By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Dec 14 2015 (IPS)

When, in June 2006, former US National Security adviser and, later on, Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, spelled out the George W. Bush administration new, magic doctrine for the Middle East, tons of ink was poured and millions of words said in a harsh attempt to speculate with what she really did mean by what she called “Creative Chaos.”

Baher Kamal

Most Middle East analysts concluded then that the new doctrine would lead to or build upon a new wave of conflicts and violence in the region.

Whether they were right or not, this is at least what has been happening. No Need to recall what is now going on in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya and even Tunisia and Egypt-–the so-called “Arab Spring” countries.

Now another U.S. neo-liberal, neo-conservative Republican “hawk,” John R. Bolton, has just come out with a new vision that might explain the rational behind that “Creative Chaos” doctrine.

“Create a New State”

In his recent article in the New York Times, published on 25 November 2015 under the eloquent header “To Defeat ISIS, Create a Sunni State” this scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and former US ambassador to the United Nations (August 2005 to December 2006), poses this question: “What comes after the Islamic State?”
Bolton then explains that “Before transforming Mr. Obama’s ineffective efforts into a vigorous military campaign to destroy the Islamic State, we need a clear view, shared with NATO allies and others, about what will replace it. It is critical to resolve this issue before considering any operational plans…”

Iraq and Syria Are Gone!

According to Bolton -who could hold a key post in the US coming administration should a Republican like Donald Trump be elected- “Today’s reality is that Iraq and Syria as we have known them are gone…”

He then says that defeating the Islamic State means restoring to power President Bashar Assad in Syria and Iran’s puppets in Iraq, and “that outcome is neither feasible nor desirable… Rather than striving to recreate the post-World War I map, Washington should recognize the new geopolitics.”

“The best alternative to the Islamic State in northeastern Syria and western Iraq is a new, independent Sunni state.”

An Oil Producer “Sunni-stan”

Bolton explains further: This “Sunni-stan” has economic potential as an oil producer (subject to negotiation with the Kurds, to be sure), and could be a bulwark against both Mr. Assad and Iran-allied Baghdad. The rulers of the Arab Gulf states, who should by now have learned the risk to their own security of funding Islamist extremism, could provide significant financing. And Turkey — still a NATO ally, don’t forget — would enjoy greater stability on its southern border, making the existence of a new state at least tolerable.”

He believes that the Arab monarchies like Saudi Arabia “must not only fund much of the new state’s early needs, but also ensure its stability and resistance to radical forces. Once, we might have declared a Jordanian “protectorate” in an American “sphere of influence” for now, a new state will do.”

Bolton’s visionary plan for the new Middle East would then explain what has been behind the “Creative Chaos” doctrine. And it would clearly revamp the nearly 100-year-old Sykes-Picot map (link to Middle East Part II – 99.5 Years of (Imposed) Solitude https://www.ipsnews.net/2015/12/middle-east-part-ii-99-5-years-of-imposed-solitude/.

Such vision would be just another step on the successive US-West roadmaps for the region. In fact, in addition to the “Creative Chaos” doctrine, the George W. Bush second term administration came out with a new name for the region: the “Greater Middle East,” which would include Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkey, Cyprus, Somalia, and eventually also Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

The Middle East Is “Served”, the “Creative Chaos” Has Worked

The “Creative Chaos” has turned to be a reality. The whole region has been boiling specially over the last five years. Violence, death and terrorism have been rapidly growing everywhere: Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, even in Tunisia. Tensions between Arabian Peninsula kingdoms and principalities and Iran,all of them oil producers, have been ramping.

Mercenary groups, under a more than doubtful religious flag have been gradually dominating the region and tragically though sporadically also some Western countries.

In short, the scenario could not be more “chaotic”. The new Middle East has been served.

The Doors of Hell Are All Open

Though Bolton’s vision should not be taken for “biblical,” things could well go in that direction.

For now, (Shii-ruled) Iraq has warned (Sunni) Turkey against deploying its troops in the DAESH-controlled Mosul area; Washington paves the ground for further military actions in conjunction with the axis Paris-London; (Sunni Wahhabi Saudi Arabia works intensively with (Sunni) Egypt for setting up a joint Army/military intervention force to fight terrorism, and (Shii) Iran warns that any attempt to remove Assad in (Alaui) Syria is a “red line”, etc.

One last question, for now: where would DAESH go once it has been militarily defeated? Libya would appear to be the next DAESH stronghold. After all, this country lacks stability, is full of weapons (up to 25 million arms) out of the government’s control, it is a big oil producer, and DAESH has an active operational branch there.

And, should this be the case, would DAESH further expand its deadly operations from Libya to neighbouring countries like Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco, in addition to some Africans countries in conjunction with Nigerian Boko-Haram?

(End)

Excerpt:

Moroccan security forces charge against a group of Sahrawi women in Laayoune, occupied Western Sahara. Credit: Courtesy of Equipe Media

By Karlos Zurutuza
LAAYOUNE, Occupied Western Sahara, Aug 23 2015 (IPS)

Ahmed Ettanji is looking for a flat in downtown Laayoune, a city 1,100 km south of Rabat. He only wants it for one day but it must have a rooftop terrace overlooking the square that will host the next pro-Sahrawi demonstration.

“Rooftop terraces are essential for us as they are the only places from which we can get a graphic testimony of the brutality we suffer from the Moroccan police,” Ettanji told IPS. This 26-year-old is one the leaders of the Equipe Media, a group of Sahrawi volunteers struggling to break the media blackout enforced by Rabat over the territory.

Ahmed Ettanji and a fellow Equipe Media activist edit video taken at a pro-independence demonstration in Laayoune, occupied Western Sahara. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

“There are no news agencies based here and foreign journalists are denied access, and even deported if caught inside,” stressed Ettanji.

Spanish journalist Luís de Vega is one of several foreign journalists who can confirm the activist´s claim – he was expelled in 2010 after spending eight years based in Rabat and declared persona non grata by the Moroccan authorities.

“The Western Sahara issue is among the most sensitive issues for journalists in Morocco. Those of us who dare to tackle it inevitably face the consequences,” de Vega told IPS over the phone, adding that he was “fully convinced” that his was an exemplary punishment because he was the foreign correspondent who had spent more time in Morocco.

“The Western Sahara issue is among the most sensitive issues for journalists in Morocco. Those of us who dare to tackle it inevitably face the consequences” – Spanish journalist Luís de Vega
This year will mark four decades since this territory the size of Britain was annexed by Morocco after Spain pulled out from its last colony of Western Sahara.

Since the ceasefire signed in 1991 between Morocco and the Polisario Front – the authority that the United Nations recognises as a legitimate representative of the Sahrawi people – Rabat has controlled almost the whole territory, including the entire Atlantic coast. The United Nations still labels Western Sahara as a “territory under an unfinished process of decolonisation”.

Mohamed Mayara, also a member of Equipe Media, is helping Ettanji to find the rooftop terrace. Like most his colleagues, he acknowledges having been arrested and tortured several times. The constant harassment, however, has not prevented him from working enthusiastically, although he admits that there are other limitations than those dealing with any underground activity:

“We set up the first group in 2009 but a majority of us are working on pure instinct. We have no training in media so we are learning journalism on the spot,” said Mayara, a Sahrawi born in the year of the invasion who writes reports and press releases in English and French. His father disappeared in the hands of the Moroccan army two months after he was born, and he says he has known nothing about him ever since.

Sustained crackdown

Today the majority of the Sahrawis live in the refugee camps in Tindouf, in Western Algeria. The members of Equipe Media say they have a “fluid communication” with the Polisario authorities based there. Other than sharing all the material they gather, they also work side by side with Hayat Khatari, the only reporter currently working openly for SADR TV. SADR stands for ‘Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic’.

Hayat Khatari, the only reporter currently working openly for SADR TV in Laayoune. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

Khatari, a 24-year-old journalist, recalls that she started working in 2010, after the Gdeim Izzik protest camp incidents in Laayoune. Originally a peaceful protest camp, Gdeim Izzik resulted in riots that spread to other Sahrawi cities when it was forcefully dismantled after 28 days on Nov. 8.

Western analysts such as Noam Chomsky have argued that the so-called “Arab Spring” did not start in Tunisia as is commonly argued, but rather in Laayoune.

“We have to work really hard and risk a lot to be able to counterbalance the propaganda spread by Rabat about everything happening here,” Khatari told IPS. The young activist added that she was last arrested in December 2014 for covering a pro-independence demonstration in June 2014. Unlike Mahmood al Lhaissan, her predecessor in SADR TV, Khatari was released after a few days in prison.

In a report released in March, Reporters Without Borders records al Lhaissan´s case. The activist was released provisionally on Feb. 25, eight months after his arrest in Laayoune, but he is still facing trial on charges of participating in an “armed gathering,” obstructing a public thoroughfare, attacking officials while they were on duty, and damaging public property.

In the same report, Reporters Without Borders also denounces the deportation in February of French journalists Jean-Louis Perez and Pierre Chautard, who were reporting for France 3 on the economic and social situation in Morocco.

Before seizing their video recordings and putting them on a flight to Paris, the authorities arrested them at the headquarters of Moroccan Association of Human Rights (AMDH), one of the country’s leading human rights NGOs, which the interior ministry has accused of “undermining the actions of the security forces”.

Likewise, other major organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have repeatedly denounced human rights abuses suffered by the Sahrawi people at the hands of Morocco over the last decades.

Despite several phone calls and e-mails, the Moroccan authorities did not respond to IPS’s requests for comments on these and other human rights violations allegedly committed in Western Sahara.

Back in downtown Laayoune, Equipe Media activists seemed to have found what they were looking for. The owner of the central apartment is a Sahrawi family. It could have not been otherwise.

“We would never ask a Moroccan such a thing,” said Ettanji from the rooftop terrace overlooking the spot where the upcoming protest would take place.

Edited by Phil Harris   

By Mandeep S.Tiwana
JOHANNESBURG, Jun 10 2015 (IPS)

Whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are hounded – not by autocratic but by democratic governments – for revealing the truth about grave human rights violations. Nobel peace prize winner, writer and political activist Liu Xiaobo  is currently languishing in a Chinese prison while the killing of Egyptian protestor, poet and mother Shaimaa al-Sabbagh, apparently by a masked policeman, in January this year continues to haunt us. 

CIVICUS, the global civil society alliance, has documented serious abuses of civic freedoms in 96 countries in 2014 alone. The annual report of the international advocacy group, Human Rights Watch, laments that the once-heralded Arab Spring has given way almost everywhere to conflict and repression while Amnesty International’s Annual Report 2014/2015 calls it a devastating year for those seeking to stand up for human rights.

Mandeep S. Tiwana

In recent years, there has been a perceptible rise in restrictions on civic space – the fundamental freedoms of expression, association and peaceful assembly. While the reasons for the eruption of repressive laws and attacks on dissenters vary, negative effects are being felt in both democracies and authoritarian states.

It is increasingly evident that the dangers to civic freedoms come not just from state apparatuses but also from powerful non-state actors including influential business entities and extremist groups subscribing to fundamentalist ideologies. This begs a deeper analysis into the extent and causes of this pervasive problem.

In several countries, laws continue to be drawn up to restrict civic freedoms. They include anti-terror laws that limit freedom of speech, public order laws that limit the right to protest peacefully, laws that stigmatise civil society groups through derogatory names such as ‘foreign agents’, laws that create bureaucratic hurdles to receive crucial funding from international philanthropic institutions as well as laws that prevent progressive civil society organisations from protecting the rights of marginalised minorities such as the LGBTI community.

In this situation, it is indeed possible to identify four key drivers of the pervasive assault on civic space. The first is the global democratic deficit.  Freedom House, which documents the state of democratic rights around the world, has reported declines in civil liberties and political freedoms for the ninth consecutive year in 2015.

In too many countries, peaceful activists exposing corruption and rights violations are being stigmatised as ‘national security threats’, and subjected to politically motivated trials, arbitrary detentions and worse. There appears to be no let up in official censorship and repression of active citizens in authoritarian states like China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Vietnam.“It is increasingly evident that the dangers to civic freedoms come not just from state apparatuses but also from powerful non-state actors including influential business entities and extremist groups subscribing to fundamentalist ideologies”

Freedom of assembly is virtually non-existent in such contexts, and activists are often forced to engage online. But when they do so, they are demonised as being agents of Western security agencies.

Ironically, excessive surveillance and/or hounding of whistle-blowers by countries such as Australia, France, the United Kingdom and United States – whose foreign policies are supposed to promote democratic rights – are contributing to a global climate where close monitoring of anyone suspected of harbouring dissenting views is becoming an accepted norm.

The second driver – and linked to the global democratic deficit – is the worldwide obsession with state security and countering of ‘terrorism’ by all actors except the state. The decline in civic space began after the attack on the World Trade Centre in September 2001 when several established democracies introduced a slew of counter-terror measures weakening human rights safeguards in the name of protecting national security.

The situation worsened after the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 as authoritarian leaders witnessed the fall of long-standing dictators in Egypt and Tunisia following widespread citizen protests. The possibility of people’s power being able to overturn entrenched political systems has made authoritarian regimes extremely fearful of the free exercise of civic freedoms by citizens.

This has led to a severe push back against civil society by a number of repressive regimes in the Middle East and North Africa. Governments in Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have stepped up their efforts to prevent public demonstrations and the activities of human rights groups.

Similar reverberations have also been felt in sub-Saharan African countries with long-standing authoritarian leaders and totalitarian political parties. Thus repression of civic freedoms appears to have intensified in countries such as Angola, Burundi, Ethiopia, Gambia, Rwanda, Sudan, Swaziland and Zimbabwe.

Activists and civil society groups in many countries in Central Asia and Eastern Europe where democracy remains fragile or non-existent such as Azerbaijan, Belarus, Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are also feeling the heat following governments’ reactions to scuttle demands for political reform.

In South-East Asia too, in countries such as Cambodia and Malaysia which have a history of repressive government and in Thailand where the military seized power through a recent coup, new ‘security’ measures continue to be implemented to restrict civic freedoms.

The third major driver of closing civic space is the rampant collusion and indeed capture of power and resources in most countries by a handful of interconnected political and economic elites.

Oxfam International projects that the richest one percent will own more wealth than 99 percent of the globe’s population by 2016.  Thus civil society groups exposing corruption and/or environmental degradation by politically well-connected businesses are extremely vulnerable to persecution due to the tight overlap and cosy relationships among elites.

With market fundamentalism and the neo-liberal economic discourse firmly entrenched in a number of democracies, labour, land and environmental rights activists are facing heightened challenges.

At least 29 environmental activists were reported murdered in Brazil in 2014. Canada’s centre-right government has been closely monitoring and intimidating indigenous peoples’ rights activists opposing large commercial projects in ecologically fragile areas. India’s prime minister recently urged judges to be wary of “five-star activists“ even as the efforts of Greenpeace India to protect forests from the activities of extractive industries have led it to be subjected to various forms of bureaucratic harassment including arbitrary freezing of its bank accounts.

The fourth and emerging threat to civic space comes from the disturbance caused by religious fundamentalist and evangelist groups seeking to upend the collective progress made by civil society in advancing the human rights discourse.

Failure of the international community to prevent violent conflict and address serious human rights abuses by states such as Israel and Syria is providing a fertile breeding ground for religious extremists whose ideology is deeply inimical to the existence of a vibrant and empowered civil society. 

Besides, religious fundamentalists are able to operate more freely in conflicted and politically fragile environments whose number appears to be rising, thereby exacerbating the situation for civil society organisations and activists seeking to promote equality, peace and tolerance.

Current threats to civic space and civil society activities are a symptom of the highly charged and polarised state of international affairs. The solutions to the grave and interconnected economic, ecological and humanitarian crises currently facing humanity will eventually have to come from civil society through a reassertion of its own value even as political leaders continue to undermine collective efforts.

Beginning a series of conversations on how to respond to common threats at the national, regional and international levels is critical. Establishment of solidarity protocols within civil society could be an effective way to coalesce around both individual cases of harassment as well as systemic threats such as limiting legislation or policies.

Further, the international legal framework that protects civic space needs to be strengthened. The International Bill of Rights comprising the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) leaves scope for subjective interpretation of some aspects of civic freedoms.

It is perhaps time to examine the possibility of a comprehensive legally binding convention on civic space that better articulates the extent and scope of civic space, so essential to an empowered civil society.  However, laws are only as good as the commitment of those charged with overseeing their implementation.

Importantly and urgently, to reverse the global onslaught on civic space and human rights, we need visionary political leadership willing to take risks and lead by example.

Over the last few years, analysts have noted with horror the steady dismantling of hard won gains on civic freedoms. Many thought things could get no worse. … but they did.

It is time to start thinking seriously about stemming the tide before we reach the point of no return. Ending the persecution of Assange, Snowden and Liu Xiaobo could be a good start for preventing precious lives such as Shaimaa’s from being lost.

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Prem Shankar Jha
NEW DELHI, May 10 2015 (IPS)

President Barack Obama’s Nowroz greeting to the Iranian people earlier this year was the first clear indication to the world that the United States and Iran were very close to agreement on the contents of the nuclear agreement they had been working towards for the previous 16 months.

In contrast to two earlier messages which were barely veiled exhortations to Iranians to stand up to their obscurantist leaders, Obama urged “the peoples and the leaders of Iran” to avail themselves of “the best opportunity in decades to pursue a different relationship between our countries.”

Prem Shankar Jha

This moment, he warned, “may not come again soon (for) there are people in both our countries and beyond, who oppose a diplomatic solution.”

Barely a fortnight later that deal was done. Iran had agreed to a more than two-thirds reduction in the number of centrifuges it would keep, although a question mark still hung over the timing of the lifting of sanctions against it. The agreement came in the teeth of opposition from hardliners in both Iran and the United States.

Looking back at Obama’s unprecedented overtures to Iran, his direct phone call to President Hassan Rouhani – the first of its kind in 30 years – and his letter to Ayatollah Khamenei in November last year, it is clear in retrospect that they were products of  a rare meeting of minds between him and  Rouhani and their foreign ministers John Kerry and Muhammad Jawad Zarif that may have occurred as early as  their first meetings in September 2013.

The opposition to the deal within the United States proved a far harder obstacle for Obama to surmount. The reason is the dogged and increasingly naked opposition of Israel and the immense influence of the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) on U.S. policymakers and public opinion.

Both of these were laid bare came when the Republican party created constitutional history by inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address  a joint session of Congress  without informing the White House, listened raptly to his diatribe against Obama, and sent a deliberately insulting letter to Ayatollah Khamenei in a bid to scuttle the talks.

Obama has ploughed on in the teeth of this formidable, highly personalised, attack on him  because he has learnt from the bitter experience of the past four years what Harvard professors John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt had exposed in their path-breaking  book, ‘The Israel lobby and American Foreign Policy’ in 2006.“Quietly, and utterly alone, Obama decided to reverse the drift, return to diplomacy as the first weapon for increasing national security and returning force to where it had belonged in the previous three centuries, as a weapon of last resort”

This was the utter disregard for America’s national interest and security with which Israel had been manipulating American public opinion, the U.S. Congress and successive U.S. administrations, in pursuit of its own security, since the end of the Cold War.

By the end of 2012, two years into the so-called “Arab Spring”, Obama had also discovered how cynically Turkey and the Wahhabi-Sunni sheikhdoms had manipulated the United States into joining a sectarian vendetta against Syria, and created and armed a Jihadi army whose ultimate target was the West itself.

Nine months later, he found out how Israel had abused the trust the United States reposed in it, and come within a hairsbreadth of pushing it into an attack on Syria that was even less justifiable than then U.S. President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.  And then the murderous eruption of the Islamic State (ISIS) showed him that the Jihadis were out of control.

Somewhere along this trail of betrayal and disillusionment, Obama experienced the political equivalent of an epiphany.

Twelve years of a U.S. national security strategy that relied on the pre-emptive use of force had  yielded war without end, a string of strategic defeats, a  mauled and traumatised army, mounting international debt and a collapsing hegemony reflected in the impunity with which the so-called friends of the United States were using it to serve their ends.

Quietly, and utterly alone, Obama decided to reverse the drift, return to diplomacy as the first weapon for increasing national security and returning force to where it had belonged in the previous three centuries, as a weapon of last resort. His meeting and discussions with Rouhani and Iranian foreign minister Zarif gave him the opportunity to begin this epic change of direction.

Obama faced his first moment of truth on Nov. 28, 2012 when a Jabhat al Nusra unit north of Aleppo brought down a Syrian army helicopter with a Russian man-portable surface-to-air missile (SAM).

The White House tried to  pretend that that the missile was from a captured Syrian air base, but by then U.S. intelligence agencies were fed up with its suppression and distortion of their intelligence and  leaked it to the Washington Post that 40 SAM missile batteries with launchers, along with hundreds of tonnes of other heavy weapons had been bought from Libya, paid for by Qatar, and transported to the rebels in Syria  by Turkey through a ‘rat line’ that the CIA had helped it to establish, to funnel arms and mercenaries into Syria.

