The New Nation - Internet Edition

Use of ID cards for voting

WITH the schedule of election of parliament announced, demand for use of identity cards issued to adult citizens during preparation of the photo voter list has been raised to make the election fair. Speakers at a roundtable the other day expressed their concern that during the recent city-corporation and municipal elections, ID cards were not used. Enthusiastic voters who carried their cards, rather, fell in embarrassing situations.

The Election Commission took up the project for making a faultless voter list with photos with a view to ensuring fair elections. More than eight crore voters in the list have been given identity cards. The common perception is that those are voter ID cards, although issued as national ID cards. It was revealed during the recent city-corporation and municipal elections that the serial numbers of the cards are not identical to those of the voters in the photo voter list and, as such, the cards were not used. It is difficult to understand the logic behind making the serial numbers different. National ID cards are expected to be given to all citizens irrespective of age. Such ID cards can and should be used for multiple purposes including identifications of voters in elections.

One of the arguments for the delay in holding the national election was the completion of the voter list. If the cards are not used to establish the voters' identity, only a correct voter list may not be enough to prevent false voting. Whether the cards are voter ID cards or national ID cards is a useless debate, the important thing is, whether those will help establish true identity of the voters. The call for making the use of ID cards mandatory during voting is thus backed by sufficient logic.

Implications for Bangladesh

BANGLADESHIS in general together with the rest of the world, have been happy due to the triumph of Barack Obama in the US Presidential contest. But how they would benefit from Obama's triumph. For, already doubts are creeping up that with a Democratic Party President in the White House and the Democrats controlling the legislature as well, what could be prospects for the Bangladesh's readymade garment (RMG) exporters to whom the USA is the single biggest market.

RMG exporters have been striving in recent years to have a bill piloted through the US Congress for duty free entry of Bangladeshi garment products. The Democratic Party is reportedly protectionist to some extent. Thus, they are likely to view this bill as contrary to their policy of not easing their market further. However, there is another catch to it. Bangladeshi RMG products are considered the cheapest in the US market. Therefore, increasing their supply may be desired when US consumers are having less disposable income and are looking for cheaper purchases of everything. Thus there is also a possibility of this bill being passed.

But there are other areas where Bangladesh stands to benefit a great deal from the Obama presidency. Barack Obama is committed to taking bold unilateral steps of cutting down emission of greenhouse gases. He is expected to reverse the US position in international negotiations on the issue. Threatened by global warming, Bangladesh would be a beneficiary of such moves on the part of the new US administration. Reforms for improving terms of international trade for developing countries, greater channelling of aid to meet their needs are also likely to be promoted by the Democratic President. In these diverse areas Bangladesh is likely to benefit from the next US administration.

It's a victory for everyone

Ripan Kumar Biswas

The victory was not only for the President-Elect of the US Barack Obama, not for the estimated crowd of up to 240,000 people, who were present at Chicago's Grant Park and enjoyed the historical moment with him on November 5, 2008. The victory was for everyone who believes spirit, democracy, ideals of humanity, respect to the opponents, secularism, and above all, who puts the country's interest first.

The victory is for Teimouri, 26, an Iranian and a journalist by profession, who expects America needs a leader who can fix its image in the world. This is a victory of Duncan Adel, a computer technician in Kenya over Bilal al-Bodour, deputy minister of culture for the United Arab Emirates. Bilal al-Bodour believed that Americans would never vote for someone who is black and belongs to an immigrant family because that's the American mentality whereas Duncan Adel was happy and thankful to all Americans as this election restored his faith in democracy.

Duncan Adel had a day off on Thursday along with others Kenyan as it was declared a national holiday by the Kenyan government. Balaji Samanthapudi, 36, a technology consultant in Bangalore, India, was jubilant as the market prices were going up. The message of this election was that everyone must believe in democracy that people of any color can unite and stand up and give hope to all over the world.

The victory is the answer for those who are in doubt that a country is usually recognized by its might of the arms or the scale of the wealth. Everyone got goose bumps all over again listening to his speech. "All those who have wondered if America's beacon still burns as bright -- tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope," Obama applauded the power of democracy in America and called America is a place where all things are possible in his acceptance speech after being elected as America's first black president.

