WILL BANGLADESH PULL OFF A FREE AND FAIR ELECTION?
Ishaan Tharoor
Time, December 12, 2008
On Dec. 29, Bangladesh voters will cast their ballots in the nation's first general election in seven years. The polls have been a focal point of the country's politics ever since a military intervention in January 2007, which postponed scheduled elections in order to end escalating violence between followers of two rival political parties. In the interim, a caretaker regime of technocrats has set about trying to tackle Bangladesh's wretched record of corruption and reform its volatile electoral politics. Results have been mixed, but the government now looks ready to deliver on its promises for free and credible polls — an effort that's not going unnoticed. Just this week, U.S. Senator John McCain, the defeated Republican candidate for president, declared on a visit to Dhaka that "this has the possibility of being the fairest election, perhaps in the entire world."
Much of that optimism has to do with the efforts of the well-educated, mild-mannered bureaucrats running the caretaker government for the past 23 months. On Wednesday, it announced that the state of emergency will be finally lifted on Dec. 17 so that parties can campaign and assemble freely. During its tenure, the government has taken to task the country's crony-state politics, strengthened regulatory bodies like the election and anti-corruption commissions, and documented and photographed the over 80 million people eligible to vote in elections — a stunning feat in this vastly impoverished nation of 150 million where many remain illiterate.
(...) [artículo aquí]
Ishaan Tharoor
Time, December 12, 2008
On Dec. 29, Bangladesh voters will cast their ballots in the nation's first general election in seven years. The polls have been a focal point of the country's politics ever since a military intervention in January 2007, which postponed scheduled elections in order to end escalating violence between followers of two rival political parties. In the interim, a caretaker regime of technocrats has set about trying to tackle Bangladesh's wretched record of corruption and reform its volatile electoral politics. Results have been mixed, but the government now looks ready to deliver on its promises for free and credible polls — an effort that's not going unnoticed. Just this week, U.S. Senator John McCain, the defeated Republican candidate for president, declared on a visit to Dhaka that "this has the possibility of being the fairest election, perhaps in the entire world."
Much of that optimism has to do with the efforts of the well-educated, mild-mannered bureaucrats running the caretaker government for the past 23 months. On Wednesday, it announced that the state of emergency will be finally lifted on Dec. 17 so that parties can campaign and assemble freely. During its tenure, the government has taken to task the country's crony-state politics, strengthened regulatory bodies like the election and anti-corruption commissions, and documented and photographed the over 80 million people eligible to vote in elections — a stunning feat in this vastly impoverished nation of 150 million where many remain illiterate.
(...) [artículo aquí]
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