A day that Obama had been dreading had finally arrived: heavy weapons that the United States and the European Union had expressly proscribed, because they could bring down civilian aircraft anywhere in the world, had finally reached Al Qaeda’s hands

But when Obama promptly banned the Jabhat Al Nusra, he got his second shock. At the next ‘Friends of Syria’ meeting in Marrakesh three weeks later, not only the   ‘moderate’ Syrian rebels that the United States had grouped under a newly-formed Syrian Military Council three months earlier, but all of its Sunni Muslim allies condemned the ban, while Britain and France remained silent.

Obama’s third, and worst, moment of truth came nine months later when a relentless campaign by  his closest ‘allies‘, Turkey and Israel, brought him to the verge of launching an all-out aerial attack  on Syria in September 2013 to punish it for “using gas on rebels and civilians in the Ghouta suburb of Damascus.”

Obama learned that Syria had done no such thing only two days before the attack was to commence, when the British informed him that soil samples collected from the site of the Ghouta attack and analysed at their CBW research laboratories at Porton Down, had shown that the sarin gas used in the attack could not possibly have been prepared by the Syrian army.

This was because the British had the complete list of suppliers from which Syria had received its precursor chemicals and these did not match the chemicals used in the sarin gas found in the Ghouta.

Had he gone through with the attack, it would have made Obama ten times worse than George Bush in history’s eyes.

Hindsight allows us to reconstruct how the conviction that Syria was using chemical weapons was implanted into policy-makers in the United States and the European Union.

On Sep. 17, 2012, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that the highly-reputed German magazine Der Speigel, had learned, “quoting several eyewitnesses”, that Syria had tested delivery systems for chemical warheads   at a chemical weapons research centre near Aleppo in August, and that the tests had been overseen by Iranian experts.

Tanks and aircraft, Der Speigel reported, had fired “five or six empty shells capable of delivering poison gas.”

Since neither Der Speigel nor any other Western newspaper had, or still has, resident correspondents in Syria, it could only have obtained this report second or third-hand through a local stringer. This, and the wealth of detail in the report, suggests that the story of a test firing, while not necessarily untrue, was a plant by an intelligence agency. It therefore had to be taken with a large pinch of salt.

One person who not only chose to believe it instantly, but also to act on it was Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. On Dec. 3, 2012, Haaretz reported that he had sent emissaries to Amman twice, in October and November, to request Jordan’s permission to overfly its territory to bomb Syria’s chemical weapons facilities.

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service.

* The second part of this two-part analysis can be accessed here.

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Apr 27 2015 (IPS)

The results of a survey of what 3,500 young people between the ages of 18 and 24 – in all Arab countries except Syria – feel about the current situation in the Middle East and North Africa have just been released.

The report of the survey, which was carried out by international polling firm Penn Schoen Berland (PBS), is not a minority report given that 60 percent of the population of the Arab population is under the age of 25, which means 200 million people. Well, the outcome of the survey is that the large majority of them have no trust in democracy.

Roberto Savio

The word democracy does not exist in Arabic, being a concept totally alien to the era in which Muhammad created Islam. However, it is worth noting that the concept of democracy as it is known today is also relatively recent in the West, and we have to wait from its origins in the Greek era for it to make a comeback at the time of the French Revolution.

It became an accepted value just after the end of the Second World War, and the end of the Soviet, Nazi and Japanese regimes.

As a matter of fact, it is still not a reality in large parts of Asia (just think of China and North Korea) and Africa.

Then we have governments, as in Hungary where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is openly preaching a style of governance à la Russian President Vladimir Putin, followed by several of his esteemers, including the National Front party in France, and the Northern League in Italy. But few have such a negative view of democracy as young Arabs.After the Arab Spring revolutions in 2012, a massive 72 percent of young Arabs believed that the Arab world had improved. The figure dropped to 70 percent in 2013, then 54 percent in 2014, and now it stands at just 38 percent

After the Arab Spring revolutions in 2012, a massive 72 percent of young Arabs believed that the Arab world had improved. The figure dropped to 70 percent in 2013, then 54 percent in 2014, and now it stands at just 38 percent.

According to the survey, 39 percent of young Arabs agreed with the statement “democracy will never work in the region”, 36 percent thought it would work, while the remaining 25 percent expressed many doubts.

It is clear that the Arab Spring has been betrayed by the return of the army to power as in Egypt, or by the clinging of the old guard to power regardless of the costs, like Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

If you add to this the fact that 41 percent of young Arabs are unemployed (out of a total unemployment figure of 25 percent), and of those 31 percent have completed higher education and 17 percent have graduated from university, it is not difficult to understand that frustration and pessimism are running high among Arab youth.

It also contributes to explaining why so many young people feel attracted to the Islamic State (ISIS) which wants to topple all Arab governments, defined as corrupt and allied to the decadent West, and create a Caliphate as in Muhammad’s times, where wealth will be distributed among all, the dignity of Islam will be enhanced, and a world of purity and vision will substitute the materialistic one of today.

This is why ISIS is attracting youth from all over. Besides, according to experts, for the terrorist to have a geographical space and run it  as a state, where hospitals and schools function and there is a daily life to prove that the dream is possible, represents a great difference with previous terrorist movements like Al-Qaeda, which could only destroy, not really build.

But the survey also reveals something extremely important. To the question “which is the biggest obstacle for the Arab world?”, 37 percent indicated the expansion of ISIS and 32 percent the threat of terrorism. The problem of unemployment was mentioned by 29 percent and that of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by 23 percent.

It is worth noting that the threat of a nuclear Iran was mentioned by only 8 percent (contrary to the declarations of Arab governments), while 17 percent consider that the real problem is the lack of political leaders, while only 15 percent denounce the lack of democracy.

It is important to note that no interviews were carried out in Iran, which is not an Arab country but is a Muslim country. However Iranian Muslims are Shiites and not Sunnis, as in all Arab countries, except for Iraq and Bahrein, and perhaps Yemen, where Shiites are a majority. Of the world’s total Islamic population of 1.6 billion people, Shiites make up only 10 percent.

It is within Sunnite Islam that a dramatic conflict is going on, where Wahabism, a Sunni school born in Saudi Arabia and the official religion of the Saudi reigning house, has now split into those who want to return to the purity of the early times and those are considered “petrowahabists” because they have been corrupted by the wealth created by petrol (they are also called sheikh wahabists because they accept government by sheikhs).

Saudi Arabia has been spending an average of 3 billion dollars a year to promote Wahabism. It has built over 1,500 mosques throughout the world, where radical preachers have been asking the faithful to go back to the real and uncorrupted Islam.

It was with Osama Bin Laden that the Wahabist movement escaped from the control of Saudi Arabia, very much like the radical Hamas movement, originally supported by Israel to weaken the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and Yasser Arafat, turned against the Israeli state. It is not possible to ride radicalism.

The survey also reveals that young Sunnis see ISIS and terrorism as their main threat, but we are talking here of a poll which should represent 200 million people between the ages of 18 and 25. Even if just one percent of them were to succumb to the call of the jihad, we are talking of a potential two million people … and this is now being felt acutely.

The polarisation inside Sunni society (Shiites are not part of that – there are no Shiite terrorists) is felt as the most important problem for the future.

In Europe and the United States, this should be the clearest of examples that ISIS and terrorism are first and foremost an internal problem of Islam and that to intervene in that problem will only unify the Arab world against the invader. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

President Barack Obama speaks at Cairo University in Cairo, Egypt, Thursday, Jun. 4, 2009. In his speech, President Obama called for a 'new beginning between the United States and Muslims', declaring that 'this cycle of suspicion and discord must end'. Credit: White House photo

By Emile Nakhleh
WASHINGTON, Jan 6 2015 (IPS)

This year, Arab political Islam will be greatly influenced by U.S. regional policy, as it has been since the Obama administration came into office six years ago. Indeed, as the U.S. standing in the region rose with Obama’s presidency beginning in January 2009, so did the fortunes of Arab political Islam.

But when Arab autocrats perceived U.S. regional policy to have floundered and Washington’s leverage to have diminished, they proceeded to repress domestic Islamic political parties with impunity, American protestations notwithstanding.Coddling autocrats is a short-term strategy that will not succeed in the long run. The longer the cozy relationship lasts, the more Muslims will revert to the earlier belief that America’s war on terrorism is a war on Islam.

This policy linkage, expected to prevail in the coming year, will not bode well for political Islam. Like last year, the U.S. will in 2015 pay more attention to securing Arab autocrats’ support in the fight against Islamic State forces than to the mistreatment of mainstream Islamic political parties and movements, which will have severe consequences in the long run.

Since the middle of 2013, the Obama administration’s focus on the tactical need to woo dictators in the fight against terrorist groups has trumped its commitment to the engagement objective. America’s growing support for Arab dictators meant that Arab political Islam would be sacrificed.

For example, Washington seems oblivious to the thousands of mainstream Islamists and other opposition activists languishing in Egyptian jails.

What is political Islam?

Several assumptions underpin this judgment. First, “political Islam” applies to mainstream Islamic political parties and movements, which have rejected violence and made a strategic shift toward participatory and coalition politics through free elections.

Arab political Islam generally includes the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan, Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, al-Nahda in Tunisia, and al-Wefaq in Bahrain.

The term “political Islam” does not include radical and terrorist groups such as the Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL or IS), al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Iraq, and Syria, or armed opposition groups in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya. Nor does it apply to terrorist groups in Africa such as Boko Haram, al-Shabab, and others.

Unfortunately, in the past three years, many policy makers in the West, and curiously in several Arab countries, have equated mainstream political Islam with radical and terrorist groups. This erroneous and self-serving linkage has provided Washington with a fig leaf to justify its cozy relations with Arab autocrats and tolerance of their bloody repression of their citizens.

Repression breeds radicalism

It has also given these autocrats an excuse to suppress their Islamic parties and exclude them from the political process. In a press interview late last month, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi forcefully denounced the Muslim Brotherhood and pledged the movement would not enter the Egyptian parliament.

Egypt’s recent terrorism laws, which Sisi and other Arab autocrats have approved, provide them with a pseudo-legal cover to silence the opposition, including mainstream political Islam.

They have used the expansive and vague definitions of terrorism included in these decrees to incarcerate any person or group that is “harmful to national unity.” Any criticism of the regime or the ruler is now viewed as a “terrorist” act, punishable by lengthy imprisonment.

The Dec. 28 arrest of the Bahraini Sheikh Ali Salman, Secretary General of al-Wefaq, is yet another example of draconian measures against peaceful mainstream opposition leaders and parties in the region. Regime repression of these groups is expected to prevail in 2015.

Second, whereas terrorist organisations are a threat to the region and to Western countries, including mainstream political Islam in the governance of their countries in the long run is good for domestic stability and regional security. It also serves the interests of Western powers in the region.

Recent history tells U.S. that exclusion and repression often lead to radicalisation.  Some youth in these parties have given up on participatory politics in favour of confrontational politics and violence. This phenomenon is expected to increase in 2015, as suppression of political Islam becomes more pervasive and institutionalised.

Third, the serious mistakes the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Nahda made in their first time ever as governing parties should not be surprising since they lacked the experience of governance. Such poor performance, however, is not unique to them.  Nor should it be used as an excuse to depose them illegally and to void the democratic process, as the Sisi-led military coup did in Egypt in 2013.

Although Islamic political parties tend to win the first election after the toppling of dictators, the litmus test of their popular support lies in succeeding elections. The recent post-Arab Spring election in Tunisia is a case in point.

When Arab citizens are provided with the opportunity to participate in fair and free elections, they are capable of electing the party that best serves their interests, regardless of whether the party is Islamic or secular.

Had Field Marshall Sisi in 2013 allowed the Muslim Brotherhood and President Mohammed Morsi to stay in power until the following election, they would have been voted out, according to public opinion polls at the time.

But Sisi and his military junta were not truly committed to a genuine democratic transition in Egypt. Now, according to Human Rights Watch reports, the current state of human rights in Egypt is much worse than it was under former President Hosni Mubarak.

The U.S. and Political Islam

Upon taking office, President Obama understood that disagreements between the United States and the Muslim world, especially political Islam, were driven by specific policies, not values of good governance. A key factor driving these disagreements was the widely held Muslim perception that America’s war on terror was a war on Islam.

The Obama administration also realised that while a very small percentage of Muslims engaged in violence and terrorism, the United States must find ways to engage the other 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide. That drove President Obama early on in his administration to grant media interviews to Arab broadcasters and give his historic Cairo speech in June 2009.

However, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on, and as drone strikes caused more civilian casualties in Yemen, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, many Muslims became more sceptical of Washington’s commitment to sincere engagement with the Muslim world.

The Arab uprisings beginning in 2011 known as the Arab Spring and the toppling of dictators prompted the United States to support calls for freedom, political reform, dignity, and democracy.

Washington announced it would work with Islamic political parties, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Nahda, as long as these parties were committed to peaceful change and to the principles of pluralism, elections, and democracy.

That unprecedented opening boosted the fortunes of Arab political Islam and inclusive politics in the Arab world. American rapprochement with political Islam, however, did not last beyond two years.

The way forward

Much as one might disagree with Islamic political ideology, it’s the height of folly to think that long-term domestic stability and economic security in Egypt, Bahrain, Palestine, or Lebanon could be achieved without including the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Wefaq, Hamas, and Hezbollah in governance.

Coddling autocrats is a short-term strategy that will not succeed in the long run. The longer the cozy relationship lasts, the more Muslims will revert to the earlier belief that America’s war on terrorism is a war on Islam.

The Arab countries that witnessed the fall of dictators, especially Egypt, will with Washington’s acquiescence revert back to repression and autocracy, as if the Arab Spring never happened.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS-Inter Press Service.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

At Tahrir Square. Credit: Mohammed Omer/IPS

By Amanda Ufheil-Somers
WASHINGTON, Jan 5 2015 (IPS)

For a moment, four years ago, it seemed that dictators in the Middle East would soon be a thing of the past.

Back then, it looked like the United States would have to make good on its declared support for democracy, as millions of Tunisians, Egyptians, Bahrainis, Yemenis, and others rose up to reject their repressive leaders. Many of these autocrats enjoyed support from Washington in return for providing “stability.”

Yet even the collapse of multiple governments failed to upend the decades-long U.S. policy of backing friendly dictators. Washington has doubled down on maintaining a steady supply of weapons and funding to governments willing to support U.S. strategic interests, regardless of how they treat their citizens.

Four years after Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak’s ouster, for example, the country once again has a president with a military pedigree and an even lower tolerance for political opposition than his predecessor.With a new year upon us, it’s our turn to face down fear and insist that another path is possible.

Mass arrests and hasty convictions of political activists — over 1,000 of whom have been sentenced to death — have reawakened the fear that Egyptians thought had vanished for good after Mubarak was ousted and democratic elections were held.

When the Egyptian military — led by now-president Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi — deposed the democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013, the Obama administration wavered about whether it would suspend military aid to Egypt, which U.S. law requires in the case of a coup. Yet despite some partial and temporary suspensions, the U.S. government continued to send military hardware.

Now that Sisi heads a nominally civilian government — installed in a sham election by a small minority of voters — all restrictions on U.S. aid have been lifted, including for military helicopters that are used to intimidate and attack protesters. As Secretary of State John Kerry promised a month after Sisi’s election, “The Apaches will come, and they will come very, very soon.”

In the tiny kingdom of Bahrain, meanwhile, the demonstrations for constitutional reform that began in February 2011 continue, despite the government’s attempts to silence the opposition with everything at its disposal — from bird shot to life imprisonment.

Throughout it all, Washington has treated Bahrain like a respectable ally.

Back in 2011, for instance, just days after Bahraini security forces fired live ammunition at protesters in Manama — an attack that killed four and wounded many others — President Barack Obama praised King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa’s “commitment to reform.” Neither did the White House object when it was notified in advance that 1,200 troops from Saudi Arabia would enter Bahrain to clear the protests in March 2011.

Since then, there’s been a steady drip of troubling news. A State Department report from 2013 acknowledged that Bahrain revokes the citizenship of prominent activists, arrests people on vague charges, tortures prisoners, and engages in “arbitrary deprivation of life.” (That’s bureaucratese for killing people.)

And what have the consequences been?

Back in 2012, international pressure forced the United States to ban the sale of American-made tear gas to Bahraini security forces. And last August, some U.S. military aid was cut off after the regime expelled an American diplomat for meeting with members of an opposition party.

But that’s it.

Delaying shipments of tanks, jets, and tear gas amounts to little more than a slap on the wrist when the Fifth Fleet of the U.S. Navy remains headquartered outside Bahrain’s capital. And Bahrain’s participation in air raids against the Islamic State has only strengthened the bond between the regime and the White House.

Indeed, the crisis in Iraq and Syria has breathed new life into the military-first approach that has long dominated Washington’s thinking about the Middle East. Any government willing to join this new front in the “War on Terror” is primed to benefit both from American largesse and a free pass on repression.

People power in the Middle East must be matched by popular demand here in the United States to shake the foundations of our foreign policy. With a new year upon us, it’s our turn to face down fear and insist that another path is possible.

This story originally appeared on Otherwords.org. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS-Inter Press Service.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Nov 3 2014 (IPS)

The Oct. 23 attack on the Canadian Parliament building by a Canadian who had converted to Islam just a month earlier should create some interest in why an increasing number of young people are willing to sacrifice their lives for a radical view of Islam. 

Until now, this was dismissed as fanaticism, but when you have over 2,000 people who blow themselves up, it is time to look to this growing reality and put stereotypes to the side.

Roberto Savio

It is worth noting that there are a growing number of voices arguing that the Muslim world and its values are intrinsically against the West. Well, basic data do not support that theory, even although it is being used by all xenophobic parties which have sprung up everywhere in Europe.

Let us recall that there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, with Indonesia the world’s largest Muslim country followed by India. The entire Middle East-North Africa region has 317 million, compared with 344 million in Pakistan and India alone. There are 3.4 million Muslims in the United States and 43.4 million in Europe, making perhaps one jihadist for every 100,000 Muslims.

There are four historical reasons for jihadism that are easily forgotten.“Unemployment is a great habitat for frustration with its lack of perspective on a future, especially when you have no participation and no voice in the political system ... And the fact that the Arab Spring did not bring any tangible change in economic terms has exacerbated frustration into rage or resignation”

First of all, all the Arab countries are artificial. In May 1916, Monsieur Picot for France and Lord Sykes for Britain met and agreed on a secret treaty, with the support of the Russian Empire and the Italian Kingdom, on how to carve up the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War.

Thus the Arab countries of today were born as the result of a division by France and Britain with no consideration for ethnic and religious realities or for history. A few of those countries, like Egypt, had an historical identity, but countries like  Iraq, Arabia Saudi, Jordan, or even the Emirates lacked even that.

It is worth remembering that the Kurdish issue of 30 million people divided among four countries was created by European powers.

As a consequence, the second reason. The colonial powers installed kings and sheiks in the countries that they created. To run these artificial countries, strong hands were required. So, from the very beginning, there was a total lack of participation of the people, with a political system which was totally out of sync with the process of democracy which was happening in Europe.

With a European blessing, these countries were frozen in feudal times.

As for the third reason, the European powers never made any investment in industrial development, or real development. The exploitation of petrol was in the hands of foreign companies and only after the end of the Second World War, and the ensuing process of decolonisation, did oil revenues really come into local hands.

When the colonial powers left, the Arab countries had no modern political system, no modern infrastructure, no local management. When Italy left Libya (it did not know that there was petrol), there were only three Libyans with university degree.

Finally, the fourth reason, which is closer to our days. In states which did not provide education and health for their citizens, Muslim piety took on the task of providing what the state was not. So large networks of religious schools and hospital were created, and when elections were finally permitted, these became the basis for legitimacy and the vote for Muslim parties.

This is why, just taking the example of two important countries, Islamist parties won in Egypt and Algeria, and how with the acquiescence of the West, military coups were the only resort to stop them.

This compression of so many decades into a few lines is of course superficial and leaves out many other issues. But this brutally abridged historical process is useful for understanding how anger and frustration is now all over the Muslim world, and how this leads to attraction to the Islamic State (IS) in poor sectors.

We should not forget that this historical background, even if remote for young people, is kept alive by Israel’s domination of the Palestinian people. The blind support of the West, especially of the United States, for Israel is seen by Arabs as a permanent humiliation. The July-August bombing of Gaza, with just some noises of protest from the West but no real action, is for the Arab world clear proof that the intention is to keep Arabs down and seek alliances only with corrupt and delegitimised rulers who should be swept away.

Not many decades ago, a modernised school system started to produce local cadres, with many at university level. But the lack of political modernisation, combined with the lack of economic development, has led to a generation of disaffected and educated young people, who made their voices heard during what was called the Arab Spring.