This is the opportunity to them to learn, who hardly respect their opponents, especially in politics. "He fought long and hard in this campaign, and he's fought even longer and harder for the country he loves," Obama offered gracious words to his vanquished opponent, Sen. John McCain of Arizona while McCain acknowledged defeat and urged all Americans to congratulate Obama and put aside their differences in the nation's interest. "To do all in my power to help him lead us through the many challenges we face," McCain pledged his support and help for the new president. Calling him President-Elect, President George W Bush congratulated his apparent successor and promised to make a smooth transition.

It is indeed a great momentous occasion for the entire world. This is big 'NO' to disruptive, divisional, and hate-mongering politics. This is a big 'YES' to civility, intelligence, intellectual thinking, and inclusiveness. This ushers in a new era - like a breath of fresh air. There is optimism in the air. There is faith in humankind.

People around the world may now trust in American values and the integrity of a man who convinced not only the majority of the voters but also people all around the world. With Obama's leadership, America will be more comfortable to join the rest of the world in solving the problems of the time-global warming, sustainable living, learning to live in peace. If he will work so hard and efficient as he did in campaigning he will be a great president and a leader of the world. According to Rashid Haider, a Pakistani student in New York, Pakistan doesn't need American weapons instead it needs institutions like America. If America can squeeze the leaders to implement good policies for the people in Pakistan, it would be the greatest contribution to the Pakistani people.

It's all been building - there have been signals of hope, of change, but according to the critic, this is the first time in recent history that Americans, as a nation, have stepped up together and, in the political arena, voted for change. Nationwide Obama gathered 349 electoral votes and pulled 53 percent of the popular vote compared to McCain's 173 electoral votes and 46 percent of the popular vote. Obama's victory was sweetened by Democratic gains in both houses of Congress.

When Obama and running mate Joe Biden will take their oath of office on Jan. 20, 2009, Democrats will control both the White House and Congress for the first time since 1994.

According to the last news, Democrats clinched 56 in Senate and 254 in House while Republicans got 40 and 173 respectively. Four seats in Senate and 8 seats in House are still to be decided.

Like Clayborne Carson, a former activist and now a Stanford University historian, many Americans believe that America was a democracy in name only. It's only since the mid-1960s that Americans have had the experiment in a multicultural and multiracial democracy. It was inconceivable then that the United States would elect an African-American president.

Barack Obama, with his fairy tale family, has personal charisma to spare. He describes his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage.

Having black African-American father and white American mother Ann Dunham from Wichita, Kansas, Barack Obama becomes a proud, self-identified "African-American" who moves easily between the realms of the ethnic minority and the mainstream majority.

He seems to transcend the race issue, giving voters of all stripes something with which to identify -- an African American success story, an immigrant "American Dream" story, or just a middle-class Midwesterner making good. Barack is an exceptional African American -- which something about the plurality of his own racial background makes him accessible to all American voters in a way that other leaders aren't. According to another African-American Colin Luther Powell, the former US secretary of state of Bush administration, Obama is the president of all Americans.

The Columbian graduate became the exact successor of Martin Luther King, Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson, or Malcolm X in the arena of political freedom. Some people might think that a president should come from right here, born, raised, bred, fed in America.

To go outside and bring somebody in from another nationality, now that doesn't feel right, but according to the renowned black author and essayist Debra J. Dickerson, Obama isn't black" in an American racial context. He shows that he can be profoundly patriot and yet find a common understanding with the rest of the world. And the world is indeed in serious need of positive coalitions to tackle the enormous challenges ahead: terrorism, hunger, global warming, diseases, and genocide.

Obama's acceptance speech wasn't only inspirational but also a blend of energy, policy, and personal anecdotes. Obama proposed specific policies to Americans and gave assurance to those, who would seek peace and security around the world. Barack Obama carried a message of hope not just for the US but for the whole world.

Where stories are possible

Roger Cohen

Of the countless words Barack Obama has uttered since he opened his campaign for president on an icy Illinois morning in February, 2007, a handful have kept reverberating in my mind: "For as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible."

Perhaps the words echo because I'm a naturalised American and I came here, like many others, seeking relief from Britain's subtle barriers of religion and class, and possibility broader than in Europe's confines.

Perhaps they resonate because, having South African parents, I spent part of my childhood in the land of apartheid, and so absorbed as an infant the humiliation of racial segregation, the fear and anger that are the harvest of hurt - just as they are, in Obama's words, "the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow."

