Kenyan supporters of the Orange Democratic Movement presidential candidate, Raila Odinga run from police water cannons at Kibera slum during a demonstration in Nairobi, Kenya, Dec. 31.

Amid the outcry over Kenya’s flawed election, one voice has sounded an unexpected note. Today’s Kenyan newspapers--rare in Africa for being free and serious - have called for restraint and urged the anguished opposition to accept President Mwai Kibaki’s unexpected victory.
“Kenya is bigger than all of us,“ today’s Standard warned, advising opposition leader Raila Odinga to “put the country first“ and focus on forming an opposition capable of keeping the government on its toes for the next five years.
The other leading newspaper, the Daily Nation, agreed, criticising the flawed management of the election but begging the opposition not to “tear the country apart“.
As the death toll mounts, their caution is understandable. Kenya has survived more than four decades since independence without the kind of fratricide seen by some of its neighbours, but in a country where politics has traditionally run on ethnic lines, the potential for tragedy is enormous.
So far, some of the worst violence has been in the opposition stronghold of Kisumu and Nairobi’s vast slum city, Kibera.
The papers urge Odinga to seek justice in the courts, though any judicial review might take months or years to settle.
There is another, more positive, way to view this dubious result. After all, many believe that real progress in Kenya has been achieved outside government--Nobel prize winner Wangari Maathai’s tree-planting Green Belt movement or Kenya Airways supremo Titus Naikuni’s skilled business leadership are good examples of how NGOs and the private sector have brought beneficial change.
And Kenya’s economy is growing, albeit not fast enough to bring down poverty levels, while corruption has receded from the high water mark of the Moi era.
But, as Meera Selva points out, these reasons are not sufficient to allow Kibaki to assume the president’s mantle.
Under his watch, corruption has continued in Kenyan public life; and those involved are sufficiently powerful to have scared the government’s own anti-sleaze watchdog, John Githongo, to quit his post and flee the country.
Britain has always been an honest friend to Kenya. The courageous former high commissioner, Edward Clay, earned a name for himself with his colourful remarks about corrupt members of Kibaki’s administration “vomiting on the shoes“ of foreign donors.
The Foreign Office is right to express concern, and should use all its influence on Kenya now. By contrast, the US State Department’s premature welcome of the results is shameful.
Raila Odinga faces a dilemma. The risk he runs, as the Kenyan papers warn, is that calling for peaceful protest could easily spiral into violence in a country with vast numbers of impoverished, jobless young men.
But rather than blame him for what happens next, pressure must be exerted on Kibaki to act as an elder statesman, examine what went wrong, and if necessary, surrender power with grace.
GUARDIAN.CO.UK

Protesters shout slogans against Indonesia's former dictator Suharto as they display posters of the former ruler during a demonstration in front of the Presidential Palace in Jakarta, July 3.

After 32 years of ruling Indonesia with an iron fist and a grabbing hand, then-President Suharto was forced to step down in 1998.
While gone from power, he clearly is not forgotten. A few months ago, an Indonesian court ordered Time magazine to pay the former dictator a judgment now valued at about $111 million in a libel case. The verdict, which Time is challenging, should not be allowed to stand.
Suharto’s case - which would be laughable if it were not so serious - concerns a May 1999 cover story in Time’s Asian edition, reporting that he and his family had amassed a fortune of about $15 billion, including $9 billion in an Austrian bank account.
Two lower courts dismissed the suit, including the central Jakarta district court which found the article, titled “Suharto Inc.,“ to be balanced, responsibly reported and in the public interest.
After Suharto pressed his complaint, arguing that the story portrayed him negatively as a greedy person, a Supreme Court panel concluded that Time had defamed the former strongman.
It ordered the magazine, its Asia editor and five other staff members (only two now live in Indonesia) to pay the judgment and apologize to him.
Time and its team of journalists are not the first or the last to report on how Suharto amassed a fortune during his years in power. The New York Times has also written about it in detail.
In a report last June, the World Bank--which considers the problem of stolen wealth from developing nations a “huge and serious problem“ exceeding $1 trillion per year--put Suharto on a list of 10 leaders who had “allegedly embezzled“ from their countries.
By the time he was forced out in the financial chaos of 1998, Suharto and his family controlled hotels, toll roads, airlines and TV stations across the country.
The World Bank--citing figures compiled in 2004 by Transparency International, a nonpartisan global organization battling corruption--estimated his assets at between $15 billion to $35 billion in a country with an economy of $86 billion.
The court’s decision is a threat to a free press. It mocks the reform efforts of Indonesia’s democratically elected government. It undermines the country’s struggle to get beyond Suharto’s corrupt legacy. We hope the panel that hears Time’s appeal will see Suharto’s suit for what it really is - the last grasp for vindication by an autocrat with no legitimate case to argue.
IHT.COM

