Category Archives: Arab Spring

Torture still rampant in post-revolution Egypt, activists say

McClatchy reports:

Egyptian human rights activists say they’ve documented hundreds of cases of civilians tortured by police and army forces since the revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak, but that none have yet gone to trial.

Under former President Mubarak, the security services were notorious for abuses, but since he left office in February dozens of cases have been filed to the general prosecutor’s office accusing police and military authorities of torture and other crimes against anti-government protesters.

For activists, that’s a sign that the interim military government hasn’t reined in the security forces, which were all-powerful during the Mubarak era. The only difference in post-revolution Egypt, they say, is that victims empowered by the uprising are speaking publicly of their brutal experiences.

Hossam Bahgat, the executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, offered a grim list of the torture methods that authorities are accused of using: “kicking and punching; beating using batons, rifle butts, whips; electrocuting (shocking) victims; hanging in painful positions; sleep and food deprivation; and sexual assault.”

Bahgat, who’s run the advocacy group since 2002, said that until the revolution, torture victims “were unable to speak. At times there was an informant watching the victim’s house. If they see activists making contact they either harassed them or threatened the victim not to speak.”

Facebooktwittermail

Syria holds massive rallies to ‘support Homs’

Al Jazeera reports:

Hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets across Syria following Friday prayers, activists said, protesting against President Bashar al-Assad and defying an intensified military crackdown on their uprising.

Demonstrations demanding an end to Assad’s rule broke out in the Medan district of Damascus, the besieged city of Homs, Latakia on the coast and the southern city of Deraa.

About 400,000 protesters came out in the eastern province of Deir Ez Zor, on the border with Iraq’s Sunni heartland, activists said.

Anthony Shadid reports from Hama:

As anthems go, this one is fittingly blunt. “Come on Bashar, leave,” it declares to President Bashar al-Assad. And in the weeks since it was heard in protests in this city, the song has become a symbol of the power of the protesters’ message, the confusion in their ranks and the violence of the government in stopping their dissent.

Although no one in Hama seems to agree on who wrote the song, there is near consensus on one point: A young cement layer who sang it in protests was dragged from the Orontes River this month with his throat cut and, according to residents, his vocal cords ripped out. Since his death, boys as young as 6 have offered their rendition in his place. Rippling through the virtual communities that the Internet and revolt have inspired, the song has spread to other cities in Syria, where protesters chant it as their own.

“We’ve all memorized it,” said Ahmed, a 40-year-old trader in Hama who regularly attends protests. “What else can you do if you keep repeating it at demonstrations day after day?”

Tunisia can claim the slogan of the Arab revolts: “The people want to topple the regime.” Egyptians made famous street poetry that reflected their incomparable wit. “Come on Bashar, Leave,” is Syria’s contribution to the pop culture of sedition, the raw street humor that mingles with the furor of revolt and the ferocity of crackdown.

Facebooktwittermail

Proposed law would mandate jail for critics of Saudi king

The New York Times reports:

A proposed Saudi counterterrorism law that would give the Interior Ministry sweeping powers and mandate jail sentences for criticizing the king would effectively squelch political dissent, human rights advocates said on Thursday.

The law would allow prisoners to be held without trial, and trials and appeals to be held secretly, Saudi and international rights advocates said. It would also grant the Interior Ministry broad powers including the ability to tap telephones or search houses without permission from the judiciary.

Saudi activists have long accused the judicial system and the Interior Ministry of a lack of respect for human rights, even when such rights exist legally. The new law, the activists said, would legalize those practices, removing all restraints.

“Every single thing we criticized them about in the past is going to be legitimate,” Bassem Alim, the defense lawyer for a group of men imprisoned in 2007 on terrorism charges, said by telephone. The men were formally charged only last August, and their real crime, Mr. Alim said, was taking rudimentary steps toward forming a political party.

“Ninety-nine percent of the law has nothing to do with terrorism, it has to do with political dissent,” he said.

