Category Archives: Arsenal Pulse

Brief thoughts and mini-analyses on stories in the news.

Another top Chinese Communist Party figure nailed for corruption

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President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive inside China’s Communist Party has reached a new peak with the arrest of one of the party’s highest-ranking figures:

China’s leaders said early Saturday that [Zhou Yongkang] the former domestic security chief has been arrested and expelled from the Communist Party over a long list of accusations including accepting bribes and disclosing state secrets.
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Top leaders handed his case over to the courts and announced through state-run media a litany of accusations. Among the allegations: Accepting huge bribes, shifting money to mistresses and relatives, abusing his office for special interests and disclosing state secrets.

If found guilty — as most party officials are in such cases — Zhou would be China’s highest-ranking party leader to be taken down in more than two decades.
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Zhou spent much of the last decade as one of China’s most powerful people, controlling every aspect of the domestic security apparatus and maintaining deep, lucrative ties to China’s oil sector. By targeting him, Xi has broken an unwritten party rule against going after current or former standing committee members.

 
President Xi has gradually been consolidating power around himself since taking office — in a break from the previous two decades that often veered closer toward rule-by-committee — and moves like this also help purge the party of potential rivals. But the main reason for pursuing such policies is one of self-interest for the Party as a whole: Cleaning up the Chinese Communist Party and making it more responsive and accountable to the population is the easiest way to maintain high enough levels of popular support to stall any push to adopt multi-party rule.

Added: Here’s an interesting pull quote from CCTV English, one of the official state media outlets:

Zhou’s conduct deviated from the Party’s nature and purpose, greatly damaged the Party’s image and caused huge losses for the cause of the Party and the people, the commentary [in Saturday’s People’s Daily] said. “The impacts are extremely bad.”

The resolute decisions of the CPC Central Committee guarded Party discipline and the socialist rule of law, the commentary noted.

“The Party and corruption are like water and fire,” the commentary said. “The Party’s nature and purpose require persistent combat against corruption. Upholding the Party’s leadership and cementing the Party’s [continued rule] also require persistent combat against corruption.”

 

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Phoenix: Another unarmed Black person killed by a White officer

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Police account:

“Witnesses indicated to us that the suspect was verbally challenging to the officer”

 
As noted last night, White police officers can apparently legally put Black people to death for talking back to them. This is the same as the heyday of lynching in the American South.

The victim here will be smeared and painted as a dastardly criminal because of his various minor charges, convictions, and prison time in previous cases, but whatever his history might be, he didn’t deserve to die for it.

Witness account, saying victim did not argue:

“Who’s gonna argue with police?” Dickerson said. “He had no death wish yesterday.”

 
Ann Hart, chairwoman of the African American Police Advisory for South Phoenix:

“We need to take a deeper dive into why police officers are feeling compelled to shoot and kill as opposed to apprehend and detain, arrest and jail.”

 
Yep. That is the million dollar question. I think we know the answer but too many Americans want to live in their post-racial fantasies (or are just straight-up racists who assume it’s justified unless proven otherwise … which is never, in their minds).

America loves its sidewalk executions

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Excerpt from a comparison of US police use of deadly force to other countries (and the racial influences in those differences):

Worse, police in the U.S. expect to be shown special deference by members of the public at large. Noble sounding as that idea is in the abstract, in practical terms it has devastating results. Given that doctrine of “respect,” any hint of disrespect or disobedience during a routine encounter – even completely imagined – can escalate into a sidewalk execution.

Combined with an ongoing legacy of historically charged, extraordinary demands of respect from racial minorities by law enforcement, such situations become exceptionally dangerous for non-White citizens.

Since a policeman can expect total deference, all it takes to legitimize a shoot to kill action is feeling threatened. The doors to playing God and/or cowboy are wide open. This legal derivation, perverted as is sounds, is no accident. It is a full reflection of American culture and mythology. Today’s shooting practices and incidents allow the police to tap into the imagery of the Lone-Ranger sheriff establishing justice in a lawless landscape.
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In an international context of other civilized countries, though, U.S. practices are clearly outside the bounds of what is seen as legally permissible.

