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Mixed Messages for Tunisian Women
After the tumult of the Arab Spring, many Tunisian women are wondering whether they should be optimistic or concerned about preserving and expanding their rights…read more
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Turkey, Jordan to set up safe zones in Syria: diplomats
BEIRUT: Turkey and Jordan, backed by Western and Arab powers, are preparing to set up two “safe zones” for civilians inside Syria, diplomats said Friday.
The Western and Arab diplomats told The Daily Star that Syria’s two neighbors would press ahead with preparations to establish the two havens if President Bashar Assad did not sign on to an Arab plan aimed at ending a bloody crackdown on anti-regime protesters by Saturday.
The diplomats said an international meeting in Paris would discuss later Friday the details of the plans to set up the zones in southern and northern Syria.
On Wednesday, the Arab League gave Assad three days to agree in writing to allowing hundreds of observers into Syria to oversee the implementation of the Arab plan to end eight months of violence against protesters that has killed more than 3,000 people.
Read more: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2011/Nov-18/154477-turkey-jordan-to-set-up-safe-zones-in-syria-diplomats.ashx#ixzz1eSvJJKOs
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(The Daily Star :: Lebanon News :: http://www.dailystar.com.lb) …Read More -
Can the study of politics, power and culture at the local level reshape efforts to rebuild Afghanistan?
Ten years after the Taliban’s leaders fled their country in apparent defeat, the war in Afghanistan has become what one observer calls “a perpetually escalating stalemate.” As in Iraq, the United States military has responded to bad news with counterinsurgency: eliminate troublemakers in the dark of night, with the most lethal arts, and befriend tribal elders by day, with cultural sensitivity and expertise. The Army has gone so far as to embed credentialed social scientists with front-line troops in “Human Terrain Teams” that engage in “rapid ethnographic assessment” — conducting interviews and administering surveys, learning about land disputes, social networks and how to “operationalize” the Pashtun tribal code…Published by The New York Times
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Why should a teacher earn less than a manager?
Criticism of capitalism has increased in recent months. Protest movements, such as “Occupy Wall Street,” are outraged at the excesses of bankers who, according to the protesters, bear the main responsibility for the current economic crisis – but apparently are not being held responsible. A growing number of voices from different parts of society are now showing solidarity with the anti-capitalism activities and reflecting the widespread frustration felt by citizens.Undoubtedly, these anti-capitalist protests have their finger on the pulse of our time. But it is not enough to simply condemn capitalism for its undeniable excesses. We need a deeper analysis of why the capitalist system, in its current form, no longer fits the world around us…
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What’s the big deal? The Arab League’s Non-Solution for Syria
On the surface, the Arab League appears to have successfully negotiated a deal with Syrian President Bashar Assad to end his bloody eight-month crackdown on largely peaceful protesters. But appearances are always deceiving, especially when the subject is the regime in Damascus, which has found endless ways to perpetuate itself, and the chief broker of the deal is a perennially ineffectual pan-Arabist dinosaur.On Wednesday, the Arab League announced from its Cairo headquarters that Syria had accepted the agreement without reservations. The pact calls on Assad to withdraw his security forces from the streets, stop violence, free all political detainees, hold a national dialogue with the opposition within two weeks and allow the media, the Arab League and international monitors access to the closed country. “The agreement is clear,” Qatar’s Foreign Minister, Jassem bin Hamad, said at a press conference in Cairo. “We are very happy that we have reached an agreement and will be happier when it is implemented.”… Read More
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A Chill on Tahrir Square
CAIRO — A cool breeze wafts along the streets of Cairo these days and the North African sun has become a tamer, gentler creature. But this sleepless city now beats to a more unsettling rhythm.Much of the unease is fed by fear of the unknown — that febrile political playground, in which new parties proliferate, filling the air with their Much of the unease is fed by fear of the unknown — that febrile political playground, in which new parties proliferate, filling the air with their… Read More
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In Assad’s Syria, There is No Imagination
The House of Assad evokes an imperial sense of power, or at least its trappings, with iconography that one scholar described as infused with “laudatory slogans and sempiternal images.”