Facebooktwittermail

Yemen on the brink of hell

The New York Times reports:

On May 29, a young woman named Bushra al- Maqtari joined a group of several thousand protesters marching down a trash-strewn boulevard in the Yemeni city of Taiz. The Arab world’s democratic uprising was five months old, and patience among the protesters in Taiz — Yemen’s second largest city — was wearing thin. Maqtari had been one of the first and most fearless leaders of the movement. She is a remarkable figure: a 31-year-old university administrator and fiction writer, she is also a childless divorcee who refused, until recently, to wear the abaya, the all-covering gown that is practically mandatory for women in Yemen. Tiny and frail, she has a round, lovely face, with level brows and tranquil brown eyes.

On that afternoon, Maqtari was standing in a crowd gathered around the city’s General Security building — an imposing six-story edifice flanked by guards — when she heard cracking sounds. She looked up and saw that the officers on the building’s roof were not just throwing rocks, as they had in the past. They were firing straight down into the crowd below. Within minutes, at least four people were dead and about 60 were wounded. Maqtari began running back toward “Freedom Square,” the intersection where thousands of protesters had been camped out for months demanding the resignation of Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s strongman president. Then the real assault began. Armored vehicles, tanks and bulldozers began converging on the protesters’ tent city from all sides. They fired tear gas and water cannons into the square and began shooting protesters at point-blank range. They doused the tents, which extended for hundreds of yards in every direction, with gasoline and lighted them on fire. None of the protesters had weapons. “People were dying all around us, and there was nothing we could do,” Maqtari told me. Some were burned alive. At around 11 p.m., Maqtari fled to her sister’s house, about 200 yards uphill from the square. There, she and other protesters watched as flames engulfed the entire square, raging for several hours. Officers stormed through the local hospital and several field clinics where protesters were being treated, firing tear gas down the corridors, shooting up the ceilings and arresting doctors and nurses. Some thrust their gun butts into patients’ wounds. Others were laughing hysterically, as if they were on drugs, Maqtari and others told me, and shouting into the darkness, “Ali is your god!” The next morning, amid the charred remains of the tents, someone had scrawled a sardonic reversal of the protesters’ chants on a wall. “The regime wants the fall of the people,” it said.

The massacre in Taiz received little attention in the West, blending in with the larger chaos and violence enveloping the Arab world. In Syria, tanks were rolling through the streets of several cities, as months of protest evolved into a bloody national insurrection. In Libya, the civil war was festering into a grim status quo, with NATO airstrikes unable to dislodge Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi from his Tripoli stronghold. Even Egypt and Tunisia seemed endangered, with fresh violence breaking out and their economies in tatters.

Yet the events in Taiz took on a tragic dimension that went beyond the numbers of dead and wounded. Taiz is Yemen’s least tribal city, home to the highest number of educated people, professionals and traders. The city was “the heart of the revolution,” in one popular refrain, and its protesters were less politicized and more rigorously nonviolent than elsewhere in Yemen. The attack on May 29, with its deliberate cruelty and excess, confirmed what many Yemenis feared: that Saleh sees the democratic uprising as a greater threat to his power than Al Qaeda.

Facebooktwittermail

Syrian forces ‘surround Damascus suburb’

Al Jazeera reports:

Troops commanded by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s brother have surrounded the Damascus suburb of Harasta, residents say.

The move appears to be part of an ongoing crackdown on urban centres that have experienced protests on a daily basis.

“Hundreds of Fourth Division troops have sealed off all of Harasta’s dozen entrances,” a resident of the large suburb, who works as an engineer and managed to leave Harasta, told the Reuters news agency by telephone.

“They are wearing combat fatigues, helmets, ammunition belts and carrying assault rifles. Water, electricity and phones have been cut.”

Anthony Shadid reports from Hama:

In this city that bears the scars of one of the modern Middle East’s bloodiest episodes, the revolt against President Bashar al-Assad has begun to help Syrians imagine life after dictatorship as it forges new leaders, organizes its own defense and reckons with a grim past in an uncertain experiment that showcases the forces that could end Mr. Assad’s rule.

Dozens of barricades of trash bins, street lamps, bulldozers and sandbags, defended in various states of vigilance, block the feared return of the security forces that surprisingly withdrew last month. Protests begin past midnight, drawing raucous crowds of youths celebrating the simple fact that they can protest. At dusk, distant cries echo off cinder blocks and stone that render a tableau here of jubilation, fear and memory of a crackdown a generation ago whose toll — 10,000, 20,000, more — remains a defiant guess.

