It’s the inauguration of your country’s newly-elected President, and you’re a sharp, enterprising young female journalist covering the event. One of the guests at the ceremony turns out to be Robert Mugabe, that African paragon of democratic virtue. This is what you do as a consequence – if you’re Nigeran satirist Adeola Fayehun at least – as revealed in a YouTube clip that’s already scored over 270,000 views since it was first broacast following the 29 May inauguration ceremony for the country’s newly-elected president Muhammadu Buhari:

Fayehun has been beavering away at this kind of thing for some years: since it was launched in November 2011, her weekly nearly 30 minute satirical news show on Sahara TV – launched in 2006 to promote media coverage of corruption and mismanagement in Nigeria – Keeping It Real has clocked up over 150 episodes. While she has an established fan base spread far across the continent it’s thanks to her recent intrepid ambush of Robert Mugabe that Fayehun has taken a step towards the international limelight.

Watching her, it’s tempting to fall into comparisons with US frontliners such Jon Snow’s The Daily Show. But I’d suggest you leave all that aside for now, and check Fayehun rapping on the state of Nigerian politics in her own inimitable mix of pidgin and English. Here’s a tasty sample – you may find yourself hungry for more!

Here’s a very strong piece from two Sri Lankans looking at the uses – and abuses – of the demand for accountability in post-war Sri Lanka. In particular the politicization – domestic and international – of the accountability agenda and the way in which it is used by hard-liners on both sides of the ethnic divide to attempt to ‘discipline’ their only people.

Don’t give into demands for international involvement in war crimes investigations – that’s imperialism pure and simple (Sinhalese version). And don’t countenance, let alone attempt to accomodate proposals for a domestic accountability mechanism – that the siren call of the sell-out, the lure proffered by traitors to the nation (Tamils).

That’s the issue the piece is mainly addressing, at least as I read it. There’s also an impassioned call for introspection and acknowledgement of the real harms done to each other in the past – whether the issue is historic LTTE (and indeed Rajapaksa regime-supported) mistreatment of Muslims, the Tiger’s ruthless pursuit of dissident Tamil political voices during the Ceasefire Agreement (CFA) era, or the persistent supression, and more often that not annihiliation, of oppositional Sinhalese forces by successive Sri Lankan governments, starting with – but not confined to – the second JVP uprising of the late 1980s.

I’m not sure Lankan nationalists of any stripe are going to like this piece. But the fact remains that it raises vital – and ultimately, unavoidable – issues in the debate over the country’s future trajectory.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/openglobalrights/ahilan-kadirgamar-mahendran-thiruvarangan/beyond-accountability-struggle-for-coexis

A stimulating piece by Michael Massing in the latest edition of The New York Review of Books takes a look at the present state of online media: tunrs out in fact, it’s the first of three articles on the subject. While understandably skewed in the direction of US media, plenty of the points he makes are relevant for a much wider audience, Europe included. Online media outlets covered in a wide-ranging analysis include Huffington Post (of course), Andrew Sullivan’s popular but now discontinued blog The Dish, The Drudge Report, Salon.com, Politico and ProPublica – most, but not all, of these publications being familiar names.

Massing argues – convincingly, I think – that a common feature of the initial wave of online media is that, having started out by developing pioneering new online approaches that produced a wide range of innovative and original media content, 10 years and some down the line many appear to be stuck in what he calls ‘middle-aged’ slackness. ‘They helped lead journalism out of the kingdom of traditional print and broadcasting into the liberating lad of the Internet’, he argues, ‘only to become stranded’.

Massing views Politico as pretty much the lone exception to this rule – and as someone who has recently taken to visiting their site occasionally, I definitely perked up at this point in the argument – not least because it is expanding its base beyond North America. In April this year, in partnership with German publishing behemoth Axel Springer, Politico launched a new European edition based in Brussels.

Even more strikingly, by the end of 2015 Politico’s European edition apparently expects to ‘have more reporters and editors covering European politics and policy than any other organization on [the] continent’. Which if it proves to be an accurate prognosis, would constitute an extraordinary media development – online or otherwise: not least for media consumers – and producers – living on the continent in question.

