Category Archives: Arab Spring

Syria, the ‘Zio-American plot’, and Conflicts Forum

On its website (which I created) Conflicts Forum is referred to as “an international movement which engages with Islamist movements” — a partially correct but somewhat misleading statement.

Conflicts Forum does indeed engage Islamist movements — principally Hezbollah and Hamas. It does have an international element — evident in its advisory board. But by no stretch of the imagination can it accurately be described as an international movement.

It is an operation so small it can barely be described as an organization, let alone a movement. It serves first and foremost as an institutional identity for the former senior British intelligence officer, Alastair Crooke.

In his decades-long service for the British government, Crooke was deeply engaged with resistance movements across the globe, opening up vital dialogue leading to peace deals for which politicians and prime ministers would later eagerly take credit.

That work was prematurely cut short in 2003 because of pressure from an administration in Washington that refused to recognize that governments, however powerful, must sooner or later learn how to talk to their enemies.

Having been pushed out of his official role, Crooke attempted to continue what had become a personal mission through the creation of Conflicts Forum. The problem was: how much value can dialogue yield if only one side is willing to engage?

The outcome — perhaps inevitable — was that Conflicts Forum would be unable to effectively serve as a bridge between Islamists and Western governments and instead become an informal advocate for those movements and for the Middle Eastern governments whose backing they still enjoy.

In the summer of 2009 after Iranians from across the social spectrum took to the streets en masse to reject the outcome of the presidential election, Crooke rejected the idea that this was a “genuine popular uprising“; as for the significance of the unrest he said, somewhat dismissively: “plainly for some in north Tehran it was very real”.

Two and a half years later, Crooke and his partner Aisling Byrne are engaged in a similar effort to portray unrest in Syria, not as a popular uprising but instead as the result of America’s covert war against Iran for whom Syria remains a vital ally. The people on the streets are supposedly just pawns serving a neoconservative agenda: regime change in Damascus and Tehran.

The Guardian’s Brian Whitaker justifiably pours scorn on Conflict Forum’s conspiratorial missives and those on the left who have become Assad and Ahmadinejad’s useful idiots.

Denying the authenticity of the Syrian uprising is a central plank of the Assad regime’s propaganda message – that the whole thing, as the official news agency put it recently, is a "Zio-American" plot.

To anyone who has been following events in Syria closely since last March, the regime’s conspiracy claims are not only ridiculous but terribly insulting to the thousands of protesters who have risked (and often lost) their lives in the struggle against dictatorship. Even so, there’s a small chorus of westerners who seem to be echoing the Assad line.

“Arguably, the most important component in this struggle,” Aisling Byrne wrote in an article last week, “has been the deliberate construction of a largely false narrative that pits unarmed democracy demonstrators being killed in their hundreds and thousands as they protest peacefully against an oppressive, violent regime, a ‘killing machine’ led by the ‘monster’ Assad.”

Arguably, my foot. Information about the protests has sometimes been wrong – as always happens in conflicts, especially when media access is so severely restricted – but to suggest that this has led to a “largely false narrative” is utter nonsense.

Byrne’s article has been doing the rounds on the internet – Counterpunch, the Asia Times and Countercurrents – as well as being touted enthusiastically inside Syria by the Assad regime. Running to more than 4,700 words, it’s probably the fullest exposition yet of the grand international conspiracy theory.

Of course, it’s true lots of countries have been reacting to the uprising in Syria and some are certainly trying to influence the outcome. Given Syria’s strategic importance, that is to be expected. Reacting to events, though, is not the same as orchestrating things according to some pre-conceived plan – which is what the Assad regime claims is happening, and what Byrne also seems to imply:

“What we are seeing in Syria is a deliberate and calculated campaign to bring down the Assad government so as to replace it with a regime ‘more compatible’ with US interests in the region.

“The blueprint for this project is essentially a report produced by the neo-conservative Brookings Institute for regime change in Iran in 2009.”

