Hope is not a plan

Nothing is ever truly uniform. This is probably a good life lesson to keep in mind. Certainly, it leads to clarity of thought to recall that any political unit is fundamentally just a bunch of people rather than a uniform mass.

South Ossetia, now even more than ever a de facto independent state in the wake of the sound beating down of the Georgian military by their Russian counterparts, is holding its parliamentary elections this week. Russian faux news source Russia today reports that the ruling party has won. This will be a disappointment, if not a surprise, to opposition members, as their two parties were actually banned from the election. As a consequence, the voting was basically between "the ruling party" and "that other party that likes the ruling party."

With 50,000 people eligible to vote, it's quite likely that South Ossetia has fewer eligible voters than the city or town you live in. It's important to remember, even at this scale, that this is not a uniform mass of identical people. Even if most of them were in agreement about not wanting to be part of Georgia (and I have not actually looked to see if we have survey data that says this is the case), that doesn't mean they all want or like their current leadership.

Interestingly, it looks like Nicaragua has become the second country (after Russia) to recognize South Ossetia as a nation. This is an interesting step to take in light of the fact that Nicaragua may well have its own separatist movement to deal with.

al Jazeera article

This week met the curious news that Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan had suggested that the Chinese treatment of Uighurs in Xinjiang amounts to genocide. Here are the words:

Mr Erdogan made the controversial comments last Friday, telling NTV television: "The incidents in China are, simply put, a genocide. There's no point in interpreting this otherwise."

This is curious, of course, since the Turkish government has, to some extent rather notoriously, rejected the suggestion that Ottoman Turkey committed genocide back in 1915. This has been a big problem for Turkey both in terms of EU entry and in terms of rapprochement with neighboring Armenia.

Naturally, Chinese officials seized on this disjunction between Erdogan's words and his country's official stance. State vehicle Xinhua took a moment out to highlight statements in the EU parliament made against Erdogan's statement, right before going on to talk about how peaceful and harmonious life resumes in Xinjiang (for definitions of "peaceful" that involve pipe beatings of Uighurs by Han Chinese).

Although Erdogan's remark is frankly silly in context, it also gave the PRC a new way to point to the outside world and shout "Bad man!" while vigorously suppressing those within its own borders.

This is, of course, the normal pattern. Or, to paraphrase a friend, "It's only okay for China to kill Chinese people."

BBC article