Perhaps they speak to me because I live in New York and watch every day a miracle of civility emerge from the struggles and fatigue of people drawn from every corner of the globe to the glimmer of possibility at the tapering edge of the city's ruler-straight canyons.

Perhaps they move me because the possibility of stories has animated my life; and no nation offers a blanker page on which to write than America.

Or perhaps it's simply because those 22 words cleave the air with the sharp blade of truth.

Nowhere else could a 47-year-old man, born, as he has written, of a father "black as pitch" and a mother "white as milk," a generation distant from the mud shacks of western Kenya, raised for a time as Barry Soetoro (his stepfather's family name) in Muslim Indonesia, then entrusted to his grandparents in Hawaii - nowhere else could this Barrack Hussein Obama rise so far and so fast.

It's for this sense of possibility, and not for grim-faced dread, that people look to America, which is why the Obama campaign has stirred such global passions.

Americans are decent people. They're not interested in where you came from. They're interested in who you are. That has not changed. But much has in the last 8 years. This is a moment of anguish. The Bush presidency has engineered the unlikely double whammy of undermining free-market capitalism and essential freedoms, the nation's twin badges.

American luster is gone. The American idea has, in Joyce Carol Oates' words, become a "cruel joke." Americans are worrying and hurting.

So it is important to step back, from the last machinations of this endless campaign, and think again about what America is. It is renewal, the place where impossible stories get written.

It is the overcoming of history, the leaving behind of war and barriers, in the name of a future freed from the cruel gyre of memory.

It is reinvention, the absorption of one identity in something larger - the notion that "out of many, we are truly one."

It is a place better than Bush's land of shadows where a leader entrusted with the hopes of the earth cannot find within himself a solitary phrase to uplift the soul. Multiple polls now show Obama with a clear lead. But nobody can know the outcome and nobody should underestimate the immense psychological leap that sending a black couple to the White House would represent.

What I am sure of is this: An ever more interconnected world, where financial chain reactions spread with the virulence of plagues, thirsts for American renewal and a form of American leadership sensitive to humanity's tied fate.

I also know that this biracial politician, the Harvard graduate who gets whites because he was raised by them, the Kenyan's son who gets blacks because it was among them that mixed race placed him, is an emblematic figure of the border-hopping 21st century.

He is the providential mestizo whose name - O-Ba-Ma - has the three-syllable universality of some child's lullaby.

And what has he done? What does his experience amount to? Does his record not demonstrate he's a radical? The interrogation continues. It's true that his experience is limited.

But Americans seem to be trusting what their eyes tell them: Temperament trumps experience and every instinct of this man, whose very identity represents an act of reconciliation, hones toward building change from the centre.

Earlier this year, at the end of a road of reddish earth in western Kenya, I found Obama's half-sister Auma. "He can be trusted," she said, "to be in dialogue with the world."

Dialogue, between Americans and beyond America, has been a constant theme. Last year, I spoke to Obama, who told me: "Part of our capacity to lead is linked to our capacity to show restraint."

Watching the way he has allowed his opponents' weaknesses to reveal themselves, the way he has enticed them into self-defeating exhaustion pounding against the wall of his equanimity, I have come to understand better what he meant.

Stories require restraint, too. Restraint engages the imagination, which has always been stirred by the American idea, and can be once again.

Teaching the holocaust to the Palestinians

Tim McGirk

As the road dips and rises through the Hebron hills, white etched with the glowing green of vineyards, the turn-off to Edna village is marked by the grey, concrete watchtower of an Israeli checkpoint. But it doesn't deter Israeli-Arab lawyer Khaled Kasab Mahameed from his quixotic mission: He has come to the West Bank to educate Palestinians about the Jewish Holocaust.

Many Palestinians have never heard that the Nazis killed six million Jews during Word War II - it doesn't rate a mention in their school history books. Others join with the likes of Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad in denying that the Holocaust ever happened. The Jews, according to this blinkered reasoning, are their enemies in the battle over the Holy Land, and they cannot afford to have sympathy for their enemy. Mahameed sees this view as tragically misguided. The key to the Palestinians achieving their own goals, he says, is to understand the Holocaust, and the place it holds in the Israeli psyche and its obsession with security.

