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Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Glimpses of the Tunisian revolution: The victory of dignity over fear - 0 views

pambazuka.org/...72930

social movements arab multinational corporations mncs egypt intervention mubarak telecom tunisia dakar wsf

shared by Arabica Robusta on 10 May 11 - No Cached
  • We expressed our admiration and solidarity and we offered our support and the promise to carry their stories, their struggles and their aspirations with us and share them in whatever ways we could as our commitment to contribute to imagine and construct a better world, more just and equal, each of us in the places where we live and work.
  • We also explained that we wished to explore the viability of a regional and continental Social Forum in Tunisia to celebrate the revolution and support the transition.
  • Enthusiastic citizens discussed and negotiated their differences, exchanged their experiences, disagreed vehemently, even shouted their frustration and disappointments contributing to give form to their visions and inspiring in each other actions and daily practices towards the establishment of a new society.
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  • In a large hall, over hundred people gathered to welcome us. In the intense atmosphere made hazy by the smoke of cigarettes inhaled with anxiety and pain, mothers, sisters, fathers, brothers and friends told us their tragedies, their losses, their suffering, their fight, their hope. In a more intimate setting on the third floor of the big building, we met later with others who lost their beloved and cried for justice, who were tortured and demanded their rights.
  • we asked each other with incredulity how we could tell the genuine from the demagogic and the demagogic from the outright false among the rhetoric that seemed to express the same discourses of liberation and the same aspiration to justice and development for all?
  • Facebook was in everyone’s mouth, Al Jazeera’s journalists were praised for their courage and dedication (though, some told us, ‘in the long run we can’t forget they are islamists’).
  • But while nobody denied the supportive role of new social media, the general understanding was that though they helped they were certainly not the determining factors pace the international media (perhaps too eager to stress how western technology democratizes the world).
  • the Italian Prime Minister and his delegation met their Tunisian counterparts in Tunis to discuss an agreement on the migrant crisis which involved shutting down Italy and Europe and send back the thousands deluded migrants who thought hospitality was one of the values of a continent that likes to preach to the world cosmopolitan ideals. If those migrants knew that in Italy a debate rages on the extent to which the boats that carry them, in which they risk their lives and die by the dozens, can be shot at to prevent their landing on national shores!
  • This revolution may have already changed the stereotypes of the submissive, agency deprived, Arab. But as the transition processes develop they may contribute to the elaboration of new democratic practices whose resonance exceeds the national boundaries and make the Tunisian youth rise to the secular Pantheon of historical revolutionaries.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Popular protests in Burkina Faso - 0 views

pambazuka.org/...72114

social movements multinational mncs corporations intervention burkina faso africa chouli

shared by Arabica Robusta on 03 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Burkina Faso has a vibrant civil society that has managed to resist attempts by successive regimes in the post-colonial period to be co-opted into the single party system or the system of trade union representation that continues to dog the country.
  • In contrast to Ben Ali’s Tunisia and Mubarak’s Egypt, Burkina Faso has always had a certain degree of freedom of information and expression and the right to organise. It is easier for young people from underprivileged classes to meet and plan their actions in person[3] rather than on the net[4].
  • Echoes of North Africa can also be seen in the relations with the police. Police brutality in the country make police stations a favourite target during demonstrations, yet in Leo some members of the armed forces reportedly apologised to demonstrators, assuring them they understood their desire for justice. ‘This immediately brought down tensions, demonstrators agreed to move on shouting bravos to the soldiers for their solidarity and compassion.’[6]
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  • Essentially, the resemblance to the uprisings in the north lies in structural similarities - an unequal society, high unemployment, the lack of future perspectives, police violence, impunity, a closed political system, a bourgeoisie tied in with a non-functioning political administration and the longevity of the regime.
  • The bloody repression of the protests in Koudougou and the entire province of Boulkiemde was followed by attempts at appeasement, which suggests that the authorities are seriously worried about the spread of popular discontent.[13] Public anger is already high, first because Blaise Compaore wants to modify the constitution to allow him to stay on as president for life.
  • The regime has stuck to the same tactics it has used since 1997 to deal with the latest crisis, alternating carrot and stick while denouncing the fact that its concessions have failed to reduce tensions.
mehrreporter

Morsi's trial postponed - 0 views

www.yjc.ir/...morsis-trial-postponed

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shared by mehrreporter on 08 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • mehrreporter on 08 Jan 14
     
    An Egyptian court on Wednesday adjourned the murder trial of deposed president Mohamed Morsi to February 1, citing "weather conditions" that prevented Morsi's transport to court from his prison.
Arabica Robusta