There’s no harm in discussing or criticising what foreign powers may be up to with regard to Syria, even if Byrne draws some rather fanciful conclusions. Any attempts to prevent the Syrian people from making their own choices ought to be resisted, too. The overall effect of such articles, though, is to delegitimise the popular struggle – which is unfair to the protesters and also plays into the hands of the regime.

But what of the article’s author, Aisling Byrne? She is projects co-ordinator for the Conflicts Forum, based in Beirut. Its director is Alastair Crooke, a former British intelligence officer who until a few years ago was heavily involved in British and European diplomacy relating to Israel/Palestine. Among many other things, he took part in clandestine meetings with Hamas.

Crooke left his government job and founded the Conflicts Forum in 2004 “to open a new relationship between the west and the Muslim world”, mainly through promoting dialogue with Islamist movements – something that western governments have often been reluctant to do. Members of the forum’s advisory board include Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo detainee, and Azzam Tamimi, regarded as an unofficial voice for Hamas in Britain.

“While facing increasingly intractable problems in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Pakistan and elsewhere,” Conflicts Forum says on its website, “we [ie western governments] immobilise ourselves by turning away from the homegrown political forces that have the power to resolve these crises.”

Judging by Byrne’s article and another by Crooke himself in the Guardian last November, though, Conflicts Forum seems oddly reluctant to engage with the “homegrown political forces” in Syria.

There’s an inconsistency and selectivity here that is also apparent among sections of the more traditionalist left. Pro-western dictators like Ben Ali and Mubarak are considered fair game, but when it comes to toppling contrarian dictators like Gaddafi and Assad there’s lingering sympathy for them.

In Syria’s case this is further complicated by viewing the uprising through the prism of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For instance, a briefing paper on Conflicts Forum’s website examining Hizbullah’s continuing support for the Assad regime says:

“Just as Hizbullah viewed the 2009 protests in Iran as a ‘bid to destabilise the country’s Islamic regime’ by means of a US-orchestrated ‘velvet revolution’, the protests in Syria are branded a form of ‘collusion’ with outside powers who seek to replace Asad’s rule with ‘another regime similar to the moderate Arab regimes that are ready to sign any capitulation agreement with Israel’…

“Echoing Hizbullah’s stance on the Iran protests is Nasrallah’s characterisation of the US role in the Syrian uprising as an extension of the July War and the Gaza War. Since the resistance in Lebanon and Palestine had foiled the ‘New Middle East’ scheme in both these military aggressions, Washington was ‘trying to reintroduce [it] through other gates,’ such as Syria.

“With this in mind, attempts to overthrow the Assad regime are considered a ‘service’ to American and Israeli interests.”

Such views are not confined to Hizbullah, however. But how realistic are they? Many neocons hoped the invasion of Iraq would deliver a pro-Israel government there. It didn’t, and instead it strengthened Iran. 

Tunisia is no more favourably disposed towards Israel than it was under Ben Ali. Nor is Libya. Nor is Egypt – if anything, less so. And a democratic Syria would still have the same territorial issues with Israel – the occupied Golan Heights, etc – that it has now. In any case Israel seems an odd reason for denying Syrians a chance to determine their own future.

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Syria’s protesters are on their own

Brian Whitaker writes: The Arab League’s much-heralded meeting to review the “progress” of its monitoring operation in Syria came and went on Sunday with barely a whimper. A few more monitors will be sent but unless Syria agrees to an extension, which seems unlikely, the mission will end on 19 January with the presentation of a report.

It’s difficult to see where the league can go from there, except by admitting failure and passing its files to the United Nations.

When the Assad regime accepted the league’s peace plan last month, after weeks of prevarication, it agreed to end the violence against peaceful protests, withdraw the army from towns, release political prisoners and start a dialogue with the opposition. The ill-prepared monitors were then sent in to assess its compliance.

