For Al Jazeera:

Bhutto was the first woman elected to lead a Muslim state and was twice Pakistan’s PM [EPA]

The United Nations is due to release the findings of its inquiry into the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the late Pakistani opposition leader and former prime minister.

Killed in an attack at the end of a campaign rally in the city of Rawalpindi in December 2007, her death served as a rallying cry for her supporters and ultimately helped to propel her Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) to election victory less than two months later.

Her death was, however, not an unexpected one. Benazir was not the first Bhutto to be killed for her politics, although she may be the last.

Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, her father and Pakistan’s first democratically elected prime minister, was executed by court order following a coup d’état by General Zia-ul-Haq, then the army chief. Her two brothers, Shanawaz and Murtaza, were both killed as well – the former poisoned while on holiday in 1985, the latter gunned down at home in 1996 during Benazir’s first term as prime minister.

Like the Kennedys of the United States and the Nehru-Gandhi family in India, the Bhutto family has been a political dynasty in Pakistan that stretches back decades. And the legacy that Benazir Bhutto inherited from her father and carried on was that of a unifying figure that stood up for the poor.

“She always stood for democracy, like her father,” Tariq Pirzada, a lawyer and Pakistan political affairs analyst, said.

“She was an enlightened and progressive woman. She used the power of the legacy of her father and also her personal charm to unite the people behind her.”

In the limelight

Despite the controversy that dogged Bhutto’s return from self-imposed exile in October 2007 – after eight years away – and the numerous threats and warnings over safety, her arrival in Pakistan was cheered by hundreds of thousands of supporters who lined the streets of Karachi to welcome her.

“Few Pakistanis have hogged more limelight than the charismatic Benazir Bhutto. She was the Muslim world’s first elected woman prime minister, as well as the youngest,” Kamran Rehmat, the resident editor of Pakistani newspaper The Express Tribune in Islamabad, said.

“Bhutto left behind a strong legacy not only because of these milestones alone – the very fact that she led Pakistan’s largest political party for nearly three decades and fought two military dictators to return the country to democratic rule each time was no mean achievement.”

When, two months after her return from self-imposed exile, Bhutto died suddenly as she left a campaign rally, it was not just her supporters, but the whole country that stood shocked.

“It was a big trauma for me that day … I haven’t fully recovered till today,” Naheed Khan, a close advisor to Bhutto, who was in the car with her when she was fatally wounded, told Al Jazeera.

“That day was very unfortunate for Pakistan, a very unfortunate day for Pakistan Peoples Party [and] for the whole nation, that we had lost a great leader.”

Following the tragedy, Asif Ali Zardari, Bhutto’s widower, and her son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, were named co-chairs of the Pakistan Peoples Party, marking the first time since 1967 that a non-Bhutto headed the party.

With a groundswell of sympathetic support for the party, political groups that would not ordinarily have allied with the PPP agreed that something had to be done to return a degree of stability to the country, and a coalition government was formed.

Months later, after Pervez Musharraf, the former Pakistani president, agreed to step down, parliament voted in Zardari to take his place.

‘Ditched’ legacy

But despite coming to power, in part, on Bhutto’s popularity and campaign promises, experts say the last two years of PPP rule have had little to do with her or her father’s original vision for the party.

“Ironically, for someone who helped her party storm back into power even in her death, today’s PPP appears to have ditched her legacy, which was primarily borne of people’s rights and struggle for rule of law,” Rehmat said.

Zardari has kept the PPP united and retained a coalition large enough to govern [AFP]

Pirzada said Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s original platform has long gone, with the party now focusing simply on how to remain viable.

“Zardari … is more worried about how to stay in power … The government can fall apart at any time,” he said.

Pakistan is battling a host of problems – from a flagging economy and rising unemployment, to consistently inconsistent electricity supplies, skyrocketing food prices and anti-government demonstrations across the country.

On top of that are persistent security threats from pro-Taliban tribal elements on the border with Afghanistan, accusations that Pakistan is harbouring members of al-Qaeda, and anger internally over US drone attacks in the country.

Zardari himself is facing an up-hill struggle against corruption allegations, which have plagued him since the days of Bhutto’s first term in office, and earned him the nickname “Mr 10 per cent” – a term alluding to the commission a broker would take in a deal.

Weakened party

Opposition politicians are seeking to have thousands of corruption cases against Zardari reopened after they were dismissed by his predecessor, Musharraf.