“Hama is free,” the protesters chant, “and it will remain free.”

Freedom is a word heard often these days in this city, Syria’s fourth largest, though that freedom could yet prove elusive. Hama rebelled last month, and the government withdrew the soldiers and security forces seemingly to forestall even more bloodshed, ceding space along the Orontes River that is really neither liberated nor subjugated.

In the uncertain interregnum, punctuated by worry that the security forces might return and fear of informers left behind, Hama has emerged in the four-month revolt against Mr. Assad as a turbulent model of what a city in Syria might resemble once four decades of dictatorship end. In skittish streets, there are at least nascent notions of self-determination, as residents seek to speak for themselves and defend a city that they declare theirs.

The sole poster of Mr. Assad in the city hangs from the undamaged headquarters of the ruling Baath Party. Gaggles of residents gather on the curb to debate politics, sing protest songs and retell the traumas of the crackdown in 1982, when the government stormed Hama to end an Islamist uprising. For the first time in memory, clerics and the educated elite in Hama are negotiating with the governor over how to administer the city, in a country long accustomed to a monologue delivered by the ruler to the ruled.

Meanwhile, “Nour Ali” reports from Damascus:

Brute force has been the main weapon of the Syrian regime as it has sought to crush growing protests, killing at least 1,500 people and torturing hundreds more. But Syrians have also been besieged by relentless propaganda.

In a week that has seen at least 40 die and escalating violence in Homs, the country’s third largest city, state radio and private stations owned by regime cronies have been blaring out songs exalting Bashar al-Assad as “Abu Hafez”, suggesting his son Hafez could succeed him, or anointing him president for “all eternity”.

Baseball caps, T-shirts and flags adorned with the president’s face are sold around Damascus. Billboards show him surrounded by pink hearts – in stark contrast to the sterner, more militarised pictures of his father, Hafez, the former president.

Television programmes show residents shopping and driving, portraying calm and order while regime supporters chant that they would shed blood for their leader.

Facebooktwittermail

The new Mubaraks: Egypt’s military rulers try to strangle the revolution

The New York Times reports:

The military council governing Egypt is moving to lay down ground rules for a new constitution that would protect and potentially expand its own authority indefinitely, possibly circumscribing the power of future elected officials.

The military announced Tuesday that it planned to adopt a “declaration of basic principles” to govern the drafting of a constitution, and liberals here initially welcomed the move as a concession to their demand for a Bill of Rights-style guarantee of civil liberties that would limit the potential repercussions of an Islamist victory at the polls.

But legal experts enlisted by the military to write the declaration say that it will spell out the armed forces’ role in the civilian government, potentially shielding the defense budget from public or parliamentary scrutiny and protecting the military’s vast economic interests. Proposals under consideration would give the military a broad mandate to intercede in Egyptian politics to protect national unity or the secular character of the state. A top general publicly suggested such a role, according to a report last month in the Egyptian newspaper Al- Masry Al- Youm. The military plans to adopt the document on its own, before any election, referendum or constitution sets up a civilian authority, said Mohamed Nour Farahat, a law professor working on the declaration. That would represent an about-face for a force that, after helping to oust President Hosni Mubarak five months ago, consistently pledged to turn over power to elected officials who would draft a constitution. Though the proposed declaration might protect liberals from an Islamist-dominated constitution, it could also limit democracy by shielding the military from full civilian control.

The Associated Press reports:

The military, which was greeted with cheers when it pushed out longtime president Hosni Mubarak in February, has proclaimed its embrace of the revolution and democratic elections later this year. But protesters have returned to Tahrir Square, holding a sit-in since July 8, to complain that the military has hijacked the transition and has been reluctant to purge members of the old regime.

Reported abuses add a darker undertone to those complaints. There have been multiple reports of torture of detainees. To an unprecedented extent, the army has also been bringing civilians before military courts, notorious for their swift rulings with little chance for defense. In five months, more than 10,000 civilians have been put on military trial, including protesters, activists and at least one journalist who wrote an article critical of the army, according to rights groups tracking the detentions.

