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It is not only our documentary film maker
Sabiha Sumar who was lucky to attend a Dinner with her President, Pakistan's leader General Musharraf:

Some journalists had the opportunity to have supper alongside Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in New York last week. Among them was Richard Stengel reporting for Time magazine about his Dinner with Ahmadinejad:

Follow these brave bloggers and read about the reaction of the military regime in Burma at Times online:

"Armed with small digital cameras, they have documented the spectacular growth of the demonstrations from crowds of a few hundred to as many as 100,000. On weblogs they have recorded in words and pictures the regime’s bloody crackdown, in a city where only a handful of foreign journalists work undercover. With downloaded software, they have dodged and weaved around the regime’s increasingly desperate attempts to thwart their work. Now the bloggers, too, have been crushed. Having failed to stop the cyber-dissidents broadcasting to the world, the authorities have simply switched off the internet.

Now Ko Latt and his blogging comrades have abandoned their keyboards and gone underground, sleeping in a different place every night, watching and waiting to see if the democracy movement has been truly crushed or is simply on hold. “When things were hot on the streets, we were not the main worry,” Ko Latt says. “But as the situation cools down, they will follow us. They know who we are, they know we are bloggers, and I am afraid.”"

Follow Burmese bloggers and their resistance in Ko Htike's blog as well as on Burmese Bloggers without Borders.

(Picture taken by racoles.)

As the Why Democracy? project has progressed, it's got me thinking about how loosely we have used the term "democracy" on so many occasions. Is it the end product? Is it a fantasy? Is it merely a stepping stone to better governance and civic engagement?

My disillusionment with so many things happening in South Africa at the moment makes me wonder about how the people who fought so hard for a democratic society would feel about the crises we face today.

In Egypt (site of the Why Democracy? film Egypt: We Are Watching You), where 11 journalists were sentenced to prison terms last month, Ibrahim Issa, editor of Al-Dustour and a high-profile critic of President Hosni Mubarak, is now headed to trial.

Press freedom exists to about the same extent in Egypt as democracy, i.e., both flourish only in the propaganda of the government. Elsewhere, blogger and journalist Hossam al-Hamalawy reports that a cleric is backing a judge's attempt to have the government ban 51 blogs and websites (including al-Hamalawy's). And Nora Younis writes of another blogger, just released from prison, who has revealed the name of the security officer who he says tortured him.

Al-Hamalawy's blog gives a great inside view of Egypt's political turmoil and the struggle against the Mubarak regime. In other posts he details the ongoing government crackdown on student groups, the massive coordinated strikes now taking place and international solidarity movements.