Gaddafi and Me
Category Archives: Issues
Who is afraid of Julian Schnabel?
Jordan Elgrably writes:
Miral, currently in theatres, portrays the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from an entirely Palestinian perspective. It is nothing earth-shattering (a brief filmography at the end of this article offers other films that do this far more effectively) except that it was made by a Jewish filmmaker.
Several Jewish organisations and the Israeli government have seen fit to protest against the film. They say it does not tell both sides of the story. But that is precisely the point. When director Julian Schnabel – previously lauded for his lavish features Basquiat, Before Night Falls and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – decided to make this film, based on the book by Palestinian journalist Rula Jebreal, his intention was to tell the story Rula tells in Miral.
Schnabel is an Academy-Award nominated director, and his film has brought “the conflict” into the mainstream. The fact that he happens to be Jewish while representing the Palestinian perspective inflames some in the Jewish community, who consider his film an act of betrayal.
I saw the film earlier this week in a special screening hosted by Javier Bardem, who starred in Before Night Falls and wanted to support Schnabel’s “brave film”. The director was there with his daughter Stella, who appears in the film, and with his new wife – Rula Jebreal. I could not help but wonder what the Jewish community thinks when a Jew marries a Palestinian.
More to the point, why are some Jews afraid of Jews who embrace narratives other than those officially sanctioned in the Jewish and Israeli community? Why do such narratives when told by Jews – including books by Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky, and Israeli revisionist historians such as Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé and Tom Segev – cause such ire?
I am one of these contrarian Jews. Why do I strive to see things not only from the Jewish perspective but the Arab one? Because my father’s family lived for centuries in an Arab country, Morocco, and because long ago I recognised that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is about nothing else if not conflicting narratives.
Israel may have squandered its last best chance for peace
Patrick Cockburn writes:
The bomb attack on a bus in Jerusalem this week killed one woman and wounded 24 people. The casualties were not high compared with similar bombings in the city over the last 20 years. I lived off the Jaffa Road for four years in the mid-1990s when bus bombings were common. I used to walk to look at the smouldering carcass of the latest bus to be hit, its metal panels bulging out from the force of the explosion. The latest bombing is having more impact than its predecessors because it is the first in Jerusalem for seven years. It comes just as there is an increase of violence between Israelis and Palestinians on the West Bank and in and around Gaza. None of this might have serious repercussions except that these incidents are happening just as the political landscape of the Arab world is being radically transformed to a degree that has not happened for half a century.
Suppose the uprisings across the Middle East had happened five years ago: Israel could not have been certain of the inaction of Arab leaders as it launched two limited wars. The Israeli bombardment and ground invasion of Lebanon in 2006 created a furious popular reaction in the region. But this did not much matter because power among Israel’s neighbours was in the hands of kings and presidents who covertly hoped that the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon would be destroyed or crippled.
The same thing happened during “Operation Cast Lead” in 2008-9 when Israel launched a three week-long air and land bombardment of Gaza which killed at least 1,200 Palestinians. Thirteen Israelis died during the conflict. Throughout, the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak cooperated with Israel, in sealing off Gaza from the outside world. The political cost to Israel and the US was not high because condemnation by the “Arab street” – that patronising and dismissive term that encapsulates the media’s contempt for the Arab public – did not count.
This is not going to happen again in quite the same way. No wonder the Israeli establishment was aghast as it watched Mubarak being gradually forced from power. Israeli leaders bad-mouthed Barack Obama for not supporting the Egyptian leader more effectively. Egypt is not going to abrogate its peace treaty with Israel, but it is likely to react more forcefully than in the past to Israeli actions of which ordinary Egyptians disapprove.
Previous political calculations about the outcome of Israeli actions in the Middle East have all changed over the past three months. States like Egypt will no longer be politically neutered by being wholly under the control of a decrepit and unpopular ruler who was not going to go against US wishes. That said, the degree of change is still unclear. Elites that got rid of Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt and possibly, in the next few weeks, Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen, are doing so in order to make sure that uprisings do not turn into real revolutions.
The US has much the same aim. But it may not be able to achieve this if, in future, its tolerance of Israeli colonisation of the West Bank remains automatic. It has to grapple with the fact that in Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan – together with Saudi Arabia the three Muslim countries that matter most to the US – an average of 17 per cent of people view US policies favourably, according to a poll by the Pew Research Centre.
Democratisation in the Middle East was always going to produce governments that the US and Israel would not like.
The fight for Libya
Chris McGreal reports:
Khalif Ameen leaped on the blackened tank, its innards hollowed out by the blast of a missile from an unseen plane, and waved his Kalashnikov as he declared the war all but won. “Now Gaddafi is finished. We have won Ajdabiya. We will not stop. Next Brega, Ras Lanuf, Sirte, Tripoli. Gaddafi will go quick,” said the young man who a few weeks ago was an engineering student.
But the burned-out remnants of the Libyan dictator’s armour abandoned on the outskirts of Ajdabiya after the strategic town finally fell to rebel forces told a different story that does not bode well for Ameen’s dream of marching all the way to Tripoli.
The fall of Ajdabiya after days of artillery duels and air bombardment delivered the Libyan revolutionaries their first significant victory over Muammar Gaddafi’s forces since the coalition air strikes began a week ago. The Libyan army sat outside town, astride the main coastal highway, blocking the rebels’ attempts to advance west toward the capital and recapture territory lost as Gaddafi found his footing after the initial shock of the uprising.
On Friday, the insurgents moved rocket launchers and other weapons down the road from Benghazi, then said they fought through the night with the dug-in enemy. “We hit them with our rockets and RPGs,” said Mohammed Rahim, a former regular soldier wearing a makeshift uniform of blue camouflage jacket and green trousers who went over to the rebels at the beginning of the uprising last month. “The fighting went on all night. It was a big battle. All the fighters came from Benghazi for it.”
However, the destruction of tanks on the edge of the town suggested it was air strikes by coalition forces, ostensibly to protect civilians, that had finally broken the back of strong resistance by army forces before the rebels moved in. The length of time it took the insurgents to overcome the army, and the rebels’ reliance on air strikes to destroy the bulk of its armour before finally taking Ajdabiya, confirmed how dependent the poorly armed and inexperienced revolutionaries are on foreign air forces to fight their war for them.