“The revolution has been stolen by the military council,” said Issam, the long-haired “Singer of the Revolution” who is known for rousing the crowd in Tahrir Square with political tunes on his Spanish guitar. “We made the revolution and we gave it to the military council on a silver platter. But everyone must know that we have learned how to say ‘No.'”

Issam seemed close to tears as he visited the Egyptian Museum in early July for the first time since his detention and recounted his ordeal to an Associated Press reporter.

He was among dozens grabbed by soldiers who broke up a March 9 sit-in in Tahrir protesting the generals’ slowness in implementing the revolution’s post-Mubarak demands.

Issam and the others were dragged to the nearby museum, the treasure trove of pharaonic antiquities that the military used as an impromptu base at times during the uprising. There, Issam says, he was beaten by wooden sticks and iron rods and given electric shocks. His hair was cut off with broken glass.

After a public outcry over that day’s crackdown, the council promised to review reports of torture, but no results of a review have been made public. It also admitted that some detained women were forced to take humiliating “virginity tests,” and it said the practice would not be repeated.

Amid the beatings, Issam recalled the warning shouted at him by one of the officers:

“We will make you know who are the real masters of this country.”

Facebooktwittermail

The fight to rescue the Arab spring

The Guardian reports:

The historic revolutions that have rippled through the Arab world this year were in danger of eclipse on Friday night as protesters returned to the streets to profess their disgust at how the movement is being stymied by regimes old and new.

Six months after the Arab spring claimed its first dictator, the main squares of Cairo and Tunis were again alive with protest, teargas and fury at the resistance to change shown by interim authorities. In Syria activists said at least 19 people had been killed in the latest crackdown against protests that have convulsed the country for more than four months. At least seven people were killed in Yemen amid a political limbo that appears no closer to resolution. And in Jordan a heavy security presence policed pro- and anti-reform demonstrations which turned violent.

The scenes served as a reminder that following the euphoria of the Arab spring, little concrete progress towards reform has been made. Elections in Tunisia and Egypt have been postponed. Offers of reform in Yemen and Syria have been rejected as inadequate.

Facebooktwittermail

Why Egypt wasn’t waiting for WikiLeaks to ignite a revolution

Nancy Messieh writes:

Ask any Egyptian how much of an influence the Internet was in the nation’s uprising, the first thing they’ll probably do is roll their eyes at you. I’ve certainly mentioned it countless times – International media found the perfectly convenient package of the Facebook revolution fueled by a Google executive. A better lede couldn’t have been written if they had made it up themselves.

But the thing is, there is as much fiction in that phrase as there is fact. Yes the Facebook page We Are All Khaled Said, created by the Google executive Wael Ghonim, was instrumental in mobilizing a certain demographic in Egypt. But long after Hosny Mubarak was toppled, figures have emerged to prove that calling the uprising in Egypt in any way, shape or form, a Facebook Revolution, is almost as ridiculous as the short-lived name, the Lotus Revolution, a name which had absolutely nothing to do with the movement.

In case you’re curious, the Lotus Revolution was a name that followed the just as ill-thought out name for the Tunisian uprising, the Jasmine Revolution. Both names were no doubt dreamed up by journalists who had visited the countries once upon a time, and were enamoured with the exotic, oriental, incense-filled alleyways of Cairo and Tunis. The reality of these uprisings couldn’t be further from the Orientalist postcard snapshot that is continually forced down our throats.

The reality of the uprising in Tunisia is that it was sparked by a young man, Mohamed Bouazizi, who lit himself on fire, because that was the only form of protest he had left to use. The reality of the uprising in Egypt is that it was sparked by a young man, Khaled Said, who was brutally beaten to death in an alleyway, while people watched, helpless as he begged for his life.

So with that in mind, it’s no surprise that the Wikileaks parody ad that seemed to be taking a bit of credit for the Egyptian revolution has sparked outrage among Egyptian activists.

Facebooktwittermail

Does the US getting into a fight with Syria help the Syrian opposition or the regime?

Joshua Landis writes:

“Bashar al-Assad is not indispensable and the United States has no interest in his regime staying in power,” US Secretary of State Hillary stated on Monday after Syrian crowds pelted the Damascus Embassy with stones, calling Ambassador Ford a “dog.”