The regime’s insincerity about this was never in much doubt. Apart from some token gestures it has made no real effort to comply, and the killings and arrests have continued. At the same time, though, the presence of monitors does seem to have emboldened the protesters and helped to keep Syria in the headlines.

Despite all that, the failure of the Arab League’s initiative may be preferable to its success. Had there been more progress, the result would have been protracted talks about political “reform”.

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Year of rebellion — state of human rights in the Middle East and North Africa

Despite great optimism over the toppling of brutal regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, fundamental reforms to prevent continuing repression and abuses remain unfulfilled, with governments failing to address the scale of change demanded by the protest movements, Amnesty International said today in a new report on the state of human rights in the Middle East and North Africa.

The 80-page report, Year of Rebellion: State of Human Rights in the Middle East and North Africa, warned that protesters show few signs of abandoning their ambitious goals or accepting piecemeal reforms—and that state-sponsored violence and repression will continue until these changes are made..

“With few exceptions, governments have failed to recognize that everything has changed,” said Philip Luther, Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa director. “The protest movements across the region, led in many cases by young people and with women playing central roles, have proved astonishingly resilient in the face of sometimes staggering repression.”

“Protestors have shown that they will not be fooled by reforms that make little difference in the way they are treated by the police and security forces. They want concrete changes to the way they are governed, and they are demanding that those responsible for past crimes to be held to account.”

Despite great optimism at the toppling of long-standing rulers in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, Amnesty International said that these gains had not yet been cemented by key institutional reforms to safeguard against the abuses of the past.

Egypt’s military rulers, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), pledged repeatedly to deliver on the demands of the “January 25 revolution,” but Amnesty International’s report finds that they have in fact been responsible for a catalogue of abuses that is in some aspects worse than those under Hosni Mubarak’s rule.

The army and security forces have continued to violently suppress protests, resulting in at least 84 deaths between October and December 2011. Torture in detention has continued, and more civilians have been tried before military courts in one year than during the 30 years of Mubarak’s rule. Women have been targeted for humiliating treatment to try to deter them from protesting. In December the offices of a number of Egyptian and international NGOs were raided by security forces in an apparent attempt to silence critics of the authorities.

Amnesty International fears that 2012 could see further attempts by the military council to restrict the ability of Egyptians to protest and freely express their views.

The uprising in Tunisia brought significant improvements in human rights, but one year later many consider the pace of change too slow; families of the victims of the uprising are still awaiting justice. Following Tunisia’s October elections, a new coalition government was formed. Moncef Marzouki, a human rights activist and former Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, is the country’s interim president. Amnesty International said that in 2012 it would be critical for Tunisians to seize the opportunity of drafting a new constitution to ensure that it guarantees the protection of human rights and equality under the law.

Regarding Libya, Amnesty International raised significant questions about the ability of the new authorities to control the armed brigades that had helped oust the pro-Gaddafi forces and prevent them from replicating the patterns of abuse of the old system.

Despite the National Transitional Council calling on its supporters to avoid revenge attacks, it has rarely condemned serious abuses by anti-Gaddafi forces. In November the United Nations stated that an estimated 7,000 detainees were being held in makeshift centers under the control of revolutionary brigades, with no prospect of a proper judicial process.

Elsewhere, Amnesty International said that governments remained determined to cling to power, in some cases at almost any cost.

The Syrian armed forces and intelligence services have been responsible for widespread killings and torture amounting to crimes against humanity, in a vain attempt to terrify protesters and opponents into silence and submission. By the end of the year there were over 200 cases of reported deaths in custody, more than 40 times the recent average annual figure for Syria.

In Yemen the standoff over the presidency brought more violence upon ordinary Yemenis. More than 200 people were killed in connection with protests, while hundreds more died in armed clashes. Tens of thousands were displaced by the violence, causing a humanitarian crisis.

There were hopes in Bahrain that the an independent experts’ report in November on protest-related abuses might bring a fresh start for the country. At the end of the year the strength of the government’s commitment to implementing the commission’s wide-ranging recommendations remained to be seen.