“Whether or not it is right … [Zardari] is known as a symbol of corruption in the country,” Pirzada said.

“This is all, in the end, damaging Mr Zardari. A lot of people believe that this may be the last year of the PPP government.”

Zardari has, so far, kept the party united and retained a coalition large enough to govern, but with so many problems in the country as yet unresolved, the PPP’s ability to remain in power is evidently on the decline.

Where the future lies for what was once the party of Bhutto remains unclear.

The young generation of Bhuttos - Benazir’s 21-year-old son Bilawal and 25-year-old niece Fatma – have yet to enter the political fray properly.

“While the PPP remains the only political party with presence in all the four federating units, even party insiders admit the future is not all that bright either for the Bhutto family, whose next generation of leaders are still a few years from even getting the drift of the rough and tumble of Pakistani politics, or the party itself,” Rehmat said.

But even if the future looks grim now, the repercussions of the United Nations report on Bhutto’s death could reshape Pakistan’s political landscape.

Benazir’s widower has time and again proven himself to be a skillful political operator, and Bhutto’s party may yet live on as the party of Zardari.

Posted via email from THE SYNTHETIC JUNGLE

Yet, today Global Post asks if, in fact, Arabic is a dying language.

Native Arabic speakers constitute about 3% of all internet users, according to World Bank figures. And yet, less than 1% of the contents of the internet are in Arabic.

Make no mistake, though, Arabic and the Arab world are only becoming more important online.

The Middle East and North Africa have seen the fastest growth of  internet users the world over  – a 900% increase in the past seven years – and more is being predicted.

But even if a breadth and depth of opinion, analysis and comment is developing on the Arabic web, it’s all lost on the English speaking world.

Into this gap enters Meedan.

Launching its website to the public today, Meedan says it wants to "build bridges between the Arab world and the West".

"We want to enable people to talk to each other and to learn more about each other – people who live in the Arab world and speak Arabic and people who live in the West and speak English," says Anas Tawileh, vice president of Engineering at Meedan.

But what does the website do? Here’s their explainer video:

Meedan is the Arabic word for town square, 34-year-old Anas explains to me on a Skype call from Toronto.

"We like to refer to our website as a town square that brings together speakers of Arabic and English to talk about things or events," he says.

The project has been in the making for three years and consists of two main elements: a socially-driven website, and the sophisticated translation engine behind it.

On the front end, news.meedan.net has a team of 50 editors and translators (most of them volunteers), who scour the web looking for news and events that impact the lives of people in the Middle East, and the West.

Once they’ve done that, Meedan’s machine translation engine steps in, automatically showing posts in both English and Arabic.

Taking a few lessons from Wikipedia, Meedan allows anybody to correct a mistake they find in translations. Those corrections are also fed back to the translation engine, so that it can learn and improve.

Quality-assurance wise, editors and translators (many based in the Middle East) double-check both the machine translations and community-contributed corrections.

But the main point of the site is conversation. And to that end, every comment made on a post is offered in both English and Arabic. As are direct messages and user profiles.

So, for example, a blogger in Iraq can respond in Arabic to a comment someone in the US made in English.

"Hopefully, we build a more tolerant and more understanding world," Anas says of the project’s long-term aims.

"I travel extensively in the [Middle East] region, and I always hear people say ‘if only the American citizen understands our point of view’. I think that Meedan offers that hope, and over the next few months we will see."

This post was first published on Al Jazeera Blogs and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

It’s now more than a week since the Caribbean nation of Haiti was rocked by a massive 7.0 magnitude earthquake, but the situation on the ground remains unstable, with people still being pulled from the rubble and the death toll continuing to rise.

With landlines in the country badly damaged, and ground transportation a significant problem, relief workers pouring into the country have had to turn to non-traditional means to try to get information from – and to – survivors of the quake.

Ushahidi, an open-source crisis-reporting platform first developed two years ago to track post-election violence in Kenya, has provided one of those non-traditional data streams, offering "near-real time disaster response" data to everyone from the Red Cross, to the United Nations, Charity: Water, the Clinton Foundation, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) and State Department, and more.

Their deployment of the software to track the crisis in Haiti following last week’s quake has drawn a huge response – both from the emergency aid community in need of the data they provide, as well as from volunteers looking to get involved in the project and help verify information coming in.

“We’ve set up a situation room here at the Fletcher School at Tufts University – it’s a 24/7 operation," Patrick Meier, director of crisis mapping at Ushahidi and a PhD candidate at the Boston, Massachusetts school, tells me.

