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Coup Squashed!
Nov. 18th, 2010 09:07 amCoup count for 2010: -1
Coup successfully squashed. Probably. The situation is unclear, but it looks like the coup plotters are holed up in an army barracks near the airport, and are not in control. If, 24 hours into a coup, you aren't appointing a new minister of Finance and Looting, chances are your coup has failed. They're probably using their position near the airport to threaten to shut it down, giving them a bargaining chip to use in negotiations. Who knows how good it is? I can't guess, not being able to find the barracks accurately on a map, but maybe it's enough of a threat to keep them from getting lined up against a wall and shot (although the leaders will probably be quietly 'done away with', either physically or politically).
What's annoying to me is the lack of information. A rather serious attempt was made to overthrow the government of a country with twenty-one million people, which is already in a rather serious internal political struggle. This seems to rate about two news articles in each of the major news sources (one for the announcement, and one for the "looks like it's over" speech), which comes out to about 0.02 Kate Middletons. This left about a twelve hour gap where, for all we knew, zombie lemurs were overrunning Antananarivo and eating the populace. It's an interesting failure mode for media, which maybe needs to think about how to incorporate local journalism and cooperation in events in places where they don't have good sources.
Coup successfully squashed. Probably. The situation is unclear, but it looks like the coup plotters are holed up in an army barracks near the airport, and are not in control. If, 24 hours into a coup, you aren't appointing a new minister of Finance and Looting, chances are your coup has failed. They're probably using their position near the airport to threaten to shut it down, giving them a bargaining chip to use in negotiations. Who knows how good it is? I can't guess, not being able to find the barracks accurately on a map, but maybe it's enough of a threat to keep them from getting lined up against a wall and shot (although the leaders will probably be quietly 'done away with', either physically or politically).
What's annoying to me is the lack of information. A rather serious attempt was made to overthrow the government of a country with twenty-one million people, which is already in a rather serious internal political struggle. This seems to rate about two news articles in each of the major news sources (one for the announcement, and one for the "looks like it's over" speech), which comes out to about 0.02 Kate Middletons. This left about a twelve hour gap where, for all we knew, zombie lemurs were overrunning Antananarivo and eating the populace. It's an interesting failure mode for media, which maybe needs to think about how to incorporate local journalism and cooperation in events in places where they don't have good sources.