Saudi Arabia’a government announced major spending packages in 2011, in what appears to be an attempt to prevent protests from spreading to the Kingdom. Despite the measures – and the drafting of a repressive anti-terror law – protests continued at the end of the year, in particular in the country’s eastern region.

In Iran, where domestic policies remained largely out of the spotlight during 2011, the government continued to stifle dissent, tightening restrictions on freedom of information and specifically targeting journalists, bloggers, independent trade unionists and political activists.

Amnesty International said the response of international powers and regional bodies, such as the African Union, Arab League and EU, to developments in 2011 had been inconsistent, and had failed to grasp the depth of the challenge to entrenched repressive rule in the region.

In Washington, Sanjeev Bery, Amnesty International USA advocacy director for the region, said: “The Obama administration has been a forceful advocate for human rights in countries like Syria but in Egypt, where the United States maintains diplomatic and military relationships, hostile security forces continue to use U.S.-supplied weapons to violate human rights. In Bahrain, the administration has suspended a proposed $53 million shipment of U.S. weapons. But we believe this sale should be cancelled outright.”

Although the international community had espoused the protection of human rights as a reason for military intervention in Libya, the U.N. Security Council, stymied by Russia and China in particular, has only issued a weak statement condemning the violence in Syria.

And although the Arab League acted quickly to suspend Libya from membership in February and later suspended Syria and sent a team of observers, it remained quiet when Saudi Arabian troops, acting under a Gulf Cooperation Council banner, backed the Bahraini government’s efforts to crush protests.

Despite the continuing violence and obstacles to change, Amnesty International’s Philip Luther said, “The refusal of ordinary people across the region to be deterred from their struggle for dignity and justice is what gives us hope for 2012.”

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In Syria, another Friday, another Damascus bomb

The Daily Telegraph reports: At least 25 people were reportedly killed or wounded after a suicide bomber blew himself up in central Damascus on Friday, the second such attack on the Syrian capital in a fortnight.

The bomb was detonated at a set of traffic lights in the historic district of al-Midan, just south of Damascus’s ancient walled city, state television reported.

Video footage indicated that a police bus had borne the brunt of the blast. Reduced to a shell, its seats were soaked in blood and covered in shards of glass.

The television station claimed that the majority of the casualties were civilians, saying that the attack took place “in a heavily populated working-class neighbourhood near a school”. More than 46 people were also wounded in the attack, it added.

There was no independent confirmation of the number of fatalities. The regime was quick to blame the attack on “terrorists”, which it says have been at the forefront of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad that erupted last March.

The attack came exactly a fortnight after two booby-trapped cars, allegedly driven by suicide bombers, exploded in front of government intelligence buildings in Damascus on December 23rd, killing 44 people.

Friday’s attack, like the one before it, coincided with mass protests called to demand Mr Assad’s overthrow and opposition officials claimed the blast was planned by the government to distract attention from the demonstrations.

Protests after noon prayers on Fridays have traditionally drawn the largest turnouts of the uprising, and organisers said they expected hundreds of thousands to take to the streets.

Once again one needs to ask: whose interests appear to be getting served by these bombings?

The regime claims it is not being challenged by a popular uprising but by “terrorists” — low and behold we get a universally recognized demonstration of terrorists at work. Not only that, but both performances have occurred during the period in which the audience includes Arab League observers present in Syria.

And since Friday is the easiest day on which mass protests can be organized, how could bombings on that day possibly serve the interests of the protesters? The bombers seem to be more interested in providing protesters with an incentive to avoid the streets and stay at home.

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Do the Middle East’s revolutions have a unifying ideology?

