O

ct. 8, p3

Eleven of the 14 civil society groups invited to join the Bali Civil Society Forum (BCSF), a side event at the annual intergovernmental Bali Democracy Forum (BDF), have rejected the invitations and denounced President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono as unqualified to host the event.

Yudhoyono has come under pressure for allowing the passage of the Regional Elections (Pilkada) Law, which abolished direct local elections, although he later issued a government regulation in lieu of law (Perppu) to reinstate direct local elections in response to a nationwide outcry.

Your comments:

I wonder which countries will show up? That will tell us a lot about those countries'€™ opinions of real democracy as well.

Nurani

Isn'€™t it amusing that the speaker boasted that Indonesia was '€œone of the most democratic countries in the world'€ and the last paragraph states that the police '€œwill not tolerate demonstrations of any kind'€?

Ozmostus

Well, it is clear that people have lost trust in him. Just look at the massive drop his party took at the legislative election a few months ago, which was not only a public reaction to the misconduct in his party but also directed at him as the chairman of the Democratic Party (it actually always hurts me a bit to refer to them as '€œdemocrats'€).

Max