But in Edna, Mahameed faces a tough crowd: The walls are bedecked with posters of Palestinians killed while fighting the Israelis, and at least three of the seven middle-aged men sitting beside me drinking tea with a sprig of sage have endured long stretches in Israeli prisons. Twice in the past few years, bulldozers had rumbled out from the nearby Israeli checkpoint to demolish the two-story home and ancient vineyards of our host, geologist Taleb al-Harithi. Armed with an Israeli court order, he managed to turn the bulldozers away, but he fears their return at any moment.

Mahameed passes around a death-camp photo of a Jewish inmate standing over a mass grave full of naked corpses. The room of Palestinians falls silent. "That man, that survivor, in the photograph came to Israel. Can you imagine the nightmares, the horrors that he brought with him? It's a suffering that nobody, even us Palestinians, can begin to comprehend," he says with quiet, lawyerly persistence. The photo moves around the room, again and again, in silence. Finally, a retired Palestinian general, Abdul Latah Solimia, once captive in an Israeli military prison in Lebanon says: "As a militant, I know the cost of war and hatred. For 60 years, we have tried to eliminate each other, and neither has won. We Israelis and Palestinians should share this land."

Mahameed's epiphany on the Holocaust occurred three years ago, when he took his two children to see the massive 20-foot high concrete wall that Israel has erected around parts of Jerusalem to keep out Palestinians. It is so high in places that it seems to slice in half the blue sky. "I told my son to break off a piece of the wall as a souvenir. It was very difficult, and while he was trying, I asked myself, what would drive the Israelis to do such a thing to us, build such a monstrosity as this wall?" He gathered his son and daughter and drove them to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum. "It was very moving. I couldn't breathe. Six million, it's like something off another planet," he recalls.

Touring the sombre museum, it occurred to Mahameed that "we Palestinians are the victims of the terrible things that were inflicted on the Jews by the Holocaust."

The images of the crimes perpetrated against the Jews of Europe also made him understand international support for Israel. "If an Israeli child dies from a Gaza rocket, the Israelis can take a photo of that child to America and remind Bush of the 1.5 million Jewish children who died in the death camps, and ?Bush will give the Israelis more money and weapons to use against us," he says.

And Israelis experience the same images of a Gaza rocket attack in the "exterminationist" frame of Auschwitz, not simply as a product of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over land.

Using photos donated by Yad Vashem and images from the Nakba - the "Catastrophe," which is how Palestinians refer to the events surrounding Israel's independence, which left thousands of Palestinians in exile and in refugee camps - the lawyer set up a one-room museum in his hometown of Nazareth, called the Arab Institute for Holocaust Research and Education.

Every week, he travels to towns, villages and refugee camps in the West Bank trying to enlighten his fellow Palestinians. Says Mahameed, "Even with the militants, when I explain to them that Israel's brutal policies in the Palestinian territories stem from the Holocaust, they tell me 'You're bringing us an atomic bomb. We need to think about this.'"

Sometimes, his message is greeted with hostility-even in his own family. Mahameed has been ostracised by his brothers, who say that his obsession with the Holocaust is tantamount to sympathising with Israel. Last week, one of his lectures in a refugee camp was cancelled because a militant group spread the false rumour that he was secretly on Israeli payroll. On the Israeli side, there is incomprehension, too. Only last January did Yad Vashem put up an Arabic language website on the Holocaust, and when asked about Mahameed's activities, one staffer replied warily: "We have doubts about his agenda." Replies Mahameed: "They don't want us Palestinians to have pity on them. They only want to show us how mighty they are."

Mahameed is an avid believer in Mahatma Gandhi's dictum that truth leads to non-violence, and he sees himself practicing a kind of ju-jitsu, using Israel's own moral superiority over the Holocaust as a way to shame the Israeli occupiers in the West Bank into treating the Palestinians more humanely. "If the Israelis believe that the Holocaust justifies this kind of brutal discrimination, then they're wrong."

He travels through army checkpoints showing his ID card and a photo from Auschwitz. At first he's met with suspicion. "I tell the soldiers that this could be a photo of their grandfather, and that I understand that they, as Jews, are unique victims. But the paradox is that we Palestinians have the Holocaust on our shoulders, too."