But that was an outburst, which did not lead to the creation of a vibrant civil society or real grassroots movements. The only grassroots movement remains the Muslim network of mosques, religious schools and assistance structures.

Besides, there are no modern political parties in Arab countries – this is the difference with the large Muslim countries of Asia, like Indonesia and Malaysia, with Pakistan half way between.

Unemployment is a great habitat for frustration with its lack of perspective on a future, especially when you have no participation and no voice in the political system. Rich countries, like Saudi Arabia, can buy people’s allegiance by offering them a generous subsidy system, but other countries cannot. And the fact that the Arab Spring did not bring any tangible change in economic terms has exacerbated frustration into rage or resignation.

It is highly instructive to read David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times in Tunisia ( from where the majority of jihadists come), Steven Erlanger, also of the New York Times, in London (on the phenomenon of women joining the ranks of IS as fighters or as the wives of fighters) or Ana Carbajasa from Melilla, the Spanish enclave in Morocco (onIslam in Melilla and the radicalisation of women). Few newspapers have given a voice to young Arabs, despite the need to understand them.

Kirkpatrick, Erlanger and Carbajasa found that, for many, the Islamic State has an image of historical revenge against the past, a place free from corruption, It is a beacon for the many young people who  have no way to study or find a job, and have nothing to lose.

Those interviewed declared that to join the radical movement – in the Middle East, in Paris or in Manchester – is to become part of an international moral elite, of a global and magnetic movement. It means having a life project and passing from frustrated anonymity to glorious recognition.

What is creating this mobilisation is that IS is a state, not a secret organisation like Al-Qaeda. And its unprecedented use of social media is attracting hundreds of new recruits every week, who feel that they can escape from their daily frustrations to enter a world of dignity and fairness.

Ahmed, a young Tunisian supporter of the Islamic State who did not want to give his family name for fear of the police, told the New York Times: ”The Islamic State is a true caliphate, a system that is fair and just, where you don’t have to follow somebody orders because he is rich or powerful. It is action, not theory, and it will topple the whole game”.

Another Tunisian, 28-year-old Mourad, with a master’s degree in technology but unemployed, called the Islamic State the only hope for “social justice”, because it would absorb the oil rich monarchies and redistribute their wealth. He said: “It is the only way to give people back their true rights, by giving the natural resources back to the people. It is an obligation for every Muslim.

This dream of a different Muslim world of identifying with the fight to get there finds an easy echo in the European ghettos where a large proportion of the young unemployed is Arab.  We should not forget the Parisian banlieu violence of 2005 or the riots in Birmingham, England, in the same year.

Meanwhile, the French police estimate that there are now at least 1,200 French citizens in the IS, and the British police estimate an equivalent number of British citizens. Those numbers will grow, as long ISIS can show in its efficient social media campaign that it is a successful reality.

So now we have the phenomenon of disaffected Westerners who have drifted away because they feel rejected by the society they live in and are joining Islam, as a radical change to their lives, and the armed struggle as a way to be part of a tidal change.

In their time, European anarchists were not drifters – they were convinced that to have a new world of social justice and human dignity, it was necessary to destroy the present one – and they were part of a very large political movement.

If some in Europe were able to a dream with violence as a necessary instrument, why can the Muslim world not have a similar dream, with much more justification? The attraction of radical Islam is destined to continue, especially if the Islamic State is destroyed by the West. (END/IPS COUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Excerpt:

At Cairo's Tahrir Square. Credit: Mohammed Omer/IPS

By Emile Nakhleh
WASHINGTON, Jan 24 2014 (IPS)

As the Egyptian revolution against Hosni Mubarak celebrates its third anniversary, the military junta under General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is resurrecting dictatorship under the veneer of “constitutional” legitimacy and on the pretense of fighting “terrorism.”

Syria is still ablaze. Yemen has yet to sever the tentacles of the Saleh regime, and Libya remains in the chaotic throes of tribal fissures and militia violence. Tunisia is the only “Arab Spring” country that is transitioning to democracy wisely and pragmatically.Although dictators fell, most of the old regimes remained intact. The re-emergence of the Mubarak-era dictatorship under General Sisi is the most vivid example.

The uprisings in the past three years have rattled Arab dictators and forced Washington to reassess its relations with the region. Arab autocrats have fought the uprisings and resisted all efforts to redesign the decades-old social contract with their people. Four fell.

Those who are still in power continue to inflict destruction on their countries and repress their citizens.

Yet, some policymakers, talking heads, and academics in Washington and other Western capitals are myopically advocating reconciling with existing regimes, including the Syrian tyrant. Self-proclaimed regional experts are advising these policymakers that Gulf monarchies, for example, are stable and secure and should be embraced.

Likewise, some of these experts are calling on Washington to engage the Egyptian military junta because, they argue, Egypt is the centrepiece of U.S. policy and interests in the region. They maintain these interests should trump American values, which were trumpeted by President Barack Obama in his initial support of the anti-Mubarak revolt.

This “expert” advice reflects a shortsighted, shallow knowledge of the region and is devoid of any strategic analysis of future relations between Arab peoples and their rulers. If followed, it would harm long-term U.S. interests in the region.

Let us remember that three years ago, many of these experts missed the Arab Spring all together, as was pointed out in the 2011 Stimson Institute’s Seismic Shift report.

Many academics and journalists paid scant attention to endemic grievances in Arab societies and focused instead on the “deep state” narrative, which they bought from the regimes hook, line, and sinker.

A few distinguished U.S. journalists, such as the late Anthony Shadid of the New York Times, were aware of what was boiling below the surface in places like Egypt despite the glossy mask of stability that Mubarak and his fellow autocrats presented to the outside world.

It is unfortunately understandable that some policymakers and academics are leaning toward accepting this narrative now because they are becoming disgusted with the bloody tumult across the region and the rise of radicalism and terrorism.

Some academics similarly are trumpeting the “stability” narrative, especially in the Gulf. These “access academics” — who forego serious analysis of regimes’ repressive policies in order to be allowed into those countries and meet with officials — are repeating the same analysis they offered before the revolutions of 2011.

In the Gulf monarchies, as the British academic Christopher Davidson of Durham University has pointed out in his book “After the Sheiks,” the absence of legitimacy, continued repression, and sectarianism will hasten the collapse of these tribal regimes.

Professor Davidson maintains some academics, retired generals and sitting and former diplomats are peddling the “stability” fiction for potential access and economic gain.

Promising business deals, lucrative post-retirement jobs, country visits, and Gulf investment in European and American university buildings are even influencing the type of research, analysis, and academic conferences that are being conducted on the present and future of Gulf monarchies.

Fortunately, some scholars such as Toby Matthiesen of Cambridge University are seriously assessing the long-term destructive nature of bloody sectarianism across the region, which for the most part is being pushed by regimes.

Several factors are driving this pernicious phenomenon. First, although dictators fell, most of the old regimes remained intact. The re-emergence of the Mubarak-era dictatorship under General Sisi is the most vivid example.

The military junta’s harsh sentencing of Ahmad Maher, Ahmad Duma, and Muhammad Adel — key activists in the January 2011 revolution — and the espionage charges against two of Egypt’s most prominent intellectuals, Emad Shahin and Amr Hamzawy, signal that the deep security state is alive and well in Egypt.

The military’s harsh crackdown against all opposition–secular and Islamist–belies its claim that Egypt is on the road to democracy.

The recent branding of the Muslim Brotherhood as a “terrorist” organisation moves Egypt away from political reconciliation, the new “constitution” notwithstanding. In fact, the recently ratified document enshrines the power of the military as an institution impervious to any form of accountability.

The politically motivated capital crime charges against the deposed President Mohamed Morsi and other Muslim Brotherhood leaders underpin the vengeful anti-democratic policies of General Sisi.

Despite flagrant human rights violations and sham trials, the Obama administration is tragically maintaining its military aid to the Egyptian military.

Furthermore, the U.S. State Department has withdrawn the name of Robert Ford as ambassador designate to Egypt from consideration in response to objections from the Egyptian military, according to media reports.

Second, the authoritarian regimes that are still in power are employing comprehensive hard and soft power tools, violently and viciously, in order to keep their rule. Bashar al-Assad has rendered his country a wasteland, killing over 130,000 Syrians and forcing millions to become refugees in an attempt to defeat the opposition.

Much like Egypt’s Sisi, he is feverishly trying to convince Washington and other Western capitals that he is the most effective force against terrorism and (Saudi) Wahhabi extremism. His foreign minister has repeatedly stated that if Western leaders hope to keep Salafi jihadists from overrunning Syria, Assad is their man.

It would be tragic if Washington falls for this ruse. It was Assad who worked closely with radical Salafis first in Iraq and then in Syria. He had hoped Salafis would discredit the moderate, secular opposition — a self-fulfilling prophecy he is happy to see come to pass.

Third, as these regimes fail to defeat their popular revolts and reject meaningful dialogue with the opposition, radical elements and Salafi jihadists begin to fill the power vacuum in Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere. The ensuing stalemate is already producing more turbulence, anemic economies, debilitating uncertainty, and diminishing personal security.

No winner will emerge in the foreseeable future, which hopefully would force Washington to make hard choices. Simply put, these choices involve drawing a morally palatable balance between values and interests. If Washington hopes to be on the right side of history, interests should never be allowed to trump values of good governance, certainly not in the wake of the Arab uprisings of 2011.

Emile Nakhleh is a former Senior Intelligence Service Officer, a Research Professor at the University of New Mexico, and author of “A Necessary Engagement: Reinventing America’s Relations with the Muslim World.”

By Roberto Savio
SAN SALVADOR, Bahamas , Dec 27 2013 (Columnist Service)

At this time of hope for what the new year may bring, it would be useful to look at the legacy we carry with us from the year we leave behind. It was a year full of events – wars, rising social inequality, unchecked finance, the decline of political institutions, and the erosion of global governance.

Perhaps this is nothing new, since these trends have been with us for a long time. But some events have a deeper, longer-lasting impact. And here we will present them briefly, as a list to remember and to watch. They are not offered in order of magnitude, which is always a subjective decision.

Roberto Savio. Credit: IPS

1. Collapse of the Arab Spring. The situations in Egypt and Syria have discouraged other Arab countries from following in their footsteps. The internal struggles in the large and variegated world of Islam will take a long time to settle. The real challenge is how modernism can be used as an element making Islam viable.

The coup in Egypt has given new strength to the radicals who do not believe in democracy, and we will never know if the Muslim Brotherhood could have run the country effectively, or if it would have failed (as is most likely). Outsiders cannot solve this conflict, as the case of Syria, which has become a proxy war financed by external players, clearly shows.

2. U.S. self-sufficiency in energy. In five years the exploitation of shale oil and gas will cut American oil imports in half, and if this trend continues the U.S. could actually become self-sufficient in energy supplies. The impact on the price of oil is clear, and this will affect the strategic importance of the Arab world and petrodollar countries like Russia. American industry will receive a strong boost, but incentives for the development of renewable energy will decline worldwide.

3. The inability to reach a meaningful agreement on climate change. The failure of the last climate change conference in Poland demonstrates that there is little political will to reach a global consensus on ways to tackle this issue. Yet according to most climate scientists we are fast approaching the point of no return, with the prospect of irreversible damage to the global ecosystem.

Meanwhile, French investors are buying land in the south of England to grow vineyards. And Iceland is besieged by investors (including the Chinese), who want to get their hands on a large land area where cultivation will continue to be possible. And all nations are gearing up for the exploitation of mineral reserves under the melting Arctic ice, which is also opening up new avenues for marine transportation.

This shows that the business world has a clearer appreciation of what is happening than governments. But it also shows a lack of vision of social responsibility.

4. U.S. decline. President Barack Obama had to cancel his participation in the recent Asian summit because of the U.S. budget crisis. But Russian President Vladimir Putin was able to attend, and he has managed to successfully manipulate events in Syria.

Obama’s signature healthcare reform is in jeopardy, and Edward Snowden has shown the world that the U.S. does not respect its own allies. Meanwhile, the Tea Party has been able to paralyse the U.S. government and bring the Republication Party to espouse a policy of public sector decline.

People all over the world now consider the U.S. an unreliable partner, in an irreversible crisis, with a president who makes a lot of high-sounding promises but is unable to bring them about.

Nobody has managed to bring the financial sector under control, and scandals and gigantic penalties are a continuing reality. There is no solution in sight on Palestine, and the U.S. is facing great difficulties extricating itself from Afghanistan, while Iraq is reverting to chaos, and the talks with Iran are giving a strong boost to the radical Shia section of the Islamic world. The U.S. is a country of great resilience, but the future does not look at all promising.

5. European decline. The past year was one of disunity in Europe, and the definitive ascendancy of Germany in European affairs. Only macroeconomics counts today. Ireland is held up as an example, after it brought its deficit under control. But at the microeconomic level, the damage to the social fabric can be dramatic.

The same is happening in Portugal, and Greece is the most extreme example. Greeks have lost 20 percent of their income, unemployment has climbed to 27 percent, and more cuts are being demanded.

This is not the place for an analysis of how Germany is helped by its policy, which undercuts others without any hint of solidarity. But in the May 2014 European elections, people are likely to vote in large numbers for the anti-Europe parties, which have sprouted almost everywhere, with the sole exception of Spain. The Spanish government of Mariano Rajoy, as the harsh laws on abortion and public order show, is far enough to the right to leave space to a more right-wing party.

The weakening of the European Parliament will be with us for a long time, until Europe recovers some of the appeal that it has been steadily losing among its citizens.

6. Chinese nationalism. The new president, Xi Jinping, has in a few months assumed an authority unprecedented since the time of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. He is pushing the idea of a Chinese dream, to galvanise people under his leadership. This is based on the assertion of China as a great power commanding respect around the world.

And bold steps have been taken to affirm Chinese territorial claims that have opened up conflicts with South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam and Japan. With the Japanese government now run by nationalist politicians, many analysts are considering the possibility of a third world war beginning in Asia.

In the 16th century China had 50 percent of world GNP, and there is a strong desire among the Chinese to regain their “rightful” place in the world. The defence treaty between Japan and the United States makes this a potentially global point of conflict.

7. Changes in the Vatican. The election of Pope Francis has brought a much-needed change of direction in the Catholic Church. The Pope is binging back a focus on people rather than the market, using terms like “solidarity”, “social justice”, “exclusion” and “marginalisation”, which until recently had all but disappeared from political discourse.

President Obama has followed with a strong speech against the growing social inequalities in the U.S.

And according to the London School of Economics, in 20 years Britain will return to the level of social inequality it experienced during the times of Queen Victoria.

But Pope Francis is the only one denouncing the dismantling of the welfare system which emerged during the Cold War. Let us hope that his call will help prevent the writing of a new Das Kapital, where the victims will not be workers, but young people.

Excerpt:

Exotic pets such as vultures are trafficked and sold openly in Egypt. Credit: Cam McGrath/IPS.

By Cam McGrath
CAIRO, Dec 26 2013 (IPS)

At a small pet shop in an upscale Cairo neighbourhood, puppies, kittens and sickly-looking parakeets occupy the cages behind the storefront window. But if you want more exciting and exotic animals – such as crocodiles or lion cubs – just ask behind the counter.

Trade in wild animals is banned under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), of which Egypt is a signatory. But decades of ineffective border controls and police indifference have made the country a major hub for the trafficking of wildlife.

Conservationists suspect that criminal gangs have expanded their networks and stepped up shipments of protected and endangered species under cover of the political turmoil that has engulfed the region since the start of the Arab Spring.

“Since the revolution in 2011, Egypt has fewer resources for enforcement, and traffickers have recognised this,” an environment ministry official told IPS. “The country is facing many serious political and economic problems, and checking shipments for wildlife is not a priority.”"Since the revolution in 2011, Egypt has less resources for enforcement, and traffickers have recognised this."

Cairo is less a destination than a transit point for animals trafficked from Africa to markets in Asia and the Arab Gulf states. Rare and endangered animals are concealed in air and sea shipments, or smuggled overland through the porous borders of Libya and Sudan.

In recent years, authorities have seized satchels full of dying tortoises, rare birds stuffed into toilet paper rolls with their beaks tied shut, and a pair of dolphins floundering in a murky swimming pool. Foreign customs officers have also discovered baby chimpanzees drugged with cough syrup and crammed into crates shipped from Egypt.

Many of the trafficked animals are kept in rented apartments in Cairo and Alexandria that act as showrooms for prospective buyers. Others fill the overcrowded and dirty cages of disreputable pet shops, or end up in the country’s growing number of private zoos.

One licensed pet store in Cairo’s Zamalek district had its front end geared for the pampered pets of the district’s affluent residents, with imported pet foods, rhinestone studded dog collars, and colourful catnip toys. Further back the shop catered to more exotic tastes, with pens of juvenile crocodiles, caged fennec foxes, and a full-grown vulture that was eventually sold to a local businessman for 1,200 dollars.

The pet store was shuttered last year after municipal authorities acted on residents’ complaints.

“The store wasn’t shut down for selling endangered species or its appalling treatment of the animals,” says local resident Dalia Awad. “It was because the neighbours complained about the smell.”

Pet shops come and go. One business that has endured is Tolba Kingdom Reptiles, the flagship operation of the Tolba family.

Their showroom in Abu Rawash, 30 kilometres from Cairo, contains a macabre collection of desiccated lizards, rows of gazelle horns, and an ineptly stuffed lion. A series of pens and cages house hyenas, raptors, servals, fennec foxes, and mongooses. Gorillas are often kept in another building.

“We can get any animal and ship it anywhere,” boasts Salah Tolba, who heads up the family business. “Most dealers don’t know how to handle wildlife and many of the animals die from trauma. But our family has long experience in this business. We have large cages and we treat our animals better here than at the zoo.”

This is probably true, concedes animal welfare activist Dina Zulfikar, “but in general, neither has the acceptable standard for keeping animals in captivity.”

Trafficked animals confiscated by Egyptian authorities are sent to the government-run Giza Zoo, which was expelled from the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums in 2004 for its deplorable conditions and inhumane treatment of animals.

Many of the lions and chimpanzees at this zoo were seized during raids on private collections. The confiscated animals become a source of personal revenue for the underpaid zookeepers, who allow visitors to handle the sedated animals in exchange for tips.

“They receive no care… and die or are stolen, are used for photo sessions, or are sold to circus trainers,” says Zulfikar. “Zoo veterinarians conduct in vitro fertilisation experiments on the lions.”

Since the 1990s, private zoos and wildlife breeding centres in Egypt have mushroomed. Some, such as Lion Village, cater to paying tourists undeterred by the shocking conditions of the exhibits. Others are protected from prying eyes by fences and guarded by thugs with automatic weapons.

“Authorities in Egypt are toothless,” says wildlife photographer and conservationist Karl Ammann. “It is impossible to get anyone to take any action. The police are afraid of these smugglers, who are trafficking all types of animals.”

Amman’s 2006 documentary ‘The Cairo Connection’ exposed Egypt’s primate smugglers and illegal breeding centres.

One ringleader, who smuggled chimpanzees and gorillas from central Africa via Egypt for decades, is reportedly serving time in a Nigerian prison. But her three daughters have allegedly continued the trade, aided by a family member who serves as a Libyan border guard.

Another black market dealer operates a primate breeding centre under the pretext of a ‘national rescue centre’ in the Red Sea resort Sharm El-Sheikh. Dozens of gorillas and chimpanzees languish in its cages, their trade facilitated by a loophole in CITES regulations that set a quota on the total number of each species a facility is permitted to hold, rather than issuing individual permits for each animal.

Ammann says there is evidence that Egyptian wildlife officers, and even local CITES representatives, are complicit in the trade.

“Authorities know what is going on at these facilities and never intervene as (CITES) Article 8 demands,” he says.

Thousands of opposition activists have protested in central Tunis, demanding the resignation of Tunisia’s Islamist-led government, before a national dialogue aimed at ending months of political deadlock.

The protesters gathered on central Habib Bourguiba Avenue in the capital, waving Tunisian flags and shouting slogans such as: “The people want the fall of the regime”, “Get out” and “Government of traitors, resign!”

Wednesday’s demonstration took place amid a heavy security presence, with armoured vehicles and anti-riot police deployed along the Tunis boulevard, which was the epicentre of the January 2011 revolution that ousted former President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

A rival rally planned by the League for the Protection of the Revolution, a controversial pro-government armed group, failed to materialise.

Wednesday’s demonstration came just hours before the start of a planned national dialogue between the ruling party Ennahda and the opposition, which has now been delayed until Friday.

Mediators hope the talks will bring an end to the political paralysis gripping the country since the July killing of opposition MP Mohamed Brahmi and will mark a crucial step in the country’s democratic transition.

“We hope that Larayedh will have enough courage to announce the resignation of his government within three weeks to save the country,” Hamma Hammami, a leader of the opposition Popular Front party, told the AFP news agency.

