viewpoint-east.org

Alexander Lukashenko loves Sweden

Category: belarus, by sophie engström, sociala medier, web 2.0
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(Läsningstid: 2 minuter)

Alexander Lukashenko has a political reputation that few wants to be confused with, and one can think that also Swedish politicians would try to avoid being confused with his ideas of running a country. But unwillingly the Swedish government has got a new fan, and perhaps a fan they never wanted to have, and that is, again, Alexander Lukashenko.


Alexander Lukashenko from wiki

Recently the Swedish Minister of Justice, Beatrice Ask, got a request from Alexander Lukashenko, where he asks her to start an exchange project, where Belarus government can learn more about how to reduce economic crime on Internet. I am however sure that this is not Alexander Lukashenko real intentions. Sweden did more than a year introduce the FRA law, that actually gives a certain department the right to track and read all emails and sms’ that crosses the border. The idea is to try to track down terrorists, which of course is complete nonsense. Sweden has a long tradition of tracking its own citizens. (It is no wonder we are the land of accurate statistics on all the moves the citizens takes.) Many in the Swedish piracy movement interpets this as a new way to violate human rights in Sweden (and other countries), and also because FRA can sell the information to anybody they want to!

I am pretty sure Alexander Lukashenko understand how the Swedish government can use all the information they track from the email and sms’ that crosses the border. (To be clear: all emails in Sweden cross the borders. Servers have a very unpatriotic style and don’t really care which server it communicates with, inside or outside Sweden, the server never care.)

It is however very easy for me to be ironic, sitting here in a country with freedom of speech, but I am really worried that this interest of Alexander Lukashenko in Internet, is more and more threatening all activity on Internet in Belarus. And outside the borders! I think it is high time that we, the blogging swarm that wants to help the citizens of Belarus to get freedom of speech and a free internet, to speaks up! At least I will do all in my power to try to high light all this crimes against human rights!


Gender Equality in Ukraine

Category: sociala medier, ukraine, web 2.0
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(Läsningstid: 2 minuter)

wikigender is a very interesting and needed project. I agree with it, even though I often hesitate for more “separatistic” movements like that. When it comes to gender equality i think it should be mainstreamed, not separated form the general debate or issue. But if you are looking for certain information about gender situation I think it is a great project. (I also think wikiprogress is a really great idea! It is when I see projects like that i understand the extreme impact web 2.0 and social web actually have on IRL).

I also think the wikigender page about Ukraine is great, since you can find several interesting articles in the bottom, and especially then the gender watch.

But women’s representation in parliament, in Ukraine, really… well, suck. 7,1% actually makes me wishing I have had chosen an other field for my interest! But on the other hand, one might say that this only shows how smart women are compared to men; I mean, who wants to be in that swamp of corruption and stupidity anyway? And when it comes to real changes for greater gender equality my assumption is that both candidates (again) suck in that regard… I would even call Yulya Tymoshenko the worst gender equality enemy Europe has… well, possibly after Berlusconi : ))) But according to the lastest pull Yanukovych is leading with 10.5% over Tymoshenko. And since I don’t like any of them, I can’t say I feel much interest in who wins. The country need to make many changes, however, none of the two candidates are serious when they mean that want to change. And please prove me if I am wrong!

elua
Tymoshenko and Janukovych from todays Kyiv Post


Ukrainians in Mozambique: An Historical Overview

Category: guests, ukraine, web 2.0
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(Läsningstid: 4 minuter)

viewpoint-east.org begins the new year with its fist guest author, Dmytro Yatsyuk. The article is about Ukrainians in Mozambique. Enjoy!

Early Ukrainian connections with Mozambique
One of the first people with a Ukrainian connection to settle in Mozambique was Leo Kröger. The son of a Ukrainian mother and German father, he was born in 1912 in Khabarovsk. His Ukrainian grandfather, Arseniy Shvorin, was a teacher in Kyiv. Arrested by the tsarist police for his participation in a populist political movement, he was deported to Russian Far East. After a long and very interesting life in China, Leo Kröger in 1954 moved to Mozambique with his family, where he pursued a career as a professional hunter. He died in 2004, just two months short of his 92nd birthday. The funeral service took place in the Greek Orthodox Church in Maputo.

Ukrainian businessman Mihaylo Tereshenko, the Minister of Finance in Kerensky’s Russian democratic government (1917), came to work in Mozambique in the mid-1950s. He worked for the Norwegian-owned company “Madal,” which was nationalized after 1975 and eventually collapsed.

There was also Pravda foreign correspondent Tomas A. Kolesnichenko (1930–2003), who, after receiving an invitation from the oligarch Jorge Jardim, an engineer and trusted friend of Portugal’s António O. Salazar, visited Mozambique at the beginning of 1960.

Also noteworthy is the 1997 visit to Mozambique of Miguel (Mihaylo) Guskow, the Vice-General Attorney of the Federal Public Ministry of Brazil. Mr. Guskow is the son of Oleksiy and Hanna Guskow, Ukrainians who immigrated to Brazil from the Odesa region of Ukraine.

Igor Sikorsky, a grandson of the famous Ukrainian helicopter inventor Ihor Sikorsky, also made Mozambique his short-term home. His business activities were related to the fishing industry.

First Mozambicans in Ukraine and first Ukrainians in Mozambique
Following an agreement between the Soviet government and the FRELIMO (Mozambican Liberation Front), the first Mozambicans came to Ukraine in the middle of the 1960s to obtain higher education. In 1964–71, António Lourenço Chade represented FRELIMO in Ukraine. Today he is an important Mozambican judiciary figure in the northern province of Nampula. Several of the Mozambican students married Ukrainian women, some of whom stayed in Ukraine while others moved to Africa. The latter included the Kyiv-born painter Maria Smoliar (artistic name: Maria Cenzani). Together with her husband Dr. Chicogo, she lived in several African countries before moving to Mozambique following its proclamation of independence in 25 June 1975. In 1990 Maria Smoliar won a prize in Japan at an art contest dedicated to ecological issues. Representing Mozambique, she sent a painting on the topic of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster.