Al Jazeera reports:
Libyan rebels are advancing westwards after recapturing the strategic eastern town of Ajdabiya from government controls with the help of coalition air strikes.
Reports late on Saturday suggested rebels had already pressed onto the key oil-port town of Brega, 80 kilometres to the west.
“We are in the centre of Brega,” rebel fighter Abdelsalam al-Maadani told the AFP news agency by telephone. But Reuters said rebels were only on the outskirts of Brega.
Al Jazeera’s James Bays, who reached Ajdabiya on Saturday, said that while it appeared that rebels had taken over the town of Brega, it remained unclear who controlled the nearby oil port.
Meanwhile, pro-Gaddafi forces were attacking the opposition-held city of Misurata in the west of the country with heavy shelling, witnesses said, drawing coalition air strikes against government military targets.
On Thursday, CNN reported:
For days, the wounded just kept coming to the 60-bed central hospital in Misrata, a city under siege from forces loyal to Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. But there were no empty beds, no electricity — only generator power. No anesthesia or painkillers.
A doctor said 109 people have died in Misrata over the past week. Six were killed Thursday by Gadhafi’s rooftop snipers — unseen but too often precise. More than 1,300 others have been wounded since the protests erupted in the western city last month.
A minaret for a mosque in Misrata comes under continuous shelling until it collapses, March 19:
The Los Angeles Times reports:
The rebels of eastern Libya have found much to condemn about the police state tactics of Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi: deep paranoia, mass detentions, secret prisons and tightly scripted media tours.
But some of those same tactics appear to be creeping into the efforts of the opposition here as it seeks to stamp out lingering loyalty to Kadafi. Rebel forces are detaining anyone suspected of serving or assisting the Kadafi regime, locking them up in the same prisons once used to detain and torture Kadafi’s opponents.
For a month, gangs of young gunmen have roamed the city, rousting Libyan blacks and immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa from their homes and holding them for interrogation as suspected mercenaries or government spies.
Over the last several days, the opposition has begun rounding up men accused of fighting as mercenaries for Kadafi’s militias as government forces pushed toward Benghazi. It has launched nightly manhunts for about 8,000 people named as government operatives in secret police files seized after internal security operatives fled in the face of the rebellion that ended Kadafi’s control of eastern Libya last month.
“We know who they are,” said Abdelhafed Ghoga, the chief opposition spokesman. He called them “people with bloodstained hands” and “enemies of the revolution.”
Any suspected Kadafi loyalist or spy who does not surrender, Ghoga warned, will face revolutionary “justice.”
Rebels have also detained scores of Libyans they say were captured during battles with government forces in the last week or so.
On Wednesday, 55 terrified detainees were paraded in front of a busload of international journalists.
It was the first time the opposition’s month-old transitional national council had organized such a controlled bus tour, and it featured some of the same restrictions placed on journalists taken on tours in Tripoli by the Kadafi regime: no interviews and no close-up photographs of prisoners.
Listening Post – Military intervention, warmongering and the media
Marchin’ On in Libya
Art challenges Tunisian revolutionaries
Al Jazeera reports:
A crowd has gathered to ponder the black-and-white photographs which have been pasted across the face of building that was, until recent, the local offices of the former president’s much-loathed party.
“I have no idea what these photos mean. Do you know?” Meddeb Nejeb, a high school teacher, asks Al Jazeera.
He might be yet to grasp the meaning of the photographs, but Nejeb wants to know more.
For the artists behind what is one of the most ambitious contemporary street art projects to vibrate the Arab world, the artwork is about replacing the once all-pervasive presidential photography with mosaics of ordinary, anonymous Tunisians who rose up against their government.
The group are using street art to kick-start conversations and to challenge their compatriots to see the familiar in a new, post-revolutionary, light.
In the spirit of people-power, the project, titled “INSIDE OUT: Artocracy in Tunisia”, features a hundred ordinary Tunisians, putting their images where only presidents once hung. The portraits were taken by six Tunisian photographers, in collaboration with the renowned French street artist known as JR and other international artists.
How soon before Gaddafi expels the foreign press?
For a couple of weeks now, Libyan authorities have clearly believed that a carefully chaperoned foreign press corps could be useful for presenting images to the world suggesting that, at least in Tripoli, Colonel Gaddafi does not lack popular support.
That hasn’t stopped reporters complaining about the restrictions that prevent them from real news-gathering and naturally the government’s blatant effort to control reporting has become a story itself. But an incident today inside the hotel where the press spends much of its time sequestered, has effectively ripped back the veil. It looks like it’s going to be just a matter of time before all the foreign press gets kicked out of Gaddafi-controlled Libya.
The New York Times reports:
A Libyan woman burst into the hotel housing the foreign press in Tripoli on Saturday morning in an attempt to tell journalists that she had been raped and beaten by members of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s militia. After struggling for nearly an hour to resist removal by Colonel Qaddafi’s security forces, she was dragged away from the hotel screaming.
“They say that we are all Libyans and we are one people,” said the woman, who gave her name as Eman al-Obeidy, barging in during breakfast at the hotel dining room. “But look at what the Qaddafi men did to me.” She displayed a broad bruise on her face, a large scar on her upper thigh, several narrow and deep scratch marks lower on her leg, and marks that seemed to come from binding around her hands and feet.
She said she had been raped by 15 men. “I was tied up, and they defecated and urinated on me,” she said. “They violated my honor.”
She pleaded for friends she said were still in custody. “They are still there, they are still there,” she said. “As soon as I leave here, they are going to take me to jail.”
For the members of the foreign news media here at the invitation of the government of Colonel Qaddafi — and largely confined to the Rixos Hotel except for official outings — the episode was a reminder of the brutality of the Libyan government and the presence of its security forces even among the hotel staff. People in hotel uniforms, who just hours before had been serving coffee and clearing plates, grabbed table knives and rushed to physically restrain the woman and to hold back the journalists.
