is inevitable, a better life is inevitable,” he said.

     

    Source: www.todayonline.com

     

  • Providing More Aid To Palestine Should Not Be Used As Bargaining Chip For Singapore Government To Invite Israel PM

    Providing More Aid To Palestine Should Not Be Used As Bargaining Chip For Singapore Government To Invite Israel PM

    Assalamualaikum,

    Bros i think we have heard the news by now – Israel PM is coming to Singapore. I won’t even mention his name because I think he is inhuman for all the injustices that he has sanctioned against our brothers and sisters in Palestine.

    In the past, the Singapore government has been very careful not to invite the Israel PM because they were sensitive to the views and conscience of the local and regional Muslim population.

    So what has happened? What has caused a change in the attitudes so much so that they don’t care about our feelings anymore?

    What i know is that every living Muslim cannot condone the presence of someone like the Israeli PM, who, by many accounts, can be counted as a war criminal.

    So what if they appointed Hawazi Daipi as a non-resident representative to Palestine? So what if they double the technical assistance package to $10 million? So what if we allowed high-level Palestinian officials to Singapore to learn from our experience? This gesture of recognizing Palestine and providing a large amount of aid should be a magnanimous one because it is only decent for us to help an oppressed people. Like how we helped our friends in Aceh during the tsunami.

    Don’t use it as a bargaining tool to justify the unjustifiable.

     

    Fuad

    Reader Contrbution

  • Damanhuri Abas: Minister’s Flawed Arguments Must Not Be Allowed To Perpetuate

    Damanhuri Abas: Minister’s Flawed Arguments Must Not Be Allowed To Perpetuate

    The flawed argument from a Minister must not go unchallenged. It is a betrayal of our collective intelligence for simplistic logic to be given public space with no rebuttal. At the very least, a fact-check is warranted. After all, he is in charge of Higher education, a place where you can get a D grade for unsubstantiated conclusion based on shallow arguments.

    The flawed logic begins with the notion that a dominant one party government for our collective greater good stems from the unique conditions of our country’s formative history and society, held as irrefutable evidence to justify it. What a sweeping lazy conclusion. It assumes a convenient self-benefiting starting point for our history and casts aside the rich part of history detailing the struggle of our people to rid us of the colonial master who was instrumental for imposing authoritarian rule upon us.

    Our forefathers fought the colonial masters to dismantle the dangerous dominance of power in one hand. History is littered with the inevitable abuse of power that dominant single party or authoritarian rule brings to the people. History also shows the inevitable demise of such arrogant dominant power with no exception. And today we instead hear such dismissive rhetoric advocating for perpetual existence of one with justification that are as porous as sand in the desert landscape.

    Power, more so absolute power, is potentially destructive whatever that power is. With skills of fine human mastery, power is harnessed for our collective human benefits. Man has shown his ability to tame the power of nature transforming it into beneficial service for humanity. A testimony of the achievements of man, a collective maestro stroke born out of the best of minds engaging and challenging one another through wit and ideas to seek the best solutions for humanity.

    Likewise, the power bestowed on man is ripe for abuse less that power is tampered with checks and balances to ensure power is beholden to people and not the other way around. Democracy is not ideal but it offered a way to check power by the people. It assumes the conditions are set to facilitate the rigor of the democratic process but it too is vulnerable to manipulations by powers that came to be from it.

    Instead of trying to justify the idea of one dominant rule by the Minister, he should be foremost in advocating the spirit of intellectual discourse and debates with persuasive factual researched ideas and wit, the very rudiments essential towards excellence in higher education. Has he somewhat forgotten his Ministerial portfolio.

    Herein lies the fallacy of this idea that in truth has been consistent of the PAP. It has been progressively practicing and institutionalising the instruments of control and dominance in society since our independence in 1965 against the fundamental articles of our constitution that were ironically written precisely to ensure this, that they have been doing, do not happen.

    Having been successful in ensuring compliance of its citizen through undermining the growth and development of our democratic society, they now are bold enough to go the next step by openly advocating the half-truth of their arguments that they will ensure little or any space for rebuttal in public, guaranteed by their current dominance of power on almost all public institutions from media, schools and education, public finances, controlling authorities, grassroots bodies, community organizations, etc.

    While other countries mature and grow wider spaces in society for advocacy and strengthening of public institutions and the civil society to function as neutral honest arbiter, we in Singapore instead continue to be doing the reverse. Why is open public debate on issues of public concern not a good thing? Imagine what quality of leaders we will have over time if each prospecting candidate is subjected to rigorous processes of debates exposing their quality of arguments or otherwise. But instead we the people are constantly deprived of real access to who our leader is in person and in terms of genuine believes and advocacy of ideas. Are they simply chosen to parrot the government line and are justified based on carefully crafted public information exercise by the compliant media ranked below Afghanistan, which has been a shameless instrument of power.

    Progress of Singapore as a society is determined by the choreographed image of artificial smiling postcard faces in the midst of facades of glittering lights and made-made structures and artifacts, all of which are designed to hide away the things that we are not to speak about nor bother asking. The modus operandi are to leave those things to the ‘wise elite’ that in truth are dependent on the façade to look good, as on their own, they are not prepared to withstand the rigor of public discourse and debate. The maxim accorded is to let matters be settled behind closed doors. Echoes of the colonial past made current by a ruling elite that seems ever more afraid of the natural process of losing power one day.

    The colonials in the past treated the locals with disdain and adopted a superior afront and framed what they want the locals to know and see in the lenses of half-truths, misleading information, manufactured fear and gross suppression of freedom on the grounds of the greater good, to ensure dominance of power. Are we seeing the re-emergence of a new form of colonial mindset with a currency that disguised the desperate attempt to ensure continued dominance of power in the hands of the new naturalized aristocrats that they justified themselves to be.

    This Minister must be checked for the sake of our future. His piece will probably be exposed for its sloppy plagiarism from dusty textbooks of authoritarian gone by on Turnitin.

     

    Source: Damanhuri Abas

  • Surbana Sackings An Example Of Weak Unions In One-Party Rule

    Surbana Sackings An Example Of Weak Unions In One-Party Rule

    I read with sadness about the Surbana’s sacking of 54 workers. As an HR practitioner for 10 years, I’ve gone through many firing exercises.

    Businesses will always place its profitability above everything else. That’s nature.

    But what is not acceptable is that when it terminate employees under the guise of poor performance.

    From news reports, we know that the terminated workers weren’t given the due process for the termination.

    I believe this happens because our labour laws are inadequate such that a company as big as Surbana has the temerity to act in such a manner.

    From this episode, I hope Singaporeans start to realise that a strong union with bite is necessary.

    We need to start looking at matters that govern our lives and not allow politicians to dictate what is best for us.

    To a certain extent, a weak Union is the result of a one party rule which is bad for any nation as opposed to what Mr Ong Ye Kung recently espouses.

     

    Source: Khan Osman Sulaiman