Russians revolt against fraud elections

The dramatic slump in United Russia’s share of the vote in Sunday’s parliamentary elections shows that voters defied a massive campaign of intimidation aimed at bolstering support for the ruling party.

President Medvedev and prime minister Putin’s party saw its share fall from around 64% to just under half after a campaign in which the Kremlin tried to bully the electorate.

In the run-up to the election, Russia experienced a ferocious crackdown by the authorities to muzzle the media, control the Internet and arrest opposition politicians. On polling day, eyewitnesses talked of ballot boxes being stuffed while “voters” were bussed around polling stations to cast multiple ballots for United Russia.

Videos posted to YouTube showed election workers opening ballot boxes with pre-marked ballots for United Russia. One poll worker told NK TV that ballot boxes were filled with checked-off ballots while she and others were in a meeting. At one polling station pens with disappearing ink were discovered, a video reported.

Members of the right wing youth group, Nashi, were brought in to Moscow as key squares were blocked off by police. Triumph Square – a popular place for oppositionists – has been fenced off since 2010. A Twitter user (@agoodtreaty) spotted a mocking sign on the fence surrounding the square saying: “Dear Muscovites! This fence has been erected in the event of popular unrest due to massively fraudulent elections. We apologise for the inconvenience.”

Countless blatant acts of repression – varying from brutal to comical – included the detention of Sergei Udaltsov, head of the Left Front and Eduard Limonov, leader of the opposition The Other Russia movement. Limonov supporters were also detained while Udaltsov was hustled into an unmarked car by unidentified men and then sentenced to five days’ arrest by a district court for “disobedience”.

Campaign ads by opposition parties were banned on state television by order of the Central Elections Commission. Intimidation and censorship by federal and local authorities included attacks on journalists, with a Moscow Times reporter ejected from a polling station in Oktyabrsky.

The ruling United Russia party was clearly behind denial of service attacks on a host of independent, business and liberal websites and media including Live Journal, a popular blogging platform, Ekho Mosvky, the New Times, the independent election monitor Golos, Bolshoi Gorod, Kommersant and the Slon.ru business news portal. Election commission officials confiscated the media accreditation of Radio Liberty reporters.

The authorities’ clampdown was easier in rural areas, where fewer people have internet connections. But Putin’s brutal state, which has overseen massive corruption and scores of journalists beaten and murdered in recent years, has not succeeded in preventing Russians – 51 million of whom have access to the Internet - from denouncing electoral manipulation.

Attempts to subvert the electoral process – shown on YouTube and social media - have increased voter scepticism about what one Muscovite derided as a “jackass democracy”.

Editor Grigory Okhotin resigned from an offshoot of the Ria Novosti news agency , after receiving an internal email asking employees “not to post any article hostile to Putin and United Russia on the site” during the week before the elections.

Ekho Moskvy’s editor-in-chief wrote on Twitter that the cyber attacks were an attempt to stop evidence of election violations from leaking out. The radio station fought back with a screenshot of its site full of Bad Gateway messages, which it jokingly called the “new site design”, on its Facebook page.

A decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the restoration of capitalism, Russia is run by oligarchs and a brutal, one-party state. Yesterday’s elections show a rising tide of anger against the regime throughout the country. Replacing the Putin’s “jackass democracy” with a Russia under the control of its people with true economic and democratic rights is surely the order of the day.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Useful links

http://journalists-in-russia.org/

http://www.rightsinrussia.info/

http://www.aworldtowin.net/resources/Pashentsev.html

The revolution will be digitised

US vice-president Joe Biden has raised the stakes in a global cyber war between those fighting for the right to information about the secret activities of governments and those who protect the warmongering interests of global capital.

By denouncing WikilLeaks founder Julian Assange as “a high-tech terrorist who has put lives and jobs in jeopardy”, he virtually signed a death warrant. Biden also confirmed that the US government is actively seeking a way of charging Assange with espionage.

After originally downplaying the leaks, the second most powerful man in the US Biden has added to Sarah Palin’s baying for blood. Palin has called for Assange to be pursued "with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders”. And we know how the US treats “enemy combatants”.

Assange and his lawyers are currently fighting his extradition to Sweden where the WikiLeaks founder faces charges of sexual molestation, the subject of a salacious witch-hunt in yesterday’s Mail on Sunday. Accusations by two Swedish women he met last August are being talked up in order to cloud the real issues and fuel a character assassination campaign.

The real problem, as Assange himself has said, for the world’s political leaders is not simply that WikiLeaks continues to exist as an organisation. It is the courage of the whistleblowers inside state institutions who actually provide the leaks in the first place.

People like US army intelligence officer Bradley Manning. Manning, who is accused of handing over 90,000 classified Afghan war logs to WikiLeaks, has just turned 23 after being held in solitary confinement for 200 days.

He is detained at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia. He spends 23 hours a day alone in a standard-sized cell, with a sink, a toilet, and a bed. US website, The Daily Beast, writes:

The conditions under which Bradley Manning is being held would traumatize anyone. . . He lives alone in a small cell, denied human contact. He is forced to wear shackles when outside of his cell, and when he meets with the few people allowed to visit him, they sit with a glass partition between them … When he was first arrested, Manning was put on suicide watch, but his status was quickly changed to “Prevention of Injury” watch (POI), and under this lesser pretence he has been forced into his life of mind-numbing tedium.

Manning is not the only young person who involved in this secretive cyber and information war. In the past fortnight, the conflict over WikiLeaks drew in thousands of “hacktivists” who brought down credit card companies who refused to process WikiLeaks transactions. A hackers’ collective called Anonymous, organised a mass “DDoS” attack on websites which acted against Assange and WikiLeaks.

DDoS means “Distributed Denial of Service”, and involves the use of “collaborative tools where supporters can voluntarily attach their machines to a botnet in order to assist with a DDoS attack. The preferred tools are usually some version of the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) software.”

Sound like a sci-fi thriller? It is – except it’s true. And young people around the world are being arrested for it. Two Dutch hackers, one aged 19 and another 16 were seized last week, as was a 17-year-old in Manchester. The Met now even has a special e-crime unit called PCeU which specialises in tracking down such people. In Switzerland and Sweden this hackers’ movement has taken the political form of the Pirate Parties.

The case of Julian Assange is about much more than one Australian campaigner. It has taken the war against non-democratic, repressive and secret states into a new dimension. For all Biden’s bluster, the Americans can’t shut down WikiLeaks because its site is replicated by supporters around the globe.

In Britain, students used social networking and micro-blogging to mobilise recently, giving the police the run-around. The notion of the all-seeing, all-powerful state is taking a battering. There is no doubt that the revolution will be digitised!

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary