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by alwyn » Mon May 09, 2011 2:34 am
by JackRiddler » Mon May 09, 2011 5:03 pm
Khaled Elfiqi/European Pressphoto Agency
A prayer service was held at the Virgin Mary church in Cairo on Sunday, one of two churches set on fire during clashes between Christians and Muslims on Saturday night.
Clashes in Cairo Leave 12 Dead and 2 Churches in Flames
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/09/world ... egypt.html
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: May 8, 2011
CAIRO — A night of street fighting between Muslims and Christians left at least 12 people dead and two churches in flames on Sunday in the latest outbreak of sectarian tensions since the revolution that ousted former President Hosni Mubarak on Feb. 11.
Parishioners removed debris from the Virgin Mary church in Cairo on Sunday after it was set on fire Saturday night.
Long suppressed sectarian animosities have burst out with increasing frequency since the rebellion removed the heavy hand of the Mubarak police state, threatening the recovery of Egypt’s tourist economy and the stability of its hoped-for transition to democracy. Officials of the Interior Ministry said at least six Christians and at least five Muslims died and about 220 people were wounded, including 65 who were struck by bullets.
The Egyptian authorities vowed a swift response, announcing military trials for 190 people arrested in the violence, along with stepped up security at houses of worship and tougher laws against attacking religious institutions. Prime Minister Essam Sharaf, serving in an interim role under the military council governing the country, canceled a trip to the Persian Gulf states to preside over an emergency cabinet meeting, and Egypt’s most respected Muslim religious authority, the sheikh of Al-Azhar, denounced the violence.
An overwhelming force of hundreds of heavily armed soldiers and riot police officers occupied the Cairo neighborhood where the clashes took place, evidently deployed prevent renewed violence and blocking off access to the church at the center of the battle. Garbage fires set in the streets during the clashes still burned in the area nearby, in a tangle of narrow and often-filthy alleys called Imbaba.
Members of Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority, who make up about 10 percent of the national population, have lived side by side with Muslims in the area for decades, even though the neighborhood is also known for its affinity for militant Islamic politics.
Witnesses and other residents said that no organized group appeared to have led the weekend’s clashes. Some Christians in the neighborhood said they had seen a vanguard of bearded Salafis — adherents of an ascetic form of Muslim fundamentalism that is increasingly used as a catch-all term to describe Islamist militancy. But people on both sides said that the fighting pitted one group of young men from the neighborhood against another, along tribal rather than ideological lines.
Like many recent episodes of Muslim-Christian violence here, the strife began over rumors of an interfaith marriage. Muslims in the neighborhood said a former Christian had left the church and married a Muslim. They said they had heard that she had been abducted and detained inside the church of St. Minas against her will, reflecting a pattern of accusations that has recurred in several recent episodes of sectarian conflict.
Christians in the neighborhood said that the story was a fiction, that there was no such woman in the church.
Both Muslims and Christians involved in the fighting said that early Saturday evening a relatively small group of Muslims had approached the St. Minas church to ask about the purported abduction. Two young Christian men said they had heard reports that a group of Salafis were headed toward the church, so they had quickly gathered along with a group of as many as 400 or 500 to defend it. At about 6:00 p.m., one man said, their large group of hundreds of Christians faced a Muslim group of only 20.
But within about an hour, a similarly large group of young Muslim men gathered in opposition. By 8 p.m., shots had been fired from a rooftop or balcony. The security forces soon arrived and fired tear gas to break up the melee. But clashes involving clubs, knives, bricks and occasional gunshots continued until at least 4 a.m., exacerbated by an electrical blackout.
Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting.
AlicetheKurious wrote:Well, you know me, Norton Ash, I'm nothing if not long-winded. So here goes:
The Salafists are not an organization, nor are they a unified movement. "Salaf" means "past" -- "Salafist" essentially means "fundamentalist". Just like in other religions, there are certain preachers whose message is attractive for whatever reason, to certain people, and they become that preacher's students and followers. It's a pretty fluid phenomenon, with some followers drifting from one preacher to another and then back again. Salafists are nothing new in Egypt, but in the past they were known for being peaceful and opposed to violence and for most of their history they kept to themselves and devoted their lives to their religious worship, avoiding politics. That was before first Saudi Arabia and then the Mubarak regime saw their potential.
A little background concerning the rise of "politicized Islam" in Egypt: when Sadat came to power in 1970, Egypt was a socialist country with a dominant Arab nationalist, secular and anti-imperialist ideology which represented a huge obstacle to be overcome as Sadat was transforming Egypt into a client state of the US, dramatically breaking with Egypt's revolutionary Arab allies and replacing them with America's Arab allies led by Saudi Arabia. That's where the Muslim Brotherhood came in handy. Under Nasser's secular regime, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood had been persecuted and their presence was virtually eradicated. After Nasser died Sadat brought them back -- he released those who were in prison and he welcomed back those who had gone into exile. The Muslim Brotherhood was eager to take its revenge against Nasserists and the Left, and Sadat was eager to let them. At the same time, truly extremist preachers were recruited, given free reign, financed and given privileges. In partnership with Saudi Arabia and of course the US, religious fundamentalism was nurtured and promoted as a recruitment tool and a weapon to be deployed, first in Egypt against the Left in government, academia and the media, and later in Afghanistan against the government there and its Soviet backers.
Under Sadat, the gap between rich and poor expanded dramatically and most of the middle class was swallowed by it. Life was hard for most people, and the absence of democracy meant that people had few outlets for their frustration, other than religion -- the mosque was one of the few places where people could meet and talk freely and feel engaged and empowered. Millions of Egyptians went to Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states for work, and returned after many years to form a new middle class deeply influenced by the Wahhabist sect, very different from the Islam that was traditionally practiced by Egyptians.
Most importantly, as public services deteriorated, the mosque and religion gradually took over many of the functions that had been associated with the state. Wealthy Muslim Brothers and Saudi backers devoted enormous financial resources to winning over hearts and minds as they provided educational, health and social assistance to the poor, along with a heavy dose of their conservative brand of Islam. A parallel process was occurring in the Coptic Church: as public services deteriorated or became non-existent, poor Copts became dependent on the church for nearly everything, from income supplements to medical services to help in finding work. Also, if a Copt felt that he or she had been discriminated against or treated badly, it was to the church that he or she turned for protection, not the state. The police were not only deeply corrupt and generally not interested in anything unless it concerned the regime's security, but it was dangerous to be on their radar, so to speak. It was hard to predict how a simple visit to a police station would end, even if one were simply making a complaint. The Church was generously financed by wealthy Coptic businessmen in Egypt and by the millions of Copts living abroad. As the Church's power grew, it became clear that an understanding existed between it and the regime, and in fact the Church hierarchy, along with the wealthy Coptic business class, were among the Mubarak regime's biggest supporters, to the anger of some Coptic intellectuals and dissident activists.
By the late 1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood had become not only a religious and social, but also a political force to be reckoned with. Unlike the Coptic Church, the Muslim Brotherhood were politically ambitious and aspired to replace the regime itself.
The Muslim Brotherhood is nothing if not pragmatic and opportunistic: its leadership has had no problem cutting cynical deals with the regime when this served its own purposes. Over three decades, Mubarak and the MB engaged in a complicated dance, not hesitating to join together when it suited their mutual agendas and then turning against each other only to collaborate yet again, especially against any possible emergence of a genuine, secular, grassroots-based political third alternative. From the regime's point of view, the existence of the Muslim Brotherhood as THE sole political alternative to its own rule was very useful in dealings with the US, especially after the events in Algeria and later, the election of Hamas in Palestine. Internally, the MB served the same purpose, as a bogeyman to use against both dissident Copts and Muslims.
Especially in the West, people have a very inaccurate understanding of what the Muslim Brotherhood is, and where its true danger lies. They imagine a bunch of wild-eyed fanatics using violence and terrorism to impose their ideology. Nothing could be further from the truth. First, the Muslim Brotherhood hasn't been associated with any violence at all since the early 1950s, when its members tried to assassinate Gamal Abdelnasser -- they had been instrumental in the coup that brought him to power and felt betrayed when they found themselves locked out in the cold in Nasser's new regime. Even that assassination attempt is hotly denied by the Muslim Brothers, who claim it was a false flag orchestrated by Nasser himself, to justify his subsequent crack-down against them.
Those Muslim Brothers who avoided prison and made it out alive, did not waste their time during their exile in Europe and the Gulf countries where they found refuge. From the mid-1950s onward, whether in Switzerland, Germany, Saudi Arabia or elsewhere, they managed to set up large companies and accumulate vast fortunes somehow. The MB's leadership is backed by a powerful transnational network of business, financial and political interests that includes princes, various intelligence agencies and other elite interests, but at the same time, in a number of countries it also maintains a relatively small but loyal, strategically spread and highly disciplined core of grassroots supporters in addition to a network of influential judges, scholars, professionals, businessmen and journalists. In Egypt, as long as the Mubarak regime maintained its vice-like grip on power, they bided their time and made what inroads they could. When the regime relaxed its grip slightly, they were poised to move forward. When it tightened its grip, they retreated and waited for the next opening.
What most people don't recognize about the Muslim Brotherhood is that they are quintessential politicians, whose only consistent goal is to achieve power. To do this, they have tried, and often succeeded, to represent themselves as all things to all people. Despite the enormous wealth of its cadres, they portray themselves to the poor as their champions, crusaders for social justice and servants of the community. To those who fear religious extremism, they portray themselves as moderates and men of the world. To the pious, they present themselves as loyal defenders of the faith. To the wealthy, they sell themselves as an effective bulwark against the Left and any possibility of a return to socialism. In contrast to the stinking corruption of the Mubarak regime, they pose as fighters for truth and justice and accountability (although their own financial affairs and sources of funding are even more mysterious than Mubarak's). They use their own persecution at the hands of the Mubarak regime to establish their street creds as victims who have heroically paid the price for freedom. Sometimes they claim that a democratic, secular state is their goal; at other times, their political candidates run under the slogan, "Islam is the solution". Their spokesmen are slick, highly-skilled and effective communicators. Some are smooth-shaven and wear impeccably tailored designer suits, others wear jeans and still others wear "Islamic"-style costumes and sport long beards, depending on the target audience.
Back to the Salafists. The Mubarak regime felt increasingly uneasy with the growing strength of the Muslim Brotherhood -- even though it had deliberately allowed it to establish itself as the sole alternative to the regime, the MB was not sufficiently tame. This was becoming a serious problem as Mubarak was getting old and planning to have his son Gamal replace him. Egyptians for the most part were used to Mubarak's dictatorship; most had known no other president. Furthermore, unlike Gamal, the elder Mubarak enjoyed the critical support of the army, and his status as an elder statesman and former war hero gave his rule a certain aura of legitimacy. Furthermore, Gamal was personally disliked for his arrogance, his open contempt for Egyptian masses, and he was blamed for putting his billionaire friends in power and for joining them in a frenzied looting of Egypt.
It was crucial that the delicate transition process be preceded by a total lock-down of the country politically, and that all opposition forces be eliminated. Thus, from around 2005 onward, the regime became even more repressive and brutal than before, especially against the Muslim Brotherhood. The regime's practice of arbitrary mass arrests, confiscations of property, military trials, torture, surveillance and other repressive tactics intensified during this period, especially against known or suspected Muslim Brothers.
Also, just as Sadat had sponsored the MB as a weapon against secularists and the Left, and Mubarak had used them as a bogeyman in the West and domestically, now Mubarak sought to create yet another proxy to use against the Muslim Brotherhood. For this, he turned to the Salafists. From 2005 onward, Saudi funding was lavished on certain Salafist preachers, who were provided with their own tv stations and money to spread around. While the Muslim Brothers were harshly persecuted, these Salafist preachers found themselves sitting on Mubarak's lap and dangling their legs, as the Egyptian expression goes. They distributed food and other charity and built lavish mosques, and used their pulpits, along with the internet and television, to recruit fanatic and ignorant foot soldiers to spread their message. These specific preachers were selected for their religious intolerance and unbelievably reactionary message, not to mention their predilection for declaring opponents of the regime (including members of the Muslim Brotherhood and Christians) as "infidels". Most notably, when Mohamed Baradei returned to Egypt and began organizing a coalition of dissidents and regime opponents to demand democracy, these Salafist preachers announced that he is an enemy of Islam and it is a pious duty to kill him. They also declared that according to Islamic strictures, Gamal Mubarak is the only legitimate future president of Egypt and that rising up against Mubarak is like rising up against God Himself.
Then, when the revolution broke out anyway, the Mubarak regime in its panic forgot about them for a while. First, it unleashed the State Security Forces and then its gangs of hired thugs against Egypt's revolutionaries. Experts estimated that in addition to its nearly 2 million-strong police force and the Republican Guard, a highly-equipped and disciplined personal army under Mubarak's direct command, the regime used its irregular militia of around 400,000 mercenary thugs, most of them hardened criminals and graduates of the regime's prisons, which the regime used to crack down on protesters and dissidents. These thugs operated more or less openly under the Mubarak regime and actually considered themselves businessmen (and even some women); they charged standard fees for everything from loud heckling and insults, to pushing and shoving, to sexual harassment and tearing the clothes off female protesters, to rape or throwing acid in the target's face, to beating (without leaving marks), to beating (with marks), to stabbing, etc. Their price lists were distributed to political candidates before elections.
When that didn't work, the regime shut down internet and telephone communications and banks. All the police disappeared across the country, but not before opening the prisons and releasing tens of thousands of inmates, and telling them to knock themselves out. Elite snipers were stationed strategically on rooftops, to shoot demonstrators and terrorize them into giving up. Thousands of demonstrators were shot, the vast majority of them in the eye.
Throughout, the state media, along with private media owned by regime cronies, did everything possible to whip up hysteria. It was impossible to know whether the latest "news" was true or false. Some journalists have complained that their job has become incredibly difficult, because up to 70% of the information being transmitted was fabricated and/or distorted beyond recognition. That's not including the incitement and false rumors that have regularly been spread through SMS's and Youtube and Twitter.
In all of this, the one card that the former regime neglected to use was the Salafist card.
Which brings us to this specific event in the OP. Prior to the revolution, on New Year's Eve, a car-bomb exploded outside a church in Alexandria, killing dozens of people. In response, Muslims and Christians rose up in solidarity with each other and declared that the real target is Egypt itself, not only the Coptic victims. It was quite an impressive show of force as all kinds of Egyptians shook off their apathy and took to the streets under the slogan, "Muslim, Christian, we are one." This same spirit pervaded the January 25th revolution itself. In addition to the regime's other crimes, Mubarak was denounced for having systematically tried to incite sectarian hatred and divisions. Even during the weeks when the streets of Egypt were in chaos, and in the total absence of security, not one church, not one Christian was harmed in any way, except by the police and State Security. Neither was any mosque. In fact, in Egypt's entire history, no Muslim has ever attacked a church, ever.
By mid-February, Egyptians were feeling exultant, not only because they had brought the regime down, but because they were so proud of how they had done it. National unity was at an all-time high. People from all classes, all religions, all ages and all over Egypt came together in an incredible spirit of love and took care of each other and protected each other. They'd defeated the regime's formidable State Security apparatus, the hired thugs, the shut-down of roads and banks and communications, the media lies and disinformation and attempts to spread panic.
Even when the "new" government, which consisted of Mubarak appointees, tried to reverse and paralyze the process of democratization, the people once again took to the streets and had it replaced. Since March, every advance has required massive public pressure, as the remnants of the regime are removed one by one and the noose is tightening around Mubarak's own neck. The Saudis and other Gulf countries have tried to bribe Egypt into letting Mubarak go free, but the people said, "Our rights are not for sale." They have begun expelling Egyptian workers and denying them work visas. Still, no dice. When the government's Chief Pathologist examined Mubarak and declared him too sick to be moved from his palace in Sharm el Sheikh to stand trial, the Chief Pathologist was exposed by investigative journalists as a liar with a long record of falsifying medical and pathology reports to protect the regime, and he was fired. His replacement examined Mubarak and just last weekend declared him to be in excellent health.