Tunisian Prime Minister Ali Larayedh on Wednesday confirmed Ennahda was ready to resign, but insisted on the completion of the country’s new constitution, the establishment of an electoral commission and a clear election date before handing over power.

Meanwhile, seven Tunisian police were killed and one injured in clashes with gunmen, as the country waited for the government’s expected resignation and the launch of talks on ending months of political deadlock.

Fighting erupted in the central Sidi Bouzid region, when members of the National Guard raided a house where the gunmen were holed up, a police source told AFP.

President Moncef Marzouki announced three days of national mourning.

“It is not a coincidence that they decided to attack the National Guard today. Every time we reach a consensus terrorism rises again,” he said.

Political roadmap

According to a political roadmap drawn up by mediators, the national dialogue will lead within three weeks to the formation of a new caretaker cabinet of technocrats.

Negotiators will also have one month to adopt a new constitution, electoral laws and a timetable for fresh elections, key milestones in the democratic transition which has effectively been blocked by wrangling between the Islamists, their coalition allies and the opposition.

A coalition of secular opposition parties are demanding the immediate departure of the government, which it accuses of clinging to power.

A senior member of Ennahda charged on Tuesday that the opposition was preparing to “destroy” the negotiations between the two sides by staging anti-government protests.

About 60 opposition MPs who have been boycotting parliament since the political crisis erupted also said they had received assurances that the national dialogue would begin with the government announcing its resignation.

The Islamist party was heavily repressed under the Ben Ali regime.

Since triumphing in the parliamentary elections in October 2011, they have been weakened by accusations that they have failed to fix Tunisia’s lacklustre economy and prevent attacks by armed groups.

After three months of political uncertainty, unkept promises and a false start to the national dialogue on Oct. 5, the Tunisian press has grown increasingly critical of the ruling elite and sceptical of efforts to end the crisis.

Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

The end of the world’s most enduring conflict was always regarded as the essential linchpin of Mideast security. As direct talks between Israelis and Palestinians resume following a three-year hiatus, it seems too late for peace between them – if the declared goal of a peace deal within nine months is achieved – to end the violence unleashed by the ‘Arab springs’.

Since the resumption of the peace negotiations last month, from Lebanon to the north, Syria to the east, and Gaza and Egypt to the south, rockets sporadically target Israel.

As they closely monitor leakages from the civil war in Syria and the perils of civil wars in Egypt and Lebanon, Israelis like to say, somewhat self-righteously, that their country “is a villa in the jungle” and that the two-and-a-half-year Arab turmoil has already taken more lives than the 100-year conflict between Jews and Arabs.

Throughout the Israeli-Arab conflict, Palestine conjured up a raison d’être for the Arab and Islamic world, the banner under which their peoples mobilise. This continued from the war that created Israel (1948) to the Suez Crisis (1956), the Six-Day-War (1967), the 1973 War, and the two Lebanon wars in 1982 and 2006. This, besides the two Palestinian Intifadah uprisings in 1987-1993 and 2000-2005 and countless campaigns against Palestinian groups.

And throughout the quest for peace, from the inception of the peace process at the Madrid Conference (1991), many processes were inaugurated with great pomp – at the White House, in Camp David, Taba, Sharm el-Sheikh, Annapolis, now again in Washington.

Peace treaties were signed between Israel and Egypt (1979) and between Israel and Jordan (1994).

But the numerous agreements signed between Israel and the Palestinians – the Oslo Accords (1993), the Cairo agreement (1994), the Wye River Memorandum (1998), the Roadmap for Peace (2003) – were never fully implemented.

Until recently, the region still lived to the beat of periods of tension and quiet, of conflict and conflict resolution between Israel and the Palestinians.

Hence, during Israel’s operation Pillars of Defence against the Islamic resistance movement Hamas in Gaza last November, the U.S., the U.N., Egypt and Qatar (to name a few) were involved in negotiating a ceasefire.

Common wisdom had it that the resolution of ‘the mother of all conflicts’ would contribute greatly to regional stability and appeasement.

Nowadays it’s the other way around. The international community fears that the winds and fires of the ‘Arab springs’ will trigger instability in Israel and the occupied territories.

For their part, Israelis and Palestinians seem to worry more about what surrounds them than what divides them, as if they were protected under the eye of the cyclone blowing on their turbulent region.

Both Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas share the same concern. Both stress that the Arab upheavals are a key motivation for engaging in peace talks now.

Though the conflict isn’t the source of the ‘Arab springs’, it’s still a unifying dimension of the Arab condition. A sovereign independent Palestine remains an elemental Arab demand, side by side with the demand for democracy, respect for human rights, and social justice.

For years, the status of the U.S. in the region was largely dependent on its administration’s ability to act as an “honest broker” between Israelis and Palestinians.

These days, the U.S. role is judged as to its administration’s capacity to stop the carnage in Syria and to influence the Egyptian military to proceed with its promised roadmap for a return to democracy.

The multiple crises which plague the Middle East – notwithstanding the great issue of a nuclear Iran – certainly factored in the U.S. decision to prod Israel and the Palestinians to finally agree to renew the peace process.

The U.S. hopes that resumption of talks will demonstrate the effectiveness of its Mideast diplomacy, given that President Barack Obama until now has given priority to mediation, containment and crisis management over military intervention. The killing of three Palestinians in a West Bank confrontation on Monday cannot have helped continuation of the talks.

Whether this expectation is confirmed or not, it definitely shows that the U.S. still believes that a resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict could impact positively on the region as a whole.

But the current peace endeavour is both a historical mission and mission impossible.

The Palestinians (supported by the U.S.) have long insisted that a two-state solution be based on the ‘Green Line’ which marks the ceasefire line with the territories occupied by Israel in the wake of the Six-Day War.

Yet until now, the demand is, at least outwardly, rejected by Netanyahu.

In the past, Israel agreed to negotiate the five core issues at the heart of the conflict – Jerusalem, settlements, borders and security, refugees and water – on the basis of the Green Line.

This time, Abbas had to reconcile with Netanyahu’s stance that nothing is agreed upon as long as nothing is agreed upon by Netanyahu himself, and thus the talks are held without preconditions, from a maximalist Israeli standpoint.

The situation on the ground is no less challenging.

About 400,000-500,000 Israelis live in settlements on territories which the Palestinians envision as part of their future state. And as the talks were under way, Israel pledged to build over 2,000 settlement homes.

Besides, a two-state solution would have to take into account not only a re-partition of historical Palestine but the fact that Israel actually negotiates with only part of the Palestinians, those who live in the West Bank under Palestinian Authority rule. Hamas, Abbas’s nemesis in control of the Gaza Strip since 2007, opposes a two-state solution.

So the chances of a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians or, alternatively, of an interim agreement on a Palestinian state with provisional borders recognised by Israel and the U.S., are slim.

And though it appears that the old conflict pales in comparison to the bloodletting in Syria and Egypt, whether its resolution has an appeasing influence on the region and on the Iranian nuclear crisis will be determined by the substance of the agreement itself, either final or interim, especially with regard to how the Green Line factors.

On Aug. 14, the 42^nd anniversary of Bahrain’s independence from Britain, an online group called Tarmarod (“rebellion” in Arabic) officially joined Bahrain’s democracy movement that began in February 2011.

A montage of the Bahraini Uprising created from images available on the Wikimedia Commons.

Tamarod’s name and inspiration came from the Egyptian movement that led to the ouster of former president Mohamed Morsi, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In its first statement, issued on Jul. 4, Tamarod said it wants “a homeland that embraces all its citizens, an Arab and independent Bahrain where the people can have greater decision-making power within their country.

“This movement is a ‘rebellion’ against the injustice and illegitimacy of a regime that has exerted its power through the exploitation of the country’s natural resources and draconian legislation that limits human rights and judges its citizens based on their ethnicities,” the statement said.

Countering the rebellion

Ahead of Aug. 14, which Bahrain’s government anticipated as a day of protest, high-level official statements describing Tamarod as a sham version of the Egyptian movement were released.

The Ministry of Interior warned against responding to Tamarod’s calls of protest and civil disobedience, and King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifah issued a decree ordering the National Assembly to convene and, for the first time in Bahrain’s history, toughen anti-terrorism laws.

Bahrain’s broad definition of terrorism can be applied to the act of burning tires, blocking streets, the use of Molotov cocktails and protesting in the capital, Manama, which the government argues can damage the country’s economy.

Bahrain’s National Assembly came up with 22 recommendations on Jul. 28, including the banning of all demonstrations and gatherings in Manama and the withdrawal of citizenship from “perpetrators of terrorist acts” and “instigators”, all of which were issued as law by the king on Aug. 1.

In the run-up to Aug. 14, at least five online activists, bloggers, photographers and other members of citizen media were arrested, according to the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR).

More than 70 websites and online forums that the government alleges promote terrorism were also blocked.

Tamarod called for peaceful but escalating civil disobedience by closing stores and refraining from shopping or fueling vehicles. The movement also called on people to temporarily halt financial transactions, including the paying of bills, and to switch off all lights at sunset.

Protest spots were also declared in nine different locations, for people to march to on foot – not as groups but individually – without any slogans, banners, flags or other such manifestations, and by avoiding all confrontation with security forces.

Bahrain’s security forces were meanwhile implementing their response plan.

Since Aug. 12, an intensive security presence was felt throughout the capital, villages and other areas. This included checkpoints and the arresting of activists.

Bahrain’s pro-government media also campaigned against Tamarod by calling for the withdrawal of citizenship of oppositional political and religious leaders.

Bahrain’s unique struggle

In comparison to the uprisings that began in other Arab or African countries in 2011, Bahrain’s protest movement was not a direct response to economic disadvantages faced by its people. The protests have been aimed at achieving freedom and self-determination.

Bahrain’s Shiite majority has long said that it is not given the same chances as the Sunni minority, such as jobs assigned by the Sunni royal family to top tier positions in commerce and governance. Shiite Muslims are also not allowed to join the island-nation’s security forces or army.

Bahrain’s authorities claim the opposition movement is aided by Iran and aims to remove the monarchy through terrorism.

The monarchy has responded by cracking down on demonstrators through hundreds of arrests recorded by international rights-monitoring organisations, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, as well as systematic torture, the killing of demonstrators and the removal of alleged protestors from their jobs.

Bahrain’s citizen media

Bahrain’s government has gone to lengths to prevent foreign media from visiting the country since April 2011. International media were also largely barred from entering the country close to Aug. 14, all of which has resulted in citizens working to disseminate information.

Bahrainis were mostly impeded from protesting on Aug. 14 or on the days after because of the heavy police presence on the streets. Local and international media were meanwhile focused on the bloody events in Egypt following the killing of hundreds of pro-Muslim Brotherhood protestors that also took place on that day.

Two-and-a-half years after Bahrain’s uprising began, international media attention also remains scarce and the support provided to the monarchy by neighbouring countries such as Saudi Arabia has not contributed to positive change for either side.

Not even the results of a Bahraini independent inquiry, which expose substantial human rights violations, have spurred meaningful reform.

But Bahrainis are still showing their resolve to achieve their rights and live in a country where the rule of law is implemented through democracy and not by a tribe.

This is one reason why the Tamarod movement has established itself in Manama – despite the authorities’ attempts to quell protests there – and promised to continue its peaceful “rebellion”.

Nazeeha Saeed is the Bahrain correspondent for Radio Monte Carlo and France 24. Her coverage of Bahrain’s 2011 uprising led to her detention by Bahraini police. She now works closely with international organisations to defend freedom of the media in Bahrain and for the rights of both Bahraini and non-Bahraini journalists.

The military on standby in central Tunis. Credit: Louise Sherwood/IPS.

By Louise Sherwood
TUNIS, Aug 13 2013 (IPS)

Tunisia was plunged into political strife when opposition leader Mohamed Brahmi was assassinated late last month, triggering widespread pro- and anti-government demonstrations across the country. In the days since his death the North African nation has faced a further series of terrorist attacks that have threatened to destabilise a country seen as a model for post-revolution democracy in the region.

Four days after Brahmi was shot dead outside his home in Tunis on Jul. 25, eight Tunisian soldiers were brutally killed in Islamist militant attacks against the army. Since then, more soldiers have died in clashes, bombs have been detonated in and around the capital Tunis, and terror suspects have been killed and arrested in police raids.

Police claim to have foiled another assassination attempt against a political figure in the city of Sousse. The target was not named."Since the revolution two important clients, an American investment fund and a tour operator that owned two hotels, have pulled out of Tunisia."

Sheikh Abdelfatteh Mourou, vice-president of the government’s dominant ruling party Ennahda Movement, told IPS: “We have no history of terrorism in Tunisia. We’re not ready for such attacks. We must strike the terrorists.

“Terrorism has no nationality. Terrorists don’t see people as victims of a particular country, they see them only as enemies. They search for the weakest link in the chain, a country that just came out of a revolution, that lacks stability, where the government isn’t strong enough. That’s us now.”

Felix Tusa from the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, a non-profit organisation that works with the Tunisian government on security sector reform, told IPS: “The politicians controlling the ministry of the interior have changed, but there have been very few changes in the security apparatus itself.

“The biggest challenges are a lack of funding for salaries and equipment and how to develop an intelligence service that is effective, whilst also being transparent and respecting human rights. One of the main criticisms of the democratic transition process has been a lack of security sector reform.”

The surprise resignation of army chief Gen. Rachid Ammar in June was attributed in part to the problems within the ministry of the interior. In the announcement of his departure on national television, Ammar stated that the lack of a functioning intelligence service was preventing effective military operations.

Minister of the interior Lotfi Ben Jeddou renewed his commitment last week to tackle terrorism along the Algerian border. “Military and security operations will continue until all terrorists holed up in the mountain are extirpated,” he said in a statement.

The ministry has come under fire for investigations into the murder of Chokri Belaid, another opposition politician who was shot six months ago, with the same gun as Brahmi, as he left his house. The ministry was criticised for taking too long to identify suspects, and when it did, for failing to arrest them. “We will soon compensate for this failure by a massive mobilisation of agents to capture these terrorists,” the minister said.

Marking six months since Belaid’s assassination, tens of thousands of Tunisians turned out Tuesday last week to call for the government to step down. The march was on the same day the National Constituent Assembly, which is writing the new Constitution, suspended its work until dialogue takes place between the government and opposition.

A large pro-government rally had been held a few days earlier, but this was the biggest anti-government demonstration since Brahmi’s murder. The now familiar cries of “dégage!” (get out!) were stronger than ever.

Ines Karaoui came to the protest with her husband and two young children from Sfax, which is a three-hour drive from Tunis. “It’s a national duty to come. I won’t sleep tonight but people have lost relatives and children have lost their fathers. It’s nothing to sacrifice a few hours of sleep compared to the sacrifice of soldiers who had their throats cut.

“Tunisia is bleeding, we have cried tears of blood for our Tunisia. We love our country and we want a future for our children. We don’t want to be like Afghanistan or Syria…The government wants people to feel that the terrorist threat is very close to Tunisia but they are the ones behind this. We are anti-extremism. We want to take back our Tunisia.”

Commenting on the accusations against the government, Mourou told IPS: “That’s not true. They [the opposition] know that Al-Qaeda, Ansar al-Sharia and the Salafists are not Ennahda…we are all Muslims but we do not follow the same programme.”

Others in Tunisia question whether even these groups are to blame. Sheikh Mohamed, an Islamist and professor of theology who spent seven years as a political prisoner under dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s regime, told IPS: “Salafists have been blamed for the terrorist attacks but it is not certain. Perhaps members of the old regime or foreigners are responsible.

“Many Salafists are peaceful but some are violent and infiltrate mosques and there are also Salafist jihadists. I support Shari’ah law and want Islam to be prominent in the new constitution but I also want democracy and refuse all violence.”

As each day brings new stories of attacks at the borders, bomb threats and assassination plots, Tunisia’s economy is also taking a hit. Both tourists and investors are being frightened away, and with them the economic lifeblood of a successful democratic transition.

Mehdi Zaoui, an international business lawyer, told IPS: “Since the revolution two important clients, an American investment fund and a tour operator that owned two hotels, have pulled out of Tunisia. I also have three or four clients who were thinking about investing in the country in the industry and IT sectors who are reconsidering.

“I had a meeting with an Italian client working in the chemicals industry asking me about the situation here. They have already spent a lot of money in the country but they are scared about their investment.”

The government is stepping up efforts to combat terrorism. The perceived insecurity and instability may yet pose the greatest threat to Tunisia.

In President Uhuru Kenyatta’s first 100 days of power, from Apr. 9 to Jul. 19, there have been a series of street protests and labour strike threats in the public sector. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Miriam Gathigah
NAIROBI, Jul 25 2013 (IPS)

Kenyan police are said to be investigating the rise of a group dubbed the March 4th Movement (M4M), which aims to make Kenya ungovernable by recruiting youths to take part in protests, similar to those that saw Egyptians overthrow their president. But politicians and analysts here say they do not foresee the movement capable of creating an East African Spring.

“Demonstrations are a good indicator of the degree of dissatisfaction among citizens, but there is no country in East Africa with a political consciousness that can sustain the kind of protests that we have seen in the Arab world,” Gideon Ochanda, member of parliament from the Bondo Constituency in Nyanza Province, tells IPS.

This week, activist Okiya Omtatah, who claims to have founded the movement, was summoned by police to give a statement. Previously it was believed that Eliud Owalo, an aide to former prime minister Raila Odinga, was the movement’s founder.

According to reports by local newspapers, M4M aims to exploit the discontent among Kenyans, many of whom are upset about rising food prices, to overthrow President Uhuru Kenyatta. They had allegedly planned massive nationwide protests similar to those seen this July in Egypt that led to Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, being overthrown by the army. In 2011 mass nationwide protests by Egyptians led to the ousting of Hosni Mubarak as the country’s president.

In Kenyatta’s first 100 days of power, from Apr. 9 to Jul. 19, there have been a series of street protests and labour strike threats in the public sector, but none to the scale of what was seen in Egypt. From Jun. 25 to Jul. 17, 280,000 teachers from the Kenya National Union of Teachers went on strike. But the strike ended primarily because the government threatened to freeze their salaries.

In May, members of parliament threatened to paralyse the government by going on strike over a new salary package that would mean they earned less than their predecessors. They, however, did not follow through on the threat.

On Jul. 5, the Kenya National Union of Nurses gave notice of a 21-day strike to the government. A date for the strike has yet to be announced.

And in June activists across the country began campaigning against a new Value Added Tax (VAT) Bill, known popularly as the “Unga tax bill”. The bill seeks to apply a 16 percent value added tax rate on basic commodities that have remained untaxed until now. These include rice, bread, maize flour, processed milk and sanitary pads.

Consequently, there are those drawing parallels between the unrest here and the Arab spring.

But Cyprian Nyamwamu, executive director of the East African Democracy Foundation, points out that Kenya’s “poor masses cannot sustain mass action.”

“When a large constituent lives from hand to mouth, they cannot afford to be on the streets long enough.”

He adds that while the Arab Spring was driven by the middle class whose struggles are political, Kenya’s struggles are economic. The African Economist shows that currently, Egypt is the fourth-largest economy in Africa with a GDP of 111.8 billion dollars. Kenya is 11th with a GDP of 24.8 billion dollars.

Nyamwamu says that while the middle class in the Arab world own houses and are fairly financially secure, “a large population in Kenya pays rent. Striking teachers in Kenya need their salary to pay rent, they could not sustain their labour strike long enough to get their dues.

“But, backed by a very progressive constitution, Kenya has achieved an expanded political space, and is only surpassed by South Africa and Ghana.”

To express his anger over rising food prices, Felix Omondi never joins street protests without carrying a plate of African cornmeal mush, popularly known as ugali, a staple food in Kenya.

His meal is often spilt as demonstrators engage police in running battles. But to put his point across, it is a loss that Omondi is willing to incur.

“A two-kg packet of maize floor should come down from two dollars to less than a dollar,” Omondi, a member of Unga Revolution, a lobby group of youths who have been regularly taking to the streets over the high cost of living and food prices, tells IPS.

Peter Kimani, who is also a member of the lobby group, tells IPS: “We will demonstrate, and even remove this government if it remains deaf to the cry of its people.”

Jennifer Massis, a politician from the Ford Kenya party in Rift Valley region, warns that the VAT bill may spark more demonstrations.

“Kenya is a man-eats-man society, we are among the most taxed citizens in Africa and our members of parliament are among the highest paid. People are disgruntled,” Massis tells IPS.

“Already, the wage bill is huge and the money is raised by taxing citizens,” she adds.

Government figures show that the public sector wage bill has almost doubled from 2.8 billion dollars in 2008/2009 to 5.3 billion dollars in 2012/2013. This is about 50 percent of the annual tax revenue.

Ochanda says that the government’s recurring cost is unreasonably high, and suggests it can be reduced by at least 60 percent.