So, fellow Europeans: who’ll be the first of your acquaintainces to be signed up by Politico? Come to think of it, could it be you?

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jun/04/digital-journalism-how-good-is-it/

Dawn arrests in 5-Star Zurich hotels. A special press conference called by US Attorney Loretta Lynch to present a charge sheet of what she called “rampant, systemic and deep-rooted” international corruption spanning decades and involving eye-watering kick-backs, fixed tournament allocations and rigged presidential elections . . . Except we’re not talking about an authoritarian statelet here. Not in the slightest. No, this is all about the latest attention-grabbing developments in FIFA, world football’s governing body.

Here’s my old friend David Goldblatt’s take on the FIFA corruption scandal – an extraordinary story that he has been following closely, writing about and campaigning on for years. Predictably, much instant media coverage of the US, and now also Swiss criminal investigations is focused on the lurid details of the corruption charges: who paid how much to who, when and so on. In one sense this is both obvious and understandable, because by any standard the details are extraordinary.

A personal standout concerns Chuck Blazer, an American described as a ‘soccer dad’ who by 2010 had risen to the higher echelons of Fifa, football’s world governing body. Whatever it was he was doing for Fifa it was certainly proving remunerative. By 2011 Blazer had supposedly acquired two flats above Fifa’s regional office in  Trump Tower close to Fifth Avene Manhattan, in New York. Why two you may ask? Answer (reportedly): one for him – and one for his cats. The presumption is that Blazer managed this, morevoer, with his cut from the massive sums – allegedly in the $150m plus category – Fifa had allegedly received in bribes and kickbacks over the last 20 years.

Finally cornered by the FBI and US Internal Revenue Service over failure to pay tax on any of this not-so-mysteriously gained income, Blazer eventually agreed to co-operate with US law enforcement agencies. The result was a spectacular series of revelations over internal corruption in Fifa that doubtless contributed to to the charge sheet against Fifa read out yesterday by the US Attorney.

As I read it David’s main point, however, is the need to use this headline-grabbing development to focus on the causes of corruption in world football’s governance, not just its financial consequences, however outrageous they indeed are.

When it comes to global football governance, he argues, it is high time for ‘the politics of Fifa to be extended beyond the eternal insiders of the dysfunctional football family, the royal houses of the Gulf, and the stooges of authoritarian regimes and commercial interests that pass for representatives of the world’s football nations.’ To who? At the very least’, he suggests, ‘representatives of fans, players, football NGOs and grassroots football should have a seat at the table’. A modest but eminently democratising proposal.

Beyond the composition of governance structures, David argues for a rewrite of Fifa’s constitution specifying and intensifying the democratic and social obligations of its constituent members, and transforming its mode and rationale for awarding World Cups.. All in all such moves are, he suggests, ‘the bare minimum that the situation demands’.

‘Democracy is coming – to the USA‘, Leonard Cohen once sang famously. Who knows? Perhaps this time round a US-prompted inititative could actually help to kickstart a process of genuine democratisation on the international scene. Now wouldn’t  be something?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/27/fifa-fiasco-football-corruption

‘My conscience is clear’. ‘The army as a whole, I can give the assurance that we never committed war crimes”. . . . . Brave, not to say fighting talk from Sarath Fonseka in an interview feature in the UK Guardian published today.

Simply ascribing the crimes committed by the Sri Lankan military in the final stages of the civil war to the acts of ‘individual offenders’, as he does here, is at best delusional on Fonseka’s part, at worst a case of being knowingly ‘economical’ with the truth.

Overall, the irresistible force of international human rights focus on the final stages of Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war looks to be on course for continuing confrontation with the irremovable object of Colombo’s steadfast official refusal to come to terms with, less still address, what really happened in the North in 2009.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/27/former-sri-lanka-army-chief-says-he-would-welcome-war-inves

For the first time since the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war in May 2009, this year it has been possible – albeit not particularly easy – for the Tamil population of the island’s North to hold public ceremonies commemorating their war dead. (Caveats include no public mention of the LTTE or use of their symbols; an effective ban on ceremonies in the Mullaitivu area, where the final and bloodiest stages of the war took place; and an often heavy police  presence at all events).