At the same time, Habib al-Adly, Mubarak's Interior Minister was finally sentenced to 12 years of hard labor on the first of many charges, which also include thousands of torture cases and murder. He is the first of the regime's top people to actually receive a prison sentence.
Also at the same time, Egypt is reversing decades of disastrous foreign policies that faithfully served the agendas of Israel and the US at the expense of Egypt's own national security. The success of the Egyptian revolution has also shaken the Gulf monarchies to their core, and has unified them as never before to defeat it, at any cost.
Where are the State Security forces? Where are the police? Where are the hundreds of thousands of thugs who depended on the regime? Nobody knows. Did they just give up and disappear into the ground? Did the billionaires who shared in the looting with Mubarak and his sons, decide to just throw in the towel and wait for the knock that will inevitably come to their door, along with the dreaded question, "How did you acquire this fortune"?
As I mentioned before, in Egypt's long history, no Muslim has ever attacked a church. After Mubarak's ouster, national unity was at an all-time high, along with for the first time, great optimism about the future. Suddenly, in the past month alone, at least 4 churches have been attacked, along with several mosques. Dozens of people, Christians and Muslims, have been killed in sectarian attacks. In all cases, there are certain elements in common: the events always happen in very poor areas, they are always sparked by mysterious rumors whose source can never be determined, witnesses always report that "outsiders" sporting long beards or not, came into neighborhoods randomly destroying, setting fires and killing, there are always snipers and shooters from rooftops or other elevations who are never caught, and bewildered residents insisting that they'd lived peacefully with their neighbors and had never experienced prejudice or problems based on religion.
Finally, and this is perhaps the scariest of all: in no cases have any arrests been made.
In the first attack, back in March, a church in a small and desperately poor village was demolished by hand, with heavy mallets. It took 20 hours, and the attackers were filmed with cell-phone cameras. Even though it was being widely reported, the army did not intervene. No arrests were made. After a national outcry and massive public demonstrations, the army promised to rebuild the church, along with a small medical clinic and a public park, at the army's own expense. The army did not arrest the perpetrators, but they brought one of Mubarak's Salafist preachers to "reconcile" the village's Christian and Muslim residents.
In fact, that's another odd but common element: suddenly Salafist preachers are being brought in by the army to resolve crises that have nothing at all to do with them. At the same time, Salafists are being collectively blamed for every event, yet the individuals responsible (whoever they really are) are not being held accountable.
Egypt's losses over the past 3 months are estimated in the tens of billions of dollars. The Egyptian stock market, which actually gained immediately after the revolution, is now in free-fall. Tourists who had booked vacations in Egypt have now canceled. The lack of police and the constant turbulence is causing investors to change their mind or postpone business projects. Unemployment is at an all-time high, and Egypt is spending from its crucial foreign exchange reserves. The government seems to be completely paralyzed and unable to perform its job.
It's all very fishy. The one good thing about all this is that, while many are panicking and even beginning to regret the revolution ever took place, the picture is becoming all too clear to even more people. These events are provoking a widespread backlash that is pushing people out of their complacency and mobilizing them to take action to save the revolution and keep it going until all its demands are fully met. Even the Muslim Brotherhood, which had become impossibly inflated and was literally crowing after it formed its own political party to contest the upcoming elections, is now taking the threat seriously. Along with the Christians and the "regular" Muslim Egyptians, the Sufis, whose mosques have been attacked, are in a fighting mood. As I've said many times already, the revolution is far from over; too many remnants of the old regime remain in place and have kept busy doing their mischief while the rest of us were too busy celebrating.
Stay tuned.
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middl ... 86609.html
Scores held in Egypt after sectarian clashes
At least 230 people injured in violence between Muslims and Christians that has left 12 people dead in Cairo.
Last Modified: 08 May 2011 18:20
Violence erupted on Saturday following a march by Muslims on a Coptic Christian church in a Cairo neighbourhood [AFP]
Egypt's military rulers have detained 190 people in connection with the clashes between Muslims and Christians in Cairo in which at least 12 people have been killed and more than 230 others wounded.
The situation remained tense on Sunday, a day after violence first erupted in the Egyptian capital's northwestern neighbourhood of Imbaba.
Witnesses said the clashes broke out after a mob of ultraconservative Muslims marched on a Coptic Christian church in Imbaba.
The march began over an apparent relationship between a Coptic woman and a Muslim man, amid reports that the woman was being held inside against her will and prevented from converting to Islam.
The verbal clash soon developed into a full-fledged confrontation where the two sides exchanged gunfire, firebombs and stones, and another church nearby was set on fire.
Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces ordered on Sunday "the transfer of all those arrested in connection with [Saturday's] events, and they number 190, to the Supreme Military Court, as a deterrent to all those who think of toying with the potential of this nation".
The council, which has ruled Egypt since a popular uprising toppled long-serving leader Hosni Mubarak, said it would "set up a committee to assess the damage from the clashes" and restore property.
'Iron hand'
In its statement, the military council further called on "all communities in Egypt, the youth of the revolution, the national forces and Islamic and Christian scholars to stand like a wall against any attempt by the forces of evil and darkness to tear the national fabric".
Egypt's cabinet also said on Sunday in an emergency meeting that it will use an "iron hand" to protect national security.
The government has said it will step up security at religious sites and activate laws dealing with terrorism, to give police more power to prevent interfaith clashes. The rules also enable stricter punishments for vandalising houses of worship.
Interfaith relationships often cause tension in Egypt, where Christians make up about 10 per cent of its 80 million people.
Al Jazeera's Rawya Rageh reports from Cairo
Al Jazeera's Rawya Rageh said Imbaba, where the clashes first began, remained tense on Sunday, as gunfire rang out briefly outside a church.
"We understand several Christians are huddled inside churches to protect their churches," she said.
"It's very intense, the military is blocking the entire area. Residents have asked us to leave, the military has asked us to leave."
"We understand the military was firing shots into the air to disperse who they are describing as hardline Muslim groups who are at the scene to take revenge for the Muslims who lost their lives in the confrontation last night. At least six of the people who died are believed to be Muslims."
Meanwhile, several thousand Copts gathered in front of Egyptian state television, demanding the resignation of the country's military ruler.
Al Jazeera's Jamal Elshayyal said that some were chanting anti-Muslim slogans.
The strife represents another challenge to Egypt's military rulers who are trying to restore law and order after following the 18-day long popular uprising earlier this year.
The grand mufti of Egypt, Ali Gomaa, a senior Islamic religious figure, called for calm following the clashes. "All Egyptians must stand shoulder to shoulder and prevent strife," he told the state MENA news agency.
He also urged the military council to stop anyone from meddling with the security of Egypt.
'Unfair treatment'
Al Jazeera's Rageh said the latest clashes have raised questions over the capability of the country's military leaders to deal with the sectarian crisis.
"The question being asked is, Why is the country's new military leadership not doing enough to deter these attacks that have been repeating since the revolution? And why is the military not doing enough to address the root causes of this tension?" she said.
Christians in Egypt complain about unfair treatment, including rules they say make it easier to build a mosque than a church.
Claims that Christian women who converted to Islam were kidnapped and held in churches or monasteries have soured relations between the two communities for months.
The religious feuds are a severe blow to the unity Egyptians professed during their popular uprising, when Christians and Muslims often protected each other during prayer.
In the months after the toppling of Hosni Mubarak on February 11, there has been a sharp rise in sectarian tensions, fueled in part by a newly active ultraconservative Muslim movement, known as the Salafis.
On Friday, a few hundred Salafis marched through Cairo celebrating al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and condemning the US operation that killed him.
Source:
Al Jazeera and agencies
by JackRiddler » Mon May 09, 2011 5:35 pm
May 5, 2011
A New Mood in Cairo
Egypt and Israel Headed for Crisis
By JONATHAN COOK
Nazareth.