Ochanda adds that devolution of the government has led to duplication of duties and responsibilities. On Mar. 5, Kenya implemented a new devolved system of government and with the new system decisions affecting Kenya’s 47 counties are now taken at local, as opposed to national, level.

“The government should be brave enough to lay off people and hold county governments responsible to create job opportunities at the county level. A lot of money is going to salaries for people at national level who have no actual work since this work has moved to county level where there are staff doing the job,” Ochanda says.

Nyamwamu says that while Kenya is seen as the most progressive among its neighbours, “street protests are not a solution. The judiciary has been reformed, Kenyans should learn to take their battles to court.”

Ochanda adds that Kenya’s demonstrators also lack a rallying point.

“It is actually the poor who demonstrate and they tend to be reactionary in their protests. The politically conscious middle class who can engineer a series of events that can rearrange power and force the leadership to be accountable to its citizenry behave as if they do not need the government to make ends meet,” he says.

In 2011 in Bahrain, riot police reportedly tried to disperse protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets. Credit: Al Jazeera English/CC by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jun 20 2013 (IPS)

Human rights groups here are calling for the United States and the European Union (EU) to exert more pressure on Bahrain, home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, to seriously engage its opposition and end its repression of its majority Shi’a population.

“Bahrain claims to be on a path of political reform, but it is heading altogether in the wrong direction,” according to Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), which issued an 87-page report Thursday on how the kingdom is cracking down harder on independent civil society organisations (CSOs).

“The new draft law on association – just like the continued imprisonment of opposition activists – shows all too clearly how the ruling family is rolling back genuine reform on so many fronts,” he added."Bahrain claims to be on a path of political reform, but it is heading altogether in the wrong direction."
-- Joe Stork

Brian Dooley, a specialist in the Gulf states for Human Rights First (HRF), said that the Obama administration “is realising, if belatedly, that it’s been had” by Bahrain’s promises of reform. “It needs to figure out what to do instead.”

“There’s been a slow, but unmistakable increase in repression. The current situation can’t go on year after year, because there’s a real danger it will explode into something much worse,” he said.

The new HRW report, as well renewed appeals for Washington to take a tougher stance, comes ten days before EU High Commissioner and several EU commissioners are to meet their Gulf Cooperation Council counterparts in Bahrain.

“They should convey beforehand their expectation that key political prisoners will be released in advance of the summit,” said Stork.

The report also comes two weeks after Obama and other senior U.S. officials met in Washington with visiting Crown Prince and First Deputy Prime Minister Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa.

The crown prince has been Washington’s favourite in the ruling al-Khalifa family due to the perception that he favours at least limited democratic reform that would give the Shi’a community, which makes up about 70 percent of the island-state’s population, some share of power. The al-Khalifas, who have ruled Bahrain for more than two centuries, are Sunni Muslims.

In a bid to increase the crown prince’s leverage back home, the administration announced during his previous visit here 13 months ago that it would deliver some weapons from a previously agreed 53-million-dollar arms package. The package was held up by lawmakers in Congress concerned about human rights abuses committed during Bahraini security forces’ fierce, Saudi-backed crackdown on opposition during the 2011 “Arab Spring”.

The crown prince, however, has failed to deliver. Despite the February launch of a much-heralded national dialogue, repression has actually increased, according to human rights monitors and independent analysts, who noted that no new arms announcements were made during this year’s visit, during which Obama nonetheless reiterated his support for “advancing reform” and the dialogue process.

“The national dialogue has essentially frozen,” noted Toby Jones, a Gulf expert at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “It’s accomplished exactly what the royal family had hoped it would; that is, to basically paralyse the political process in Bahrain.”

“Washington had hoped that the crown prince and Al-Wefaq, the mainstream Shiite opposition party, could reach some negotiated compromise, but the crown prince is not as powerful as the U.S. would [like] him to be,” Jones explained.

“His rivals have used this kind of public politics as a way to give the appearance of accomplishing something without really accomplishing anything at all.”

The situation actually appears to have deteriorated, said rights advocates here, several of whom, including Dooley and the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on torture, Juan Mendez, were given visas to Bahrain this spring only to have them cancelled at the last minute.

Since February, when HRW researchers visited the country to compile information for its new report, “‘Interfere, Restrict, Control’: Restraints on Freedom of Association in Bahrain”, the group has been denied visas to return.

“New laws and lengthy jail terms for activists have put freedom of association in Bahrain under severe threat,” HRW said Thursday, pointing to a draft bill that would be even more restrictive than current law, which bans CSOs from engaging in politics. “Bahraini authorities have left hardly any space for peaceful political dissent.”

“We’re seeing an uptick in the last month of people being pulled from their houses at night by masked men without warrants, similar to what happened [during the repression of] 2011, though not on the same scale,” Dooley told IPS. He also pointed to more “reports of torture in custody” and “a clampdown on social media”.

“No senior officials have been prosecuted for torture or extra-judicial killing. Judicial harassment of dissidents has continued, as has the excessive use of force by police, plus the problem of increasingly violent protests…with no light at the end of the tunnel,” he continued.

The Obama administration, according to Dooley, is deeply frustrated by the situation and increasingly impatient with the Khalifas to follow through with promises for reform. He noted that recent official U.S. government reports on human rights, religious freedom and labour rights in Bahrain have been noticeably more critical than in the two previous years.

In 2011 and 2012, no one in Washington considered moving the Fifth Fleet out of Bahrain, Dooley said. “But there’s now much more open discussion about it in two ways – that the level of repression may reach such a pitch that’s it’s just too embarrassing to have the fleet there and that the political situation is becoming so unstable and volatile that it’s just too risky for the fleet to remain.”

Jones, however, was more doubtful, particularly given rising regional tensions around Iran’s nuclear programme and strong Saudi pressure to support the monarchy.

“Washington continues to see Bahrain not as a place with complicated politics, but as a strategic asset.…If it had to choose a menu of options, it would choose the Al-Khalifas and a more or less stable Bahrain over a political system in which the opposition has more say,” he told IPS.

“Except for the crown prince, the other major players in the royal family don’t believe American pressure is real, and it’s not as evidenced by the continued sale of military hardware.” Indeed, in its proposed 2014 foreign aid budget, the administration asked for 10 million dollars in military sales credits, the same as in 2012, and 450,000 dollars in security training programmes for the Ministry of the Interior (MOI), which is in charge of the police.

In defending the latter, the State Department said the training would “contribute to counterterrorism and investigative support”.

As explosive devices from opposition protesters grow in sophistication, “the MOI needs training to better counter and prevent terrorist activities,” it said, and all training “will underscore the importance of adherence to international human rights standards while confronting serious threats”.

Demonstrators in Cairo hold up used tear gas shells. Credit: Cam McGrath/IPS

By Barbara Slavin
WASHINGTON, Apr 24 2013 (IPS)

It’s no wonder that Egypt has floundered in its efforts to create a more democratic system from the ruins of the Mubarak regime.

A sweeping new history of Middle Eastern political activists shows that the search for justice has deep roots in the region but has often been thwarted by the intervention of foreign powers.

The Arab Spring revolts of 2011 were “both improbable and long in the making,” writes Elizabeth Thompson in her book, “Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East.”

The young people who massed in Tahrir Square and overturned the U.S.-backed Mubarak dictatorship were the heirs of Col. Ahmad Urabi, whose peasant army was crushed in 1882 by British troops. The beneficiaries of 2011 so far, however, are the heirs of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose concept of “justice” appears to restrict the rights of women, religious minorities and secular groups.

On Tuesday, President Mohamed Morsi’s own legal adviser resigned to protest a law that would force the retirement of more than 3,000 judges – Mubarak appointees that have sought to blunt the rising influence of Islamist politicians such as Morsi. The United States, while criticising human rights abuses under the new regime, appears to be placing a higher priority on Egypt maintaining its peace treaty with Israel.

If, as President Barack Obama likes to say – quoting Martin Luther King – “the arc of history bends toward justice” – in the Middle East, that arc has been exceedingly long.

The breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I interrupted movements for constitutional government and tainted liberalism by association with Western colonialism. Military autocrats, nationalists and Islamic groups took their place.

Thompson, a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Virginia, structures her book by compiling mini-biographies of strivers for justice beginning with an early Ottoman bureaucrat, Mustafa Ali, who wrote a critique of corruption in Egypt, and ending with Wael Ghonim.

Ghonim, a Google executive, created a Facebook page devoted to a young Egyptian beaten to death in 2010 by police that attracted 300,000 followers – many of whom later gathered in Tahrir Square.

Others profiled in the book include Halide Edib, known as Turkey’s “Joan of Arc,” who first supported, then opposed Kemal Ataturk’s dictatorship; Yusuf Salman Yusuf or “Comrade Fahd,” whose Iraqi Communist Party was the largest and most inclusive political movement in modern Iraqi history; and Ali Shariati, the Iranian Islamic Socialist whose ideals were hijacked by the clerical regime after the 1979 revolution.

At a book launch Tuesday at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Thompson was asked by IPS if her book was largely a “history of losers” and whether there was any way to break the dismal cycle of one step forward, two steps back toward effective, representative government in the Middle East.

She compared recent revolts in the region to the 1848 revolutions in Europe that failed at the time but were key precursors of democratic movements to follow.

“You have to think long term,” she said. The optimistic interpretation of the Arab Spring is that it has led to “a fundamental shift in the political culture that will bear fruit decades later.”

She conceded that the current picture in Egypt is not a happy one.

Women, who in 2011 figured prominently in the overthrow of Mubarak, are now afraid to go to Tahrir Square for fear of being molested by thugs. Morsi, the president who hails from the Muslim Brotherhood, “is in a defensive posture,” Thompson said, “playing to the Salafist right.” Meanwhile, “the poor and the Copts are losing out.”

However, the Egyptian press has never been so free and Middle Easterners in general are more exposed to information than at any time in their history, she said. “People are not sealed off like they were in Syria in 1989” when state-run media omitted news that the Berlin Wall had fallen, she said.

Still, time and again in the last 150 years, the desire for security and independence from foreign powers has trumped liberal conceptions of human rights.

Thompson’s book contains many tantalising “What ifs” often linked to foreign machinations.

What if France had permitted Syria to retain an independent constitutional monarchy under King Feisal after World War I? French troops instead occupied the country under an internationally blessed mandate that lasted until after World War II.

What if Akram al-Hourani, leader of the Arab Socialist Party in Syria after independence, had not agreed to union with Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt in 1958? Nasser proceeded to outlaw Syrian political parties and in 1963, the Baath party staged a coup and installed a regime that is fighting for its existence today.

The book also sheds light on important figures such as the Palestinian Salah Khalaf, Yasser Arafat’s number two who was known as Abu Iyad. Assassinated in 1991 by the rejectionist Abu Nidal faction, Iyad had made the transition from terrorist mastermind to supporter of the two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. Arafat, who used to rely on Khalaf’s advice, might have steered his movement more wisely in his later years if he had not lost Abu Iyad as well as PLO military commander, Abu Jihad, who was killed by Israelis in 1988.

If, as Thompson concludes, the Arab Spring “has reprised the struggle interrupted by the World Wars and the Cold War,” it is a struggle that is still far from being won.

Booths and stands at the World Social Forum on the El Manar campus in Tunis. Credit: Alberto Pradilla/IPS

By Alberto Pradilla
TUNIS, Mar 29 2013 (IPS)

The World Social Forum’s traditional focus on economic, political and social injustice caused by globalisation shifted towards the revolts and unrest of the Arab Spring, in the current edition of the global gathering in Tunisia.

The WSF “contributed in Latin America to the construction of governments that are with the popular classes. We hope that will also happen in the Arab world,” said Tarek Ben Hiba, a human rights activist in Tunisia and France.

He was referring to the Tunisian left’s expectations with respect to the 12th annual WSF taking place Mar. 26-30 in the capital, Tunis, where demonstrations forced President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali from power in January 2011.

The WSF got its start in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in 2001, drawing together hundreds of NGOs and movements critical of the direction taken by the globalisation process.

The 2013 WSF was organised in Tunisia, the cradle of the Arab revolts, to express support for the processes of change triggered by the December 2010 self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, an impoverished fruit vendor whose desperate last act sparked the Tunisian revolution and, ultimately, the ongoing Arab Spring.

The first WSF edition hosted by an Arab country has become a reflection of the achievements and pending challenges in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria, and of the contradictions and unresolved clashing visions.

On one hand is the broad conflict between secularists and Islamists, especially in Tunisia and Egypt. And on the other is the war raging in Syria and the uncertainty and instability in Libya.

The conflict in Syria has been one of the main sources of tension in the WSF workshops and panels held this week across the Tunis El Manar University campus.

Supporters and opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have been sharing space on a campus that has been turned into an encampment of heterogeneous global struggles.

On Thursday, for example, while four Syrian communist and two Kurd organisations discussed future action against the regime, supporters of al-Assad held a rally in the central square. The two groups did not cross paths, so no confrontation took place, but the tension was palpable.

Participants in the debate held by the Syrian communists and Kurds told IPS that they had agreed on a document recognising the importance of the individual and collective rights of all ethnic groups in Syria, which is especially significant for the Kurds, the largest minority.

They also agreed to hold a day of solidarity with the Syrian uprising, in the first week of May.

The sources said a congress was being planned for June, to bring together “the Syrian, European and Latin American internationalist left” to coordinate support for the revolt.

The situation in Libya has been another source of tension. On Wednesday, two groups clashed when one of them tried to hold up a sign in support of Muammar Gaddafi (who governed the country from 1969 to October 2011, when he was captured and killed by rebel forces).

That provoked a reaction by supporters of the uprising, who have several stands at the WSF, where the revolution’s tricolour flag and the flag of the nomadic Berber or Amazigh people can be seen.

“We are better off than they are saying,” Fatma, a woman from Tripoli who belongs to an organisation fighting for women’s participation in political life, told IPS. “There are problems, but we are learning from scratch, because there was no civil society before.”

The disputes between Islamists and secularists that are heating up the political processes in Tunisia and Egypt have also been reflected at this week’s WSF.

One of the novel aspects with respect to previous WSF sessions is the presence of organisations with ties to mosques, in booths on campus as well as specific protests.

For example, for over a month, female university students have staged a sit-in on campus to protest university regulations that prohibit the niqab – the full Muslim veil that only shows the eyes. Muslim students argue that the ban violates their freedom of religion.

The protests are occurring in a climate of growing clashes since the assassination of leftist politician Shokri Belaid in February.

“The participants in the Forum are demanding freedom, which is why we’re asking for your support,” said Nabi Wahbi, one of the young demonstrators taking part in the pro-niqab protest.

The integration of these groups in an environment marked by the struggle for women’s rights is a challenge for these gatherings.

Progressive groups in Tunisia accuse Islamists of trying to impose Sharia, or Islamic law, and of undermining the rights of women.

But the Arab revolutionary processes are not the only challenge facing this week’s WSF. There are also deeply-rooted nationalist conflicts.

The central ones involve Palestine and the Western Sahara. But while Palestine is the main cause espoused by several delegations, the Sahrawis are facing off with the enormous delegation from Morocco, who tried to discredit the demands for independence of the inhabitants of the former Spanish colony.

“The Polisario Front is lying,” read a sign referring to the political movement leading the struggle for the independence of Western Sahara, proclaimed the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic in 1976 by the independence fighters.

Moroccan activist Benis Ghitah complained about the Sahrawi refugees, who have been living for decades in remote camps in southwest Algeria.

But the Sahrawis combat the campaign against them. “Morocco tries to confuse people,” Dih Naocha told IPS, who expressed fears because this was the first time representatives of the Sahrawi people had come to Tunisia to defend their rights.

The change of region by the WSF also involved a shift in focus. But it is also true that, as Ben Hiba indicated, the WSF sessions in the first decade of the 21st century served as support for emancipatory processes in Latin America – something that the revolutionary Arab forces hope to repeat with this week’s event.

Bloggers, human rights groups and activists of different stripes have had a chance to meet face to face. Time will reveal the results.

Um Abed plants an olive tree in support of Palestinian farmers. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS

By Emile Nakhleh
WASHINGTON, Mar 5 2013 (IPS)

As President Barack Obama travels to Israel and Palestine in the spring, Washington’s unconditional backing of Israel could soon begin to harm U.S. interests and security in Arab Muslim countries.

Recent Pew and Gallup polls show animosity toward the U.S. in many Muslim countries has deepened since he took office with most respondents citing U.S. support for Israel as a major cause for their antagonism.

Obama’s visit should offer more than photo-ops and soaring rhetoric. Arabs have heard these speeches before, and they no longer appeal to the youthful generation, in particular.

Four years ago, the president said the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was unsustainable. Now is the time to resolve it if the Palestinians are to live in freedom and dignity, if Israel is to be accepted in the region as a secure state, and if the U.S. is to preserve its influence in the region’s new political era.

U.S. backing of Israel in recent decades, coupled with official Arab acquiescence, served Israel well without inflicting too much damage on U.S. interests in the region. But this is no longer tenable.

Popular upheavals have toppled pro-Western regimes and are threatening others. Political Islam has come to power in Egypt and elsewhere. New Arab governments are now responsive to their peoples, and the security or mukhabarat state is being replaced by populist politics.

Israel also has witnessed significant demographic, religious and political changes. European liberal secularism, which governed Israel for decades, has given way to extremist politics pushed by smaller fringe parties, not unlike the U.S. Tea Party.

On the verge of bankruptcy and devoid of internal popular legitimacy, the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah is rife with corruption and inefficiency.

Support of Israel is driving rising U.S. negativity in the region, according to polls and media reports. Other policies contributing to anti-Americanism include drone strikes and indifference toward the plight of the Syrian people. Palestinians are becoming more desperate, and Israel continues to build settlements without fear of condemnation from Washington.

The president and his second-term foreign policy team should think creatively about Israel and Palestine. The so-called peace process is no more than a pipedream to which some Arab and Western governments unrealistically still cling.

As Washington rethinks its position on the conflict, it should consider the following realities.

First, while the popularly elected, Islamically-led Arab governments are committed to peaceful relations with Israel, they are becoming less tolerant of Israel’s continued intransigence toward the Palestinians.

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Tunisian al-Nahda believe peace with Israel in the long run requires Israel to settle its conflict with Palestinians on the basis of justice, equality, and realism.

They expect Israel to terminate its 46-year old occupation, end its siege of Gaza, and allow the Palestinians to live in their own independent nation with Jerusalem as its capital. Under the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, Arab governments committed themselves to peace with Israel in exchange for a return to the 1967 borders.

As one Palestinian told the author, “This is not rocket science. Everyone knows what should be done, and yet no one does anything about it.”

Second, with Hamas and Fateh inching toward reconciliation, the Palestinian public is becoming more empowered to wage an active non-violent resistance campaign against Israel in the occupied territories.

Third, the Palestinian community in Israel, roughly 21 percent of the population, is reasserting its national identity and engaging in a national campaign for justice and equality. Feeling empowered by popular upheavals in neighbouring countries, this community is demanding equal rights as indigenous inhabitants of the land and an end to discrimination.

Many in Washington argue that Washington’s unconditional backing of Israel has not harmed U.S. interests or endangered Israel’s security despite official Arab public criticism. They cite several indicators to bolster their status quo position.

First, “political Islam” is diverse and does not express a monolithic view about U.S. standing in the region or its perceived anti-Palestinian stance. Sunni Saudi Arabia, Shia Iraq, and Muslim Brotherhood Egypt have not shown a serious inclination to go to bat for the Palestinians, according to this position.

Second, although Arab countries have repeatedly defended the Palestinian cause in international forums, they have done very little to support the Palestinians as a people. Many Arab governments, which defend the Palestinianism of the cause refuse Palestinians entry visas to their countries.

Third, most Arab governments are pre-occupied with domestic security and economic issues, and have turned to the U.S. for help. U.S. forces are stationed in Arab and Muslim countries, which also receive substantial U.S. economic aid. These needs often trump official Arab support for Palestine and mute any retaliatory action against the U.S. for its pro-Israeli position.

Fourth, Arab regimes that are fighting for survival – for example, Syria and Bahrain – are involved in quashing anti-regime revolts and have no interest in the Palestinian cause

So where do we go from here?

First, the status quo defenders’ assessment is short-sighted and ignores the recent history of the Middle East. Empowered Arab publics will no longer tolerate their governments’ hypocrisy in the face of U.S. regional hegemony or Israeli intransigence.

Second, although Arab publics cannot fight Israel militarily, they could wage massive civil rights campaigns, hunger strikes, and challenges to the Gaza blockade. The Palestinian BDS (Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions) campaign has resonated globally and has deepened Israel’s international isolation despite U.S. opposition to the movement.

Third, the Palestinian public seems to have moved increasingly away from a two-state solution towards a “one Palestine” in which the inhabitants would enjoy equal rights and access to economic opportunity regardless of religion or ethnicity.

Despite its military prowess, Israel would be severely challenged by a global Palestinian civil rights campaign. As a non-violent Palestinian activist said, “Israel faces a stark choice: either end the occupation or give Palestinians Israeli citizenship.”

