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The Egyptian Army’s Unlikely Allies
When the Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany took the stage in October at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris to promote the French translation of his latest novel, he was presumably not expecting to be heckled and chased from the venue by a crowd of his own countrymen. But minutes into his talk, the author’s voice was drowned out by the shouts of Egyptian emigrés who had come out for the chance to tear him to bits.
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Occupied Pleasures: diverse Palestinian life
Now, in Occupied Pleasures, a short video edited by Amber Fares and twinned with music from Stormtrap Asifeh, Habjouqa’s images are given even greater scope to display the humor and strange, stereotype-challenging juxtapositions in which she seems to delight.
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Tunisia’s Islamists I: Ennahda Withdraws
Christopher Alexander is the John and Ruth McGee director of the Dean Rusk International Studies Program at Davidson College. In addition to several articles on politics in North Africa, he is the author of Tunisia: Stability and Reform in the Modern Maghreb (2010).
In this article, he asks: “What is the status of Islamists in Tunisia three years after the Arab uprisings began and two years after the Islamist Ennahda Party’s first electoral victory?”
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Obama To Cut MidEast Democracy Programs
A planned decrease by the Obama administration in funding for democracy promotion and election support in the Middle East is prompting alarm among activists. They say cuts are likely to be more severe than first realized and that the White House appears to be giving up on democracy in the region and downgrading its advancement as a policy priority.
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Stability by Change: New Political Economy?
Issue brief author Faysal Itani, a fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, argues that King Abdullah ought to move forward transforming Jordan’s institutions and reimagining its relationship with its citizens, despite the associated political risks.
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Whose sarin?
Investigative journalist, Seymour M. Hersh, is writing an alternative history of the war on terror. In this thorough article in the London Review of Books, he argues about Barack Obama’s attempt to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August.
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Year Four of the Arab Awakening
Marwan Muasher is the vice president for studies at Carnegie, where he oversees research in Washington and Beirut on the Middle East. Here he writes another important article on the passage of the fourth year of the Arab Awakening and what to expect in the year ahead.
“How will history judge the uprisings that started in many parts of the Arab world in 2011? The label “Arab Spring” proved too simplistic from the beginning. Transformational processes defy black-and-white expectations, but in the end, will the awakenings be more reminiscent of what happened in Europe in 1848, when several uprisings took place within a few weeks only to be followed by counterrevolutions and renewed authoritarian rule? Or will they more closely resemble the 1989 collapse of the Soviet Union, after which some countries swiftly democratized while others remained in thrall to dictatorship?”
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Rapper challenges veiled women mold
Egyptian Mayam Mahmoud stirred debate in the Middle East when she appeared at Arabs Got Talent’s stage and rapped, defying the expectations of a veiled woman in this part of her world.
“It’s got a lot of people talking about whether it’s possible for a veiled girl, or even a girl, to do this,” says Mahmoud, who says her veil is a personal choice and has little relevance to her music. “If a girl has a dream to work in a field where many girls don’t work, or to do post-graduate study, or to work in a position higher than her husband – all these things often can’t be done.”
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Audiovisual archive for Palestine refugees
On this website, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) unveils the first images of its newly digitized archive. Over half a million images and hours of film will follow, covering all aspects of the lives and history of Palestine refugees from 1948 to the present day.
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The Future of Syria – a UNHCR report
UNHCR has launched a report, based on research carried out over four months in Lebanon and Jordan, which finds alarming indications of distress among children, with thousands living alone or separated from their parents, many out of school, and extensive child labour. An informative source for journalists interested in the Syrian crisis.
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Path to Political Parties in Arab World
“Dozens of new political parties have emerged in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia since the start of the Arab uprisings. While many of these forces played an active role in overturning old orders, they have struggled to develop coherent identities, establish effective support networks, and build sustainable constituencies.”
In this article, vice president for studies at Carnegie Marwan Muasher, who oversees research in Washington and Beirut on the Middle East, writes about what emerging political parties need to participate effectively in the political process.
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Flesh and Blood
Using Skype as a digital rehearsal studio, Sofiane and Selma Ouissi’s experimental choreography is surviving long distance
Selma and Sofiane Ouissi share a body with two heads – at least that’s how Sofiane, the Tunis-based half of this Tunisian brother and sister dance duo, sees it. They do have their differences, he explains. Selma, who is currently based in Paris, is the more pensive of the two, while he is driven by impulse and instinct. When they dance together however, they are bound by a palpable energy, one that allows them to flow through each other’s bodies.