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But my first impression of Rami Makhlouf, President Bashar al-Assad’s cousin and one-time confidante, was of his unassuming quality. Here was a tycoon, a figure as rich as he was loathed, who eschewed formalities and ceremony. I had seen it before, in men like Saad Hariri, a former prime minister in Lebanon, lavished with so much privilege and so much wealth that pretensions become unnecessary… Read More -
Reporting From Syria in Secret
As The Lede has reminded readers for months, because of restrictions imposed by the Syrian government on independent reporting, much of the information about the uprising there, including video of the security crackdown on protesters this week, reaches the Web only after it has been smuggled out of the country by a network of activists.Some foreign reporters, including Anthony Shadid of The New York Times, have managed to make the opposite journey, sneaking into Syria to cover the uprising in person.This week’s episode of the PBS series “Frontline” featured a video report produced by another journalist who managed to work secretly inside Syria, Ramita Navai… Read More
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The Consequentialist
Barack Obama came to Washington just six years ago, having spent his professional life as a part-time lawyer, part-time law professor, and part-time state legislator in Illinois. As an undergraduate, he took courses in history and international relations, but neither his academic life nor his work in Springfield gave him an especially profound grasp of foreign affairs. As he coasted toward winning a seat in the U.S. Senate, in 2004, he began to reach out to a broad range of foreign-policy experts––politicians, diplomats, academics, and journalists… Read More
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HSBC accused of helping Egyptian generals
Democracy and social justice campaigners in Egypt say that HSBC bank is colluding with the Egyptian military generals currently running the country, in order to intimidate them and stifle their legitimate activities.
A range of NGOs and human rights groups say the global banking giant has been contacting them over the last two months, requesting information and documents relating to their work and activities in Egypt…Read More
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Life, the Revolution and Everything
After viewing a few of the gruesome videos of Muammar Qaddafi’s last moments, I called Abdullah, the young translator with whom I’d worked in Benghazi last spring. “You can’t imagine how great we are feeling after forty-two years and nine months,” he said, sounding like many of the Libyans I’d seen interviewed on TV. Few of them mentioned Qaddafi without also mentioning the forty-two years. The number had been everywhere in Libya since the revolution began: One of the many posters I’d seen plastering downtown Benghazi in March read, “42 is number of shoe’s size…Read More
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Dead Without Trial. Again
Once more there was to be no trial, no judgment. Over the last five years the scenario in the Arab world seems to be the same. Over and over again, the same confusion, the same dramatic end. Saddam Hussein, Usama bin Laden and Qaddafi were killed without a fair trial, no judge or jury brought down a verdict, in the most undignified manner. Saddam Hussein was hanged the day of the Muslim festival (after a parody of a trial) and his execution was filmed by mobile phone camera. Usama bin Laden was assassinated unarmed with no image to prove his fate. Qaddafi was caught alive, beaten and then executed, with hundreds of people around him taking pictures of his blood-covered face…Read More
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In Rubble-Strewn Sitra, Faces of the Young Foretell a Grim Future for Bahrain
SITRA, Bahrain — Sometimes a name suggests a condition. There was Beirut a generation ago, Baghdad more recently. In Bahrain, a Persian Gulf state so polarized that truth itself is a matter of interpretation, it is Sitra. Here, the faces of young men foretell a future for the country that looks like the rubble-strewn and violent streets of this town.
On a recent night, after clashes that erupt almost daily, one of them entered the house of a relative, squinting as though he had stumbled from a dungeon into the sun. Tear gas. His friend smirked as he showed the smooth scars left by rubber bullets fired at his leg and chest. Another shrugged as he removed his shirt to reveal a back scarred by pellets…Read More
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Journalists gather in show of solidarity with Jordan’s Al Ghad reporter
AMMAN – Scores of journalists converged at the Jordan Press Association (JPA) on Thursday to show their solidarity with Al Ghad journalist Yousef Damra, who was threatened after publishing an article exposing a major fraud case.
The demonstration was joined by Minister of State for Media Affairs and Communications Rakan Majali, who reiterated the government’s rejection of recent acts of intimidation against journalists.
The story, according to Damra, started in April when he started writing about victims of fraud.
He added that his last article, dated October 19, exposed a JD3 million real estate fraud case…Read More
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Alaa Abdel Fattah: Portrait of a revolutionary
Prominent Egyptian blogger and activist Alaa Abdel Fattah was summoned today to Cairo’s notorious C28 military prosecution headquarters to face charges of incitement to violence in the violent 9 October Maspero clashes between Coptic-Christian protesters and military police.
Abdel Fattah, who rejects the notion of civilians being tried by military courts, has refused to be interrogated by military prosecutors as a matter of principle. He has also vociferously criticised the idea that the military prosecution should investigate the Maspero clashes, in which military police were directly involved…Read More
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The Arab Intellectuals Who Didn’t Roar
IN mid-June, the Syrian poet known as Adonis, one of the Arab world’s most renowned literary figures, addressed an open letter to the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. The stage was set for one of those moments, familiar from revolutions past, in which an intellectual hero confronts an oppressive ruler and eloquently voices the grievances of a nation…Read More
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Syrian Forces Take Aim at Journalists
The Internet has been a critical part of the demonstrations in Syria, as it has in other “Arab Spring” uprisings, but forces in the country have taken aim at journalists and activists attempting to cover the protests.