If the U.N. Security Council and the International Court of Justice begin to take action against Israel, Arab governments will have to re-assess their peace treaties with the Jewish state. The U.S. also will have to respond to preserve its interests in the region. It is doubtful Washington has the luxury of time before it’s forced to act.

*Emile Nakhleh, a former Senior Intelligence Service Officer, is a research professor at the University of New Mexico and the author of A Necessary Engagement: Reinventing America’s Relations with the Muslim World and Bahrain: Political Development in a Modernizing Society.

Is Bangladesh just trying to process its dark legacy, the trauma of the genocide that took place during the country´s liberation war in 1971? Or is something more afoot?

On Feb. 5, activists belonging to a network called ‘Blogger and Online Activist Network’ occupied a key intersection in the centre of the capital Dhaka known as Shahbagh, and started protesting the verdict pronounced by the International Crimes Tribunal in the case against Abdul Quader Mollah, the assistant general secretary of the country’s main fundamentalist party, Jamaat-e-Islami.

According to the Tribunal, Quader Mollah amongst others actively participated in the massacre of large numbers of civilians committed in a locality near Dhaka at the very start of the liberation war. At the time he was a member of the Jamaat-e-Islami’s student wing. The victims perished when their houses were set on fire.

The verdict was the second one pronounced by the court’s judges, and it was considered too lenient by the activists. Hence they demanded capital punishment, nothing less.

The public’s reaction to the Shahbagh occupation has been so overwhelming, and the movement’s advance so sweeping, that it might surprise foreign observers not acquainted with the dynamics of Bangladeshi politics. Within no time, the demand for capital punishment reverberated throughout the length and breadth of the country, forcing the country’s Awami League-led government to change gear and strengthen its commitment to bringing justice for the victims of 1971.

Moreover, within no time the focus of the protests has shifted towards the demand that the Jamaat-e-Islami, seen as the party that embodies the legacy of war crimes, be banned.

Let’s further highlight the actors and momentum of the upsurge. The Shahbagh protests were initiated by none of the country’s established political parties. Nor were they started by any of the forces which in the past have been instrumental in building public opinion around the demand for adjudication of war crimes. The principal role is being played by independent activists, and by the country’s population of students and youngsters.

Whereas people from all walks of life have participated in the mass rallies and demonstrations held in Dhaka and elsewhere, it is students of universities and high schools who have been coming out in largest numbers.

Some of the key steps of the movement so far: the grand rally held at Shahbagh on Friday Feb. 8, three days after the beginning of the rising, which was attended by tens of thousands of people; the three minutes of silence observed countrywide by people forming human chains on Feb. 12; and the candle light protests staged on the evening of Feb. 14.

Particularly impressive also was the hoisting of national flags at thousands of educational institutions throughout the country on Sunday Feb. 17. The principal force carrying the mass movement forward indeed is Bangladesh’s generation of youngsters. They are showing a keen interest in events they did not experience themselves – those leading to the country’s independence 42 years back.

We also need to take a closer look at the political polarisation around the protests. First, the nature of the target the youngsters are up against. People are not just protesting the court’s leniency in the case against one single war criminal; they do not just insist that all those leading politicians who helped the Pakistani army implement its policy of mass murder be given capital punishment.

The six-point charter of demands which a delegation of the bloggers and online activists brought to the speaker of the parliament on Feb. 10 notably included the demands that the Jamaat-e-Islami be banned and that its financial wealth be confiscated.

There is indeed ample evidence proving that this party’s leaders in 1971 offered their services to the Pakistani military. They set up paramilitary forces and death squads which murdered innumerable numbers of intellectuals, members of the Hindu minority and other civilians.

Moreover, not only did Jamaati leaders never apologise for the role they played in 1971, since the start of the trials against a selected number of war criminals the party has tried its utmost to obstruct the court’s proceedings. Over the last months party militants have repeatedly confronted the police in street battles, protesting the very holding of the war crimes trials.

The Jamaat also is widely presumed to be behind the murder of online activist Rajib, whose body was found near his house on Feb. 15.

What of the attitude of Bangladesh’s government, which is led by the daughter of the country’s founder, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman? Characteristically, several leading politicians belonging to the ruling Awami League, including the party’s joint general secretary, were refused permission to speak at Shahbagh.

Indeed, whereas the chief demand of the activists tailors with official government policy, the mass movement is largely an expression of public frustration with the way the government has handled the war crimes trials.

And yet one can’t say that Bangladesh’s government has not responded to the restlessness of its young generations. Thus, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has publicly hailed the Shahbagh protestors, and several ministers have humbly visited the intercrossing to express their solidarity.

Equally significant is the fact that whereas the government in the past seemed very lukewarm – to say the least – about de-legalising the Jamaat-e-Islami, on Feb. 17 the Parliament dominated by the Awami League passed a bill enabling the International Crimes Tribunal to put the party on trial – in line with what the post-World War II Nuremberg trials did with Germany’s Nazi party.

It is possible to consider the dynamic interconnection between Bangladesh’s people’s upsurge and the Arab Spring. Given the fact that the country’s population is overwhelmingly Muslim, it is only natural that the Bangladeshi citizen closely follows the changes taking place in Egypt and the Middle East.

Again, from the way the Shahbagh protests were launched it is evident that Bangladeshi activists have drawn lessons from their Egyptian counterparts who started their encampment at Tahrir square with a call via facebook. Bangladesh’s youth has been late in reacting. Yet the agenda of the Shahbagh protests goes beyond the agenda of the democratic movements in most parts of the Middle East.

After all, here is a movement which does not just have an uneasy relation with Islamist parties. No, Bangladesh’s mass upsurge from its inception has borne the seal of secularism and tolerance, and is opposed to fundamentalist politics.

Indeed, the South Asian country is not just re-living its own historical legacy, i.e. the secular spirit that pervaded the struggle for the country’s independence. Perhaps it is on its way to setting a fresh example for the Muslim world and for the West.

A protest rally in Tunis in support of free expression. Credit: Lassad Ben Achour/IPS.

By Justin Hyatt
TUNIS, Feb 28 2013 (IPS)

The extent to which Tunisians are able to express themselves freely is an ever-changing phenomenon. While the country is still in the grips of turmoil after the recent killing of left-wing politician Chokri Belaid, which sparked some of the largest protests since the initial revolution in 2011 that toppled Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the airing of dissent has become second nature for many.

It is widely agreed that freedom of speech is the most significant achievement in the wake of the collapse of the former regime. Veteran Tunisian journalist Sofiane Ben Hamida says fear of speaking one’s mind too loudly was once the order of the day. “In the former regime, someone sitting at a café would be afraid to just voice their political opinions too loudly. This is now ancient history.”

This positive development notwithstanding, it is still sometimes a rough transition. A number of incidents have been recorded where journalists have had their camera stolen or even been beaten up. Some journalists have also received death threats for being too outspoken.

Tawfik Ben Brick, a well-known public figure, has faced repeated harassment over his journal ‘Dhed Assolta’ (‘Against the Power’). He had been accused of assault on a woman during the Ben Ali era and has more recently had issues of his magazine confiscated in bulk by the police.

“Better protection of journalists is needed,” says Fathi Zabaar, an independent consultant and formerly with Freedom House Tunisia. “While there are significant advances being made towards a freer society, journalists and the public should be spared all harassment, and when needed, the government should be there to protect its citizens.”

According to Hichem Snoussi from the international NGO Article 19, which is dedicated to safeguarding freedom of expression, Tunisian media is free, yet these freedoms do not have full legal bearing in Tunisian law.

A number of decrees are currently being drafted and debated, and are intended to provide legal structures for the media and for access to information.

Article 19 has also provided a thorough legal analysis of the draft constitution, and is putting pressure on the National Constituent Assembly (ANC) to go further than the initial draft to make sure that international standards are considered.

Much of the national debate is on the Internet. In a country where roughly one out of three persons has a Facebook account, the realm of social media is exploited to the hilt. According to Zabaar, something akin to an Internet militia is also spreading rumours and hate speech, especially on Facebook.

“There is a given pattern to the choice of language employed as well,” says Zabaar. “The right-wing groups tend voice their opinions in Arabic, while those representing the left side of the spectrum frequently use the French language.”

The range of new media is quite fully explored in Tunisia. Adherents of data journalism can plug into fhimt.com, which takes an approach to interpreting events that is based on graphical data analysis and comparison charts.

At the same time, those concerned with privacy and surveillance issues attend meetings dedicated to cryptography, and the ‘hacktivist’ group Anonymous is also alive and well in Tunisia.

Or consider the Tunisian version of Telecomix, which describes itself as a ” sociocyphernetic telecommunist cluster of internet and data loving bots and people” and sees its role as one of defending the free flow of information.

Nader Yamoun, a Tunis-based entrepreneur and open data activist, set up an anti-corruption portal, which promotes open data in Tunisian society. “In this regard, Tunisia can boast of real progress. The first open data platform was created in the U.S. in 2009. France followed in 2011, and we got one in Tunisia in 2012.”

While much work in this area has clearly still to be done, Zabaar sees the current stage of Tunisia’s transition towards a free society as one of growing up and joining the ranks of other functioning, albeit flawed democracies.

“Whatever they say, we do now have a strong base for a sound democracy.” (End)

By Ignacio Ramonet
PARIS, France, Jan 9 2013 (IPS)

Having survived the announced end of the world on Dec. 21, we can now try to foretell our immediate future, based on geopolitical principles that will help us understand the overall shifts of global powers and assess the major risks and dangers.

Ignacio Ramonet

Looking at a map of the world, we can immediately see some hotspots lit up in red. Four of them represent high levels of danger: Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia.

In the European Union (EU), 2013 will be the worst year since the beginning of the crisis in 2008. Austerity is the only creed and deep cuts to the welfare state continue because Germany, which for the first time in history dominates Europe and is ruling it with an iron fist, wills it so.

In Spain, political tensions will rise as the Generalitat de Catalunya (Government of Catalonia) decides the terms of a local referendum on independence for this autonomous community (province), a process that will be watched with great interest by the separatists in Euskadi, the Basque Country.

As for the economy, already in dire straits, it all depends on what happens – in the Italian elections in February; and on how the markets react to a possible win by conservative candidate Mario Monti, who has the support of Berlin and the Vatican, or by centre-left candidate Pier Luigi Bersani, who is the frontrunner in the polls.

Social explosions could occur in any of the countries of southern Europe (Greece, Portugal, Italy or Spain), exasperated as their people are with the constant cutbacks. The EU will not emerge from the doldrums in 2013, and everything could get worse if, on top of it all, the response of the markets is brutal (as neoliberals are urging) in France under the very moderate socialist President François Hollande.

In Latin America, 2013 will also be a year of challenges. In the first place, in Venezuela, which since 1999 has been a driver of progressive changes throughout the region, the unforeseen relapse in the health of President Hugo Chávez – re-elected Oct. 7 – is creating uncertainty.

There will also be elections on Feb. 17 in Ecuador. President Rafael Correa, another key Latin American leader, is expected to be re-elected. On Nov. 10 important elections will be held in Honduras, where former president Manuel Zelaya was toppled on Jun. 28, 2009. The Electoral Tribunal has authorised the registration of the Partido Libertad y Refundación (LIBRE – Freedom and Refoundation Party), led by Zelaya.

Chileans are due to go to the polls on Nov. 17. The unpopularity of conservative President Sebastián Piñera opens the way for a possible victory by socialist candidate and former president Michelle Bachelet.

International attention will be focused on Cuba as talks continue in Havana between the Colombian government and the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC) with the aim of putting an end to Latin America’s last armed conflict.

Meanwhile, there again appears to be a stalemate in the Middle East, the location of the most disturbing events in the world.

The Arab Spring uprisings toppled several dictators in the region: Zine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.

But subsequent elections allowed reactionary Islamist parties, like the Muslim Brotherhood, to come to power. Now, as we are seeing in Egypt, they want to hold onto it at all costs, to the consternation of the secular segments of society who had been the first to rise up in protest, and are refusing to accept this new form of authoritarianism. Tunisia faces the same problem.

After following with interest the explosions of freedom in the spring of 2011, European societies have again become apathetic about what is going on in the Middle East.

For example, the inexorably deepening civil war in Syria clearly shows how the big Western powers (the United States, the United Kingdom and France), allies of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, have decided to support – with money, arms and instructors – the Sunni Islamist insurgents. On all fronts, they are gaining ground. How long can the government of President Bashar al-Assad last?

In the face of the “Shiite Front” (Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Syria and Iran), the United States has built a broad regional “Sunni Front” (from Turkey and Saudi Arabia to Morocco, including Egypt, Libya and Tunisia). Its goal: to overthrow Bashar al-Assad and deprive Teheran of its big regional ally by next spring.

Why? Because on Jun. 14 Iran will hold presidential elections, in which incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not eligible to stand. In other words, for the next six months Iran will be immersed in a violent election campaign between partisans of a hard anti-Washington line and supporters of negotiations.

Given this situation in Iran, Israel will no doubt be preparing for a possible attack on Iran’s nuclear installations. The Jan. 22 elections in Israel will probably result in victory for the ultra-conservative coalition that supports Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is all for bombing Iran as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, U.S. President Barack Obama is looking toward Asia, a priority region for Washington since it decided on a strategic redirection of its foreign policy. The United States is attempting to curb the expansion of China by surrounding that country with military bases and relying on the support of its traditional partners: Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

China’s seas have become the areas with the greatest potential for armed conflict in the Asia Pacific region. Tensions between Beijing and Tokyo caused by the sovereignty dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands could be heightened following the Dec. 16 electoral victory of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, led by the new Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, who is a nationalist hawk.

China is moving full speed ahead with the modernisation of its navy. On Sept. 25 it launched its first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, with the intention of intimidating its neighbours. Beijing is increasingly intolerant of the U.S. military presence in Asia. A dangerous “strategic distrust” is building between the two giants, which will doubtless leave its mark on international politics in the 21st century.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

The hard-won freedoms of the Arab Spring need support from the international community to survive. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Daan Bauwens
BRUSSELS, Oct 4 2012 (IPS)

The Arab Spring is far from over. The protracted conflict in Syria continues to swallow lives while the international community, hamstrung by geopolitics, looks on; riots across the Muslim world following the release of a low-budget American movie that is disrespctful of the Prophet Muhammad resulted in the death of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens in Libya; Tunisia and Egypt continue to struggle with post-revolutionary economies; and a string of democratically elected Islamist governments has taken root in newly-liberated countries throughout the region.

Activists and analysts are on the edge, fearing that the freedoms fought for and won during the Arab Spring are now diminishing again. The only hope, they say, is the continued support of the international community for the long road ahead.

“Even though we are experiencing setbacks, we do need your continuous support for this momentum,” Tunisian activist Nabila Hamza, president of the international non-profit, Foundation for the Future (FFF), said at the European Union headquarters last Thursday, in a plea to European governments for long-term engagement in the Arab transition to democracy.

According to a recent report by the U.S.-based Freedom House, only Tunisia has shown an improvement in its overall governance score. Bahrain slipped backward while Egypt only showed a minor improvement. The score was based on five criteria: accountability and public voice, civil liberties, rule of law, anti-corruption and transparency.

At the United Nations General Debate last week, European Council President Herman Van Rompuy and UK Prime Minister David Cameron urged the U.N. not to be put off by setbacks, and called for increased support for people seeking to build democracy. “Achieving lasting change takes time,” Van Rompuy said to the General Assembly.

Last Thursday, during a panel discussion entitled ‘Arab Spring, revolutions and the domino effect’, organised at the Brussels office of the representation of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia to the European Union, several experts shed light on the most recent developments in the region and debated the EU’s specific role in democracy promotion in the Arab region.

Professor Todd Landman, director of the Institute for Democracy and Conflict Resolution at the University of Essex, pleaded for continuous foreign support for democracy, even if the donors themselves are not satisfied with the results of the elections.

Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, European Parliament Member and head of the EU Election Monitoring Mission in Libya, lamneted the many bureaucratic hurdles involved in the EU’s aid allocation process.

Hamza echoed these sentiments, adding, “The EU expects us to hire experts to decipher official aid documents while we’re fighting a revolution.”

Hamza, who, through the FFF, oversees the disbursement of more than 10 million dollars of support to over 166 civil society-led projects spread across 15 countries in the Arab region, is optimistic about the changes sweeping the Arab world.

“The Arab Spring has created space for civil society to grow at an enormous pace,” she told IPS. “Egypt, Libya and Yemen (are witnessing) a multiplication of new organisations, where men and women equally engage in civic matters.

“We have been fighting for human rights, anti-corruption and media freedom since the early fifties, but now we can do it without being prosecuted. New laws about free association have been installed in Tunisia (and) are being drafted in Libya and Egypt. The legal environment is changing.”

According to Hamza, the Arab spring also brought about a new phenomenon: “We see young activists from the diaspora coming back to Tunisia. People who had been exiled and banished are now coming back to help rebuild and reform the country. This cultural meeting between local people and Tunisians from the diaspora is creating a wonderful dynamic, especially in terms of civic engagement.”

In Hamza’s view, the election of Islamist governments should not be regarded as a setback for the revolution. “The Islamists are perceived by the population as martyrs of the oppression, this is what gave them legitimacy as a counter-power. That is why they got elected so easily.

“But in Tunisia and Egypt, the two countries where an Islamic movement tried to include Sharia law in the new consitution, they failed. After weeks of discussion, and under huge pressure from civil society, the Islamist party in Tunisia drafted a constitution in which men and women are equal.”

“We are witnessing a change within political Islam,” Hamza added. “Now that Islamists are running the countries they have to become more pragmatic. There is pressure from within the country: they have to solve issues like unemployment and the distribution of wealth. Then there is external pressure: now they are part of a world (in which) they need the support of Western countries to survive and tell their own people that faith isn’t the answer to their every need.”

Hamza urged the European Union to increase its support for democratisation in the Arab region. “Many pledges have been made and many programmes have been created to support us,” she said, referring to the European Support for Partnership, Reform and Inclusive Growth (SPRING) programme, under which the European Commission promised to provide support for democratic transformation, institution building and economic growth in the wake of the Arab Spring.

“But we still have the feeling more can be done, especially (for) civil society organisations, the only watchdogs of democracy, the only ones who can hold the government accountable. We need the support because we have to remain vigilant: the danger of new dictatorships still exists. We are still in a transition period.

“And after all, it is also in Europe’s own interest that the Arab Spring succeeds,” she added.

Most importantly, she said, the EU must redefine its aid paradigm. “Transition is a process,” she said. “The international community should support the process, not the short-term project. We need strategic patience in order to look at the real achievement of the revolution. Donors want immediate results, but a revolution has ups and downs.”

(END)

The recent visit by Abd al-Halim Murad, head of the Bahraini Salafi al-Asalah movement, to Syria to meet with Syrian rebels is an attempt by him and other Gulf Salafis to hijack the Syrian revolution.

Sadly, the Saudi and Bahraini governments have looked the other way as their Sunni Salafis try to penetrate the Syrian opposition in the name of fighting Assad, Alawites, Shia, Hizballah and Iran.

The Assad regime has pursued a sectarian strategy that has resulted in promoting violent “jihadism” in order to bolster his narrative that the opposition to his regime is the work of foreign radical Salafi terrorist groups. Despite Assad’s self-serving claims, violent Salafi activists are nevertheless exploiting instability and lawlessness in some Arab countries, Syria included, to preach their doctrine and force more conservative social practises on their compatriots.

Some Salafis do not believe in peaceful, gradual, political change and are actively working to undermine nascent political systems, including by terrorising and killing minority Shia, Alawites, and Christians.

Radical Salafis have recently committed violent acts in Mali and other Sahel countries in Africa, as well as in Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya. Salafis also have committed violent acts in the name of “jihad” in Egypt, Sinai, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East.

As the Arab Spring touches more countries and as more regimes—for example, in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Sudan and the Palestinian authority—come under pressure from their own citizens, they begin to use sectarianism and promote radical elements within these sects for their own survival and regional posturing. Salafi “jihadists” are more than happy to oblige. Unfortunately, average Muslim citizens bear the brunt of this violence.

Where did modern day Salafism come from?

Since the late 1960s, when King Faisal declared exporting Islam a cardinal principle of Saudi foreign policy, Saudi Arabia has been spreading its brand of Wahhabi-Salafi Islam among Muslim youth worldwide.

At the time, Faisal intended to use Saudi Islam to fight “secular” Arab nationalism, led by Gamal Abd al-Nassir of Egypt, Ba’thism, led by Syria and Iraq, and atheist Communism, led by the Soviet Union.

The Wahhabi-Salafi interpretation of Islam, which has been a Saudi export for half a century, is grounded in the teachings of 13th century Islamic scholar Ibn Taymiyya and 18th century Saudi scholar Ibn Abd al-Wahhab. It’s also associated with the conservative Hanbali school of Sunni jurisprudence.