Israeli officials have expressed alarm at a succession of moves by the interim Egyptian government that they fear signal an impending crisis in relations with Cairo.
The widening rift was underscored yesterday when leaders of the rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah signed a reconciliation pact in the Egyptian capital. Egypt's secret role in brokering the agreement last week caught both Israel and the United States by surprise.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called the deal "a tremendous blow to peace and a great victory for terrorism".
Several other developments have added to Israeli concerns about its relations with Egypt, including signs that Cairo hopes to renew ties with Iran and renegotiate a long-standing contract to supply Israel with natural gas.
More worrying still to Israeli officials are reported plans by Egyptian authorities to open the Rafah crossing into Gaza, closed for the past four years as part of a Western-backed blockade of the enclave designed to weaken Hamas, the ruling Islamist group there.
Egypt is working out details to permanently open the border, an Egyptian foreign ministry official told the Reuters news agency on Sunday. The blockade would effectively come to an end as a result.
The same day Egypt's foreign minister, Nabil Elaraby, called on the United States to recognise a Palestinian state -- in reference to a move expected in September by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, to seek recognition of Palestinian statehood at the United Nations.
Israel and the US have insisted that the Palestinians can achieve statehood only through negotiations with Israel. Talks have been moribund since Israel refused last September to renew a partial freeze on settlement building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
According to analysts, the interim Egyptian government, under popular pressure, is consciously distancing itself from some of the main policies towards Israel and the Palestinians pursued by Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president overthrown by a popular uprising in February.
Mubarak was largely supportive of Israel and Washington's blockade policy to contain Hamas' influence. Egypt receives more than $1.3 billion annually in US aid, second only to Israel.
But the popular mood in Egypt appears to be turning against close diplomatic ties with Israel.
A poll published last week by the Pew Research Centre showed that 54 per cent of Egyptians backed the annulment of the 1979 peace treaty with Israel, with only 36 per cent wanting it maintained.
Israel's Yedioth Aharonoth daily reported this week that Egyptian social media sites had called for a mass demonstration outside the Israeli embassy tomorrow, demanding the expulsion of the ambassador, Yitzhak Levanon.
In comments to several media outlets last weekend, unnamed senior Israeli officials criticised Egypt's new foreign policy line. One told the Wall Street Journal that Cairo's latest moves could "affect Israel's national security on a strategic level".
Another unnamed official told the Jerusalem Post that "the upgrading of the relationship between Egypt and Hamas" might allow the Islamic movement to develop into a "formidable terrorist military machine".
Silvan Shalom, Israel's vice-premier, told Israel Radio on Sunday that Israel should brace for significant changes in Egyptian policies that would allow Iran to increase its influence in Gaza.
Egypt's chief of staff, Sami Hafez Anan, responded dismissively on his Facebook page to such statements, saying, "Israel has no right to interfere. This is an Egyptian-Palestinian matter."
In a sign of Israeli panic, Netanyahu is reported to be considering sending his special adviser, Isaac Molho, to Cairo for talks with the interim government.
In recent weeks, Netanyahu has repeatedly complained to visiting European ambassadors and US politicians about what he regards as a new, more hostile climate in Egypt.
Late last month Elaraby said Egypt was ready to "turn over a new leaf" in relations with Tehran, which were severed after the signing of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty more than three decades ago.
Egyptian offiials have also warned that the supply of natural gas to Israel may be halted. The pipeline has been attacked twice on the Egyptian side, including last week, in acts presumed to be sabotage.
Even if Egypt continues the flow of gas, it is almost certain to insist on a sharp rise in the cost, following reports that Mubarak and other officials are being investigated on corruption charges relating to contracts that underpriced gas to Israel.
Yoram Meital, an expert on Israeli-Egyptian relations at Ben Gurion University in Beersheva, said Egypt's policy change towards Gaza threatened to "provoke a severe crisis in Egyptian-Israeli relations" by undermining Israel's policy of isolating Hamas.
With the toppling of Mubarak's authoritarian regime, Meital noted, the Egyptian government is under pressure to be more responsive to local opinion.
"We are at the beginning of this crisis but we are not there yet. However, there is room for a great deal more deterioration in relations over the coming months," he said.
Analysts said Cairo wanted to restore its traditional leadership role in the Arab world and believed it was hampered by its ties with Israel.
Menha Bahoum, a spokeswoman for the Egyptian foreign ministry, told the New York Times last week: "We are opening a new page. Egypt is resuming its role that was once abdicated."
That assessment is shared by Hamas and Fatah, both of which were looking to Egypt for help, said Menachem Klein, a politics professor at Bar Ilan University.
He noted that Abbas had lost his chief Arab sponsor in the form of Mubarak, and that the Hamas leadership's base in Syria was precarious given the current upheavals there.
With growing demands from the Palestinian public for reconciliation, neither faction could afford to ignore the tide of change sweeping the Arab world, he said.
Meital said: "We are entering a new chapter in the region's history and Israeli politicians and the public are not yet even close to understanding what is taking place".
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
by AlicetheKurious » Tue May 10, 2011 5:02 am
JackRiddler wrote:]That no longer seems to be the case with the latest incident; 190 trials before military tribunals?
by AlicetheKurious » Tue May 10, 2011 11:41 am
@LeilZahra Leil-Zahra Mortada
We want a Mona Mina in every syndicate & union, we want a Mona Mina everywhere. #EgyDoctors #Egypt #EgyWorkers #Tahrir
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by JackRiddler » Tue May 10, 2011 7:19 pm
http://mondediplo.com/2011/05/03tunisia
May 6 -8, 2011
A Nation in Political Ferment
Tunisia Gets to Grips With Democracy
By JEAN-PIERRE SÉRÉNI
The Tunisians have been torn between revolution and democracy for almost four months. After January’s revolution came a spring of anxious anticipation. Some Tunisians believe the priority should be to sweep away the former regime and its legacy, in order to draw a clear line under political authoritarianism that had lasted since 1956. Others passionately hope for elections to a national constituent assembly on July 24 , a date many feel to be premature, to end this potentially volatile period of change.
These divided aims complicate the coexistence of the only political institutions currently functioning in the country: the provisional government and a newly formed Tunisian-style committee of public salvation, a higher authority intended to effect the revolution’s aims, political reform and democratic transition. The committee has members of 12 political parties, 19 unions or other associations, and 72 national figures. The number of its members (whose appointment procedure is not clear) rose from 71 to 155 in three weeks, and it has set itself up in Bardo in place of the former upper chamber, which was unceremoniously dismissed. This new institution is trying to become the main legislative power since the provisional government is made up of technocrats unknown to the general public, mostly appointed by Mohamed Ghannouchi, prime minster under the ousted president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. While one body is steering through political reform, the other is trying to maintain order despite economic meltdown, exacerbated by the flight of tourists and investors, while there is war in neighboring Libya.
Beji Caid-Essebsi, prime minister since February 27, is the only heavyweight in the cabinet. His unexpected return at the age of 84 is a result of the vacuum left in the political class by 23 years of authoritarianism under Ben Ali. He is also the beneficiary of an old alliance with the only national organization in Tunisia to survive under the dictatorship: the UGTT (Tunisian General Labor Union), which has been “a strange organization in the Arab world since it was founded in 1946”, according to Abdeljalil Bedoui, an economics professor and president of the Tunisian forum for economic and social rights. “Ever since, it has played a central role in every historic event in the country.”
In 1952, as a barrister, Essebsi successfully defended the union’s then secretary general, Ahmed Tlili, who faced the death penalty in a colonial court. That created links which were all the more useful as the union – the only organized mass movement in the country, with 500,000 members – is, along with Tunisia’s bar association, the National Order of Lawyers, one of the twin pillars of the committee of national salvation and of Tunisian political life.