While Clinton turned up the rhetorical head a notch, President Assad must taken satisfaction in the dust up with the great conspirator. From the outset of the uprising four months ago, the Syrian regime has been accusing Washington of orchestrating its troubles. According to reports from Syria, the pro-regime public has been galvanized by Ambassador Fords actions in Hama. They see it a proof that the US is acting as the puppeteer and takes an active role in the uprising. His trip to Hama to demonstrate US support for the demonstrations was the sort of provocation, Damascus authorities had been waiting for. Now it is a US-Syrian confrontation. World news programs have ramped up their coverage that had been flagging. I cannot tell you how many calls I received today compared to the last week of comparative quiet.

What is unclear is whether the Syrian opposition will gain from this controversy. Will the increased international news coverage and augmented US role in this Syrian drama prove to be a boon for the opposition? Will it make up for any damage the opposition suffers from local accusations that it is but a spearhead of a vast imperialist-Zionist conspiracy?

Certainly, Ford’s credibility is restored in Washington. Even Republicans will have to laud him as a local hero. Only yesterday they branded him an Assad propaganda tool. The State Department will also look good. But are these antics helping the Syrian opposition or Assad?

Facebooktwittermail

Street by street, Egypt activists face Old Guard

The Associated Press reports:

After the fall of President Hosni Mubarak, a group of young activists quickly moved to bring the can-do spirit of Egypt’s revolution down to the level of their neighborhood.

They began installing electricity poles in Mit Oqba’s dim streets. They got gas pipes extended to the area. They did what local officials had long promised but never done, with the aim of showing 300,000 low-income residents the benefits of an uprising meant to end the corruption and stagnation under Mubarak.

Then the activists’ parents started getting intimidating warnings: Your children are going to get beaten up by thugs. An official who helped them get papers signed for extending the gas pipes was suddenly transferred to another post.

The activists had run into a collision course with powerful local members of the former ruling party. It was a lesson about the new Egypt: The old regime is still in place and fighting change.

“The regime is not just Mubarak and his ministers. There are thousands still benefiting,” said Mohammed Magdy, one of the activists in Mit Oqba.

Mubarak was ousted five months ago, along with top figures from his nearly 30-year regime. But the military generals who now rule have been slow in — or have outright resisted — dismantling the grip that members of his former ruling party hold on every level of the state, from senior government positions down to local administrations. In the meantime, public anger that real change has not come is growing explosive.

Facebooktwittermail

Ex-newspaper editor appointed as Egypt’s Information Minister

The Los Angeles Times reports:

The former editor in chief of the Wafd party’s newspaper was sworn in as the new Minister of Information by the head of the ruling Supreme Council of Armed Forces, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi on Saturday.

The appointment of Osama Heikal surprised many politicians and activists, who believed that the ministry, which had not filled the job for five months, might keep the position vacant. Many online activists and bloggers quickly highlighted what they called Heikal’s “support” to Mubarak’s regime through an article he wrote one day before the Jan. 25 revolt that ended with ousting Mubarak.

“I don’t think that any devout Egyptian would want his country to witness a similar fate to Tunisia’s [referring to the Tunisian revolution]. No one wants a clash between people and the regime. What we should understand is that people want change and the quieter those changes come the better this will be for Egypt,” Heikal wrote in an editorial dated Jan. 24.

The editorial added that angry demonstrations represent a coup against “our values.”

After working as the newspaper’s reporter for military and presidential affairs for 18 years, Heikal was elected as head of Wafd’s newspaper last January. After his appointment as minister, Heikal stressed that the Egyptian state media will focus on “reporting the full truth without any exaggerations or exclusions and that all sects of the country’s society will have an equal place to appear in state media.”

Despite its status as an opposition party, Wafd and its newspaper have in recent years been criticized for taking the side of the former Mubarak regime against other independent newspapers and writers more critical of the former president. Egyptian information ministers during Mubarak’s rule have always been regarded as watchdogs who controlled and manipulated state media according to the ruling party’s interests.

Facebooktwittermail

Witness saw teen severely beaten in Syrian jail for failing to praise president

The Associated Press reports:

Inside a filthy detention center in Damascus, eight or nine interrogators repeatedly bludgeoned a skinny teenager whose hands were bound and who bore a bullet wound on the left side of his chest. They struck his head, back, feet and genitals until he was left on the floor of a cell, bleeding from his ears and crying out for his mother and father to help him.