In a nutshell, the Wahhabi-Salafi religious doctrine is intolerant of other religions such as Christians and Jews and of Muslim sects such as the Shia and the Ahmadiyya, which do not adhere to the teachings of Sunni Islam. It also restricts the rights of women as equal members of the family and society and uses the Wahhabi interpretation to quell any criticism of the regime in the name of fighting sedition, or “fitna”.

Even more troubling, Salafis view violence as a legitimate tool to fight the so-called enemies of Islam without the approval of nationally recognised religious authorities. Any self-proclaimed Salafi activist can issue a religious edict, or “fatwa”, to launch a jihad against a perceived enemy, whether Muslim or non-Muslim.

Usama Bin Ladin did just that in the 1990s, which, of course, started an unending cycle of violence and terrorism against Muslims and “infidels” alike, including the United States and other Western countries.

Many of the radical Salafi activists in Mali and other African countries have received their religious educations at Imam Muhammad University in Saudi Arabia, the hotbed of Salafi Islam and one of the most conservative institutions of Islamic education in the world.

The Saudi government and some wealthy Saudi financiers have been spending significant amounts of money on spreading Islam through scholarships, local projects and Islamic NGOs, as well as by building mosques and printing of Korans and other religious texts espousing Wahhabi-Salafism.

Since the early 1970s, Wahhabi-Salafi proselytisation has been carried out by Saudi-created and financed non-governmental organisations, such as the Muslim World League, the International Islamic Relief Organisation, the World Association of Muslim Youth, and al-Haramayn.

Some of these organisations became involved in terrorist activities in Muslim and non-Muslim countries and have since been disbanded by the Saudi government. Many of their leaders have been jailed or killed. Others fled their home countries and forged careers in new terrorist organisations in Yemen, Morocco, Iraq, Somalia, Indonesia, Libya, Mali and elsewhere.

For years, Saudi officials thought that as long as violent “jihad” was waged far away, the regime was safe. That view changed dramatically after May 12, 2003 when terrorists struck in the heart of the Saudi capital.

Wahhabi proselytisation has laid the foundation for today’s Salafi “jihadism” in Africa and in the Arab world. Saudi textbooks are imbued with this interpretation of Islam, which creates a narrow, intolerant, conflict-driven worldview in the minds of youth there.

Unlike the early focus of King Faisal, today’s proselytisers target fellow Muslims, who espouse a different religious interpretation, and other religious groups. The so-called jihadists have killed hundreds of Muslims, which they view as “collateral damage” in the fight against the “near and far enemies” of Islam.

While mainstream Islamic political parties are participants in governments across the Islamic world, and while Washington is beginning to engage Islamic parties as governing partners, radical Salafis are undermining democratic transition and lawful political reform. They oppose democracy as understood worldwide because they view it as man-made and not God’s rule, or “hukm”.

And what to do about it?

The raging violence in Syria and the regime’s clinging to power provide a fertile environment for Salafi groups to establish a foothold in that country. National security and strategic interests of the West and democratic Arab governments dictate that they neutralise and defeat the Salafi project.

As a first step, they must work closely with Syrian rebels to hasten the fall of the Assad regime. This requires arming the rebels with adequate weapons to fight the Assad military machine, especially his tanks, bulldozers and aircraft.

Washington and London must also have a serious conversation with the Saudis about the long-term threat of radical Salafism and the pivotal role Saudi Wahhabi proselytisation plays in nurturing radical Salafi ideology and activities. A positive outcome of this conversation should help in building a post-Arab Spring stable, democratic political order. In fact, such a conversation is long overdue.

For years my colleagues and I briefed senior policymakers about the potential and long-term danger of spreading this narrow-minded, exclusivist, intolerant religious doctrine. Unfortunately, the West’s close economic and security relations with the Saudi regime have prevented any serious dialogue with the Saudis about this nefarious export and insidious ideology.

The writer is the former director of the CIA’s Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program and author of A Necessary Engagement: Reinventing America’s Relations with the Muslim World.

A crowd of police at street demonstrations in Algiers on Feb. 19, 2011. Credit: Giuliana Sgrena/IPS

By Giuliana Sgrena
ALGIERS, Jun 20 2012 (IPS)

The on-going hunger strike of nine Algerian court clerks, coupled with the government’s indifference to their demands for an independent labour union, have stirred debate about Algeria’s role in the Arab Spring, which many see as an incomplete attempt to overturn a deeply flawed political and economic system.

Despite the fact that the health of the six women and three men, who have been fasting for over a month now, are deteriorating rapidly, neither the government nor the justice ministry has shown any indication that they will meet the workers’ demands.

“The health conditions are getting worse every day, three women are now in the Rouiba hospital; all of them have lost ten percent of their weight, and suffer from pain in their muscles and bones,” Nassira Ghozlane, chairwomen of the Autonomous National Trade Union of Public Administrations Workers (SNAPAP), told IPS.

“Also doctors are being pressured by authorities (the government) that want to minimise the impact of the hunger strike,” she added.

The justice workers started their protest last February, after the Minister of Justice failed to implement an agreement to improve working conditions. To make matters worse, the government still prevents workers from organising independent unions to advocate for their rights.

Nevertheless the clerks decided to create their own trade union affiliated to the independent SNAPAP.

These striking clerks are just one example of nation-wide discontent, that is daily manifest in strikes and protests around the country.

Thus many are curious as to why the wave of dissent, which began in earnest early last year, has failed to yield results in a country that offers fertile ground for resistance.

Following the now landmark act of self-immolation that sparked the Arab Spring in Tunisia, the practice spread through Algeria as well. Meanwhile opposition parties, unions, human rights organisations and bloggers united to form the National Coordination for Democracy and Change (NCDC) to organise rallies every Saturday.

“The slogan under which protesters rallied was ‘Systeme Dégage’ (System Go Away) not only ‘Bouteflika (referring to Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika) Dégage’, because people knew that even if the president were to leave, nothing will change as the whole system is corrupted,” Nadjet Rahmani, one of the protesters, told IPS.

But protesters suffered a brutal crackdown, with 30,000 policemen and riot police surrounding the location of a May 1 demonstration and arresting numerous people last year.

Though government repression was swift, some observers believe the failure of the Algerian Spring is due more to memories of terror that still haunt the masses.

“We already had our revolution back in 1988. Although it was called the ‘couscous revolt’ (in reference to critical food shortages at the time) it was also a revolution for social justice, against the one party system, for democracy,” Cherifa Kheddar, chairwoman of Djazairouna (Our Algeria), an association of families of terrorism victims, told IPS.

“It was organised by trade unionists and activists, who were all put in jail and tortured. So the streets were occupied by Islamists, as (was the case) with the Tunisian and Egyptian revolts,” she added.

Elections following the 1988 revolt resulted in the victory of the Islamic Salvation Front. The Algerian army, supported at the time by large swathes of the population including women’s groups who rightly feared the outcome of an Islamic party victory, interrupted the election and opened the floodgates to a period of bloodshed in the country that claimed 200,000 lives.

Both the army and the Armed Islamic Groups (GIA) were responsible for the massive human rights violations that marked this dark period of Algeria’s history, in which 40,000 people were disappeared.

The Islamists clung to power for a year but even after they were ousted in 1992 they continued to threaten and kill anyone considered to be a non-believer – soldiers, politicians, women, intellectuals, teachers, hairdressers.

The period of terror only ended when then-president Bouteflika declared a national reconciliation programme that failed to persecute human rights violators or bring perpetrators of grave crimes to justice.

Exhausted by the wave of bloodletting, a majority of Algerians supported the presidential proposal, which effectively destroyed any substantial opposition for years to come.

As a result, the same tensions that plagued the country a decade ago are still very much alive today, with Islamists and secular people living side by side in simmering hostility.

Added to these old wounds are the issues of corruption, low salaries, inadequate housing and unemployment, which is particularly high among the country’s youth.

“People are still afraid of what happened in the 90s and they do not want to risk going back to that period, so they do not want to go to the street to protest,” Karima Moali, a secondary school teacher, told IPS.

Meanwhile, the Algeria government is using covert methods of warding off dissent, particularly the kind aroused by economic dissatisfaction.

Consistently high oil revenues suggest that by the close 2012 the foreign revenues fund will amount to some 205.2 billion dollars.

Currently, Algeria is producing 1.2 million barrels of oil per day, but “our capacity is 1.4 million barrels, and (could) reach 1.5 million in a few months,” said Algerian Energy Minister, Youcef Yousfi, in a summit in Kuala Lumpur on Jun. 7.

Thus the government has been able to allocate enough money towards employment-generating schemes, better housing, and social services in an effort to ward off social unrest.

State-owned companies have created enough new opportunities to bring unemployment down to 9.8 percent from 11.3 percent in 2008, according to national statistics, though the youth unemployment rate stands stubbornly at 20 percent.

The government also allocated funds towards new public housing and increased state salaries across the board, just prior to the May 10 elections.

“Of course there is not a fair redistribution of the oil revenue, as we asked for in the demonstrations; rather, (national) wealth is being used to avoid a worse situation that could provoke a revolution or a revolt,” Djamal Hammoune, a human rights activist, told IPS.

(END)

The Arab Spring sent scores of sick and injured Libyans, fleeing their war- torn country, straight to Jordan, where the influx of patients is putting a lot of pressure on Jordanian hospitals and disrupting the lives of Libyan and Jordanian patients alike.

Former Libyan rebel fighter Faraj Fakhri is being treated in Amman’s Chmeisani hospital. Credit: Mona Alami/IPS

“Hospitals have stopped admitting Libyan patients, with the exception of emergency cases and those who can pay cash up front. It’s a very difficult situation for patients, especially those undergoing cancer or in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatments,” Awni Bashir, former minister of social development and head of the Chmeisani hospital and the Jordanian Association of Private Hospitals, told IPS.

In the last six months alone about 52,000 Libyan patients sought treatment in Jordan; today, about 15,000 remain.

Stress of overcapacity in hospitals might explain several recent cases of patients’ distraught family members assaulting medical staff. “The number of attacks is still minimal with about 10 to 12 cases recorded this year,” said Bashir.

But another crisis might be looming on Jordan’s horizon, which is home to about 100,000 Syrian refugees.

“Syrian patients are starting to trickle in and we worry that we might face a similar situation in the next few months,” Bashir said.

Strain on limited resources

The popular uprising in Libya last year ended the 40-year dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi but not before it claimed thousands of lives and left countless Libyans injured.

While driving from Ajdabiya to Benghazi during the Libyan revolution, rebel fighter Faraj Fakhri’s motorcade came under heavy fire. His car crashed and his body was riddled with bullets. Fakhri now sits in Amman’s Chmeisani hospital. He has been operated on twice and is waiting to undergo three more operations.

“Thank God almighty I can now move my leg. I came to Jordan to be operated on, as my country does not have the same medical facilities, especially in the current situation,” he said, looking down at his torn up leg.

Sharing Fakhri’s room is Hajj Omar, a patient in his seventies who has also undergone a leg operation. “The doctor operated on me out of the goodness of his heart. I was in pain and hospitals were refusing to treat Libyans like me because we couldn’t afford to pay for our care,” said Omar.

Since 2006, Jordan has specialised in medical tourism, providing tens of thousands of people with cosmetic surgery, neurological surgery, orthopaedic care, organ transplants, fertility treatments and cancer procedures. The country’s medical tourism industry contributes four percent of the national gross domestic product (GDP) and earns about a billion dollars a year, according to the Oxford Business Group.

But the flood of casualties from the Libyan revolution has wreaked havoc on the sector.

“We were receiving 18 planes every week, with most Libyans heading directly to our hospitals, (putting) significant pressure on our medical sector,” said Ahmad Rajaei al-Hiari, director of the Medical Tourism Directorate in the country.

Similarities in language, culture and tradition, the absence of visa requirements for Libyans and convenient direct flights between Amman and Tripoli attracted a multitude of Libyan patients.

There is now a serious shortage of beds for Jordanian patients, forcing private hospitals to keep 10 percent of emergency beds free for nationals. The medical sector has a total of about 4,000 beds in private hospitals, and another 8,000 in public institutions.

The problem is not limited to the hospitals; Libyan patients are also utilising tourism facilities like hotels, restaurants and car rental services. “Some hotels are simply refusing Libyan guests until payment is made,” said a healthcare source.

Others have asked Libyan guests to vacate their rooms by the end of the week, unless they can settle their bills in cash.

The situation is exerting a heavy financial burden on the Hashemite Kingdom; Amman and Tripoli are now locked in a financial dispute over Libya’s outstanding debt of 200 million dollars for unpaid “medical bills as well as accommodation expenses.”

The new Libyan government made a 65-million-dollar payment to the Kingdom’s hospitals and hotels last month. Earlier this week Libya transferred an additional 60 million dollars to Jordan.

In the meantime, hospitals are experiencing a shortage of funds and cash flow difficulties, which in turn have impacted the medical supply chain. As a result, the Kingdom’s hospitals currently owe more than 65 million dollars to medical equipment suppliers.

About 20 percent of all Libyan patients treated in Jordan were wounded during last year’s conflict; others were seeking care for problems related to nerves, vision, cancer or infertility.

(END)

At the battered terminal of Tripoli’s tiny Mitiga airport, over 150 young men and women jostle to be repatriated home to Nigeria on Libya’s Buraq airlines. This journey to Lagos is one of hundreds the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has facilitated since the start of the uprising against Gaddafi’s regime over a year ago.

IOM estimates that one million migrant workers were in Libya sending remittances home before the crisis, a heavy footprint for a Libyan population of under seven million.

Early on in the uprising, workers from Asia, the Middle East, and neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt fled across Libya’s borders. But Somali and Eritrean political refugees continued to arrive in Tripoli throughout the war; braving the harrowing journey north through Sudan.

IOM’s current flights are now filled with West Africans who traversed Niger and Chad to Libya seeking a better economic future, but whose ultimate hardships have forced them to return.

At Mitiga, many Nigerians don the brand new green sports jackets and shoes given to them by IOM, with their meagre possessions stuffed into plastic suitcases and shopping bags.

“The major problem is citizenship verification and temporary travel documentation,” explains Jeremy Haslam, IOM’s mission chief in Libya. “If they don’t have their documents – which I can say is (true for) over 90 percent – the first thing we have to do, before we can even think about repatriation, is confirm where they are from.”

While a few Nigerians look relieved to return home and laugh with comrades, the majority are in despair. After a costly and arduous car trip with smugglers over the desert into Libya, they have spent most days searching for piecemeal day labour, and living in perpetual fear of being harassed, robbed and detained by the Libyan militias policing the streets. They will now return to families – often indebted to smugglers – empty-handed.

“When I got to Tripoli I worked at a car wash and got up to 50 Libyan Dinars (40 dollars) a day,” says Dennis, a soft-spoken 24-year old. “When the war came however, it was hell. I lost my passport and money to the militia. They arrested me for 20 days and beat me up. During the war the militias were always stopping me, so I stayed indoors.”

Migrants interviewed by IPS often had their passports confiscated or lost early on, and none possessed entry visas. Libya is not a destination country for most, but a stepping-stone to Europe. While stigma towards Sub-Saharan migrants may have lessened since the war – when Muammar Gaddafi employed black mercenaries to fight against the rebels – racism is still pervasive, they say.

Many Nigerians at the airport terminal know each other. Each forked out around 1,200 dollars for a dangerous boat ride to Europe late last year, only to be apprehended by Libyan authorities while at sea and jailed in Tripoli’s Ain Zara prison for the past three months.

One among them is Shauna, a 38 year-old mother to daughters Angel, 4, and Blessed, 1. She was heavily pregnant when her husband reached Italy by himself at the start of Libya’s conflict. She gave birth to Blessed in an apartment in Tripoli, and then paid for a boat ride.

She was arrested with both daughters, and all three spent time in prison. “I don’t have any money,” Shauna says, opening her fake leather handbag full of torn, waterlogged documents and children’s drawings. “What am I to do?”

The U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) estimates that roughly 50,000 people attempted to cross the Mediterranean by boat in 2011, and close to 2,000 drowned. Rumours persist that Gaddafi encouraged the crossings to Europe in retribution over NATO strikes. However, the numbers are small in the context of last year’s overall migration from Libya; the largest in the region since World War II.

“It’s a very complicated picture,” says IOM’s Haslam. “Migrants may have been moved from a basement of a house where they were protected for some time, and then whoever was protecting them couldn’t handle it any longer. They pass them to the next entity, person, group, militia – and they are bouncing all over the place. They may have been working in forced labour to earn their keep.

“Maybe some opportunistic types have seen they can actually trade migrants,” says Haslam. “It gets into the whole debt-bondage deal. Migrants are being sold on now for 260 – 800 LD (208 – 642 dollars) per person. You come across enough cases to see a trend. We saw a discount on one particular day of 21,000 LD (16,875 dollars) for 78 people – that’s a knocked-down price for West Africans, with women and children among them.”

Economic and political refugees now face another new threat. Libya’s minister for labour, Mustafa Ali Rugibani, has declared a Mar. 4 expulsion deadline for irregular workers. Despite the lack of a transparent system to process people in place, he says, “if they are not legalised they will be deported.”

“I hope they won’t expel people who should not be expelled, such as asylum seekers and refugees, or people in need of international protection,” says Emmanuel Gignac, UNHCR’s mission head in Libya.

On a sodden, winter day at a Tripoli railway yard that a Chinese company was building before the war, hundreds of refugees from Somalia and to a lesser extent, Eritrea, live in ramshackle housing. The government-owned property is now ‘managed’ by a local militia, replete with 4×4 trucks patrolling with anti-aircraft guns, and a detention cell.

This militia is entrepreneurial – charging refugees 24 dollars each per month to stay, and assigning them laminate ID cards. They offer ‘protection’ and paid daily labour – as well as harassment, the residents claim.

Seventeen-year-old Ayan is originally from the war-torn Ogaden region in southeast Ethiopia, but had been living in Mogadishu. It took her seven months to reach Libya, and after some boys accidentally hit her during an overcrowded car ride through the desert, she developed physical pain that won’t go away. Her friend, Fawza, 20, is also from Mogadishu. “In Somalia, there is forced marriage and no education. Every day people are dying from the war,” she says.

All the residents interviewed by IPS say they want to go to Europe, despite the fact that 15 recently washed-up bodies from a shipwreck were Somalis from their camp.

“I am going to Italy, I have many friends there,” exclaims Theodras from Eritrea, who is able to find work three days a week loading trucks. When asked about the labour ministry’s threat of expulsion, he replies: “Who cares – we will get to where we are going.”

Meanwhile, across Tripoli in an Italian-era Catholic church a festive crowd gathers in glittering gowns and headdresses. This is a Nigerian wedding, replete with traditional musicians, food, and a chance for dancing, gossip and laughter. On this rare morning, the tight-knit migrant community can forget their daily hardships, at least for an hour. (END)

The Arab world is talking about a revolution; not just out on the streets but in films, in newspapers, in songs – using any means necessary to document events, expose the horrors of war and explore the struggles and possibilities that lie ahead as the Arab Spring feels the wintry chill of post-revolutionary democratic challenges.

Caught between repression and the struggle for change, filmmakers have been documenting the tidal wave of transformation sweeping across Arab countries and creating a new, collective culture of resistance.

Many feel the artistic process has been a personal and political quest for reconciling the tensions between Islam, faith, freedom and democracy, but by far the strongest consensus among media makers has been – as Julius Caesar famously remarked while leading his armies across the River Rubicon in Northern Italy – “the die has been cast.”

Image production in war-torn Syria

Filmmakers from Syria, where images of daily civilian massacre slip through the cracks of censorship, brought home the relation between image production and democracy, which has become painfully obvious in the conflict-ridden country.

According to film journalist Alaa Karkouti, Syria has no national commercial cinema and only Hollywood movies and Egypt films are publicly available, resulting in the total absence of a common film culture among civilians.

This was no accident – most authoritarian regimes thrive on placing severe restrictions on the collective imagination of their populations, limiting their ability to conjure up alternatives to the daily routine of repression.

While working on a documentary about the ‘caricature scandal’, a story about freedom of expression circumventing censorship, Syrian producer and film activist Hala Al Alabdallah unearthed a law forbidding the use of “images devoid of commentary”. The discovery highlighted just how insidious repression can be.

But while state forces attempt to control everything from free association to artistic production, resistance and creativity have come together in the squares or “agoras” of the Middle East and North Africa, opening up new public spaces for social solidarity, overcoming collective fears and expressing hope and a new sense of belonging.

For the first time, it seems, the feeling of being a citizen of one’s own country is proliferating among the Syrian masses, buoyed by a cultural resurgence that includes street dancing and turning old folksongs into revolutionary anthems.

“People came to the streets asking for freedom; even in a (muzzled) country like Syria we hear slogans chanting that Syrian people are one. I see the incarnation of freedom in poetry,” said Al Alabdallah pointing out the powerful nexus at work between insurgency, culture and engagement.