Guardians of the revolution
There are 8,000 lawyers in Tunisia and as many trainees, often living hand to mouth. This creates a natural affinity with the desperate young people of Sidi Bouzid, whose cry of despair the lawyers took up, giving it a political meaning with which all Tunisian youth could identify. Held in contempt by the former regime and too many for the needs of the country’s 155 courts, the lawyers are out to reclaim their place in society. In the street and on television they have been campaigning, exercising their skills with such zeal and panache that their opponents have called them rabble-rousers. Their leader is the dynamic and influential Abderrazack Kilani, from an important southern family, the first person the new prime minister received on coming to office. “Our responsibility,” he explained in his office in Tunis’s Palais de Justice, “is to avoid being taken in as we were by Ben Ali in 1987. We want to be the guardians of the revolution and defend democracy, not seek political office.”
On April 11, just 11 days later than timetabled, the committee for national salvation passed an electoral law among the most democratic in the world: it provides for an independent electoral commission, parity between the sexes and an entirely proportional voting system. It is the result of consensus among the political forces on the committee: Islamists, socialists, centrists, Ba’athists, Marxists, Trotskyists, Maoists, Arab unionists, all convinced that the future constitution will only function if it is a joint effort.
Everyone has made concessions. The Ennadha movement, which represents the majority among the Islamists, voted by a show of hands for parity between men and women, in spite of attempts by Ettahrir, a radical Salafist minority, to deter the Islamist base. The prime minister, who supports a uninominal voting system as used in the Third Republic in France before 1914, which would have been likely to send to the chamber a majority of local candidates, resigned himself to a proportional system that will favor small parties – Tunisia officially has 51 parties already – and makes the return of a moderate majority government that excludes extremists unlikely.
The only exceptions to this unanimity are the old guard from Ben Ali’s now dissolved party, the Rassemblement Constitutionnel Démocratique (RCD), who have been declared ineligible to stand although it is unclear to what level of the party hierarchy the ban extends. This marks a major break with history: the RCD was the successor to Neo-Destour, which from 1934 led the struggle for independence under Habib Bourguiba’s leadership. The 11th anniversary of Bourguiba’s death on April 6 prompted an impressive popular mobilization in his birthplace, Monastir, and around the country. For the moment, this resurgence of feeling has nowhere to go, even if the prime minster, an old comrade of Bourguiba’s, basks in the man’s former glory every time he makes a public statement and promises to restore the nation’s prestige.
’Democracy is a mindset’
It seems certain that Tunisia’s future constitution will not be written in secret by an expert commission nominated by those in power, as in Egypt, Morocco and Algeria, but by a democratically elected constituent assembly. This has been a demand of opposition groups in the Arab world for generations. Professor Yadh Ben Achour, president of the committee and architect of this first stage, is under no illusions about the scale of the task: “We need a culture change. Democracy is a mindset and in particular a set of unwritten principles: respect for the opposition, knowing how to handle victory, accepting that power will alternate and that you may be beaten at every election.”
Other promises, concerning the main causes of popular discontent, will be harder to keep: regional divisions and unemployment. “The economic problem is the problem of regional poverty, and those regions don’t see anything coming to them,” said former minister and Bourguiba loyalist Tahar Belkhodja. An emergency package of 200m dinar ($148m) has been allocated to the 14 poorest regions (of 24), all in the interior: foremost are Kasserine, Sidi Bouzid and Gafsa, a triangle that was the epicentre of the revolution. The prime minister would like to achieve the first results before the elections in the regions along the mountainous spine of bare peaks that divides the country. He hopes to launch before July 24 an ambitious regional development program from Jenduba to Medenine. The program already has a name if not funds: the Bouazizi plan, named after Mohamed Bouazizi whose suicide triggered the uprising last December. The plan will represent an important effort to open up the west, raise standards in education, modernise the health system and develop local resources.
The other challenge, unemployment, is national. There are half a million unemployed in Tunisia, a quarter of them graduates: 20,000 jobs have been lost this year because of political upheavals and the fallout – lockouts, looting, destruction of factories, vandalism; 50,000 workers have returned home from Libya; and 70,000 more graduates will flood the job market this July. That’s 140,000 more people seeking work in six months. Optimistically, the government is hoping that 60,000 new posts can be created, split equally between the civil service, the security forces and the private sector. It is a sign of how tense things are that the publication of the results of the first round of the Capes, an annual competitive exam for entering the upper echelons of the teaching profession, has been delayed by several weeks. There were 100,000 candidates for just 3,000 jobs, and fears of riots.
Thousands of young people make the dangerous voyage to the Italian island of Lampedusa to get into Europe, many others hawk contraband on the streets, and a minority are taking advantage of the weakened state to turn to crime, which has exploded in poor neighborhoods. At the same time there has been a renewal of social and political mobilization, and it is now common for groups of up to 30 to hire a coach and go to Tunis to sort out business – even in ministerial offices – buried by central bureaucracy. Permanent sit-ins in places with symbolic significance – a motorway or railway line, a large hotel or government office, a gas pipeline – have become regular. The sacking of bosses, governors and company directors has become commonplace and several rebellious regions in the hinterland have seen off government officials appointed by Tunis. The sans-culottes from inland who came down to the capital secured the departure of eight RCD ministers in January. They returned in force in February and saw off the then prime minister, also ex-RCD. Who will be next?
Translated by George Miller
Jean-Pierre Séréni is a journalist.
An Arab spring for women
The missing story from the Middle East
26 April, by Juan Cole and Shahin Cole
The “Arab Spring” has received copious attention in the American media, but one of its crucial elements has been largely overlooked: the striking role of women in the protests sweeping the Arab world. Despite inadequate media coverage of their role, women have been and often remain at the forefront of those protests.
As a start, women had a significant place in the Tunisian demonstrations that kicked off the Arab Spring, often marching up Bourguiba Avenue in Tunis, the capital, with their husbands and children in tow. Then, the spark for the Egyptian uprising that forced President Hosni Mubarak out of office was a January 25th demonstration in Cairo’s Tahrir Square called by an impassioned young woman via a video posted on Facebook. In Yemen, columns of veiled women have come out in Sanaa and Taiz to force that country’s autocrat from office, while in Syria, facing armed secret police, women have blockaded roads to demonstrate for the release of their husbands and sons from prison.
But with such bold gestures go fears. As women look to the future, they worry that on the road to new, democratic parliamentary regimes, their rights will be discarded in favor of male constituencies, whether patriarchal liberals or Muslim fundamentalists. The collective memory of how women were in the forefront of the Algerian revolution for independence from France from 1954 to 1962, only to be relegated to the margins of politics thereafter, still weighs heavily.
Historians will undoubtedly debate the causes of the Arab Spring for decades. Among them certainly are high rates of unemployment for the educated classes, neoliberal policies of privatization and union-busting, corruption in high places, soaring food and energy prices, economic hardship caused by the shrinking of employment opportunities in the Gulf oil states and Europe (thanks to the 2008 global financial meltdown), and decades of frustration with petty, authoritarian styles of governing. In their roles as workers and professionals as well as family caregivers, women have suffered directly from all these discontents and more, while watching their children and husbands suffer, too.
In late January, freelance journalist Megan Kearns pointed out the relative inattention American television and most print and Internet media gave to women and, by and large, the absence of images of women protesting in Tunisia and Egypt. Yet women couldn’t have been more visible in the big demonstrations of early to mid-January in the streets of Tunis, whether accompanying their husbands and children or forming distinct protest lines of their own — and given Western ideas of oppressed Arab women, this should in itself have been news.
Women take to the streets from Tunisia to Syria
To start with Tunisia, women there have, in fact, been in the vanguard of protest movements and social change since the drive to gain independence from France of the late 1940s. Tunisian women have a relatively high literacy rate (71%), represent more than one-fifth of the country’s wage earners, and make up 43% of the nearly half-million members of 18 local unions. Most of these unionized women work in the education, textile, health, city services, and tourism industries. The General Union of Tunisian Workers (French acronym: UGTT) had increasingly come into conflict with the country’s strongman, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, and so its rank and file enthusiastically joined the street protests. Today, the UGTT continues to pressure the government formed after Ben Ali fled to move forward with genuine reforms.