In addition, in advance of the day President Sirisena announced that it would no longer be known as ‘Victory’ or ‘Heroes Day’, at had been the case for the previous 5 years under Mahinda Rajapaksa’s rule, but rather ‘Remembrance Day’: a day, in other words, on which to remember all who died in the conflict.

Below is a selection of photos, mostly published in Sri Lankan media, from ceremonies held both in the North and the capital, Colombo. The first set of photos are from Tamil ceremonies in the Jaffna area.

Police surveillance of a ceremony

Military Wall of Remembrance, Colombo Cemetery

Commemoration Ceremony, Colombo

President Sirisena and the country’s military leadership at the official ceremony in Colombo

Commemmorative gatherings in the Jaffna district

A lone Tamil National Alliance (TNA) local politician defies the ban on ceremonies on Mullivaikal beach, scene of one of the final battles and horrendous Tamil civilian carnage

Trenchant, if depressing, analysis of the recent Israeli election results by an insider who knows what he’s talking about. A few shards of hope too.

In particular, author David Shulman’s depiction of the way in which Israeli occupation and the slide towards de facto apartheid rule over the Palestinains is not only humiliating and oppressing the Palestinian population, but also eating away at the moral and ethical core of Israeli society is both highly persuasive – and relevant to other countries embroiled in wars of conquest, subjugation, combatting terrorism etc.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/apr/23/bibi-hidden-consequences-his-victory/

To mark the sixth anniversary of the ending of Sri Lanka’s civil war in May 2009, Frances Harrison has published a devastating piece in The Colombo Mirror. I say devastating avisedly, because the stories of pain and suffering endured by Tamil survivors, primarily women, both during the conflict’s final stages and since she conjures up have a genuinely nightmarish quality to them. I am one of the people Frances alludes to in the article who found they could only read her 2012 book, Still Counting The Dead, in small doses – and even that sometimes felt like putting yourself through pure torture. The same is true to an extent here. But it remains necessary reading nonetheless. Not just in order to understand this important part of what happened in the war, but also because of its implications for the difficult and demanding process of reconciliation in Sri Lanka.

Concluding, Frances notes that some Tamil women who were multiple rape and/or torture victims have since decided that “the best way to defeat their torturers is to try to be happy again”, among things by electing to marry and have children. That requires extraordinary individual courage but be under no illusion that it implies forgiveness or reconciliation”, Frances underlines. “It’s hard to imagine someone in this situation would not harbour deep-seated anger and hatred for those who still deny their attempted mental and physical obliteration.  Reconciliation has to be about a lot more than which language you use to sing the national anthem.”

Which in own way, pretty much sums up some of the key challenges confronting the country along the path towards attempting reconciliation.

http://www.colombomirror.com/?p=3412#.VVnSQheastE

Divided and confused, the SLFP is morphing into President Sirisena’s greatest vexation, with its shifting allegiances towards his predecessor, determination to scuttle his reform agenda and frustration that he has chosen to govern with their archrival UNP.

Long but percipient analysis of current Lankan political dynamics from Dharisha Bastians, for my money one of the country’s best commentators. Her conclusion: the best thing that could happen in current circumstances is fresh parliamentary elections, and sooner rather than later. Let’s see if that is what happens . . .

See the article at: www.ft.lk/article/419453/Freedom-Party-Blues-II

Three expert voices interviewed in the context of EU Foreign Policy Supremo Federica Mogherini’s request to the UN Security Council earlier this week to pass a resolution authorising military action against migrant smugglers operating in Libyan and international waters:

‘[Europe has] constructed the irregular migrant as a security object when 99.9 percent are not: they present no security risk. The more we started to close our borders, the more migrants were forced to start using smugglers. The biggest misunderstanding is that by attacking smugglers you solve the issue. You only increase the dependency of migrants on smugglers . .  .

There are four million Syrians stuck in the Middle East with no future. If we believe they’re going to stay there quietly and wait for us to move them, we’re delusional. If we don’t organise it ourselves, the smugglers will. Many people are fleeing violence and conflict and it’s there that we need to think much harder about what we can do, because the ethical obligations that we have towards those people are very important.

http://www.irinnews.org/report/101478/should-europe-open-its-borders-or-shore-them-up