Ms. Obeidy said she was a native of the rebel stronghold of Benghazi who had been stopped by Qaddafi militia on the outskirts of Tripoli. After being held for about two days, she said, she had managed to escape. Wearing a black robe, a veil and slippers, she ran into the Rixos Hotel here, asking specifically to speak to the news service Reuters and The New York Times. “There is no media coverage outside,” she yelled at one point.
“They swore at me and they filmed me. I was alone. There was whiskey. I was tied up,” she told Michael Georgy of Reuters, the only journalist who was able to speak with her briefly. “I am not scared of anything. I will be locked up immediately after this.” She added: “Look at my face. Look at my back.” Her other comments were captured by television cameras.
A wild scuffle began as journalists tried to interview, photograph and protect her. Several journalists were punched, kicked and knocked on the floor by the security forces , working in tandem with people who until then had appeared to be members of the hotel staff. A television camera belonging to CNN was destroyed in the struggle, and security forces seized a device that a Financial Times reporter had used to record her testimony. A plainclothes security officer pulled out a revolver.
Two members of the hotel staff grabbed table knives to threaten both Ms. Obeidy and the journalists.
“Turn them around, turn them around,” a waiter shouted, trying to block the foreign news media from having access to Ms. Obeidy. A woman on the staff shouted: “Why are you doing this? You are a traitor!” and briefly put a coat over Ms. Obeidy’s head.
There was a prolonged standoff behind the hotel as the security officials apparently restrained themselves because of the presence of so many journalists, but Ms. Obeidy was ultimately forced into a white car and taken away.
“Leave me alone,” she shouted as one man tried to cover her mouth with his hand.
“They are taking me to jail,” she yelled, trying to resist the security guards, according to Reuters. “They are taking me to jail.”
Questioned about her treatment, Khalid Kaim, the deputy foreign minister, promised that she would be treated in accordance with the law. Musa Ibrahim, a government spokesman, said she appeared to be drunk and mentally ill. “Her safety of course is guaranteed,” he said, adding that the authorities were investigating the case, including the possibility that her reports of abuse were “fantasies.”
Charles Clover of The Financial Times, who had put himself in the way of the security forces trying to apprehend her, was put into a van and driven to the border shortly afterward. He said that the night before he had been told to leave because of what Libyan government officials said were inaccuracies in his reports.
Syria’s Day of Dignity
The Guardian reports:
Demonstrations in the Syrian capital, Damascus, and elsewhere were met with force as security forces struggled to contain unrest that had begun in the southern city of Deraa a week ago.
Thousands once again joined funeral processions in Deraa on Friday, chanting: “Deraa people are hungry, we want freedom.”
Hundreds took to the streets in the cities of Homs, Hama, Tel and Latakia and in towns surrounding Deraa, with smaller protests in the major cities of Damascus and Aleppo, which are more firmly under the watch of security forces. Troops reportedly opened fire in some cases.
Protests in the capital are rare and not tolerated by the Ba’athist regime. A witness told the Guardian that efforts at protests in Damascus were broken up by plain-clothed agents using batons.
By nightfall, a counter-demonstration had been mounted near the historic Umayyad mosque in the heart of the capital. Brief clashes were reported between anti-regime demonstrators and loyalists. A large rally then began in support of President Bashar al-Assad. Hundreds drove around the capital beeping horns and waving flags, whilst posters of the president were put up in the city.
The violence in Syria came after the government had pledged on Thursday to look into reforms. But activists using the Syrian Revolution Facebook page had called for a day of solidarity with Deraa, where according to unofficial reports at least 44 have been killed in the past week.
In the past, many young Syrians had been willing to overlook corruption, a lack of freedom and the slow pace of reforms in return for what they have seen as dignified leadership brought about by Assad’s anti-Western foreign policy. He has also had a youthful appeal. Both appear to now be wearing thin.
“Regimes become really weak when their image turns to brutality. The killings in Deraa have done that,” said Ziad Malki, an activist living in exile in Switzerland. “The Syrian people want more now.”
Others agreed that a turning point had been reached. “Syrians [normally] never come out to protests. This shows how the killings, the worthless reforms announced yesterday and the government propaganda is insulting and is only making us angrier,” said a 32-year-old man.
Demonstration in Damascus:
Demonstration in Hama:
Joshua Landis writes:
The Baathist regime that has ruled Syria for 48 years is on the ropes. Even President Bashar al-Assad himself seems to have been shocked by the level of violence used by Syria’s security forces to suppress demonstrations that began a week ago, and on Thursday afternoon his office announced unprecedented concessions to popular demands. But the question of whether those concessions assuage protesters’ concerns or prove to be too little too late may be answered in the escalation of clashes that followed Friday prayers, with a number of demonstrators reportedly killed when security forces again opened fire.
The protests began a week ago in the dusty agricultural town of Dara’a, near the border with Jordan, over the arrests of high school students for scrawling antigovernment graffiti. Those demonstrations quickly spun out of control, with thousands joining in, inspired by the wave of revolutions that have rocked the Arab world, to demand political freedoms and an end to emergency rule and corruption. The government responded brutally, killing over 30 demonstrators and wounding many more, according to activists. Gruesome videos of the crackdown, disseminated via the Internet in recent days, have enraged Syrians from one end of the country to the other.
On Thursday, the regime began to try a different tack, with Assad’s spokeswoman Buthaina Shaaban offering the President’s condolences to the people of Dara’a and acknowledging their “legitimate” demands, even as she insisted that reports of the scale of protests and the number of casualties had been exaggerated. Oddly, the President has himself not appeared on TV since Syria’s political troubles began, apparently hoping to protect himself from criticism. But Shaaban insisted that Assad was completely against the use of live fire in suppressing the demonstrations. She emphasized that she had been present in the room when the President ordered the security agencies to refrain from shooting at protesters — “not one bullet.”
But the only promised concessions that can be taken to the bank are pay rises for state employees of up to 30%, and the release of all activists arrested in the past weeks. Other reforms, which the regime undertook to study, are job creation, press freedom, permitting the formation of opposition parties and lifting emergency law. Should they be implemented, those changes would be nothing short of revolutionary. But many activists have already dismissed Assad’s offer as a stalling tactic to make it through the next few days of funerals and demonstration. The opposition had called for Syrians to assemble in large numbers in mosques for a day of “dignity” and demonstrations.