Nobody could accuse the US of rushing to elect its presidents. After many months of full-on electioneering--it seems like longer--the country is steeling itself for nearly another year of the same. Except that it will not be the same. The sooner the two party nominees emerge from the primary election process that starts in Iowa on Thursday (Dec. 28), the better.
At that point, the intra-party feuding of 2007 can stop and the candidates can address themselves more directly not just to their own committed supporters, but to the undecided voters in the middle. A clearer sense of just how much this election will matter to the country and the world will emerge--and about time too.
There can be little doubt that the US has had its fill of the Bush administration. It wants change, but has not yet decided what kind of change. The prevailing mood is of economic pessimism--an un-American trait and one that gives the rest of the world cause for concern.
With a slowing economy, falling house prices and a financially stressed middle class, the country’s commitment to lightly regulated capitalism and open international markets is in doubt.
The Democratic party has shifted left; and it is telling that Mike Huckabee, the improbable insurgent generating most excitement on the Republican side, is a populist champion of
“fair trade“.
The frontrunner to secure the Democratic nomination and go on to gain the White House is Hillary Clinton. Like all the Democrats, she offers a decisive break from George W. Bush on domestic policy: radical healthcare reform, expanded public spending in other areas and tax increases “on the rich“ to pay for it all. She offers a wholly different style, at least, in the conduct of foreign policy. Yet she is campaigning on her “experience“.
That means, in large part, her years in the White House as first lady. Bill Clinton is a prominent part of her campaign. The change she is calling for, sometimes in these very words, is a return to the 1990s, minus the commitment to liberal trade.
Her principal challenger, Barack Obama, represents change of a quite different order. His pitch, of necessity, is entirely forward-looking, which makes him (as the Clinton campaign tirelessly insists) a gamble. He has strong support in Iowa and the other early primaries, showing that voters who see and hear him are impressed.
But he cannot campaign that way across the whole country and needs to do well early on to gain momentum and challenge Mrs Clinton’s still-strong base of support elsewhere. A surprise in Iowa might even revive the hopes of John Edwards Ð uncompromisingly positioned as the choice of the left. Mrs Clinton’s lead is not yet unassailable.
On the Republican side, however, any kind of frontrunner has yet to emerge. Each of the candidates looks fatally flawed, as viewed from the party’s grass roots, yet none is too attractive to the centre, either, since nobody has dared to denounce the Bush administration. Mitt Romney’s Mormonism remains an issue, as does his flip-flopping. Rudolph Giuliani is a social liberal with a colourful personal history even by New York standards.
Mr Huckabee has ideas about policy that are, let us say, unorthodox (for instance, he wants to abolish the federal income tax). The irrepressible John McCain, who polls suggest might best give the Democratic nominee a run for his or her money in November, has mortally offended much of his own party with his liberal stance on immigration. Fred Thompson, the party’s longed-for “none of the above“ candidate, has failed to shine.
Electoral history suggests that the faster a party can settle on its candidate and unite against the opposition, the better its chances in the general election. The Republican party’s disarray and its tepid support for its own candidates improve the Democrats’ chances still further. But what kind of Democrat? The contest between Mrs Clinton and Mr Obama will decide.
FT.COM

Belgium’s new interim dispensation, headed by the outgoing liberal Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt and drawn from rival parties representing the two main linguistic regions, ends a six-month political stalemate.
The deadlock in the formation of government by the victors in the June 2007 elections-- constituents of the so-called “orange-blue“ umbrella coalition--reflects the strains experienced by the Belgians in the country’s evolution from a unitary to a federal system.
Talks on a common programme broke down on at least four occasions and the Flemish Christian Democrat leader and potential prime minister had to step down twice as the official negotiator.
His party’s cohabitation with the far-right secessionist and anti-immigrant ally on an agenda of self-rule for the Dutch-speaking Flanders in the north is at the root of the current crisis.
Another sticking point in the conservative-led coalition has been the demand for the bifurcation of the electoral district of the Brussels Capital Region, where French is the language of the majority and where the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation has its headquarters.
After gaining independence from the Netherlands in 1830, Belgium’s predominantly French and Dutch populations co-existed in the cosy political comfort of the uniquely Belgian consociational model of democracy, characterised by mutual accommodation among political elites.
This phase of innocence eventually gave way to the assertion of competing demands for linguistic and cultural autonomy from the mid-20th century, culminating in a series of constitutional reforms from 1970 that led towards a federation of power-sharing arrangements.
Extreme nationalist forces have sought to exploit the economic backwardness of the French-dominated areas for articulating separatist claims of the prosperous Flanders.
To suggest a break-up of the country, as commentators have tended to do, is perhaps premature, if not downright na•ve, and it exaggerates the importance of the far-right that is a fringe element. Belgium’s formidable centrist and left forces may well rise to contain this misapprehension.
HINDU.COM