 
Eric Garner was street-executed by the NYPD on suspicion of selling untaxed cigarettes. They were filmed on a bystander’s camera. There won’t be a trial.

 
An initial version of this post was corrected for factual accuracy.

Mujuru faction in Zimbabwe ruling party collapses

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As I predicted on November 19th, after an alleged assassination plot was cooked up, a massive political purge in Zimbabwe’s ruling Zanu-PF has unfolded in the past several days. Vice President Joyce Mujuru, once widely seen as a potential successor to President Robert Mugabe, has been blocked from rejoining the party’s vast central committee ahead of the party conference in December. Her allies were also not re-elected. As a result, unless President Mugabe reverses course and uses his 10 discretionary appointments to restore their committee spots, none of them will be permitted to join the smaller Zanu-PF Politburo, the policy-making body of the ruling party that by default holds all the cabinet posts and deputy secretary positions in the country’s government.

Although she was not the only leader of a faction struggling for control of the Zanu-PF and jockeying to succeed the elderly dictator, Vice President Mujuru was the most direct threat to the rising star of Mugabe’s (much younger, second) wife, Grace Mugabe, who has no political experience but sought to appeal to the same female activist base in the party. (That base had previously been pretty locked in for Mujuru.) In sharp contrast with the First Lady — who was just a teenager when her now-husband was handed the keys to the country by Britain’s transition supervisors — Mujuru is a hardcore combat veteran of the liberation war (of which Robert Mugabe was a top leader) against the White Rhodesian government, a highly experienced politician and government official, and generally a serious figure in the way Grace Mugabe doesn’t seem to be.

Vice President Mujuru’s bid for re-election to the Zanu-PF central committee was blocked back home by her own province’s party committee, on the grounds that they didn’t want to support an alleged assassin. (Or a “demon,” if Grace Mugabe’s colorful accusations are also to be believed.)

Similar explanations were provided by local/provincial party committees for blocking all her cabinet allies, or else they were pushed to resign. In total, at least nine other cabinet ministers are now out, including very high-ranking officials such as the foreign minister.
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Kobani allegedly attacked from Turkish side by ISIS

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In a potentially huge development, observers and Kurdish fighters say ISIS staged an attack on the north side of the border town of Kobani — previously besieged on just the other three sides — by crossing through Turkish territory.

Turkey denied this version of events, but it’s not totally implausible. The border is heavily mined there, so such an attack would probably require some complicity by low-level border checkpoint guards, but the latter have previously been a bit lax about stopping Sunni Arab militants from crossing for the right price.

Here’s what each side says happened:

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and a Kurdish official in the town, Idris Nassan, said the vehicle used in the dawn car bombing had come from Turkish territory.

Prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s office said in a statement that while Islamic State had attacked several parts of Kobani, including Mursitpinar, it was “definitely a lie” that the vehicle used in the bombing had crossed from Turkey.
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The observatory said a second bomber detonated an explosive vest in the same area before two more suicide attacks hit the southwestern edge of the town.

Turkey’s pro-Kurdish HDP party said the militants were using state grain depots on the Turkish side of the border as a base from which to attack Kobani and described their presence in an area patrolled by Turkish security forces as a “scandal”.

 
An alternate explanation supporting Turkey’s version would involve ISIS fighters driving very carefully and undetected through the very narrow gap between the northern edge of the town and the border fence, but the witnesses on the Kobani side of the border seem pretty convinced (according to the report above, at least) that the vehicle had crossed the border.

Labeled overhead map of Kobani / Ayn Al-Arab, Syria, showing its relationship to the Turkish border crossing bottleneck on the north side. The empty band of space is a fenced-in border buffer with land mines. Click map to enlarge or click here to navigate in Google Maps.

Namibia holds Africa’s first vote with electronic machines

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We can now welcome Africa to the “Diebold Age.” Electronic voting machines have been used in an African election for the first time ever in Friday’s Namibian elections. The machines were made in India, which has extended its existing IT sector into the design and production of electronic voting machines.

Both a presidential election and a parliamentary election were on the Namibia ballot, and over 1.2 million Namibian citizens are registered to vote. 9 candidates are seeking the open presidency, while 16 parties are contesting seats for parliament.