In order to mount a serious challenge to the regime’s iron grip on power, opposition activists will have to move their protest actions beyond Dara’a and its surrounding villages, and extend it to the major cities. Their attempt to do so presents the country with a choice of great consequence: they must decide if Syria is more like Egypt and Tunisia, where the people achieved sufficient unity to peacefully oust their rulers, or whether Syria is more like Iraq and Lebanon, which slipped into civil war and endless factionalism.
What does social science tell us about intervention in Libya… or much else?
Stephen Walt writes:
Before France, Britain, and the United States stumbled into its current attempt to dislodge Muammar al-Qaddafi from power in Libya — and let’s not kid ourselves, that’s what they are trying to do — did anyone bother to ask what recent social science tells us about the likely results of our intervention?
I doubt it, because recent research suggests that we are likely to be disappointed by the outcome. A 2006 study by Jeffrey Pickering and Mark Peceny found that military intervention by liberal states (i.e., states like Britain, France and the United States) “has only very rarely played a role in democratization since 1945.” Similarly, George Downs, and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita of New York University found that U.S. interventions since World War II led to stable democracies within ten years less than 3 percent of the time, and a separate study by their NYU colleague William Easterly and several associates found that both U.S and Soviet interventions during the Cold War generally led to “significant declines in democracy.” Finally, a 2010 article by Goran Piec and Daniel Reiter examines forty-two “foreign imposed regime changes” since 1920 and finds that when interventions “damage state infrastructural power” they also increase the risk of subsequent civil war.
The best and most relevant study I have yet read on this question is an as-yet unpublished working paper by Alexander Downes of Duke University, which you can find on his website here. Using a more sophisticated research design, Downes examined 100 cases of “foreign imposed regime change” going all the way back to 1816. In particular, his analysis takes into account “selection effects” (i.e., the fact that foreign powers are more likely to intervene in states that already have lots of problems, so you would expect these states to have more problems afterwards too). He finds that foreign intervention tends to promote stability when the intervening powers are seeking to restore a previously deposed ruler. But when foreign interveners oust an existing ruler and impose a wholly new government (which is what we are trying to do in Libya), the likelihood of civil war more than triples.
It’s not as though Susan Rice and Samantha Power lack grounding in the social sciences, but if President Obama, when being pressed to authorize an urgent intervention in Libya, had responded by calling for a report to see what useful lessons social scientists had drawn from previous interventions, his request might have been greeted with an exclamation: “give me a break!” or at least a polite admonition: “we don’t have the time.” But even if the situation was not quite as urgent, how much could social science reveal about the situation in Libya?
The problem is, social science isn’t science. In real science, you can test theories by running multiple experiments, changing the variables and comparing the different outcomes. You can’t prove that something is true if there are no means by which it could be proved false. In this case, all a social scientist can do is posit a number of what are deemed to be parallel cases, pointing to the outcomes there and then and predict a similar outcome in Libya.
But whatever generalizations you want to make, it’s hard to dispute the Colonel Gaddafi is one of a kind and however important the lessons from history might be, they do no more than suggest a number of possible outcomes. Indeed, we do well to remember that only a matter of weeks ago scholarly opinion was quite confident in asserting that Egypt was not ripe for revolution. History is not a process of endless repetition and there are periods of change when it becomes foolish to predict with much conviction what is going to happen.
In real life we make choices and the nature of most major decisions is that they foreclose the possibility of backtracking and finding out the consequences of each alternative.
The US and its allies chose to intervene in Libya and now those who doubt the wisdom of that choice can second guess it and make all sorts of claims about how things would have worked out better if that choice had not been made. These are to a significant degree idle forms of speculation because they involve making unprovable claims. There is no parallel reality in which we can observe what would have happened had UN Res. 1973 not passed and the intervention thus not occurred. The only incontrovertable statements are of the kind, we wouldn’t be spending $300 million a week on an intervention in Libya if we hadn’t intervened in Libya. You don’t say?
Walt concludes, “these various scholarly studies suggest that the probability that our intervention will yield a stable democracy is low, and that our decision to intervene has increased the likelihood of civil war.”
Who claimed this intervention was going to lead to a stable democracy? At this point there has yet to be a clear consensus on what the operation’s aims are. I haven’t heard any grand predictions about the dawn of a new democracy. This sounds like another instance of the echoes of Iraq emerging out of silence.
As for the risks of civil war, many of the skeptics claim that a civil war had already started. That, I would dispute.
By the point at which Gaddafi’s power briefly appeared not to reach far out of Tripoli, the uprising had all the marks of being a popular and contagious rejection of his rule. Had he not already anticipated the need to guard his power by relying on foreign mercenaries, he would most likely already be gone.
And as for the danger of instability in a post-Gaddafi Libya, the truth is that in a revolutionary society, stability is just another name for oppression. It might look appealing to those of us outside for whom it has tangible benefits, like lower oil prices, but for the Libyans who have risen up to overthrow a tyrant, the prize of freedom they seek is all that they can now accept — even if the price is turmoil.
Does that sound like Rumsfeld’s view of the collapse of civil order in Baghdad? Superficially, but the rupture Iraq went through was triggered by an American invasion. This time around the outsiders have inserted themselves (though not literally stepped in) at a point at which a society was already being ripped apart. We didn’t make this happen.
Riz Khan – The Arab Street
The Saudi women revolution statement
[The following statement in English and Arabic (below) was written by Mona Kareem on Friday March 18th, 2011, and can be found on her personal blog.]
After the recent importance of Social Media in creating change in our societies, a lot of Saudi women have been active on Twitter through the hash tag #SaudiWomenRevoltion to write their demands of applying social equality in Saudi society, giving examples and telling stories on the injustice they are facing in their society.
Media has talked about this hash tag but did not care to push this cause forward. Saudi Women, however, have created a page for their revolution on Facebook and talked to several media means to support their legal and legitimate human rights to fight sexism in their society. Thus, this following statement comes as a document that gathers different demands from the Saudi Women Revolution:
Women cannot have their rights until the system of Male Guardianship is completely taken off the laws and rules of the Saudi state. The Male Guardian or “Mahram” is the father, brother, husband, or even son who has all the legal rights to control a Saudi woman’s life in different ways. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has promised the Human Rights Council of the United Nations in June 2009 to cancel Male Guardianship and to end Sexism in the country, but these promises remain unaccomplished. Saudi women mostly suffer from the Male Guardianship because of the following reasons:
– The Saudi Woman cannot work or apply to a job without the permission of her legal male guardian.