Marc Lynch writes: “Why does every nation on Earth move to change their conditions except for us? Why do we always submit to the batons of the rulers and their repression? How long will Arabs wait for foreign saviors?” That is how the inflammatory Al Jazeera talk-show host Faisal al-Qassem opened his program in December 2003. On another Al Jazeera program around that same time, Egyptian intellectuals Saad Eddin Ibrahim and Fahmy Howeidy debated whether it would take American intervention to force change in the Arab world. Almost exactly seven years later, Tunisians erupted in a revolution that spread across the entire region, finally answering Qassem’s challenge and proving that Arabs themselves could take control of their destiny.

Throughout this year of tumult, Arabs have debated the meaning of the great wave of popular mobilization that has swept their world as vigorously as have anxious foreigners. There is no single Arab idea about what has happened. To many young activists, it is a revolution that will not stop until it has swept away every remnant of the old order. To worried elites, it represents a protest movement to be met with limited economic and political reforms. Some see a great Islamic Awakening, while others argue for an emerging cosmopolitan, secular, democratic generation of engaged citizens. For prominent liberals such as Egypt’s Amr Hamzawy, these really have been revolutions for democracy. But whatever the ultimate goal, most would agree with Syrian intellectual Burhan Ghalyoun, who eloquently argued in March that the Arab world was witnessing “an awakening of the people who have been crushed by despotic regimes.”

In March, Egyptian writer Hassan Hanafi declared that the spread of the revolutions demonstrated finally that “Arab unity” — long a distant ideal in a region better known for its fragmentation and ideological bickering — “is an objective reality.” This unified narrative of change, and the rise of a new, popular pan-Arabism directed against regimes, is perhaps the greatest revelation of the uprisings. Not since the 1950s has a single slogan — back then Arab unity, today “The People Want to Overthrow the Regime” — been sounded so powerfully from North Africa to the Gulf. This identification with a shared fate feels natural to a generation that came of age watching satellite TV coverage of Palestine, Iraq, and Lebanon over the previous decade. Al Jazeera, since its rise to prominence in the late 1990s, has unified the regional agenda through its explicitly Arabist coverage — and its embrace of raucous political debates on the most sensitive issues.

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Egypt: the mayhem

Yasmine El Rashidi writes: To live in Cairo these days is to live in constant disorientation. You wake up on Friday to violent clashes between the army and civilians, on Saturday to young people rescuing old books from a government building engulfed in flames, on Sunday to images of women being assaulted by uniformed soldiers, on Monday to pools of blood in the city’s central square, and on Tuesday to thousands of women marching through the streets of downtown chanting for freedom, cheered on by a human shield of men. A week later, nearly all the traces of these events are gone: except for some graffiti, the odd tent in Tahrir, and a few barricades of barbed wire and concrete blocks, the city feels listlessly unchanged, almost as if the revolution never happened.

The past two weeks in Cairo brought all of this and more, as has much of the fall. Amid moments of hope for stability and lasting change — such as Egypt’s first free and fair parliamentary elections, which began on November 28 and end next week — the country has faced wave after wave of unpredictable violence between civilians and security forces. Peaceful protesters are arbitrarily being arrested and thrown in jail; and the army’s estrangement from the activists who led the revolution is visible in the newly-erected concrete walls that sever downtown streets to separate its forces from the people. Last week, security forces raided 17 offices of internationally-funded NGOs, confiscating computers, documents, cameras, and bizarrely, even office tea kettles. It was the latest attempt to tarnish the image of the activists, and more urgently, abort the possibility of another ‘January 25’ — this time against the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF), which has been in power since Mubarak stepped down.

From their position as the apparent protectors of last year’s revolution, SCAF have been pushed into increasingly brutal confrontations with civilians — at Maspero in October, during the run-up to elections in November, and most recently, during a week of mayhem in mid December. These spasms of violence, as important to the future of Egypt as the outcome of elections, often seem to have a logic of their own; December’s episode was set off by a chain of events few could have predicted. [Continue reading…]

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Syria opposition lacks solidarity

AFP reports: Syria’s opposition was in disarray Wednesday, struggling to present a united front in the face of a protest crackdown whose death toll rose again despite the presence of Arab League monitors.