In all of this, women opinion-leaders played an important part. To take one example, although like most prominent Tunisians movie star Hend Sabry had been coerced into supporting Ben Ali and his mafia-like in-laws, when the anti-government rallies began she broke with the autocrat, warning him in a Facebook post against ordering his security forces to fire on the protesters. Later, she admitted to being terrified at making such a public gesture, lest her relatives in Tunis be harmed or she be permanently exiled from her homeland.
In Egypt, the passionate video blog or “vlog” of Asmaa Mahfouz that called on Egyptians to turn out massively on January 25th in Tahrir Square went viral, playing a significant role in the success of that event. Mahfouz appealed to Egyptians to honor four young men who, following the example of Mohammed Bouazizi (in an act which sparked the Tunisian uprisings), set themselves afire to protest the Mubarak regime.
Although the secret police had already dismissed them as “psychopaths,” she insisted otherwise, demanding a country where people could live in dignity, not “like animals.” According to estimates, at least 20% of the crowds that thronged Tahrir Square that first week were made up of women, who also turned out in large numbers for protests in the Mediterranean port of Alexandria. Leil-Zahra Mortada’s celebrated Facebook album of women’s participation in the Egyptian revolution gives a sense of just how varied and powerful that turnout was.
As in Tunisia, Egyptian women make up a little more than one-fifth of wage-earning workers — and labor has long been a powerful force for change in that country. Before they began to mobilize around the Tahrir Square protests, Egyptian workers had staged over 3,000 strikes since 2004, with women sometimes taking the lead. During the height of the protests against the rule of long-time dictator Hosni Mubarak, unionized workers even formed a new, nationwide umbrella trade union.
In Libya, women’s protests proved central to the movement of entire cities out of the control of Col. Muammar Gaddafi, as with Dirna in the western part of the country in February. What makes the prominence of women demonstrators there so remarkable is that city’s reputation as a stronghold of Muslim fundamentalism. The abuse of women, a central issue in countries like Libya, even burst into consciousness when a recent law-school graduate from a middle-class family in Tobruk, Iman al-Obeidi, broke into a government press conference in Tripoli to charge that Gaddafi’s troops had detained her at a checkpoint and then raped her. Her plight provoked women’s demonstrations against the regime in the rebel-held cities of Benghazi and Tobruk.
On April 15th, Yemeni president for life Ali Abdullah Saleh scolded women for “inappropriately” mixing in public with men at the huge demonstrations then being staged in the capital, Sanaa, as well as in the cities of Taiz and Aden. In this way, the issue of women’s place in the mass protests against decades of autocracy was, for the first time, explicitly broached by a high political figure — and the response from women couldn’t have been clearer. They came out in unprecedented numbers throughout the country, and even in the countryside, day after day, accusing the president of "besmirching their honor" by implying that they were behaving brazenly. (It is a longstanding value in the Arab world to avoid impugning the honor of a chaste woman.) In other words, they turned his attempt to invoke Arab mores about women’s seclusion from the public sphere into a rallying cry against him.
Women of a certain age who lived in the southern part of the country found the president’s taunt particularly painful, given that they had grown up in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY), ruled by a communist regime that promoted women’s rights. They were not subjected to more conservative norms until Saleh united the PDRY with northern Yemen in 1990. Unlike in Tunisia and Egypt, only about a quarter of Yemeni women can read and write, only 17% have finished high school, and only 5% are wage earners, though most work hard all their lives, many on farms. Still, in urban areas such as Aden, Taiz or Sanaa, middle and upper middle class women have an important place in the professions and business, or as schoolteachers, and more than a quarter of college students are women.
Faced with the power of outraged women, Saleh quickly backed off, maintaining that, as a secular Arab nationalist, he believed they should be full participants in the political affairs of the nation. He had simply been wondering aloud, he claimed, how members of the opposition Islah Party, a fundamentalist Muslim organization, were so willing to allow women to march in the streets against him when they favored women’s seclusion on all other occasions.
In Syria as well, on several occasions, women have shown their strength and bravery, turning out in forceful demonstrations — sometimes without men, but with their children in tow. Near the town of Bayda, for instance, thousands of women shouting “We will not be humiliated!” cut off a coastal road to protest a heavy-handed government policy in which the secret police of President Bashar al-Assad had arrested their demonstrating male relatives. On other occasions, Syrian women have staged all-female marches to demand democracy and changes in regime policy.
Protecting women’s gains
Despite the centrality of women activists to the Arab Spring, they have seldom been recognized as of real significance by most of the male politicians who will undoubtedly benefit from what they have accomplished. It was, for example, striking that women were without representation on the commission appointed to revise the Egyptian constitution in preparation for September elections, and that only one woman (a Mubarak holdover at that) was appointed to the 29-person interim cabinet.
In addition, patriarchal forces such as Muslim fundamentalist groups and clergy are determined that women’s rights should not be expanded in the wake of these political upheavals. As an omen in the wind, when a modest-sized group of 200 women showed up at Tahrir Square on March 8th to commemorate International Women’s Day, they found themselves attacked by militant religious young men who shouted that they should go home and do the laundry.
Women’s groups and progressive movements are understandably apprehensive about the possibility that, in Tunisia and Egypt, Muslim fundamentalist movements will become more influential in parliament and push through laws to the disadvantage of both women and secularists. Yet they have been remarkably unwilling to let such considerations deter them from embracing democracy, something secular-leaning dictators Ben Ali and Mubarak had warned them against.
The likelihood of an actual Muslim fundamentalist takeover in either country remains minimal for the foreseeable future. In Egypt, the military government has so far retained a Mubarak-era ban on the Muslim Brotherhood putting up candidates under its own banner. As a result, its candidates will run as the representatives of other small parties. In addition, the organization has pledged to contest parliamentary seats in only a limited number of electoral districts, so as to allay middle-class fears that their goal is an Iran-style fundamentalist takeover of the country. Admittedly, Muslim conservatism will likely burgeon as a political current more generally in Egypt, whatever the shape of the next parliament, posing a challenge to women’s rights.
For instance, some Brotherhood officials have let slip that they will indeed be working for the implementation of a medieval form of Islamic law, which would include the segregation of women and men in the workplace, while the mufti or chief adviser on Islamic law to the government in Egypt has called for a “review” of secular personal status laws that favor women, and which had been supported by Suzanne Mubarak, the fashionable wife of the deposed dictator.
In Tunisia, the long years of repression under Ben Ali left the leading fundamentalist group, al-Nahda or the Renaissance Party, weakened. In any case its leader Rashid Ghannouchi has been speaking of institutionalizing a “Turkish model” and says that, unlike the Egyptian Brotherhood, he supports the right of a woman to become the country’s president.
In this, he is looking to former Turkish fundamentalists like Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Abdullah Gul who, tired of being imprisoned by and butting heads with the secular Turkish establishment, founded the Justice and Development Party. Since coming to power in 2002, they have fought for a pluralistic system as a way of making a place for more traditional Muslims in society and politics without pushing for the implementation of medieval Muslim legal codes.
Still, as backlash reactions like the attack on the International Women’s Day protest have set in, activists on women’s issues and progressives are wondering how to ensure that women’s gains this spring not be rolled back. In Egypt, prominent newscaster and critic of the Mubarak regime Buthaina Kamel has her own idea about how to gain women’s rights in a new, more democratic environment. She is running for president, something inconceivable in the Mubarak era.
Even if her run gets little traction, her candidacy is nevertheless deeply symbolic and historic — and another strikingly brave act by a woman in this new era in the Arab world. (Her decision is, of course, opposed by the Muslim Brotherhood.) Other Egyptian women are hoping that the constitution can be rewritten to strengthen women’s rights, and that the 64 seats set aside for women in the previous parliament will be retained.
Politicians in the transitional government of Tunisia, for decades the most progressive Arab country with regard to women’s rights, are determined to protect the public role of women by making sure they are well represented in the new legislature. Elections are now planned for July 24th, and a high commission was appointed to set electoral rules. That body has already announced that party lists will have to maintain parity between male and female candidates.
In such a list system, you don’t vote for an individual but a party, which has published an ordered list of its candidates. If the list gets 10% of the vote nationally, it is awarded 10 percent of the seats in parliament, and can go down its ordered list until it fills all those seats. Parity for women means that every other candidate on the ordered list should be a woman, ensuring them high representation in the legislature. This procedure is sometimes called a "zipper" gender quota. Quotas for female legislators are common in Scandinavia and in the global South.
Although the Tunisian requirement for gender parity remains controversial in some quarters, Ghannouchi’s al-Nahda Party recently came out in support of it. In contrast, Abdelwaheb El Hani, leader of the newly founded right-of-center party al-Majd, complained that the rule was “a violation of freedom of electoral choice,” and insisted that he doubted it would be effective in promoting women’s representation. In contrast, the leftist al-Tajdid (Renewal) Party praised the move as “historic” and pledged to make women’s equality an “irreversible accomplishment and an effective reality in Tunisian political life.” Indeed, al-Tajdid wants an explicit equal rights amendment put into the constitution.
Giving women a fighting chance
The Arab Spring has proven an epochal period of activism and change for women, recalling the role of early feminists in the 1919 Egyptian movement for independence from Britain, or the important place of women in the Algerian Revolution. The sheer numbers of politically active women in this series of uprisings, however, dwarf their predecessors. That this female element in the Arab Spring has drawn so little comment in the West suggests that our own narratives of, and preoccupations with, the Arab world — religion, fundamentalism, oil and Israel — have blinded us to the big social forces that are altering the lives of 300 million people.
Women have been aided by this generation’s advances in education and the professions, by the prominence of articulate women anchors on satellite television networks like Aljazeera, and by the rise of the Internet and social media. Women can assert leadership roles in cyberspace that young men’s dominance of the public sphere might have hampered in city squares.
Their prominence in the labor movements and at the public rallies in Tunisia and Egypt, moreover, underlines how much more of a public role they now have than is usually acknowledged. Even the trend toward wearing a headscarf among women in Egypt during the past two decades has been seen by some social scientists as a step forward. It has been a way for women to enter the public sphere and work outside the home in greater numbers than ever before while maintaining a claim on conservative ideals of chastity and piety.
Women activists of the Arab Spring have come from all social classes, since it has been a mass movement. Middle and upper class women often focus their political energies on issues of political representation and on laws affecting women’s equality. Seeking constitutional guarantees of electoral parity is one possible way of responding to any patriarchal political backlash.
Working class women are particularly concerned with wages and workers’ rights. Stronger unions would improve women’s prospects for greater rights. Women’s health, literacy, and material wellbeing are concerns of all women. During the age of the dictators, the nation’s wealth was often usurped by a narrow elite of politically connected families. A democratization of politics could potentially lead to more state resources being devoted to women and the poor.
Keep in mind that women such as Buthaina Kamel knew the risks when they called for Mubarak to step down. Whatever their patronizing appeals to feminist themes, authoritarian regimes like Mubarak’s and Ben Ali’s politically oppressed and stole from everyone in society, including women, and they had proved increasingly unable to deliver the social services and employment on which women and their families fundamentally depend for a better life. Before, women could be marginalized at will by the dictators whenever they made demands on the regime. Now, at least, they have a fighting chance.
This article was first published in Tomdispatch, 26 april 2011.
http://counterpunch.org/patrick05092011.html
May 9, 2011
Does It Matter?
Portrait of the US Press in the Hour of Its Fall
By PATRICK COCKBURN
I once shot at Donald Trump, property magnate and possible Republican candidate for the presidency, with a small green plastic frog that squirted water. It was at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner at the Washington Hilton in about 1994. His chunky form was an easy target as he walked between the tables, though he was clearly mystified by his sudden wetness. I heard him mutter: “Even in New York they don’t spit at me.”
I had gone to the dinner with my friend Nina Burleigh, an author and journalist, then working for People magazine. Male guests in tuxedos and women in formal dresses sat at round tables in the Hilton’s gloomy and cavernous hall. Nina recalls: “The White |House dinner can be boring and one must bring one’s own entertainment. I believe those frogs would still make it past the metal detectors at the Hilton. I think we hit or aimed at Janet Reno [then attorney-general] as well.”
I remembered the incident when watching on television President Obama deride Trump at the most recent White House Correspondents’ dinner 14 years after we squirted him with the frogs. The reason for Obama’s jabs was Trump’s successful campaign to get the president to publish his long-form birth certificate proving that he was born in the US and not in Kenya and was therefore eligible to occupy the White House. Obama was full of snide remarks about Trump, after his victory on the birth certificate question, suggesting that Trump now move on to the big serious issues like aliens landing or whether the moon landing was faked. In the end Trump glowered sullenly as he sat at the Fox table.
The White House Correspondents’ dinner has always been a gruesome affair with journalists, celebrities and politicians in unseemly embrace. The president addresses the throng in a spirit of phony self-deprecation and lumbering jocularity which is often reported, as were Obamas’s jibes at Trump, as subtle and witty barbs.
It is curious to see the dinner with its embarrassing rituals go on year after year regardless of the state of American journalism. US newspapers and television networks have famously been in a state of deepening crisis in the last few years. But the Arab Awakening has been a watershed in this decline. It was CNN’s reporting of the first Gulf War from Baghdad in 1991 that made it the channel that presidents, prime ministers, foreign ministers and journalists around the world had to watch. Back in 2003, CNN and the US networks CNN and the US networks still had the most ample coverage of the start of the war in Iraq. But since the start of the Arab Awakening even the White House has reportedly been watching al-Jazeera English to find out what was happening (though the BBC has not been far behind).
It is depressing how swiftly the corps of American foreign correspondents has shrunk over the last five years. Papers like the Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer and Boston Globe, which once had a full roster of reporters, no longer do so. US television networks that used to rent whole floors of hotels, to the envy of non-American broadcasters, are now down to a single journalist to cover a story. At least one US network did not send a single correspondent to report the uprising in Tunisia in January that began the capsizing of the regional political status quo.
Does it matter? In one sense it obviously does, since there are fewer effective journalists in the business. The drop in their numbers would be more evident if so many Arab countries in turmoil like Syria and Yemen had not banned reporters from obtaining entry visas. The consequences of more limited journalistic resources being deployed is also masked by the use of YouTube, photographs taken on mobile phones, and conversations with eyewitnesses on satellite phones.
This sort of evidence is powerful but easier to manipulate than it looks. Governments that kick out foreign correspondents may breathe a sigh of relief without realizing that they have created a vacuum of information that can easily be filled by their enemies. Thus much of the reporting of demonstrations, arrests, shootings and killings in Syria now comes courtesy of opponents of the regime.
It is difficult to feel much sympathy for governments whose abortive attempts at censorship make them vulnerable to hostile propaganda, but it does make it very difficult to verify what is going on. For instance, at the end of February I was in Tehran where exile websites reported that there were continuing street demonstrations. I could see none of these though there were plenty of black-helmeted riot police. Local Iranian stringers for foreign publications had mostly had their press credentials suspended so they could not write.
“In any case,” one of the stringers complained to me, “the news agenda for Iran is now being set by exiles and, if we report that nothing much is happening, nobody will believe us.” On YouTube I noticed one video of a demonstration in Tehran that had supposedly taken place in February showing all the men in shirts and without jackets, though the temperature in the Iranian capital was only a couple of degrees above freezing. I suspected that the video had been taken at the height of the Iranian protests in the summer of 2009.
This is not to say that flickering films of atrocities by the Syrian security forces are not true, but collection and control of such information by the exiled opposition, makes it impossible to judge the extent of the violence.
It is naïve to be too nostalgic about the passing of the age when the US dominated the foreign news media. What made CNN’s coverage so distinctive in 1991 was that Peter Arnett, their correspondent in Baghdad, was prepared to take a sceptical approach to US government claims about the accuracy of its bombing and the identity of its victims. CNN lost its critical edge over the years, while network correspondents, often privately critical about US government policy, were prevented by their bosses in New York from straying too far from conventional political wisdom
The press has always been more dependent on the powers-that-be than it likes to admit. American journalists outside Washington often express revulsion and contempt at the slavish ways of the Washington press corps. But it is difficult to report any government on a day-to-day basis without its cooperation, cooperation that can be peremptorily withdrawn to bring critics into line. Also, contrary to every film about journalism, people tend not to admit voluntarily to anything that might do themselves damage. Woodward and Bernstein learned about Watergate almost entirely from secondary sources such as judges, prosecutors and government investigative agencies which could force witnesses to come clean by threatening to put them in jail.
The media is often credited or blamed for an independent sceptical spirit which it seldom shows in reality. In wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan effective media criticism has tended to follow rather than precede public opinion. Even then it usually needs important politicians to be standing on the same side of the fence. The Afghan war is unpopular in the US, but there is no effective anti-war movement because the Democrats, once so critical of the Iraq war, are now in the White House and, if Obama goes on being presented with targets as vulnerable as Trump, are likely to stay there.
Patrick Cockburn is the author of "Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq."
by Joe Hillshoist » Tue May 10, 2011 8:31 pm
by AlicetheKurious » Thu May 12, 2011 3:22 am
by vanlose kid » Thu May 12, 2011 7:13 am
by AlicetheKurious » Thu May 12, 2011 10:55 am
vanlose kid wrote:*
foment sectarian violence. have people call for military action. try civilian crimes in military courts. avoid/derail coming elections. put the fear back in place in the populous. strengthen the military junta. – counter revolution.
*
by AlicetheKurious » Fri May 13, 2011 5:29 am
by crikkett » Fri May 13, 2011 12:15 pm
AlicetheKurious wrote:There's an incredible, incredible interview on Egyptian state tv with Egypt's only female presidential candidate, activist Buthaina Kamal. She is so brave and says straight out why she believes the Armed Forces Council is at the very least complicit in the counter-revolution. Her list of indisputable facts is devastating. The interviewer keeps trying to mitigate her words and steer her away from the AFC, but he's no match for her. It's frustrating that I can't translate it, it's too long.
by AlicetheKurious » Sat May 14, 2011 5:04 pm
by JackRiddler » Mon May 16, 2011 11:37 pm
May 16, 2011
Not Even a Bleat, Mrs. Clinton?
Anti-Shia Pogroms Sweep Bahrain
By PATRICK COCKBURN
"Let us drown the revolution in Jewish blood,” was the slogan of the Tsars when they orchestrated pogroms against Jews across Russia in the years before World War1.
The battle-cry of the al-Khalifa monarchy in Bahrain ever since they started to crush the pro-democracy protests in the island kingdom two months ago might well be “to drown the revolution in Shia blood.” Just as the Tsars once used Cossacks to kill and torture Jews and burn their synagogues, so Bahrain’s minority Sunni regime sends on its black-masked security forces night after night to terrorize the majority Shia population for demanding equal political and civil rights.
Usually troops and police make their raids on Shia districts at 1-4 am, dragging people from their beds and beating them in front of their families. Those detained face mistreatment and torture in prison. One pro-democracy activist, Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, brought before a military court last week with severe facial injuries said he had suffered four fractures to the left side of his face, including a broken jaw that required four hours surgery.
The suppression of the protesters came after Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council – also known as the ‘kings’ club’ of six Gulf monarchs -- sent 1,500 troops to Bahrain to aid repression which began on March 15. It soon became clear that the government is engaged in a savage onslaught on the entire Shia community – some 70 per cent of the population – in Bahrain.
First came a wave of arrests with about 1,000 people detained, of whom the government claims some 300 have been released, though it will not give figures for those still under arrest. Many say they were tortured and, where photographs of those who died under interrogation are available, they show clear marks of beating and whipping. There is no sign yet that King Hamad bin Isa al Khalifa’s declaration that martial law will end on 1 June is anything more than a propaganda exercise to convince the outside world, and foreign business in particular, that Bahrain is returning to normal.
Repression is across the board. Sometimes the masked security men who raid Shia villages at night also bulldoze Shia mosques and religious meeting places. At least 27 of these have so far been wrecked or destroyed, while anti-Shia and pro-government graffiti is often sprayed on walls that survive.
The government is scarcely seeking to conceal the sectarian nature of its repression. Defending the destruction of Shia mosques and husseiniyahs (religious meeting houses) it claims that they were constructed without building permission, but critics point out that one that was demolished was 400 years old. Nor is it likely that the government has been seized with a sudden enthusiasm for enforcing building regulations since the middle of March.
The government is determined to destroy all physical rallying points for the protesters. One of the first such places to be destroyed was the Pearl Square monument, an elegant structure commemorating the pearl fishers of the Gulf, which was bulldozed soon after the square had been cleared of demonstrators. A measure of the government’s paranoia is that it has now withdrawn its own half-dinar coins showing the Pearl Square monument.
Facing little criticism from the US, otherwise so concerned about human rights abuses in Libya, the al-Khalifa family is ruthlessly crushing opposition at every level. Nurses and doctors in a health system largely run by Shia have been beaten and arrested for treating protesters. Teachers and students are being detained. Some 1,000 professional people have been sacked and have lost their pensions. The one opposition newspaper has been closed. Bahraini students who joined protests abroad have had their funding withdrawn.
The original February 14 protest movement was moderate, contained Sunni as well as Shia activists, and went out of its way to be non-sectarian. Its slogans included a demand that Bahrain’s powerful prime minister for the last 40 years, Shaikh Khalifa ibn Salman al-Khalifa, to step down and for fair elections. It also wanted equal rights for all including an end to anti-Shia discrimination under which the majority were excluded from the 60,000-strong army, police and security forces. Security jobs went instead to Sunni recruits from Pakistan, Jordan, Syria and other Sunni states who were immediately given Bahraini citizenship.
Sometimes the anti-Shia bias is explicit. One pro-government newspaper prominently published a letter that compared the protesters to “termites” that are intelligent but multiply at alarming speed and “are very similar to the February 14 group that tried to destroy our beautiful, precious country.” The writer recommends exterminating the “white ants so they don’t come back.”
The purpose of the systematic torture and mistreatment inflicted on the detainees is firstly to create a feeling of terror in the civilian population. It is not only protesters or pro-democracy activists that are being targeted. Al-Jazeera satellite television, based in and funded by neighboring Qatar, which played such a role in publicizing protests and their attempted repression, in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Libya, was initially much more reticent about events in Bahrain. But al-Jazeera revealed this week that the Bahraini police has been raiding girls’ schools, detaining and beating school girls, and is accused of threatening to rape them.
One 16-year-old called “Heba” was taken with three of her school friends and held for three days during which they were beaten. She said an officer “hit me on the head and I started to bleed” and she was thrown against a wall. She says that, although the girls were beaten severely, they scarcely felt the pain because they were so frightened of being raped. The Bahraini opposition party al Wefaq says that 15 girls’ schools have been raided by the police and girls as young as 12 threatened with rape.
Aside from intimidation there is a further motive for the beatings and torture: This is to extract evidence that, against all appearances, the opposition was planning armed revolt and is manipulated by foreign powers, notably Iran. The aim, in the case of Abdulhadi al-Kawaja, was evidently to beat out of him a confession to the charge that he was attempting to “topple the regime forcibly in collaboration with a terrorist organization working for a foreign country.”
The al-Khalifas are aware that their strongest card in trying to discredit the opposition is to claim it has Iranian links. US embassy cables revealed by Wikileaks show that the Bahrain government has continually making this claim to a sceptical US embassy over the years, but has never provided any evidence. This propaganda claiming Iranian plots is crude, but plays successfully in Sunni Gulf states that see an Iranian hand behind every Shia demand for equal rights and an end to discrimination. It also gets an audience in Washington, conscious that its Fifth Fleet is based in Bahrain, and fearful of anything that might strengthen Iran.
The Bahraini monarchy, having effectively declared war on the majority of its own people, is likely to win in the short term because its opponents are not armed. The cost will be that Bahrain, once deemed more liberal than its neighbours, is turning into the Gulf’s version of Belfast or Beirut when they were convulsed by sectarian hatred.
Patrick Cockburn is the author of "Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq
by AlicetheKurious » Tue May 17, 2011 4:59 am
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