“What we’re doing … is a little different. [We're] monitoring tweets, Facebook, getting emails from United Nations and other contacts in Haiti, geo-tagging and providing that information in near-real time.

“We’ve expanded that operation quite a bit [recently] with more tweets, as well as blogs, other online news resources, [and we've] set up an email address. [We're] also working very closely with the International Network of Crises Mappers (CM*Net),  a group of 500 members who are very active on Haiti.

“We’re [also] getting a lot of information directly from search and rescue teams and providing up to date info for organisations like FEMA, the Red Cross, the US state department and so on.”

In addition to the volunteers working in shifts out of a university dorm room in Boston, Meier says Fletcher alumni have set-up a "situation room" in Washington, DC, where they are helping monitor one of the new developments of the project – a free SMS number for anyone in need of help in Haiti.

“One of the most important things we need to get out to the world is there’s this SMS number – 4636 - for anyone in Haiti. We’re on standby.

“All these text messages get translated – they are usually in Creole. In 10 minutes, we get that in English, and as I mentioned, we are able to then map it.”

Meier says there are also Ushahidi teams in Kenya and Uganda working to track down and verify new data out of Haiti, while a university in Geneva, Switzerland, is due to set up another situation room.

In Boston, meanwhile, the team has reached out to MIT, Harvard and other local institutions, seeking volunteers to help them maintian the momentum they’ve had going this past week.

Patrick Meier

But with all the time and energy these volunteers have put in, has the project been a success?

"We have been collecting a number of success stories. One of the very first was a report that went up through Ushahidi – an orphanage that was desperately running out of water. Soon after, we had someone report they had dispatched 20 litres of water to the orphanage. 

“Our situation room is now [also] known to be one of the go-to places for anyone who needs GPS coordinates [on the ground] on an urgent basis.

Another sign of success:

For ways to to get involved with Ushahidi’s Haiti project, get started at haiti.ushahidi.com.

You can also learn more about the developing situation in Haiti from Al Jazeera.

Photos are courtesy of Ushahidi.

This post was first published on Al Jazeera Blogs and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

International aid groups are rushing to get relief workers and supplies to Haiti after a 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit Haiti on Tuesday. The Red Cross says up to 3 million people may have been affected.

Paul Conneally, head of media at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said that although the Red Cross was on the ground in Haiti, "our ability to operate effectively is hugely constrained with massive logistical problems caused by the earthquake".

 "We need to bring in emergency field hospitals and all of the emergency pain medicines that will be needed. Added to that we need to support search and rescue operations … there is a very short window in which to save lives."

Celebrities have sought to join their voices to the appeals for assistance.

Sean (P Diddy) Combs posted a message to Twitter saying:

"God Bless Haiti!!!! God please!!!"

Followed by:

STATE OF EMERGENCY!!! RT PLEASE!!! ‎?Earthquake relief for Haiti please text YELE to 501501 to donate $5 or go to www.yele.org RT PLS!!!

Texting "HAITI" to "90999" to donate $10 to the Red Cross or "Yele" to 501501 to donate $5 to Yele Haiti are the top ways of contributing aid to the quake-stricken country, according to Chris Sacca’s blog post Six ways you can help in Haiti.

Yele Haiti is the aid orgnaisation founded by musician Wyclef Jean (@wyclef) to assist his country of origin.

Shortly after news of the quake broke, Wyclef issued an urgent appeal for help:

“Haiti today faced a natural disaster of unprecedented proportion, an earthquake unlike anything the country has ever experienced.

The magnitude 7.0 earthquake – and several very strong aftershocks – struck only 10 miles from Port-au-Prince.

I cannot stress enough what a human disaster this is, and idle hands will only make this tragedy worse. The over 2 million people in Port-au-Prince tonight face catastrophe alone. We must act now.

President Obama has already said that the U.S. stands ‘ready to assist’ the Haitian people. The U.S. Military is the only group trained and prepared to offer that assistance immediately. They must do so as soon as possible. The international community must also rise to the occasion and help the Haitian people in every way possible.”

Jen Corlew, the head of news for the UK-based charity Oxfam, told Al Jazeera from London that they too were launching an emergency appeal to get supplies in as quickly as possible.

(Updated with video)

The group has also been campaigning on Twittter and contributing to Haiti Quake Updates, a Posterous blog set up by "aid workers and journalists in Haiti".