Reporters Without Borders, a non-profit promoting press freedom, released a list Thursday of journalists, bloggers and cyber-activists detained in Syria who were attempting to cover the protests. The organization listed 22 people but said the roster “is almost certainly incomplete.” …Read More
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How Stable is Jordan
In the wake of revolts in Egypt, Tunisia, and Bahrain, Jordan – another seemingly stable pro-Western regime with a reputation for progressive social and economic policies – has received curiously
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little attention. In the early 1990s, Jordan was one of the region’s most democratic countries, registering the highest ever Freedom House scores for an Arab country in 1992 (a 3 on political rights and 3 on civil liberties)… Read More -
Qaddafi’s Death Places Focus on Arab Spring’s ‘Hard Road’
TUNIS — Like the flight of Tunisia’s dictator or the trial of Egypt’s, the capture of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi on Thursday afternoon captivated the Arab world, giving a renewed sense of power and possibility. But the photographs of his bloody corpse that circulated just moments later on cellphones and television screens quickly tempered that exhilaration with a reminder of the many still-unresolved conflicts that the Arab Spring has also unleashed.
“This isn’t justice,” Mustafa Haid, 32, a Syrian activist, said as he watched Al Jazeera’s broadcast in a Beirut office. Colonel Qaddafi should have been put on trial, his crimes investigated, Libya reconciled to trust in the law, he said, as though he still hoped better from the regional uprising that began with peaceful displays of national unity in Tunis and Cairo.
Across the region, Colonel Qaddafi’s bloody end has brought home the growing awareness of the challenges that lie ahead: the balancing of vengeance against justice, impatience for jobs against the slow pace of economic recovery, fidelity to Islam against tolerance for minorities, and the need for stability against the drive to tear down of the pillars of old governments.
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In Egypt and Tunisia women are both hopeful and fearful about what the Arab revolutions might mean for them
“ALL of us were there, throwing stones, moving dead bodies. We did everything. There was no difference between men and women.” So says Asmaa Mahfouz, an Egyptian activist, remembering the protests that felled Hosni Mubarak at the beginning of the year. Though some men told her to get out of the way, others held up umbrellas to protect her.
In Tunisia Lina Ben Mhenni, an activist, travelled round the country documenting protests on her blog, “A Tunisian Girl”. Besides photographing the dead and wounded, she included pictures of herself with male protesters at sit-ins in the Kasbah in Tunis. Tawakul Karman, awarded the Nobel peace prize at the beginning of October, has been a leading figure in the pro-democracy demonstrations in Yemen, camping out for months in front of Sana’a University, calling for Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s president, to step down. Defying their stereotype as victims of oppressive patriarchies, Arab women have made their presence a defining feature of the Arab spring.
The position of women in the Arab world has long been difficult. In 2002 the first Arab Human Development Report cited the lack of women’s rights as one of three factors, along with lack of political freedoms and poor education, that most hampered the region’s progress. Amid the loud calls for democracy in the early days of the uprisings, little was said specifically about women’s rights. But now that constitutions are being rewritten, many women in Egypt and Tunisia, whose revolutions are most advanced, hope to push their own liberation.
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In Egypt, corruption cases had an American root
CAIRO — Beginning two decades ago, the United States government bankrolled an Egyptian think tank dedicated to economic reform. A different outcome is only now becoming visible in the fallout from Egypt’s Arab Spring.
Formed with a $10 million endowment from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies gathered captains of industry in a small circle — with the president’s son Gamal Mubarak at the center. Over time, members of the group would assume top roles in Egypt’s ruling party and government.
Today, Gamal Mubarak and four of those think tank members are in jail, charged with squandering public funds in the sale of public resources, lands and government-run companies as part of a dramatic restructuring. Some have fled the country, pilloried amid the public outrage over insider deals and corruption that toppled President Hosni Mubarak.
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Renowned TV presenter Fouda halts famous show, citing media freedom restrictions
Renowned TV presenter Yosri Fouda said on Friday he had decided to halt his famous show ‘Akher Kalam’ for an indefinite period in protest at what he called “relentless censorship efforts.”
Fouda was due to host staunch SCAF critic Alaa El-Aswany on Thursday night to comment on the interview two Egyptian army generals, Mahmoud Hegazy and Mohamed El-Assar, gave on Wednesday.Thursday’s episode was abruptly cancelled, fuelling speculation that Fouda, a highly-respected media figure, was pressured into shifting his plans by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF).