Ibrahim Jamal al-Jahamani, a fellow prisoner who said he witnessed the brutal scene in Syria in May, heard the interrogators demand that the 15-year-old proclaim strongman Bashar Assad as his “beloved” president.

The youth, later identified as Tamer Mohammed al-Sharei, refused. Instead, he chanted an often-heard slogan from anti-regime street protests calling for “freedom and the love of God and our country.”

Tamer’s refusal apparently was the final straw for the interrogators.

“Guards broke his right wrist, beating him with clubs on his hands, which were tied behind his back,” al-Jahamani told The Associated Press after his release from detention, referring to the beatings as torture.

“They also beat him on the face, head, back, feet and genitals until he bled from the nose, mouth and ears and fell unconscious,” he recalled.

“He pleaded for mercy and yelled: ‘Mom, dad, come rescue me!’” al-Jahamani said. “He was lying like a dog on the floor in his underwear, with blood covering his body. But his interrogators had no compassion that they were savagely beating a boy,” al-Jahamani added, his voice breaking with emotion.

Facebooktwittermail

On YouTube, glimpses of Syrian crackdown

Robert Mackey writes:

While restrictions on independent reporting inside Syria make it difficult to say for certain what is going on in Hama, video posted online in recent weeks appears to show that Hama, Syria’s fourth-largest city, has emerged as a center of the current uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.

A generation ago, in 1982, before YouTube and ubiquitous camera phones, Mr. Assad’s father, Hafez, also used military force to crush an uprising in Hama, away from the world’s eyes. Before journalists were eventually allowed into Hama that year, after the bombardment was complete, at least 10,000 people are thought to have been killed.

That history makes every video clip showing tens of thousands of protesters packed into Hama’s central Assi Square somewhat remarkable. Among those clips is this video, said to have been filmed in the square two weeks ago, as a singer named Ibrahim Kashoush led the crowd in a rendition of his protest anthem, “Yalla Erhal Ya Bashar,” or, “It’s Time to Leave, Bashar.”

Facebooktwittermail

Is Palestine next?

Adam Shatz writes:

No one in the Arab world was watching the news more closely than the Palestinians during the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. The first emotion they experienced was disbelief; the second – particularly when they saw Palestinian flags being raised in Tahrir Square – was relief that they were no longer alone. Arab lethargy has been a virtual article of faith among Palestinians, who felt that their neighbours had betrayed them in 1948 and had done nothing to help them since. The Palestinian national movement, which rose to prominence under Yasir Arafat’s leadership in the late 1960s, was defined in large part by its belief that Palestinians had to rely on themselves. Mahmoud Darwish was not the only one to note that during the siege of Beirut in 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon in an attempt to crush the PLO, tens of thousands of Israelis protested in Tel Aviv but the Arabs were too busy watching the World Cup Final to take to the streets.

The old Arab order was buried in Tahrir Square. Young revolutionaries rose up against a regime which for three decades had stood in the way of Palestinian aspirations. It seemed too good to be true and some pundits in Palestine wondered whether it wasn’t an American conspiracy. But it wasn’t, and Palestinians began to re-examine what had been one of their most disabling convictions: the belief that the US controls the Middle Eastern chessboard, and that the Arab world is powerless against America and Israel. ‘There has been a kind of epistemic break,’ a young Palestinian said to me. The excitement among Palestinians sometimes seems to be mixed with unease, even envy: the spotlight has been stolen from them. As a Hamas councilwoman in Nablus put it, ‘For 60 years they were watching us. Now we are watching them.’ But Palestinians have prided themselves on being the vanguard of protest in the Arab world and they will not be content to remain spectators for long.

In the absence of a state and an army, Darwish wrote in one of his best-known poems, Palestinians live in a ‘country of words’. The conversation that they are having is only beginning to translate into action. What was clear to me during the three weeks I spent recently in the West Bank is that the Arab revolutions have emboldened them to ask for more, both from Israel and from themselves, even if that means preparing for a much longer struggle.

Facebooktwittermail