To better track the developments on the ground, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has also partnered with Ushahidi, a crowd-sourced crisis reporting platform.

The tracking map can be updated by the public via sms, email, Twitter or via, and tracks emergency situations, threats, and responses.

The US State Department has also set up the following number for US citizens seeking information about family members in Haiti: 1-888-407-4747

This post was first published on Al Jazeera Blogs and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Steff Gaulter, Al Jazeera’s meteorologist, explains what made the Caribbean nation of Haiti so susceptible to such a devastating earthquake.

She says the problems are all due to where the Caribbean plate is situated.

Haiti sits on a faultline in the earth’s crust called the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden Fault.

At 4:53 pm local time, the Caribbean Plate slipped against  the North America plate, causing a massive tremor of 7.0 magnitude.

That was quickly followed by giant aftershocks – at least 28 of them so far.

It’s the worst earthquake to hit the island in more than 200 years.

The capital Port-au-Prince is only 15km from the epicentre of the quake. More than a million people live there, and it has been almost completely devastated according to witnesses.

The impact on the surface was apparently made much more intense, because the movement between the two plates happened only 10km below the surface.

This post was first published on Al Jazeera Blogs and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Heavy casualties are feared after numerous buildings were levelled by the 7.0 magnitude earthquake.

I’m keeping a live blog on the quake on Al Jazeera Blogs.

After Eid day, the pilgrims spend the final two or three days of Hajj at Mina – eating, sleeping and praying at its sprawling encampment site.

The camp comprises hundreds of thousands of semi-permanent fireproof tents built by Saudi authorities. You get a real sense of the scale of the camp when looking at it from above:

Despite the relative luxury of the Saudi-built facilities, which includes electricity and running water, many people still pitch their own tents while in Mina. As Reuters’ FaithWorld blog points out, this is often because they cannot afford to pay the rates of the Hajj trip groups that are allocated the space.

At Mina, the task at hand is pretty simple – stone the devil.

Three big columns – more like walls, really - represent the three spots where the devil appeared to Abraham to try to dissuade him from heeding God’s command.

So, for those three days, pilgrims throw stones at the pillars, in a symbolic rejection of temptation.

But with millions of people converging on the site of the pillars, called jamarat, it has become the most dangerous spot during Hajj. There is a very real risk of getting crushed by the crowd.

After the tragedy of 2006, in which hundreds of people died during a stampede, the Saudis have poured millions of dollars into expanding the Jamarat Bridge.

As it stands now, the bridge spans 5 floors, and is set to expand further.

This year there were no major incidents reported.

At the Hajj command and control center, Major General Khalid Fahad al-Shunaber, of Saudi Public Security, said that of the 1,800 security cameras installed across the pilgrimage sites to monitor the Hajj, more than 200 are located on the bridge.

Data from Public Security’s studies and statistics division showed 2.5 million people had entered the bridge on the first day of stoning.

I and several colleagues went out onto the bridge yesterday in the early afternoon, which would normally be peak stoning time, but we found the crowd to be quite manageable.

So perhaps they’ve got the crowding issue under control at the Jamarat Bridge. But there’s still much work to be done. I’m sure thousands of people, having completed their final stoning, are at this moment, stuck in gridlocked traffic on the road out of Mina.

We chose to head back to Mecca yesterday. Getting on the road at about 3pm, we lurched through traffic for about four-and-a-half hours before trekking the last half-hour by foot. It was only an eight kilometre trip.

Back at Mecca, the only thing left for pilgrims to do is perform a tawaf – walking around the Kaaba seven times. Then Hajj is complete.

This post was originally published on Al Jazeera Blogs, and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

The day of Arafat is one of the most important dates of the Muslim calendar, and a crucial part of Hajj. For us, the day began at 12:13am.

We set out from Mina just after midnight, hoping to avoid traffic congestion – most pilgrims only head for Arafat after dawn prayers. All the same, it took us three hours to travel 15km by bus, and many pilgrims had already arrived.

Where heavy rains had drenched so many pilgrims at Mina and led to the deaths of around 50 people in Jeddah, the weather in Arafat was sweltering by midday.

Lines of buses crowded the streets, whilst throngs of people flooded in between the cracks.

In an effort to ease the difficulties many pilgrims face, Saudi authorities have installed drinking fountains offering sterilised water, and sprinklers releasing mist into the air around the area of Mount Arafat.