– The Saudi Woman does not have the right to travel without her “Mahram” or without his written permission. The Ministry of interior affairs has decided to permit women who are over 45 years in age to travel without a male guardian or his permission; however, airport officials did not apply the decision, as the Human Rights watch stated in its report in April 2008.
– The Saudi Woman cannot receive education without the permission of her male guardian and cannot travel to receive education abroad without his permission even if she was awarded a scholarship from the state. The Saudi woman also suffers from the limited academic majors although she has proved a better educational performance than the Saudi man as the official statistics show.
– The Saudi woman does not have the rights of marriage and divorce without the permission from her male guardian. Saudi Arabia has had different examples of how women suffered from this system in particular. Human Rights Watch 2010 report stated two incidents of men marrying off their sisters five times to get money, in Braida and Riyadh.
– The Saudi Woman does not have the right to follow and finish her official documents and papers without the permission of her male guardian including her cases in court. Human Rights Watch 2010 report mentioned a woman named Sawsan Salim in Qasim who was punished with 300 lashes and one year and a half in jail for showing up to court without a “Mahram”. Justice ministry itself has promised in February 2010 to permit women to work as lawyers, but the promise is still not fulfilled.
– The Saudi woman cannot have medical surgery without the permission of her male guardian. Women have talked a lot about the damages done because of this system. Human Rights Watch report stated in July 2009 that Saudi women need a “Mahram” to enter and leave the hospital. If no “Mahram” showed up to get her out of the hospital, she will stay in until someone does so.
– The Saudi Woman cannot make a bank account for her kids, enroll them in schools, ask for their school files, or travel with them without the permission of her male guardian. [Continue reading…]
The fight for Libya
The New York Times reports:
NATO will assume leadership from the United States of patrolling the skies over Libya but the military alliance remains divided over who will command aggressive coalition air strikes on Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s ground troops, NATO and American officials said Thursday.
After a day of confusion and conflicting reports out of NATO headquarters in Brussels, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced late Thursday in Washington that NATO had agreed to lead the allies in maintaining the no-fly zone. Effectively, that means that planes from NATO countries will fly missions over Libya with little fear of being shot down since Tomahawk missiles, most of them American, largely destroyed Colonel Qaddafi’s air defenses and air force last weekend.
But NATO balked at assuming responsibility, at least for now, of what military officials call the “no-drive zone, which would entail bombing Colonel Qaddafi’s ground forces, tanks and artillery that massing outside crucial Libyan cities, and doing so without inflicting casualties on civilians.
Late Thursday night a senior Obama administration official insisted that NATO had agreed to assume responsibility for the no-fly and “no-drive” zones but said the details remained to be worked out. The official’s statements appeared to contradict those of the secretary-general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen.
A NATO official said that two member nations, Germany and Turkey, objected to NATO participating in strikes that they consider beyond the mandate of the United Nations security resolution that authorized the military action in Libya.
Associated Press reports:
The international military operation against Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s forces may last days or weeks — but not months, France’s foreign minister said Thursday, as allied countries tried to work out who will run the campaign.
Alain Juppe also said he hopes the airstrikes in Libya and the boisterous quest for freedom and democracy in the Arab world will serve as a warning to autocratic regimes elsewhere, including in Syria and Saudi Arabia.
“The job of dictator is now a high-risk job,” Juppe said, noting that some autocrats — including Gadhafi — have been targeted by the International Criminal Court.
Laura Rozen reports:
With a new poll showing 60 percent of the American public approves of the allied air campaign to protect Libyan civilians, it seems that popular opinion is leaning toward cautious support for the limited U.S. military intervention that President Barack Obama is conducting. But the same poll shows that Americans are deeply averse to endorsing deeper U.S. involvement if the current effort fails to restrain Libya’s Muammar Gadhafi.
The new Reuters/Ipsos poll, conducted on March 22, just four days into the air strikes, found that 40 percent of Americans oppose U.S. and allied military action in Libya, leaving no one in the undecided camp.
But while four in five Americans agree that the United States and allies should seek Gadhafi’s removal, they don’t support increasing U.S. military involvement to achieve that goal. If the current air strikes fail to curb Gadhafi’s crackdown on dissent in the country, almost one in three Americans say they don’t know what to do. One quarter say the U.N. should then send in peacekeeping troops. However, just 7 percent of those surveyed say that the United States and its allies should send in ground troops (“peacekeeping troops” seems merely a rhetorically less worrisome way to say “ground troops.”) A lukewarm 23 percent say the best path forward in that scenario would be to increase air strikes–essentially, more of the same.
Noman Benotman, a former leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, says:
Gaddafi has tried very hard to give the impression that the Libyan opposition is controlled by al-Qaeda. This ideas flies in the face of all the evidence. The opposition is a diverse coalition of Libyans from many tribal and political backgrounds. Just because some Islamists support the opposition against Gaddafi this does not make the opposition Islamist.
At the same time, there are some extremists who want to manipulate the Libyan conflict for their own ends. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) is looking for ways to play a greater role in this conflict. Since the start of the year it has tried to move men and arms into Libya from its bases in Niger and Mali, near Libya’s southern border. At the same time, al-Qaeda’s leaders in Pakistan and Afghanistan are trying to portray the international intervention in Libya as a ‘crusader’ attack on Muslim in order to further their own agenda.
Colum Lynch reports:
In the rush to curtail Muammar al-Qaddafi’s military capacity to attack civilians in Libya, the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously on February 26 to impose a comprehensive arms embargo on Libya. But the measure also unwittingly impeded the effort of the Western-backed rebels to fight Qaddafi’s forces.
Paragraph 9 of Resolution 1970 required all U.N. members to “immediately take the necessary measures” to bar the sale, supply or transfer of weapons, mercenaries, or other supplies to Libya. The arms embargo, which was adopted before the rebels had emerged as a potential threat to the regime, included no exemptions for Qaddafi’s foes.