The contemporary Ukrainian community in Mozambique
Today, the Ukrainian community of the country is made up of three different groups of citizens: medical personnel, university teachers, and women who married Africans and chose to live in Mozambique.
There are about 400 Ukrainians living in Mozambique (adults and children). The majority of them are the Mozambique-born or Ukraine-born offspring of African–Ukrainian marriages. In the last five years, several Ukrainians employed as medical personnel have left Mozambique because of the unfriendly political attitude of the Minister of Health, Dr. Ivo Garrido.

There are no officially registered Ukrainian community organizations in Mozambique. The majority of Ukrainians in Mozambique are Orthodox, and they attend the Greek Orthodox Church of Archangel Gabriel in Maputo. Until January 2007 a Ukrainian priest, Fr. George Zolotenko, served there; he is currently studying at the Ecclesiastical Academy in Greece.

There is no Ukrainian diplomatic representation in Mozambique. The closest Ukrainian Embassy is situated in Pretoria, South Africa, though Ukrainian citizens in Mozambique are served by the Ukrainian Embassy in Angola because Portuguese is the official language in both these two countries.

Political life in Mozambique
Mozambique is dominated by two political parties, the FRELIMO ruling party and the former anticommunist guerrilla movement RENAMO (Mozambican National Resistance).

The President of Mozambique is a FRELIMO candidate, Mr. Armando Emílio Guebuza. In the 1960s he received military training in Ukraine, at the 165th Training Center for Foreign Military Personnel, in the village of Peravalne, 20 kilometres outside of Simferopol. President Guebuza remembers his time in Ukraine with fondness and has not ruled out the possibility of visiting Ukraine and his old training center. These very facilities are now used by the 36th Special Brigade of the Coast Defense of the Ukrainian Naval Force and units of the National Guards of Ukraine.

First Ukrainian blog in Africa
Our blog was created on 15 January 2004, during the Orange Revolution, when we started to inform Portuguese-speakers in Angola, Brazil, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, Mozambique, Portugal, East Timor, and Macau about events in Ukraine. This information was distributed as press releases in Mozambique, Portugal, and Brazil. As of 28 December 2009 our blog has been visited by almost 180.000 people.

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Blog’s address ucrania-mozambique.blogspot.com

Our blog also acts as a cultural bridge between Mozambique and Ukraine. And we interact with Ukrainian Web groups in Portuguese-speaking countries, among them pessoal.cefetpr.br/ucrania, which was created by fourth-generation Ukrainians in Brazil, and spilka.pt, the Web site of the Association of Ukrainians in Portugal.

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NOTE
This article first appeared in “Ukrainians Abroad: News and Views’ #40”, the newsletter of the Ukrainian Diaspora Studies Initiative at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta.


Sociala medier i kampen mot valfusk

Category: by sophie engström, sociala medier, ukraina, ukraine, web 2.0
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(Läsningstid: 2 minuter)

Under förra presidentvalet 2004, som senare ledde till den orangea revolutionen, rapporterades det om det flera oegentligheten. De första uppgifterna som kom ut om valfusk och förhindrande av valprocedur var ofta via internet. Detta ledde till att man valde att stänga ned en server som användes av en organisation som bland annat ställde sig bakom den nuvarande presidenten, Viktor Jusjenko. Idag är nästan alla överens att kommande presidentval i januari MÅSTE gå rätt till. Denna gång får inte internationella övervakare rynka på näsan åt den ukrainska demokratiska viljan.

twitter

Ett försök att stärka valprocessen är Internviews-Ukraine’s Twitter projekt. Vitaliy Moroz, från Internews-Ukraine, säger till Olya Vesnjanka för Deutche Welle att Ukraina ofta har varit arena för innovativ och kreativ journalistik, och avser aktioner som de jag nämnde ovan, samt att Livejournal användes som en politisk debatt och nyhetsrapportering under förra presidentvalet.

Tanken med Internews-Ukraine’s projekt är att utbilda journalister (och gärna bloggare) runt omkring i Ukraina, till att skapa ett twitter flöde som synliggör oegentligheter under valkampanjen 7-17 januari. De också lyfter fram de politiska frågorna även om de är väl medvetna om att kan inte kan ha en politisk debatt på Twitter, eftersom siten bara erbjuder 140 tecken per status uppdatering!

Journalisterna i projektet ska därför inte bara få utbildning i hur de rent tekniskt twittrar, exempelvis från mobil, utan också hur man kort, endast några tecken, uttrycker saklig och begriplig information. (Helt uppenbart är att undertecknad borde gå en sådan kurs, då jag verkligen har svårt att uttrycka något sakligt, kärnfullt och framförallt kort 😉 ) Allt material som twittras ska sedan smalas upp av en större portal som samlar blogginlägg, twitter, bilder från exempelvis Flickr, på en och samma sida. Jag föreställer mig att den eventuellt kan se ut som piratpartiets Live-ström.

Om detta kommer att motverka att presidentvalet 2010 blir lika smutsigt som förra, låter jag vara osagt. Men faktum är att förra valet kanske “räddades” just av att de som kritiserade situationen under valet faktiskt använde sig av ny teknik för att sprida information!

För den som är intresserad kommer jag att under december månad publicera en liten artikel med intervjuer med några dem som stod bakom förra presidentvalets flashmobs och spektakulära serverflyttar.