Fruit vendors set up shop along Arafat’s streets, while many companies and private organisations distributed food as a goodwill gesture towards the pilgrims.

The atmosphere at Arafat was a mix between reverance and carnival. Rows of people prayed together, held their hands in the air asking God’s forgiveness, and chanted religious phrases. Elaborately decorated camels were situated near the plains of Arafat, paired with photographers wielding polaroid cameras, for that perfect hajj memorabilia.

Photographers deftly navigated the crags and outcroppings of Mount Arafat itself – also known as Jabal Rahman (Mountain of mercy) as well, to ply their tourist-savvy trade.

The crowd at Arafat was so thick, it became very easy to get separated from each other, or just lost. Both happened to us. But what else can be expected, with millions of people coming together in this small place.

Crowd control and traffic flow are obviously crucial to Saudi executing the annual pilgrimage without major incidents.

This year, Saudi banned the use of small vehicles for pilgrims, meaning anyone intending to do Hajj had to be aboard a group bus. By 2011, the kingdom plans to have finished a railway to link Mina, Arafat and Muzdalifah to Mecca. It estimates the rail provide transport quivalent to 53,000 vehicles.

The real test for crowd control, though, will be when pilgrims first symbolically stone the devil on Friday in Mina.

By sunset on Thursday, we and the millions of pilgrims had hit the road again, heading to Muzdalifah to spend the night. Tomorrow, the big Hajj day awaits.

This post was originally published on Al Jazeera Blogs

Mina, we have arrived! Hitting the road out of Mecca just before dawn was the plan, but organising a group big enough to fill a bus is not always the most efficient process, and we left several hours later than anticipated.

Despite an estimated 2.5 million people performing Hajj, we encountered rather light road traffic on the way.

Saudi Arabia has recently banned travelling to Mina by car, in an effort to prevent excessive road congestion. So for the Hujjaj (pilgrims), they must either get here by foot, or fill a group bus.

Eight kilometres, and less than an hour later, we were greeted by the sight of the sprawling tent city of Mina. Row upon row of white tents, punctuated by pockets of white-clad pilgrims.

Most Hajj pilgrims will have arrived in the country via Jeddah, and at least visited Mecca, but Mina (number 2 on the below map) is when and where it all kicks off. Its a steep, uphill climb from here, figuratively speaking.

Pilgrims will spend this day completing their five daily prayers in Mina, before heading to Arafat on Thursday morning.

A lot of time and effort has been put into preparing for this day – both by Saudi authorities and by those who’ve journeyed to Saudi for Hajj.

Mobily, Saudi’s second telecommunications company, has pledged to provide free Wi-Fi at the sacred site of Mina, Arafat and Muzdalifah; likey to be welcome news for those relying on their iPhones for Hajj guidance.

To safeguard against fears of an H1N1 outbreak, 20,000 health workers have been deployed, 1.5 million swine flu vaccines purchased for the country’s residents, and 600,000 face masks handed out in Mecca (no one gave me one).

To make sure no serious disruptions – violent or otherwise – occur during the pilgrimage, Saudi is also deploying some 100,000 security and emergency response personnel.

In Mecca the night before, you could feel the anxiety and anticipation hanging thick in the air. Throngs out on the streets doing some last minute shopping, or making final prayers.

Al-Rajhi Bank, across from the Grand Mosque, was doing swift sales of sacrifice coupons – pre-purchased vouchers to have government-organised butchers slaughter animals in their name on Eid day, as part of the Hajj rituals.

The cost of the coupons this year, as set by The Saudi Project for Utilization of Hajj Meat, is 430 Saudi riyals ($115), broken down into 334 riyals for the average price of a sheep, 88 riyal for slaughtering services and distribution, and 8 riyals for transportation and distribution.

But the demands of the Hajj are not just physical or financial.

One Hajji (pilgrim) I spoke with, said that for him, getting to Mecca was the easy part. And he wasn’t worried at all about getting swine flu (he got the vaccine in Australia).

"If it’s going to happen, [there's] nothing you can do about it. Besides, you’re [already] in the best place."

Majid Kanj’s main concern is, however, being able to maintain patience throughout the journey – a battle we are quickly losing to these Mina flies.

This post was originally published on Al Jazeera Blogs

If you find it all confusing, or perhaps just want to understand it better, check out the explainer The rites of Hajj – A look at the rituals Muslims perform during the annual pilgrimage.