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Arab socities must build ‘citizen-states’
Sami Nader is a columnist for Al-Monitor’s Lebanon Pulse. He is an economist, Middle Eastern affairs analyst and communications expert with extensive expertise in corporate strategy and risk management. In this article, he argues that…
“…The primary danger facing the Arab world in the wake of successive revolutions is not a wave of political Islam, but rather the state of violent chaos that has resulted from the breakup of former regimes, which had imposed security through repression and violence. This danger comes as a result of the absence of alternative ruling systems to both maintain security and guarantee the participation of various segments of society.”
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Putting Saddam Hussein back in the frame
When Saddam Hussein fell, we Iraqis were disoriented. For all our lives, he had always been there. His image was everywhere,’ says photographer Jamal Penjweny, whose series Saddam is Here depicts Iraqis in everyday locations covering their faces with pictures of the former dictator. ‘His image was in the cities where we live, on the walls of our schools, on our money, everywhere. Then he vanished. So taking a picture with Saddam was breaking a taboo that was created after the fall of the regime.’ Penjweny, a former shepherd, will show his work in the Iraq pavilion at the Venice Biennale (Welcome to Iraq, 1 June to 24 November).
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Europe Beckons to Desperate Syrians
Thousands of Middle-Class Syrians Are Trying to Get to Europe’s Northern Countries to Seek Asylum
Fares Ayyub, here in a park in Sofia, Bulgaria, fled his home in Deraa, Syria, after his mother and brother were killed by an airstrike on his house by government forces. He dodged soldiers and militia in Syria and traveled through Turkey to Bulgaria, where he has been stuck for three months.
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Politics & power in Jordan’s refugee camp
A year and a half after it was first established, the dynamics of Jordan’s Za’atari Syrian refugee camp are changing with time. A city in the making? IRIN news, a humanitarian news and analysis portal, borrows the insight of anthropologist professors to explain the transformation of the second largest refugee camp in the world.
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Jordan’s Reform Agenda on Hold
Osama Al Sharif, a Jordanian political commentator and journalist, writes in Al Monitor about the reform process in Jordan, suggesting that the crisis in Syria has been a catalyst for Jordan to focus on economic, not political, reform and security.
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Women on Front Lines & Behind the Lens
“Stephanie Sinclair has mostly happy memories of her childhood in Miami, where she grew up encouraged by her parents to be carefree, confident and defiant. It was there, in an elementary school broadcast arts program, that she requested to be a camera operator, offering the first inkling of what she would do with her life.
Today, she is one of National Geographic’s conflict photojournalists, one of about a dozen women among the magazine’s 60 freelance photographers.”
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Close encounters of the Arab kind
Have you ever heard of Alif the Unseen, computer hacker and recipient of an ancient scroll written by mythological spirits?
Or Ajwan, a teenager on an intergalactic quest to save her son from the clutches of those who wish to convert him into a super-warrior?
Probably you haven’t. Possibly you should have. Introducing the rapidly evolving face of Arabic science fiction literature.
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Desert Island Discs: Jim Al-Khalili interview
Desert Island Discs is a radio programme presented by Krisy Young and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. In this episode, Kirsty Young’s castaway is the physicist Professor Jim Al-Khalili.
He’s spent his adult life studying sub-atomic particles – and trying to explain them to the rest of us. He fell in love with physics when he was a teenager growing up in Iraq. With an Iraqi father and English mother, the Baghdad he spent his early years in was cosmopolitan and vibrant but, once Saddam Hussein came to power, his parents realised the family would have to flee, and he has lived and worked in Britain for the past 30 years.
Jim is the author of the book Pathfinders; The Golden Age of Arabic Science, among others.
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The Fugitive
The Foreign Policy writes this piece on an Iraqi former Abu Ghraib prisoner who has turned to Syria for jihad.
“Waiting for the tram in the southern Turkish city of Gaziantep, Abu Omar is on his way to the mall. No groceries today — his shopping list includes a Turkish-made tablet computer and a small GPS navigation device loaded with digital maps of the Middle East.”
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How to win the next Mideast war – over water
Russell Sticklor is a research analyst at the Stimson Center, a nonprofit and nonpartisan international security think tank. In this opinion piece at the Christian Science Monitor, he writes about the water crisis looming in the Middle East and North Africa region.
“The Middle East and North Africa – the world’s most water-scarce region – will soon face a severe water crisis. That could create an even greater challenge than today’s upheavals. More attention must be paid to the problem. Conservation, communication, education, and technology can help.”
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Controlling Access to Online Information in Jordan: the Role of ISPs
In autocratic counties such as Jordan with no system built to ensure accountability, models of control over internet access may range from legislative measures enforced by the government to informal techniques exercised by the private sector.