The ruling party, SWAPO Party (formerly South West Africa People’s Organization or Südwestafrikanische Volksorganisation) is expected to win as usual. (They’ve won every time since 1990 and are currently ahead in the projections today.) SWAPO led the Namibian war of liberation against neighboring Apartheid South Africa, which had annexed the country illegally after taking it from the German Empire as a League of Nations mandate colony in the aftermath of World War I. Several years before the Apartheid Government fell in 1994, South Africa agreed to give up the territory and allow it to become independent and Black-ruled.

More on the election procedure, from Reuters:

Despite an 11th hour challenge from the opposition over the lack of a paper trail from electronic voting, the election commission was using about 4,000 voting machines for the presidential and parliamentary vote instead of paper ballots.

In the booth, voters found a gray electronic device with pictures or logos of the candidates and a green button next to each one. Instead of marking a cross on paper, voters selected their choice by pressing the button.
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While there is no history of electoral fraud in Namibia unlike in many of its neighbors, logistical problems meant the results from the vote in 2009 took a week to emerge. The election commission has this time promised them within 24 hours.

 
The election commission also says they cut their ballot printing budget for the entire election by 90% by switching to electronic voting machines (although presumably some of the savings were spent to buy the machines).

Elections director Paul Isaak said that instead of spending N$20 million ($1.81 million) printing ballots, this year the commission had achieved an “enormous saving” by spending just N$2 million ($181,000) on such paper – one for each voting machine.

 
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Nigeria government raids opposition offices

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After more than 15 years in power, the ruling party in Nigeria doesn’t seem too keen on letting a credible opposition emerge. Between the police assault on the country’s House Speaker inside the National Assembly last week and the subsequent raid of his party’s Lagos offices, I think it’s pretty clear what’s going on right now.

Here’s the BBC report on the raid:

Nigeria’s main opposition party has condemned a weekend raid of its Lagos offices by state security agents.

“We call for an independent commission of inquiry to ascertain the reasons why armed officers raided our office,” the All Progressive Congress (APC) deputy chairman Lawal Shuaibu told the BBC.

The party said computers were destroyed and documents seized during the raid.
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But the APC said the incident was “another one in the string of attacks and illegal actions of the administration.” It said “more than a dozen” computers had been destroyed, a server had been “vandalised” and 28 people arrested.
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“Just like the Watergate scandal in the USA, the state-sponsored security operatives apparently acting at the behest of the ruling PDP [People’s Democratic Party] government turned the office upside down, and pulled out and vandalised everything in sight,” he told the AFP news agency.

 
The conservative PDP — delicately balancing market liberalization supporters with Christian and Muslim social conservatives from the north and south — has held the presidency since first democratic elections of the Fourth Nigerian Republic, in 1999, and then again won elections in 2003, 2007, 2011. (In 2003, the win came easily and freely. In 2007, there was serious controversy over whether it had been rigged — which seems fairly likely. In 2011, the PDP won relatively easily in a fair election.)

Incumbent Goodluck Jonathan, who assumed office in early 2010 when his predecessor died, is now almost five years into office and wants another full term, amid mass disatisfaction with his tenure and a chaotic insurgency. Unfortunately for him, after years of PDP domination, the splintered opposition has formed a left-leaning unity party (the aforementioned All Progressives Congress) and is coalescing around a single candidate for the presidency. They have also captured key defectors from the ruling party, including the House Speaker in the assembly, to the point that the APC now holds a slight majority in the House and may even have a majority in the Senate (depending on the exact defector count). Nearly as many governorships are also now in APC hands.

The PDP is facing its darkest political hour right now and is very reluctant to give up power after 15 years of control. But beyond the inherent dangers of single-party democracy cycle after cycle, the PDP, and their leader in President Goodluck Jonathan, have been massively incompetent in the past four years. It’s time for Nigeria to give someone else a crack at it.

Logo of the All Progressives Congress opposition coalition. (Credit: Auwal Ingawa)

Logo of the All Progressives Congress opposition coalition. (Credit: Auwal Ingawa)