Tagged with Riots

Revolution in Bosnia?

It’s all kicking off. This from Euronews.

Thousands of Bosnians have been demonstrating for a sixth day, calling for the resignation of the government. There have been mass protests in more than 30 cities and the heads of four regional cantons have already resigned. The protests started in the former industrial heartland town of Tuzla after four state-owned Bosnian revolution 1companies were privatised and sold off leaving workers unpaid and without jobs.

In Tuzla on Monday, locals were clearing up after government buildings were destroyed in riots. In Sarajevo, demonstrators gathered outside the presidency building which was set on fire on Friday. Protesters say overpaid politicians have left the country with more than 40 percent unemployment and rampant corruption. The are calling for non-partisan technocrat regional governments to take over. Political analysts say it is hard to tell how the demonstrations will develop. Continue reading →

Mark Duggan: now there’s no doubt the police are above the law

Police helmetTrials or inquests by jury are the most democratic means of bringing a legal process to a conclusion. Recruited from the electoral roll, jurors provide an important corrective to magistrates and judges, who might be hardened by the number of cases that come before them and/or be out of touch with the pace of modern life.

Juries aren’t perfect by any means. In their turn they are open to manipulation of evidence by skilled barristers, can be bamboozled by expert testimony, and are subject to judicial direction. They can also reach “perverse” conclusions by ignoring the instructions of the judge or the provisions of the law, resorting instead to common sense or the dominant logics that emerge through their process of deliberation. Continue reading →

Riots: are we serious about dealing with underlying causes before next eruption?

The report on the riots published by the Riots Communities and Victims Panel is a welcome alternative to the establishment’s atavistic call for revenge in the days and weeks after August last year. It is right to demand that everyone should have a stake in society and at least half a million ‘forgotten families’ who ‘bump along the bottom’ don’t. It is right too to demand that schools that fail to teach children to read properly should be penalised, that more should be done to get young people into work, and that schools should concentrate on developing character. All estimable aspirations. But is there the will to push through radical reform, and anyway are these prescriptions nearly enough? Continue reading →

‘We’re All In This Together’

2011 was the year the phoney war ended or – as the kids say these days, so I’m told – shit got real. When queues of anxious customers demanding their money suddenly formed outside Northern Rock over four years ago, it seemed like a slightly surreal – but one-off – disruption to normality, like an eerie re-enactment of a scene from Depression-era United States. As the entire global financial system faced total meltdown a year later, a sense of normality was mostly still preserved thanks to taxpayer bailouts and multi-billion fiscal stimuli. But more than one commentator conjured up the image of the global economy as a cartoon character who runs off a cliff, legs still flapping, suspended in mid-air as the scale of the fall sinks in. This year, the tumble began. Continue reading →