The eruption of social and political unrest has followed the impact of deepening economic turbulence across the region, due to the inflationary impact of rocketing fuel and food prices.
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The Great Unravelling: Tunisia, Egypt, and the Protracted Collapse of the American Empire - 0 views
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The global food situation has been compounded by the over-dependence of industrial agriculture on fossil fuels, consuming ten calories of fossil fuel energy for every one calorie of food energy produced
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The fuel price hikes, combining with the predatory activities of financial speculators trying to rake-in profits by investing in the commodity markets, have underpinned worldwide inflation.
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Egypt is particularly vulnerable. Its oil production peaked in 1996, and since then has declined by around 26 per cent. Since the 1960s, Egypt has moved from complete food self-sufficiency to excessive dependence on imports, subsidized by oil revenues.
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Due to such vulnerabilities, Egypt, as with many of the MENA countries, now lies on the fault-lines of the convergence of global ecological, energy and economic crises – and thus, on the frontlines of deepening global system failure.
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“Egypt benefits from certain aid provisions that are available to only a few other countries. Since 2000, Egypt’s FMF funds have been deposited in an interest bearing account in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and have remained there until they are obligated... Egypt is allowed to set aside FMF funds for current year payments only, rather than set aside the full amount needed to meet the full cost of multi-year purchases. Cash flow financing allows Egypt to negotiate major arms purchases with U.S. defense suppliers.”
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Perhaps Biden’s denial of Mubarak’s dictatorial qualities are not that difficult to understand. Since the assassination of President Anwar el-Sadat in 1981, Egypt has officially been in a continuous “state of emergency,” which under a 1958 law permits Mubarak to oversee measures unnervingly similar to the USA Patriot Act – indefinite detention; torture; secret courts; special authority for police interventions; complete absence of privacy; and so on, ad nauseum. Not to mention the fact that inequality in the U.S. is actually higher than in Egypt.
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When asked about the shocking findings of the 2009 report, Clinton herself downplayed the implications, describing Mubarak and his wife as “friends of my family.” So it is not that we do not know. It is that we did not care until the terror became so unbearable, that it exploded onto the streets of Cairo.
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On the plus side, Egypt not only has the largest population in the Middle East, but is one of the Arab world's most diversified economies with oil and natural gas reserves, world-class tourist attractions and a strategic trading location between Europe, the Middle East and Africa, which explains why no major investors have left Egypt since Mubarak’s ouster. The new administration could improve Egypt's economic prospects should it prove to be less corrupt than Mubarak’s.
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ENI, which has been operating in Egypt since 1954 through its subsidiary International Egyptian Oil Company (IEOC), owns a 56 per cent working interest in the Meleiha Concession, with Russia's Lukoil holding a 24 percent stake and Japan's Mitsui owning 20 percent. In Egypt's Western Desert ENI already produces about 36,000 bpd in five different development licenses.And, unlike Egypt’s eastern neighbour Saudi Arabia, which has been nervous about the implications of the Egyptian revolution, Qatar, which was always more enthusiastic about Egypt's political changes, is focusing more on private-sector investment there, most notably when earlier his month, Qatar Petroleum engaged in “serious” talks about investing in an Egyptian oil-refinery project.
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The Nigerian youth is no fool, says Bassey | African news, analysis and opinion - The A... - 0 views
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It is clear that the US diplomacy in Nigeria is also hinged on open and unhindered flows of crude oil and gas. When it comes to crude, there is no sync between diplomacy and democracy. It appears dictatorships and repression serve the interest of the volatile industry and US leaders. This explains why we do not hear any denunciations of the rampant impunity and human rights abuses recorded since Nigeria returned to civilian rule in 1999.
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It is clear that the US diplomacy in Nigeria is also hinged on open and unhindered flows of crude oil and gas. When it comes to crude, there is no sync between diplomacy and democracy. It appears dictatorships and repression serve the interest of the volatile industry and US leaders. This explains why we do not hear any denunciations of the rampant impunity and human rights abuses recorded since Nigeria returned to civilian rule in 1999.
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Pambazuka - Opposing massacres in Libya: A call for solidarity and vigilance - 0 views
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Belatedly, after the Arab League expelled Libya, the chairperson of the AU Commission, Jean Ping, expressed ‘deep concern’ about what was going on in Libya. It is in the face of the timid position of the leaders of the African states that this statement wants to forthrightly express solidarity with the peoples of Libya and their demand to end the Gaddafi police state.
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It is in the midst of this confusion it is necessary to say just as how Tanzanians did not classify all Libyans as supporters of Idi Amin of Uganda when Gaddafi used his mercenaries to back up that dictator in invading Tanzania in 1979 so it is also necessary to distinguish between poor African migrant workers in Libya and mercenaries and military entrepreneurs who are the leftovers from the military adventures of Gaddafi. This kind of clarity is necessary so that Africans in Libya and in other parts of the continent can distinguish between the oppressed and their oppressors in order to form the solidarity that could bring about true revolutionary transformation of relations of peoples across the Nile and the Sahara.