Ever since the passage of that first resolution, government lawyers from the United States, Britain and France have been looking to see if they can find a way around it, according to U.N.-based diplomats. The United States may have now found one.
The Syrian uprising
The Guardian reports from Damascus:
Syria’s government pledged to consider protesters’ “legitimate demands” after thousands took to the streets for the funerals of nine people killed by the military.
Rights activists described Wednesday’s shootings in the southern city of Daraa as a massacre, claiming that more than 100 people may have been killed when troops fired on a mosque in the early hours and throughout the day.
With protests called for after Friday prayers, Buthaina Shaaban, adviser to President Bashar al-Assad, announced that the government would consider ending Syria’s emergency law and revise legislation for political parties and the media. Similar reform pledges have been announced in the past, and are unlikely to satisfy protesters.
In Deraa, funeral-goers chanted “God, Syria, Freedom” and “The blood of martyrs is not spilt in vain!”, Reuters news agency reported. Some reports said that up to 20,000 people attended, but this could not be verified. The city has been cordoned off .
Deraa’s hospital reported receiving 37 bodies from Wednesday’s violence. YouTube videos apparently showed bloody scenes at the mosque.
Electricity and communications in the city were cut before the attack, which sources said was by a unit of forces headed by the president’s brother, Maher al-Assad.
“This is a crime against humanity because forces opened fire on unarmed civilians without any warning,” said Radwan Ziadeh, head of the Damascus Centre for Human Rights and a visiting scholar at Harvard University.
Michael Young writes:
A key indicator of the uprising’s momentum will be whether the situation escalates after Friday prayers this week. The Assads are taking no chances. The brutality in Dara is a testament to the family’s sense of vulnerability. The minority Alawite-led regime controls all levers of power and intimidation in Syria, including elite military units and the intelligence services. Reports have suggested that troops whose principal role is regime protection were swiftly dispatched to the south. According to Syrian dissident Ammar Abdulhamid, this included Republican Guard detachments, and rumor has it that Assad’s younger brother, Maher, has been directing operations.
Haytham Manna, the spokesman for the Arab Committee for Human Rights, appeared to agree that internal security companies, not the army, were leading the repression. He told the BBC Arabic service that “security branches, military and civilian, wearing civilian clothes, they are the ones engaging in [attacks against the Omari mosque].”
The fear is that the situation may take on a sectarian coloring, with Sunnis, some 74 percent of the population, turning against Alawites, who represent roughly 8 to 12 percent. This is simplistic. The Assads will defend Alawite domination as an existential necessity, but Sunnis thrive in many sectors, especially the economy. Assad is married to a Sunni. Syria is characterized by complex, sometimes crisscrossing, political, regional, tribal, ethnic, and class bonds that transcend a narrow sectarian reading of events. That’s why a breakdown of authority could bring about a situation even more volatile and vicious than in Libya.
Jim Muir writes:
The Syrian leadership seems for the moment to have drawn back from the kind of draconian repression that it meted out to crush a revolt by the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama in 1982.
It seems to be following the Egyptian and Tunisian examples rather than the Libyan model, though clearly with the hope that placatory measures may be in time to head off a national upheaval.
In theory, the political reforms promised would – if implemented swiftly and seriously – meet most of the demands of reformists and activists.
The Baath party would no longer enjoy an official monopoly of power, the press would be free, citizens’ rights would be respected, and the corrupt would be punished.
It is hard to imagine.
For it to happen, powerful vested interests would have to be overridden.
Some diehards within the regime may not admit the necessity for radical self-reform until it is too late – if it is not already.
The globalisation of revolution
Tarak Barkawi writes:
To listen to the hype about social networking websites and the Egyptian revolution, one would think it was Silicon Valley and not the Egyptian people who overthrew Mubarak.
Via its technologies, the West imagines itself to have been the real agent in the uprising. Since the internet developed out of a US Defense Department research project, it could be said the Pentagon did it, along with Egyptian youth imitating wired hipsters from London and Los Angeles.
Most narratives of globalisation are fantastically Eurocentric, stories of Western white men burdened with responsibility for interconnecting the world, by colonising it, providing it with economic theories and finance, and inventing communications technologies. Of course globalisation is about flows of people as well, about diasporas and cultural fusion.
But neither version is particularly useful for organising resistance to the local dictatorship. In any case, the internet was turned off at decisive moments in the Egyptian uprising, and it was ordinary Egyptians, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, who toppled the regime, not the hybrid youth of the global professional classes.
Are there other tales of globalisation, perhaps those told by rebels and guerrillas?
Globalisation is also coming to awareness of the situations of other peoples, such as those similarly oppressed by local and faraway powers. Of particular interest are those moments when these peoples rise up, when they devise forms of revolt and struggle. Defeats provide lessons, and victories give hope. These revolutions need not be on satellite TV to effect their instruction. Revolutionaries in France and Haiti in the 1790s received news of one another””s activities by the regular packet ship that plied between Jamaica and London.
Sailors, slaves, and workers circulating in the Atlantic between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries shared and improved upon their repertoires of revolt and resistance, bringing the good news to ports from Rio to Boston, Bristol to Havana.
When Indians rose in revolt in 1857, Frederick Engels analysed their mistakes – like the Libyan rebels today, they were too eager to stand and fight against a better organised opponent. Engels publicised the uprising in a series of newspaper articles that ultimately inspired Mao Tse-tung”s theories of guerrilla warfare, which went on to circulate as well-thumbed texts in the pockets of Vietnamese, Cuban, Algerian and other revolutionaries (and of those who sought to defeat them).
The fight for Libya
In a Pentagon briefing, Rear Adm. Gerard Hueber, the chief of staff for the operational command, told reporters:
As long as the regime’s forces are fighting in and around cities where the allies have ordered them to back off, he said, coalition attacks would continue. He said the allies are in communication with the Libyan units about what they need to do, where to go and how to arrange their forces to avoid attack, but that there was “no indication” that the regime’s ground forces were following the instructions.
