Thursday, April 09, 2009

Moldávia

Ter em conta isto:


Insurgente: "Aconselho estes dois posts de José Milhazes e este no blog da Foreign Policy. E, já agora, este sobre o papel do Tweeter."

Mas ter também em conta isto:

Moldova’s ‘Twitter Revolution?: (...) "Just as many of us cast a skeptical eye on the sudden emergence of massive plasma-screen televisions in also-poor Ukraine during the “Orange Revolution,” the idea that thousands of young Moldovans are spending such sums on their Twittering seems equally implausible.

So what is fueling this revolution? A brief glance at the website of one of the Moldovan NGOs leading the effort to overthrow the elected Moldovan government, that of the “Hyde Park Organization,” reveals an interesting benefactor: at the bottom of the page, next to a seal of the United States, one can read that “This website is hosted free of charge through the Internet Access Training Program (IATP). IATP is a program of the Bureau of Educational & Cultural Affairs (ECA), US Department of State, funded under the Freedom Support Act (FSA).”

Digging a bit further, one can see on the website of the US Agency for International Development that the United States government, through cut-out organizations like the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, is funneling large sums of money to Moldova for programs with such fascinating titles as “Strengthening Democratic Political Activism in Moldova (SPA).” USAID boasts that this program is “cultivating new political activists who can formulate and pursue concrete political objectives…” No doubt.

Another program, titled the “Internet Access and Training Program” may hold a clue as to where all these Twitterers came from. According to the US government, this program “provides local communities with free access to the Internet and to extensive training in all aspects of information technology.” Does the training come with iPhones?

The media, with story-line already inked out, mock the Moldovan president’s claims that the protests were “well designed, well thought out, coordinated, planned and paid for,” but isn’t that what the USAID website has already claimed? After all, to what end does the US train and fund NGOs in projects such as the “Moldova Citizen Participation Program,” whose goal is to “build… the capacity of citizens to create tangible and positive change in their own communities through civic activity and democratic practices…by providing training, mentoring, and funding for citizen-initiated projects and strengthening the capacity of NGOs and citizen groups to mobilize their community, advocate for change, and hold government accountable”? In the previous color revolutions we have seen the perversion of “democracy” to mean getting enough people getting to the street to overthrow an elected government. 

Why bother with all this? The same reason the US funded the other color revolutions. The same reason the US announced missile defense facilities in Poland and Czech Republic. The same reason the US has propped up and provided massive military aid to a creepily unstable Mikheil Saakashvili in Georgia. Encircle Russia."

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