Formal censorship techniques are exercised through a legislated framework for law enforcement to block websites, and fine journalists, bloggers, editors-in-chief, and owners of online content. The design of the legal framework relieves Jordan from local and international pressure given that it is only applying the rule of law put forward by an elected parliament. In this blog Reem Almasri talks about the informal techniques the country have used, and still use, to control access to information in cooperation with the private sector, especially internet service providers.
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Why is Albert Camus Still a Stranger in His Native Algeria?
On the 100th anniversary of the birth of the famed novelist Albert Camus, the Smithsonian reporter returns to his birthplace, Algeria, in search for signs of his legacy. In this well-written article, he shares his findings, among which is a striking forgetfulness of one of the greatest writers of his time.
“Camus is regarded as a giant of French literature, but it was his North African birthplace that most shaped his life and his art. In a 1936 essay, composed during a bout of homesickness in Prague, he wrote of pining for “my own town on the shores of the Mediterranean…the summer evenings that I love so much, so gentle in the green light and full of young and beautiful women.” Camus set his two most famous works, the novels The Stranger and The Plague, in Algeria, and his perception of existence, a joyful sensuality combined with a recognition of man’s loneliness in an indifferent universe, was formed here.”
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The Regression of Human Rights in the Middle East
Huffington Post Blog
By Rana F. SweisWith a high death toll in Syria, intensified sectarian strife across the region and a sharp rise in conservatism, it’s easy to forget why the Arab Spring actually began.
From autocratic regimes to deteriorating press freedoms to consistent corruption, the Middle East was, for the most part, decaying.
The past decades in the Middle East saw a decline not only in literacy and culture — Arabs comprise almost five percent of the world’s population, but publish just 1.1 percent of its books, according to the U.N.’s 2003 Arab Human Development Report – but it is also the consistent regression in human rights.
When Mohammad Bouazizi set himself on fire in December 2010, it was in protest against injustice, harassment and humiliation. In Egypt, 28-year-old Khalid Said died while in police custody. It was the brutality and abuse inflicted upon him that inspired many to take to the streets. Even in Turkey, an economically prosperous country, it was aggression against protestors that prompted outrage across the country.
Even so, human rights issues have taken a back seat as the region continues to face unprecedented change. Despite protests waning, divisions plaguing opposition movements and violence intensifying, one of the biggest challenges facing the Middle East today is the declining state of human rights and the silence of so many democratic governments across the world.
From Qatar to Tunisia, artists such as poets, musicians, bloggers have been imprisoned since the revolutions.
“The willingness of new governments to respect rights will determine whether those uprisings give birth to genuine democracy or simply spawn authoritarianism in new forms,” noted Human Rights Watch in its 2013 world report on challenges for rights after the Arab Spring.
“Turning a blind eye to repression may be politically convenient but it does enormous damage to the quests for rights-respecting democracies.”
Dozens of social media users have been jailed in the Gulf for posting comments on Twitter.
“I see freedom of expression as a release valve: people have those thoughts, people have those concerns, they want to articulate them and when a government takes an approach (such as jailing dissidents), what you’re really doing is forcing those concerns and debate internally, it doesn’t go away,” said Ross LaJeunesse, global head of Google’s Freedom Expression project.
After 16 years of free and unfettered access to the Internet, Jordan blocked nearly 300 news websites this month and enforced an amended press law to regulate online content. And still despite the uplifting of a public assembly law, speech related crimes or simply participating in protests could send you to State Security Court, a special body that has jurisdiction over crimes considered harmful to Jordan’s internal and external security — involving drugs, terrorism, weapons, espionage and treason.
In Egypt, 20 organizations announced the decline in the status of human rights in Egypt since Morsi took office last year — police beatings, torture, military trials and lack of accountability.
Earlier this year, an Egyptian prosecutor charged Bassem Yousef, a comedian whose satire brings relief to many Arabs bombarded by constant images of war and violence, of maligning president Mohammad Morsi.
Morsi’s office claimed the show was, “circulating false news likely to disturb public peace and public security and affect the administration.”
For many decades, Arabs were denied a platform for expression and in turn they were plagued by internal fear and self-censorship. There is no doubt, after the Arab Spring, an internal barrier of fear was lifted.
I see this during labor strikes and protests, in art exhibitions and plays that tend to push previous boundaries but where it will all end remains unclear.
Western democracies continue to send a message to people in the Middle East: Security and stability trumps human rights issues. But if there is any lesson to be learned from the Arab Spring, it is indeed that human rights is security.
This post is part of a collaboration between The Huffington Post and The Aspen Institute, in which a variety of thinkers, writers and experts will explore the most pressing issues of our time. For more posts from this partnership, click here. For more information on The Aspen Institute, click here.
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