A senior British commander said Wednesday that the allies had effectively destroyed the Libyan air force and air defenses and were now able to operate “with near impunity” across the country, Reuters reported. “We are now applying sustained and unrelenting pressure on the Libyan armed forces,” the commander, Air Vice Marshal Greg Bagwell, said at an airbase in southern Italy where British warplanes are based.
At sea, news reports said six NATO warships had started patrolling off Libya’s coast Wednesday to enforce a United Nations arms embargo, but Germany, which has opposed military intervention in the Libya crisis, said it was withdrawing four of its ships in the Mediterranean from NATO command. To offset the impact of its action on other NATO allies, Germany said it would send 300 more troops to Afghanistan to help operate surveillance aircraft, German officials said.
Colonel Qaddafi himself made a brief but defiant appearance on Libyan television on Tuesday night, appearing at what reporters were told was his Tripoli residence to denounce the bombing raids and pledge victory. “I am here!” he shouted from a balcony to supporters waving green flags. “I am here! I am here!” It was his first known public appearance since the allied bombing began on Saturday.
“We will not surrender,” he told supporters. “We will defeat them by any means. We are ready for the fight, whether it will be a short or a long one. We will be victorious in the end,” he said. “This assault is by a bunch of fascists who will end up in the dustbin of history.”
Time magazine reports:
Khaled al-Sayeh, the rebels’ ostensible military spokesman, insists that rebel forces have captured both the eastern and southern gates to Ajdabiyah, bypassing the regime forces dug in at the northern gate by moving along the coast. They have effectively surrounded Gaddafi’s forces and have even begun to encroach on his stronghold of Sirte. Before long, the loyalist forces will run out of ammunition.
At a press conference on Tuesday evening, without so much as glancing at a sheet of paper, al-Sayeh runs off a long list of impressive achievements. In recent days, he says, rebels and allied air forces have destroyed all but 11 of the 80 tanks Gaddafi had sent to Benghazi. Ten other tanks were captured intact, along with 20 pickup trucks, two armored vehicles and a vehicle with radar equipment. He estimates that between 400 and 600 government troops were killed over the weekend.
But al-Sayeh’s message seems to change from day to day. On Monday, he had been more defensive, insisting that “the army is starting from scratch; we are putting the structure in place.” The army needs training. It needs arms. And the real officers and commanders have no control over the youth gathered at the front line. “The youth advanced today and it was spontaneous, as always. They don’t take orders from anyone,” he said bitterly. “If it was up to the regular military, the advance by the youth today would not have happened.”
“I am here to defend Benghazi,” says Muatasim Billah Mohamed, waiting with a crowd of young men on the roadside some 5 km from where the shells are falling. He has gone all the way from Tobruk and has a flag tied around his head like a bandanna, but carries no weapon. God will protect him, he says, pointing to the sky.
Others point to the sky to signify salvation from allied warplanes, expecting to see more wreckage of Gaddafi’s armor. “People now are waiting for the planes to hit Gaddafi’s forces,” explains Ahmed al-Faytoori, a former government bureaucrat, waiting beside his truck on the road. “The revolutionaries cannot proceed without the air strikes because we have very light weapons.”
He has approached the front with a vague intention of fighting Gaddafi, but makes no indication that he plans to move forward into the fray. “There are people here who are prepared to do suicide missions against Gaddafi’s forces, to shake them if the airplanes don’t come,” he says. “But it’s necessary for the planes to come so the rebels can move into Ajdabiyah, and after Ajdabiyah, Ras Lanuf.”
The roar of fighter jets had inspired fear in many of the volunteer fighters and local townspeople along this road less than a week ago. Now it generates excitement. “Air strikes,” a group of young men cheered from a sand dune on Sunday, as explosions to the south sent white clouds of smoke into the air. They turned out to be incoming tank shells, and an older fighter urged them to go down from the dune where he said they were vulnerable.
On Monday, the roar of the warplanes has filled many of those gathered with hope and expectation, but the strikes on Gaddafi’s forces defending the approach to Ajdabiyah never seem to arrive. And as the braver ones press forward into shelling despite their inferior weapons, the war tourists who stay behind get a glimpse of the real horror as well.
Anthony Shadid, Lynsey Addario, Stephen Farrell and Tyler Hicks recount their experience as captives held for several days by Gaddafi forces.
All of us had had close calls over the years. Lynsey was kidnapped in Falluja, Iraq, in 2004; Steve in Afghanistan in 2009. Tyler had more scrapes than he could count, from Chechnya to Sudan, and Anthony was shot in the back in 2002 by a man he believed to be an Israeli soldier. At that moment, though, none of us thought we were going to live. Steve tried to keep eye contact until they pulled the trigger. The rest of us felt the powerlessness of resignation. You feel empty when you know that it’s almost over.
“Shoot them,” a tall soldier said calmly in Arabic.
A colleague next to him shook his head. “You can’t,” he insisted. “They’re Americans.”
They bound our hands and legs instead — with wire, fabric or cable. Lynsey was carried to a Toyota pickup, where she was punched in the face. Steve and Tyler were hit, and Anthony was headbutted.
Even that Tuesday, a pattern had begun to emerge. The beating was always fiercest in the first few minutes, an aggressiveness that Colonel Qaddafi’s bizarre and twisted four decades of rule inculcated in a society that feels disfigured. It didn’t matter that we were bound, or that Lynsey was a woman.
But moments of kindness inevitably emerged, drawing on a culture’s far deeper instinct for hospitality and generosity. A soldier brought Tyler and Anthony, sitting in a pickup, dates and an orange drink. Lynsey had to talk to a soldier’s wife who, in English, called her a donkey and a dog. Then they unbound Lynsey and, sitting in another truck, gave Steve and her something to drink.
From the pickup, Lynsey saw a body outstretched next to our car, one arm outstretched. We still don’t know whether that was Mohammed. We fear it was, though his body has yet to be found.
If he died, we will have to bear the burden for the rest of our lives that an innocent man died because of us, because of wrong choices that we made, for an article that was never worth dying for.
No article is, but we were too blind to admit that.
In a report for The Arabist, Abu Ray writes:
Napoleon famously said an army marches on its stomach, and in the case of Libya’s rebel forces, that would be tuna sandwiches, fava beans and a lot of junk food.