Western powers have repeatedly called for the Syrian opposition to put aside differences and join forces in their bid to oust President Bashar al-Assad and his autocratic regime after more than nine months of bloody violence.

Stepping up its involvement, the United States sent Jeffrey Feltman, the assistant secretary of state for Near East Affairs, to Cairo overnight for consultations with the Arab League about Syria.

Democracy activists have denounced the 22-member Arab bloc over the “unprofessionalism” of a team of peace observers whose presence in Syria since last week has failed to stem the bloodshed.

Making matters worse, a pact that two of Syria’s main opposition factions — the Syrian National Council (SNC) and National Coordination Body for Democratic Change in Syria (NCB) — agreed last week now appears to be in tatters.

The political agreement signed Friday in Cairo had outlined a “transitional period” should Assad’s regime be toppled by a pro-democracy uprising that erupted in March.

However, in a posting on its Facebook page, the Syrian National Council said late Tuesday that the “document conflicts with the SNC’s political programme and with the demands of the Syrian revolution.”

Widely regarded as the most inclusive of Syria’s opposition alliances, with representation from both the Muslim Brotherhood and parties drawn from the Christian and Kurdish minorities, the SNC has been at odds with some activists over the extent of foreign intervention required to bring change.

There was still no response to the statement from the NCB, an umbrella group of Arab nationalists, socialists, independents and Marxists which also comprises Kurds and is staunchly opposed to any foreign military intervention.

Michel Kilo, a prominent Syrian dissident who has been linked to the SNC, said the opposition grouping “considers itself the only representative of the Syrian population.”

“It refuses to accept the existence of other opposition forces and rejects the formation of a committee to lead the common work of the different opposition groups”, he added in remarks published Tuesday in France’s L’Humanite newspaper.

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Egypt: from Nasser’s ideological hotchpotch to an Islamist landslide

Magdi Abdelhadi writes: Egypt’s secular half, along with a sizeable Christian minority, is bracing itself for an Islamist parliament, the first in the country’s history. While many are stunned and terrified at the prospect, some still pin their hopes, paradoxically, on the very institution that’s largely to blame for the country’s democratic deficit – the army. They think only the soldiers can thwart, or at least to slow down, the Islamist steamroller.

No one knows for sure how that potential stand-off might evolve, if it were to happen at all. Optimists rule out a descent into bloodbath (as happened in Algeria in 1990 when the military cancelled parliamentary elections the Islamists were poised to win). Others predict a Pakistani scenario (the emergence of an Islamist-inclined officer like Zia-ul-Haq, acceptable to both the army and the Islamists) or, just as bad, a repeat of Egypt’s recent past when the military fabricated a pretext to suspend all politics in 1954.

By mid-January, when the final election results are known, we should have a better idea. So, far the Islamists have won two-thirds of the seats in the first and second phases of the vote – gains they are expected to consolidate in the third stage. Speculation and fears aside, the Islamist landslide should not have come as a surprise to close readers of Egyptian recent history.

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Internet finds voice as citizens cry freedom

Stratis G. Camatsos writes: July 1956: Writers, journalists, and students started a series of intellectual forums, called the Petőfi Circles, examining the problems facing Hungary. Later, in October 1956, university students in Szeged snubbed the official communist student union, which led to students of the Technical University to compile a list of 16-points containing several national policy demands. Days after, approximately 20,000 protesters convened organised by the writer’s union, which grew to 200,000 in front of the Parliament, all chanting the censored patriotic poem, the “National Song”.

December 1964: The Free Speech Movement (FSM) at the University of California at Berkeley was started by students who had participated in Mississippi’s ‘Freedom Summer’, and it provided an example of how students could bring about change through organisation. Later, in February 1965, the United States begins bombing North Vietnam. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organised marches on the Oakland Army Terminal, the departure point for many troops bound for Southeast Asia. In April 1965, between 15,000 and 25,000 people gathered at the capital, a turnout that surprised even the organisers.