Fouda refrained from directly accusing any party of imposing restrictions on his work, but said he could not bear “an obligatory censorship.”
“There is a fact that gradually came to prominence during the past few months, which makes us feel that there are relentless efforts to maintain the core of the old system,” Fouda, a former BBC Arabic and Al-Jazeera employee, said in a statement on his Facebook page.
“That old system was dismantled by the Egyptian people after it spread corruption and immorality all over the country.
“There have been relentless efforts since the revolution, using both old and new techniques, to put direct and indirect pressure on those who still believe in the revolution’s values … to oblige them to impose self-restrictions on what should not be hidden.
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Job creation and education: Proud to be Jordanian
The World Economic Forum Special Meeting on Economic Growth and Job Creation in the Arab Worldcomes at a crucial time not just for the region, but also for the world at large. The programme is filled with many topics of interest, specifically job creation and its related sub-components of entrepreneurship and poverty alleviation. Those subjects should be addressed collaboratively if we want stability in the region and beyond. I believe these issues should no longer be treated as “unique” or as the “topic of the day”, but rather as a constant factor to be considered and institutionalized within the systems of all countries.
I look forward to hearing from the list of participants made up of experts, renowned thought leaders and decision makers, all of whom will hopefully engage in fruitful discussions to come up with relevant, realistic and effective solutions.
In addition to job creation, the Forum provides an opportunity to present and discuss other important issues facing the region, such as addressing the region’s scarce resources of water, energy and food; improving education; and regional collaboration. Improving education should be a main focus, as it is the basis of everything, and as my parents taught me, it is the one thing that no one can ever take away from you.
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The Strange Power of Qatar
On August 23, Libyan rebels raised their flag over Bab al-Aziziya, the once-impregnable complex housing Muammar Qaddafi’s headquarters in Tripoli. Though the dictator himself still remained at large, the overrunning of one of the nerve centers of his regime had enormous symbolic power and seemed to offer definitive proof of the rebels’ strength. And yet on several newscasts, a different story about the uprising was emerging: along with the rebels’ tricolor with white crescent and star, the presidential compound at Bab al-Aziziya was briefly shown flying the maroon and white flag of Qatar, the tiny, gas-rich Arabian emirate more than two thousand miles away.
Though little noted in the West, Qatar’s enthusiasm for the Libyan revolt had been on display from the outset. The emirate was instrumental in securing the support of the Arab League for the NATO intervention back in March, contributing its own military aircraft to the mission. It also gave $400 million to the rebels, helped them market Libyan oil out of Benghazi, and set up a TV station for them in Doha, the Qatari capital. Following the conquest of Bab al-Aziziya, however, it became clear that the Qataris were deeply involved on the ground as well. Not only did Qatar arm the rebels and set up training camps for them in Benghazi and in the Nafusa Mountains west of Tripoli; its own special forces—a hitherto unknown contingent—helped lead the August offensive on the capital. (Although Qatar’s military is one of the smallest in the Middle East, with just over 11,000 men, its special forces were trained by the French and other Western countries and appear to possess considerable skill.) The day the rebels captured Bab al-Aziziya, Mahmoud Jibril, the leader of Libya’s interim government, singled out Qatar for its far-reaching support, despite “all the doubts and threats.”
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From the West Bank: The Palestinians Are Ready
On the West Bank, the Palestinian September has come and gone in an eerie quiet. Abu Mazen returned from the UN to a hero’s welcome in Ramallah, and there were low-key celebrations in other cities as well; but the mass demonstrations that many predicted, and that the Israelis feared, have not materialized. The Palestinian security forces were given strict orders to keep demonstrators away from potential places of friction such as roadblocks, checkpoints, and of course Israeli settlements. Expecting the worst, the Israeli army invested considerable resources in the latest crowd-control technology, including the infamous “Skunk” spray, which disperses an unbearable malodorous mist, and which some of us have experienced in Bil’in and al-Nabi Saleh; but so far they haven’t needed these methods.
In the meantime, has anything changed on the ground? Yes. According to the statistics compiled by Peace Now, in the ten months following the end of the “as-if” freeze on building in the territories in October 2010, work began on 2,598 new housing units; 2,149 new units were completed, and building continued on at least another 3,700. The rate of housing construction per (Israeli) person on the West Bank was double that in Israel proper. If you drive south from Jerusalem along Road 60, the main north-south artery, you see signs of building by settlers everywhere. At Avigail, an “illegal outpost” in the south Hebron hills—that is, a settlement that is illegal even within the peculiar terms of the Israeli legal system—a big sign on the roadside proudly proclaims, “We’re growing!”
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