As Western air strikes are restarting once thoroughly defeated rebel advance, the once weirdly successful aspect of their rag tag forces should be gearing up again — their food supply lines.
Like everything else about the uprising in eastern Libya seeking to challenge Moammar Gadhafi’s four decade hammerlock on power, the fighters’ food supply was an ad hoc affair of entreprising individuals and local charities with official sanction that somehow seemed to work — even when nothing else really did.
Rebel checkpoints always featured cases of bottled water, juice, piles of bread and plenty of junk food such as biscuits and packaged cupcakes that fighters can grab and throw into their pick up truck before taking off for the front.
“We never run short of food, we have good kids from Benghazi who come and bring it down to us,” said Mohammed Selim, 23, as he cleaned up the empty boxes of Twinkies, cookies and sugary juice drinks piled outside a rebel checkpoint in the oil refinery town of Ras Lanouf, two weeks ago before they were driven out.
Syrians have broken the fear barrier
Some observers of the Libyan uprising, particularly those who now most vehemently oppose intervention, insist that Libya is a special case, really a civil war rather than a revolution — the implication being that if Gaddafi were to crush his opponents, then the wider Arab revolution would not suffer a major setback.
Activists involved in the uprising that has now started in Syria indicate that, on the contrary, the fate of Libya has very much been in their minds. Fearing that a Gaddafi victory in Libya would make it more difficult to plead their case for revolution to the Syrian people, activists launched demonstrations this month, instead of allowing several more weeks for organization, as they had earlier intended.
David Hirst writes:
In whichever countries it has already broken out – from Yemen, whose President Saleh is suffering new, perhaps even terminal reverses, to Libya, where Colonel Gaddafi defies the military “crusaders” from the west – the Arab democratic revolution pursues its seemingly inexorable, if chequered, course. But is it yet another country’s turn now? Of all Arab regimes, none more resembles those of former presidents Mubarak and Ben Ali than President Assad and the ruling Ba’athists of Syria; and, after their fall, his 51-year-old “republican monarchy” looked the next most logically in line of candidates to succumb to the Arab uprising.
Yet Assad himself begged to differ. “We are not Egyptians or Tunisians,” he said; Syria might have “more difficult circumstances than most of the Arab countries” but it was “stable”. And outwardly it did remain an island of calm, even as pro-democracy turbulence rocked other Arab countries from the Atlantic to the Gulf. But last week things suddenly changed. A series of small-scale and isolated but audacious protests developed into much larger ones after Friday prayers in a string of Syrian cities.
One, in the southern city of Dera’a, was particularly serious. It had been triggered by the arrest of 15 schoolchildren accused of scrawling anti-government graffiti on city walls, among them that trademark slogan – “the people want the overthrow of the regime” – of the uprisings elsewhere. It was a peaceful gathering but the security services opened fire, killing three. The next day a much larger, angrier crowd – estimated to number as many as 20,000 – turned out for the burial of the previous days’ victims.
Bloomberg reports:
Syrian troops are forcing people to stay at home in the southern city of Daraa after six people were killed in renewed anti-government protests that have swept across the country, Amnesty International said.
“People are being asked through loudspeakers to remain at home or they will be shot,” Neil Sammonds, a researcher on Syria for the rights group, said today by telephone from London. Snipers are enforcing the orders and all the city’s entrances are being watched, he said. “The town is besieged.”
Seven people were also wounded when security forces opened fire earlier today during the funeral of two of those killed during the night in Daraa, according to an Agence France-Presse photographer who visited one of the local hospitals. President Bashar al-Assad sacked Faisal Kalthum, the governor of Daraa, state television reported today.
The rallies in Syria mark the latest extension of the political turmoil that has engulfed the region this year.
Ammar Abdulhamid, a Syrian dissident and democracy activist now living in exile in Washington, DC, writes:
What a difference six weeks make. Back in early February I was asked whether Syria would be next on the growing list of countries to witness a popular revolution. My answer, which came in the form of an article published on Comment is free, was, in essence, “not yet”.
The “day of anger” that exiled opposition figures called for on 5 February fizzled out largely because the networks that were being built on the grounds at the time were not ready to take up such a call. Activists needed time to ensure that they had networks of supporters all over the country and that clear communication strategies and methods were agreed, both within these networks and between them and their supporters in the country and across the world.
Formulating the right messages meant to address the concerns of certain segments within Syrian society, as well as those of the international community, especially with regards to the potential role Islamists would play in a future democratic Syria, was also something that required more time.
These points were being debated online through emails and on various Facebook groups; the main thrust of the debate was not whether a revolution could take place but when. Myself and others were on the side of waiting until mid-summer at least, to give in-country activists more time to organise their networks, while others worked on messaging.
Others were less patient, with some fearing a Gaddafi victory in Libya could make it more difficult to plead our case for revolution to the Syrian people; they pushed for a quicker move. Obviously, seeing that Syria has been caught in the midst of a revolutionary upheaval since the Ides of March, it was this latter side that won the debate.
Maher Arar, an engineer with dual Canadian and Syrian citizenship who was a victim of the Bush administration’s rendition program in 2002, writes:
At the time of his ascent to power in 2000, still only, the young president [Bashar al-Assad] promised major reforms were coming.
Popularly elected by 97% of all votes, Syrians of all stripes thought they finally had a glimpse of hope after the 30-year, iron-fist rule of his father.
Assad pledged he would fight corruption, would guarantee his people more freedom of expression, and would adopt a more liberal market policy. He may have partially succeeded on the latter point but it became clear a few years into his rule that he miserably failed on the first two, leading some Syrians to speculate that the new president was simply a puppet in the hands of his father’s old camp.
Furthermore, Syria’s human rights situation steadily deteriorated under the new ruler, especially after the unofficial alliance with the Unites States to fight al-Qaida, a historically common enemy. For instance, it became clear around 2001 that Syria was a preferred rendition destination for terror suspects. The cases of Hydar Zammar, Ahmed El-Maati, Abdullah El-Malki and my own are only a few examples . Bob Baer, a former CIA official, stated at the time: “If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria,” something to which I can personally attest.
The internet in society: empowering or censoring citizens?