Mohamed Ali Atassi, a cultural producer in exile, turned to filmmaking out of psychological necessity, “when I realized I could no longer express the complexity I was feeling without picking up a camera,” Atassi, whose “creative solutions” include obtaining footage from inside the country using the internet and Skype interviews, told IPS.

“Reporting what is happening is a survival strategy. We went to the streets and we lost friends, hands, eyes. We realised this is no longer an action but a style of life, a choice to be against injustice now and forever,” explained Nora Younis a 34-year old online journalist, human rights activist and founder of Al Masry Al Youm a multimedia company and the Arab world’s first WebTV in Cairo.

Despite her fear, Younis felt compelled to order her newly trained team of young video journalists to “get out there and keep the cameras rolling.” In their toughest assignment yet, the 20-year-olds had to get on the streets and ‘learn by doing’ the dangerous process of reporting a revolution.

One of the video journalists reporters, Ahmed Abdel Fatah, was shot in the eye while filming people being killed on the Qsr el-Nil bridge during the Internet blackout of the 18-day-long Cairo revolution last January.

The resulting dramatic footage was edited into a documentary entitled “Reporting… a Revolution” – a powerful example of witness-filmmaking by six young reporters including Abdel Fatah.

“I am a videographer, my eye is my most precious asset,” he said. “But we will never stop. This is our job, it’s what we know how to do best and we’ll keep doing it.”

Well aware of the contradictions implicit in “guerrilla journalism”, Younis faces a daily struggle with the ethics of journalistic objectivity, as the lines between documenting revolution and revolutionary documentary filmmaking blurred into non-existence.

Arab women face the camera

Many acts of defiance amongst women are increasingly poignant expressions of a new readiness to speak up without fearing the consequences of being heard.

Examples like Aliaa Magda Elmahdy’s subversive act of posting a nude photo of herself was seen as a groundbreaking statement on the dignity of the naked female body trapped in a gender power struggle.

“The nude picture is indicative of a new state of fearlessness and this gives me hope because an incident of this kind would not have occurred before the revolution,” pointed out Viola Safik, a German- Egyptian documentary filmmaker talking in Berlin about changing perspectives in the Arab world.

Safik also warned that the opening up of cultural frontiers could lead to an era where art will become more aggressive, potentially engendering violent backlashes, like the power of the regime to label cultural producers as “traitors” or “unbelievers”.

Undeterred, women are slowly and tentatively facing the camera. Long-repressed controversial issues like marriage freedom, the meaning and implications of financial independence, tradition, what to accept and what to refuse, were all central questions in Hanan Abdalla’s debut documentary “In the Shadow of a Man”.

Born in the backstreets of Cairo, 69-year-old Wafaa, the documentary’s protagonist, looks back at the “honour” check she was forced to submit to on her wedding night and has no qualms or regrets about her divorce, though she sadly never recovers a sense of respect for men.

As violence rages throughout the Arab world, with the spotlight largely on Syria and Bahrain, Berlinale Festival jury-member Boualem Sansal, the Algerian novelist and poet, pointed out that Algeria has somehow escaped scrutiny, despite the fact that president Abdelaziz Bouteflika “strangles his people morally and culturally, an act that is tantamount to cultural genocide,” Sansal said on the last day of the Berlin film festival.

His words are a sombre reminder that the die may be cast but crucial dominoes in the Arab world have yet to fall; and when they do, the cameras will be rolling.

(END)

The United Nations, which remains politically deadlocked over the drawn-out crisis in Syria, has hit another roadblock, this time over humanitarian assistance to the thousands of men, women and children caught up in the 11-month-old conflict.

Despite repeated efforts, Valerie Amos, U.N. under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, has failed to get approval for a proposed visit to Syria.

The government of President Bashar al-Assad has continued to stall – virtually refusing to cooperate with the United Nations.

“I am deeply disappointed that I have not been able to visit Syria, despite my repeated requests to meet Syrian officials at the highest level to discuss the humanitarian situation and the need for unhindered access to the people affected by the violence,” Amos said Wednesday.

The Syrian government has not only remained silent over the U.N. offer to facilitate food and medical supplies but also turned down a request by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) for a pause in hostilities to evacuate the wounded.

U.N. spokesperson Martin Nesirky told reporters Wednesday that Amos was ready to go “at a moment’s notice” but that the Syrian government has failed to agree on a date.

“She hasn’t got the green light yet,” he said.

According to the United Nations, over 7,500 have been killed, mostly civilians, and including members of the Syrian security forces.

“Every day that we are not able to reach people, especially in the towns where there is heavy fighting, prolongs their suffering,” Amos said.

The United Nations and its partners stand ready to help humanitarian aid reach people in desperate need in Syria, she added, pointing out this should be one of the highest priorities in the ongoing conflict.

A meeting of Western and Arab leaders in Tunis last week called for a U.N. peacekeeping mission in Syria.

But this proposal is considered a non-starter since it has to be approved by the 15-member Security Council where Russia and China have already exercised their vetoes to protect the Assad regime.

Both countries rejected a Security Council resolution last month critical of the Syrian government which was accused of committing atrocities against civilians.

Speaking in Tunis last week, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was quoted as saying, “It’s quite distressing to see two permanent members of the Security Council using their veto when people are being murdered: women, children and brave young men.”

“It’s just despicable. And I ask, whose side are they on?” she said.

Clinton also told a U.S. Senate hearing Wednesday “there would be an argument to be made” that Assad was a “war criminal” in the context of a definition by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Navi Pillay, U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said Wednesday that Syria should be referred to the ICC.

Addressing an “urgent debate” of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Pillay said there were massive campaigns of arrest by the Syrian military and security forces and an escalation of violence in the country.

“Blockades have made it impossible for the injured to reach hospitals or for supplies of food, water and medical supplies to reach residents,” she said.

Pillay also referred to reports of increased armed attacks by anti- government fighters.

The Syrian government has provided the U.N. Human Rights office with casualty figures which put the total number of people killed in the violence – civilians, soldiers and police officers – between March of last year and mid January 2012 at more than 3,800, she said.

But the U.N. Human Rights office believes the actual numbers maybe many more, she noted.

“What is urgently needed today is for the killings to stop. Those committing atrocities in Syria have to understand that the international community will not stand by and watch this carnage and that their decisions and the actions they take today ultimately will not go unpunished.”

Pillay said she believed the situation of Syria should be referred to the ICC. The prosecutor of the ICC is able to initiate an investigation on the basis of a referral from a state party to the court or from the U.N. Security Council.

Pillay also called on the Syrian authorities to cooperate with international mechanisms, particularly the newly appointed special envoy, Kofi Annan. The former U.N. secretary-general was appointed jointly by the United Nations and the League of Arab States.

Syrian Ambassador Faysal Khabbaz Hamoui told the Human Rights Council it was the desire of some to use the Council “for slander and libel”. The real aim of the meeting was to cover up the murder and violence of armed groups directed against innocent civilians, he added.

“The Syrian government was aware that the quality of services had regressed but armed groups have targeted state infrastructure including educational and health institutions,” he said.

The international community, he said, should stop enticing and exciting sectarian violence.

The action by the Human Rights Council would fuel the flames of terrorism and prolong the crisis, he declared.

(END)

In the Friends of Syria meeting held in Tunis last week, Gulf Arab monarchies offered nearly unqualified support for the Syrian opposition, while the democratic states were more cautious.
Representatives of 60 nations and members of Syria’s largest opposition group, the Syrian National Congress (SNC), met here Friday to discuss a possible resolution to escalating conflict in Syria.

The nations present were all generally in support of Syria’s opposition and opposed to the authoritarian regime of Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad. Iran, China and Russia, all high-profile international backers of the Assad regime, were notably absent.

The meeting in Tunis was designed to be a space in which the SNC and their international supporters could formulate a unified plan of action to stop the atrocities in Syria.

However, despite the absence of any Assad supporters, disagreements among the different parties present were more striking then any agreements reached.

While every participant offered rhetorical support to the Syrian rebels and universal condemnation of the Syrian regime, many important delegates were unwilling to back their expressed sympathies with concrete offers of military aid.

A serious rupture between Gulf Arab monarchies calling explicitly for regime change and immediate military support for the opposition, and democracies (including the United States and host nation Tunisia), who stressed caution and stopped short of demanding that Assad leave the country, proved to be a major obstacle to the conference.

The current Tunisian government came to power as the result of a revolution against a dictator similar to Assad, and most senior officials are former dissidents who spent decades imprisoned or in exile.

Thus it came as no surprise earlier this month when Tunisia expelled the Syrian ambassador in response to the violence in the country.

However, at this meeting the Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki said that Assad should receive immunity from prosecution and that international military intervention in Syria would be a “serious mistake.”

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton struck a similar tone, condemning the Assad regime and praising the opposition, but not offering any explicit military support.

The Syrian opposition came to this meeting hoping for tangible military promises in what is now an increasingly brutal and one-sided civil war; the measured language of Marzouki and Clinton was anathema to what the SNC and broader Syrian opposition wanted to hear.

Achraf al Moqdad, Syrian opposition activist and member of the Current for National Change, told IPS, “This isn’t what the Syrian people want, they want a concrete resolution with the threat of military action, or (real) military action, to stop the crimes against humanity that are happening everyday, every night in Syria,” he said.

SNC’s press spokesman Mouayad AlKiblawi was even more direct. “(Marzouki and Clinton) never talked about self defense. We want to keep the peaceful image of our revolution but (the regime doesnt) allow us. What (does the international community) want us to do, do they want to exterminate the Syrian people, must there be 100,000 victims before the international community intervenes?” he asked IPS.

When asked what kind of international intervention the SNC wanted, AlKiblawi emphasised that the opposition wanted the international community to treat Syria like Libya, where air-strikes and direct military aid were instrumental in toppling the Qaddafi regime, and not like Yemen, where slow international pressure and promises of immunity finally caused the regime to relinquish power.

“The Syrian streets want any kind of intervention that (ends the) killing here, they don’t care about the method….We’re not Yemen, we have already gone (far) beyond that….it’s nonsense to apply the Yemeni solution in Syria, we don’t agree with that. We won’t live with killers (linked to the regime),” he said.

Clinton and Marzouki’s reluctance to offer military backing disappointed the opposition so much that at one point it looked like SNC representatives were going to walk out of the conference.

Meanwhile, the Gulf Arab dictatorships present at the meeting gave nearly unconditional backing to the democratic aspirations of the Syrian opposition.

Both Qatar and Saudi Arabia called for immediate shipments of arms to the Syrian opposition and explicitly advocated broader military support and the prosecution of Assad and his entourage.

Both these nations are absolute monarchies with few democratic freedoms. The fact that they are throwing their support behind the Syrian democracy movement may have more to do with their longstanding loathing of the Assad regime and his Iranian backers than to any principled commitment to democratisation.

The very fact that Qatar and Saudi Arab are dictatorships may allow them to support intervention in Syria, an idea that is extremely divisive in the Arab world and beyond, whereas Clinton and Marzouki have to be cognizant of the public opinion of their country’s citizens.

Most analysts in Washington believe that the U.S. public will not accept any more costly, uncertain military adventures in the Middle East and while many Tunisians support the Syrian revolution, there is a strong undercurrent of support for Assad because of his rhetorical stance against Israel and his vocal opposition to the United States.

The hard fact that foreign intervention in Syria is still extremely controversial in the international community was not lost on any of the conference’s attendees.

As the first delegates began filing into the hotel, a crowd of about two hundred pro-Assad protesters amassed in front of the conference waving Ba’athist and Palestinian flags and shouting slogans denouncing the U.S. and Gulf Arabs.

Minutes before Marzouki and Clinton arrived at the meeting, the protest turned violent, and demonstrators were beaten back by police.

While this meeting was supposed to present a unified front against Assad, it did anything but. For now, it seems that the bloodshed in Syria will continue.

(END)

The ongoing crackdown by Egypt’s military rulers on a handful of civil society groups accused of receiving illegal foreign funds has far-reaching implications for the estimated 40,000 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) operating in the Arab world’s most populous country.

Thousands of NGOs – engaged in everything from nature conservation to eradicating illiteracy and sheltering women from domestic abuse – are collateral damage in a row that threatens Egypt’s longstanding relationship with the U.S.

“This dispute is affecting all NGOs in Egypt that rely on foreign donors for grants,” the director of a Cairo-based non-profit organisation told IPS. “Unless it is resolved soon, hundreds if not thousands of NGOs will be forced to shut down.”

Egyptian security forces stormed the offices of 10 local and foreign NGOs in late December, including the U.S.-based International Republican Institute (IRI), the National Democratic Institute (NDI), and Freedom House. Since then, authorities have referred 43 employees of non-profit pro-democracy groups – including 16 Americans – to trial before a criminal court on charges of receiving unauthorised foreign funds and using them to incite anarchy in Egypt.

The tension has been building since March 2011, when Washington announced plans to distribute 65 million dollars in grants directly to pro-democracy groups in Egypt. Hundreds of local NGOs applied for the grants, angering Egypt’s military rulers, who claimed the direct funding bypassed proper government channels.

State prosecutors have accused 300 non-profit groups with offices in Egypt, including the April 6 Youth Movement that played a leading role in the uprising that toppled president Hosni Mubarak last year, of accepting unauthorised funds. A source close to the investigation said civil society organisations and prominent activists received over 300 million dollars in illicit funds between June 2010 and December 2011.

International cooperation minister Fayza Aboul Naga, the Mubarak-era holdover seen as the driving force behind the NGO crackdown, has blamed foreign hands for the continuous unrest that has rocked the country since Mubarak’s ouster last February. In October she told a judicial panel that Washington had funded unregistered non-profits operating in Egypt as part of a scheme to destabilise the country and hijack its revolution for its own interests.

“The United States and Israel could not directly create a state of chaos and work to maintain it in Egypt, so they used direct funding to organisations, especially American NGOs, as a means of implementing these goals,” state-run Middle East News Agency (MENA) quoted Aboul Naga as saying.

Rights activists contend that the military has targeted human rights and democracy-building organisations to divert attention away from its mismanagement of Egypt’s transition and exhaustive list of rights violations.

“The military is using civil society as a scapegoat for its failures,” said Negad El-Borai, a prominent rights lawyer and activist. The ruling generals are using the same repressive tactics employed by the former regime, he added.

Under Mubarak, stringent conditions for NGO registration and funding forced many groups to operate in a grey area, leaving them vulnerable to crackdowns whenever authorities felt it politically expedient. The non-profit groups at the centre of the current controversy are accused of failing to register with the Ministry of Social Solidarity as required by Egyptian law.

“In reality, the (registration) process is rarely straightforward,” said the director of a developmental NGO, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. “Typically, the ministry doesn’t respond in any way to applications, so you just go ahead and operate assuming you’ve been approved.”

He said it took over five years for the ministry to approve his non-profit group’s licencing.

Approximately 30,000 NGOs were operating in Egypt at the start of the uprising that ended Mubarak’s 30-year rule. An estimated 10,000 more were established in the year since, most engaged in human rights and democracy building – areas the country’s military rulers view with deep suspicion.

“Some of the new groups were able to register, but with the Ministry of Social Solidarity in a state of paralysis since the revolution, most just started without any permits,” said the NGO director.

Analysts see the raids that catapulted a handful of NGOs into the spotlight as part of a broader campaign against civil society involving intimidation tactics, media vilification, and a probe into the bank accounts of prominent activists. Several non-profit groups that IPS spoke to claim government agents arrived unannounced at their offices demanding to see bank records and interrogating staff.

Many groups feel cornered. Egyptian authorities have allegedly refused all requests for foreign funding since the uprising, leaving civil society groups to cancel or scale back activities – or risk accepting unauthorised direct funding.

“About 20 percent of the NGOs in Egypt receive foreign funding, either direct through a donor, or through an intermediary organisation that receives funding and distributes it to grassroots NGOs,” the director explained. “Grants have been approved (by Western donors), but the government has not allowed any foreign funding since the revolution, so the NGOs can’t implement their projects.”

Egyptian civil society relies heavily on foreign funding because domestic resources are limited. Individuals and companies readily donate to charity, but local donors have small purses and are generally reluctant to support any group that engages in controversial areas such as reproductive health, drug abuse counselling, or political participation.

“The government will chip in, but only if your project is in line with its policies,” said the employee of an NGO whose project to educate citizens on their basic rights was cancelled due to a funding shortfall.

Even protecting the environment can be a sensitive issue if it involves a foreign donor.

Environmentalist Mindy Baha El-Din said the government flatly rejected her application to establish a non-profit association to manage sport hunting as a sustainable way of generating revenue and retooling the police force. The issue: the small grant needed to seed the conservation project was to come from a U.S. government agency.

“We sought money from USAID, not because it was American, but because they weren’t dictating the terms of how it could be used,” said Baha El-Din. “They were telling us, you come up with a good idea and we’ll fund it. But the Egyptian government refused to allow the funding so we couldn’t take the project forward.”

Activists say the government’s witch-hunt of foreign-funded non-profit groups has altered the way ordinary Egyptians view civil society. Many NGO workers claim they no longer feel welcome in the neighbourhoods where they serve the poor, and some have been forced out by angry mobs accusing them of being foreign agents.

“Everything has come to a standstill until this dispute is resolved,” said the administrator of a small NGO. (END/IPS/MM/IP/HD/CS/RA/CM/SS/12)

A year ago the fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt was greeted with general satisfaction and considerable relief. Was it already possible to glimpse (for example, in the spectacle of the Egyptian leader being judged bedridden in a cage) the difficulties that lay ahead for North Africa and the Middle East fulfilling the promise of the “Arab Spring”?

The cruel end of Gaddafi, trapped and lynched on nearly live television, and his anonymous burial, was a foretaste of what lay ahead and would cause discomfort to the European powers and the United States, whose intelligence services had already warned of the precariousness of the process of change.

After a prolonged period of relative stability of the Israeli-Palestinian situation, thanks to the cooperation of Cairo, which received as much military aid as Tel Aviv, the alarms went off when the Palestinian government decided to go to the United Nations asking for admission.

The next blow came, as feared, from Iran, which confirmed its rejection of the inspectors’ demands and its refusal to stop its project to develop nuclear energy, which was suspected of being a cover for a nuclear weapons programme.

If London, Paris, and Washington do not succeed in changing Teheran’s path, Israel would be willing and ready to bomb the country’s nuclear sites. The U.S. and Iran find themselves at historical loggerheads. The regime of the ayatollahs cannot forgive Washington’s long support of the Shah, while Washington still smarts at the humiliation of the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, which contributed significantly to making Jimmy Carter a one-term president. Both sides reserve the right to revile and spar with the other.

Iranian president Ahmadinejad recently took advantage of an opportunistic alliance with Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez to annoy the United States in its own “backyard”, paying visits to Caracas, Quito, and Havana. But this did not greatly displease Washington, as it isn’t clear whether the Iranian president has a clear strategy or whether this is simply theatre for his bosses, to whom he must give the impression of being a global player.

This may be also the case with his threat to close the Gulf of Hormuz, which the US has stated it would react to with force. It is the only case in which Obama has gone this far, moreover, in a year in which he would be best served by stability before the elections next November.

Closing the straits would mean economic ruin for Teheran, which would lose the income from its oil exports. Moreover, Ahmadinejad’s threat provoked Saudi Arabia to warn that it would follow the U.S.’ lead in terms of using force. The terror that this Hormuz eventuality has provoked in Washington is striking.

In this complex scenario, there is another awkward contestant and a humanitarian situation that has seized world attention: Syria, which since the explosion last spring has shown all signs of being the next domino to fall, became a central object of concern when domestic protests sparked systematic repression by the Assad regime and the detonation of “asymmetric” civil war much along the lines of that in Libya.

The other factor was the predictable surge in Islamism as a political force both in the transition of certain countries already in the grips of change (Tunisia, Egypt) and others where predictions see Islam as an essential character on the political stage. What we have yet to see is whether this Islamism will be compatible with the U.S.’s and Europe’s expectations of democracy.

While the dramatic developments above do not necessarily have direct effects on neighbouring countries, it is clear that Turkey is a reference point and essential protagonist, passively and actively. Given the doubtfulness of its entry into the European Union, Ankara needs to explore other areas in which to assert itself as a regional player. Erdogan has presented the Turkish model -with possible adjustments to the ideology of his Islamically-inclined party along the lines of Europe’s Christian democratic parties – as a formula for regimes seeking their own political-religious compromise.

Though plagued by internal problems, including the eternal challenge of the Kurds and the still unresolved face-off with the military – who resist any change to the system put in place by Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey – Erdogan faces the dilemma of looking across his border and seeing a crisis build in Syria and having to decide whether or not to intervene.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Joaquin Roy is ‘Jean Monnet’ Professor and Director of the European Union Centre of the University of Miami. jroy@Miami.edu

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