December 2010: Mohamed Bouazizi proclaimed that there was police corruption and ill treatment in Tunisia. This sparked revolutions well into 2011 in Tunisia and Egypt, a civil war in Libya resulting in the fall of its government; civil uprisings in Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen, major protests in Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, and Oman, and less in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan.

The parallels between all three of these iconic uprisings are that the protests have shared techniques of civil response in sustained campaigns involving strikes, demonstrations, marches and rallies. All of them were based on a common ideal or symbol that led the way for organisation. All were themselves the epitome of the principle of freedom of expression.

The differences between the three rest with the tools used to mobilise and organise. As the former two were based on word of mouth and media such as newspapers and TV, the latter one saw the largest uprising to have used the social media to communicate and raise awareness in the face of state attempts at repression and Internet censorship. It was truly a behemothic moment for the internet, as its potential was finally reached. [Continue reading…]

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Liberation Square: A thrilling account of Egypt’s revolution

Laura Miller reviews Liberation Square by Ashraf Khalil: The overthrow of Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt last year served as dramatic proof that the Arab Spring wasn’t just a passing, or purely Tunisian, phenomenon. Egypt’s revolution heralds the coming obsolescence of the late-20th-century-style militarized pseudo-democracy in the Middle East, and its influence has extended as far as Wall Street’s Zuccotti Park. Future generations will surely study Tahrir Square and what happened there intensively, but anyone in search of an expert account today need look no further than Ashraf Khalil’s “Liberation Square: Inside the Egyptian Revolution and the Rebirth of a Nation.”

Khalil is a Cairo-based journalist who reports on the Middle East for a variety of Western publications. While it’s impressive that he has published “Liberation Square” before the one-year anniversary of the uprising, it’s not unusual. Reporters routinely crank out quickie books on major news events, and these tend to be rushed and lumpy creations, nearly as ephemeral as the newspaper stories on which they’re based. What’s remarkable about “Liberation Square” is how good it is, how well written, how perfectly calibrated in its amounts of background, commentary and prognostication — and above all how thrilling it is to read.

“Liberation Square” is also far from impartial, though I doubt there are many readers who will fault it for that. As a longtime Cairene, Khalil is able to quickly and vividly sketch the mindset of his countrymen as, a mere year ago, they faced the demoralizing prospect of Mubarak’s son, Gamal, continuing his father’s nepotistic, kleptocratic style of governance into the foreseeable future. He knows the jokes they told and the shame they felt — as a nation of famously “clever, resourceful and resilient” people, inheritors of an ancient and storied civilization — at being dominated by a pack of bullies, liars and incompetents.

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Top ten myths about the Arab Spring of 2011

Juan Cole lists the myths: 1. The upheavals of 2011 were provoked by the Bush administration’s overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq Bzzt! Wrong answer. None of the young people who made this year’s revolutions ever pointed to Iraq as an inspiration. The only time Iraq was even brought up in their tweets was as a negative example (“let’s not let ourselves be divided by sectarianism, since that is what the Americans did in Iraq.”) Americans are so full of self-admiration that they cannot see Iraq as it is, and as it is perceived in the Arab world. Iraq is not a shining city on a hill for them. It is a violent place riddled with sectarian hatred, manipulated by the United States, and suffering from poor governance and dysfunctional politics. I did interviewing with activists last summer in Tunisia and Egypt. The youth do not want to be like Iraq! They want to be like Turkey, or, now, Tunisia.

2. President Obama was wrong to ask Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to step down. This position has been taken by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. It is a crazy thing to say. Mubarak could not have stayed in power, with nearly a million people in the streets and order breaking down in the country. If anything Obama was far too slow to act, and there was danger of Egypt turning seriously anti-American if he had not stepped in when he did. Trying to keep a dictator in power who has worn out his welcome is always a big mistake on the part of a great power, as was seen in the case of the shah of Iran.