Pan-African News Wire: Disputes Fracture Emerging Egyptian Parties - 0 views

panafricannews.blogspot.com/...racture-emerging-egyptian.html

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shared by Arabica Robusta on 29 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Now, almost three years later and after much political tumult — including one year of Muslim Brotherhood rule when they led the opposition — internal divisions and organisational problems have taken a toll on nascent liberal and leftist parties, leading to the resignation of hundreds of their members.
  • Variance gave the party diversity and strengthened the party’s positions at first, as a result of the synthesis of the opinions of its members, in contrast to “cadre parties” that would have a fixed outlook, like for example the Muslim Brotherhood, who would recruit people who would adopt it, Attia explained.
  • Believing that differences weakened the party, a bloc was formed of certain members with more organisational experience who started working against the party’s diversity. Attia says this group attempted to prevent those it differed with from being elected to the party’s central committee in the founding conference, but failed. However, the superior organisational skill of this group compared to others eventually enabled it to suppress other voices within the party and take political positions unfavourable to many others in SPAP — for example, aligning with the state following the ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi.
mehrreporter

Why has ISIS killed no American? - 0 views

www.yjc.ir/...hy-has-isis-killed-no-american

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shared by mehrreporter on 03 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • mehrreporter on 03 Jul 14
     
    Tehran, YJC. Al-Mayadeen has made an interview with Nabil Na'eem, founder of the Democratid Jihad Party.
Arabica Robusta

Violence comes home: an interview with Arun Kundnani | openDemocracy - 0 views

opendemocracy.net/...e-interview-with-arun-kundnani

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shared by Arabica Robusta on 24 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • President Obama continues to rely on the authorization to give his drone-killing programme a veneer of legality. This is the old colonial formula of liberal values at home sustained by a hidden illiberalism in the periphery – where routine extra-judicial killing is normalised.
  • colonial history teaches us that violence always ‘comes home’ in some form: whether as refugees seeking sanctuary, whether as the re-importing of authoritarian practices first practised in colonial settings, or indeed as terrorism.
  • What results is a mutual reinforcing of the militarized identity narrative on both sides: the jihadists point to numerous speeches by western leaders to support their claim of a war on Islam; and western leaders legitimise war with talk of a ‘generational struggle’ between western values and Islamic extremism. What is striking today is the tired rhetoric of military aggression – Hollande’s “pitiless war” – once again recycled, despite the obvious failures of the past 14 years.
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  • Empirical evidence does not support either of these assumptions – witness the European ISIS volunteers who arrive in Syria with copies of Islam for Dummies or the alleged leader of the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who was reported to have drunk whisky and smoked cannabis
  • Yet radicalisation theories have been officially accepted and popularised. This is because they provide a rationale for surveillance (it is easier for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to find ideologues than terrorists). And they conveniently disavow the cycle of violence we have entered.
  • What radicalisation theories ignore is that violence in the ‘war on terror’ is relational: the individuals who become ISIS volunteers are willing to use violence; so too are our own governments.
  • These recruits are not corrupted by ideology but by the end of ideology: they have grown up in the era of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history”, of no alternatives to capitalist globalisation. They have known no critique, only conspiracy theory, and are drawn to apocalyptic rather than popular struggle. Nevertheless, for all its lack of actual political content, the narrative of global war against the west feels to its adherents like an answer to the violence of racism, poverty and empire.
  • The intellectual reaction to the Paris attacks has continued these patterns. The dominant feature is a narcissism that describes ISIS as simply the polar opposite of whatever we value in ourselves. For liberals, ISIS is intolerance, racism and oppression of women. For conservatives, ISIS is the ideal enemy: fanatical, non-western and barbaric. In this mode, ISIS is merely the absolute ‘other’ that enables the construction of a positive image of ourselves.
  • This means that the most appropriate response to ISIS is to see it as a symptom of the ‘normal’ functioning of the modern, global system, rather than as an external element corrupting the system from outside or from the pre-modern past. Its use of social media, its rejection of the national borders of the twentieth century and its linkages to the petroleum economy all demonstrate that ISIS is a child of globalisation.
  • ISIS is certainly a monster but a monster of our own making. It was born in the chaos and carnage that followed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Its sectarian ideology and funding has come from the Saudi and Gulf ruling elites, the west’s closest regional allies after Israel. Russia and Iran have also played their role, propping up the Bashar al-Assad regime – responsible for far more civilian deaths than ISIS – and prolonging the war in Syria that enables ISIS to thrive.
  • The left should be much bolder in asserting that only an anti-racist, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist politics can provide a genuine alternative to jihadism; that more radicalisation, in the genuine sense of the word, is the solution, not the problem; that terrorism thrives in environments where mass movements advancing visions of social progress have been defeated.
  • We must therefore defend the spaces of radical politics, for the right to dream of another world.
  • there are two broad approaches to making sense of ‘Islamic extremism’: there are conservatives who regard Islam as an inherently violent culture defined essentially by its founding texts, and liberals who think the enemy is a totalitarian perversion of Islam that emerged in the twentieth century.
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