3. Muslim radicalism benefited from the revolutions in the Arab world. So far, at least, the beneficiaries of the upheavals have been both secular, left-leaning dissidents and Muslim religious parties. Neither is violent. In Tunisia, the new president, Moncef Marzouki, is a staunch secularist. The al-Nahda (Ennahda) religious party got about 40 percent of the seats in parliament. But neither sort of movement is radical or violent. Likewise, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is now peaceful and talks moderately, and is attacked for it by the radicals such as Ayman al-Zawahiri. Muslim radicals have not been able to take advantage of these largely peaceful movements in the way they could of George W. Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, which really did fuel the spread of violent extremism. Nobel Peace Prize winner Tawakkol Karman of Yemen argues that if democracy can be achieved in the Arab world, it will finish off violent extremism, which only flourishes under dictatorship. [Continue reading…]

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Internet freedom in the wake of the Arab Spring

Jillian C. York writes: For several years, discussions about global Internet freedom have focused primarily on what are widely considered the world’s two most restrictive countries: China and Iran. But while China’s ‘Great Firewall’ is indeed the most sophisticated system of censorship and Iran’s persecution of bloggers unprecedented, the Arab world — the 22 Arabic-speaking states and territories stretching from Morocco to Saudi Arabia — is the most Internet-restrictive region on earth.

In 2010, four Arab countries (Syria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia) were named to Reporters Without Borders’ Enemies of the Internet [PDF] list, while two more (the UAE and Bahrain) were designated as ‘under surveillance.’ Freedom House’s Freedom on the Net 2011 [PDF] report (released early in the year) saw two of the region’s countries (Tunisia and Egypt) slide backwards, and The OpenNet Initiative claimed in their most recent regional report that “Internet censorship in the Middle East and North Africa is on the rise, and the scope and depth of filtering are increasing.” Meanwhile, a glance at the Threatened Voices project’s map shows China and Iran immediately followed by Egypt and Tunisia when it comes to repression of bloggers.

Therefore, when Egyptians and Tunisians kicked off 2011 with a bang, ousting entrenched leaders Hosni Mubarak and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, observers were hopeful that the two countries–both of whose pro-democracy movements had strong contingencies of free expression advocates–would move in the right direction toward Internet freedom.

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Sightings of the Egyptian ‘deep state’

Issandr El Amrani writes: The turbulence that has hit Egypt since mid-November seems, at first glance, mostly a testament to the poor performance of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) in handling the transition away from the rule of Husni Mubarak. Having assumed power on February 10, the SCAF moved quickly to attain the stamp of popular legitimacy through a March 19 referendum on constitutional amendments. Since then, however, the conclave of generals has stumbled over the flawed logic of its own plan for the transition, as well as ad hoc decision making and a high-handed, dismissive attitude toward the new politics of the country. The SCAF’s plan, in brief, was to engineer a restoration of civilian rule that shielded the army’s political and economic prerogatives from civilian oversight, and perhaps bolstered those roles, yielding a system not unlike the “deep state” that prevailed for decades in Turkey. Such was the system in Egypt, in fact, under Mubarak.

As a return to civilian government looms, with Parliament set to reopen and presidential elections scheduled for no later than July 2012, the SCAF is no closer to securing such behind-the-scenes dominance for the military and is much further from winning popular consent to that arrangement. Indeed, for much of the political class and a not inconsequential slice of public opinion, the violence of the early winter has reduced the military’s moral authority to a level unseen since its defeat at Israel’s hands in 1967.

In some respects, this delegitimization is not unlike the erosion of Mubarak’s authority over the 2000s: Just as the deposed president, once deemed untouchable, became the butt of activist and media scorn from late 2004 onward, the military now finds itself subjected to unprecedented criticism and scrutiny. The difference is that the SCAF’s fall from grace is occurring at an accelerated pace, propelled by the new faith in participatory politics unleashed by the January uprising and the army’s own bungling. [Continue reading…]

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