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Libya is supposed to be the country in Africa with the highest Human Development Index ranking in Africa. Yet, even with significant oil reserves, the wealth of Libya did little for the peoples of Libya since only a small clique around Gaddafi and his family benefited from the billions of dollars of oil revenue. Gaddafi and his ‘revolutionary committees’ did very little to address the deep exploitation and marginalisation of the peoples of Libya, especially among the country's largely young population
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While France toyed with the idea of a Mediterranean Union to compete with US military penetration of North Africa, Gaddafi was fast becoming a close ally of the United States as Condoleezza Rice flew into Libya to proclaim that ‘nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests’.
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On top of this economic relationship, Gaddafi agreed to act as the police for the European Union, arresting and detaining Africans who believed that the freedom of labour should be the same as the freedom of capital.
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I want to draw attention to my submission last year when I wrote that despite the statements of Gaddafi that he supported African unity, his leadership represented an obstacle to the future unity of the peoples of Africa.
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It was after this that Gaddafi called the extra-ordinary meeting of the Organisation of African Unity and set in motion the convergence of forces that resulted in the Constitutive Act of the African Union. From the moment this Constitutive Act came into force, Gaddafi worked with those elements who wanted to turn the African Union into a club of dictators. It must be clarified here that, contrary to reports from many quarters, Gaddafi is not the original champion of the vision of a United States of Africa. Neither did his brand of Pan-Africanism capture the essence of the kind of grassroots Pan-Africanism that had been envisioned for the unity of African peoples and for the uplifting of the dignity of African peoples. When visionaries like Kwame Nkrumah and Cheikh Anta Diop championed the idea of a federated African state in the 1960s and 1970s, they did not envision one which would be ruled by corrupt dictators and an arrogant king of kings.
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Western news agencies used the antics of Gaddafi to discredit the AU. But pan-Africanists at the grassroots worked hard to give meaning to the AU by building networks among the various constituencies of Africans who wanted to build a genuine union of peoples across borders. African women who were fighting for their rights joined with workers and oth
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The ECOSOCC, which is an official civil society general assembly of the AU, was launched in September 2008, in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Its membership includes trade unions, non-governmental organisations, women’s groups, human rights campaigners and anti-poverty campaigners.
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Gaddafi feels that he is in good company when he unleashed mass violence against the people, but the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions had changed the political calculus in Africa. While Africa is silent, Gaddafi goes back to those elements that he supported in the past to recruit mercenaries to suppress the uprising of the Libyan people. It is in the midst of this uprising where the forms of solidarity have to be very sophisticated and clear so that the machinations of foreign incursions are not engineered in an opportunistic manner to impose a solution on post-Gaddafi Libya that could rob Africa of the kind of revolutionary breakthroughs in Tunisia and Egypt.
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With the rise of popular protest against neoliberalism globally – as we are witnessing inside the United States with massive demonstrations in Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio – the US militarists and barons of Wall Street are on the defensive. Despite the isolation and repression of the people of Libya under Gaddafi, after one week of protest people have learnt enough from the Tunisian and Egyptian phases of the revolution to neutralise the armed forces of Gaddafi. This neutralisation of the armed forces means that Gaddafi and his sons are isolated.
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Now that there is the possibility of the democratisation of Libyan society, progressive persons everywhere must stand in solidarity with the peoples of Libya against the repression of Gaddafi while opposing all forms of divisive manipulations. Progressives in Europe and North America want to take Libya, Egypt and Tunisia out of Africa and term the process an Arab awakening. There are many in North Africa who may call themselves Arab, but as Firoze Manji rightly corrected some progressives in Europe, ‘Egypt is an African country.’
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Libya and Beyond - IPS - 0 views
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With Libya providing huge percentages of the oil and gas imported by powerful European countries – especially Italy – and with the UK working hard the last several years to burnish Libya’s image so that British Petroleum could claim a privileged stake in the Libyan oil industry and General Dynamics UK could sign lucrative weapons contracts, western countries came late and soft to criticize Qaddafy’s violent assault.
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Libya: It's Not About Oil, It's About Currency and Loans By John Perkins « Da... - 0 views
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The US, the other G-8 countries, the World Bank, IMF, BIS, and multinational corporations do not look kindly on leaders who threaten their dominance over world currency markets or who appear to be moving away from the international banking system that favors the corporatocracy. Saddam Hussein had advocated policies similar to those expressed by Qaddafi shortly before the US sent troops into Iraq.
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Arab Spring: flowers faded, harvest to come | openDemocracy - 0 views
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In a way counterrevolution started already mid-March 2011 when Saudi and Emirati troops invaded Bahrain to put an end to the movement. Precisely at the same moment NATO forces struck Gaddafi. Cracking down on the uprising in Bahrain, while supporting Benghazi ?
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It was an Arab movement in the sense that it happened from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian-Arabian Gulf, which constitutes a cultural and linguistic zone, even if the local dialects are different, a significant number of people have a mother tongue other than Arabic (Tamazight, Kurds…) or do not consider themselves Arabs. A region stretching out from its common destiny.
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Through the policies of infitâh (economic opening) and the process of privatization, the coherence of the system built post independence has vanished. Neoliberalism has deepened the differences between rich and poor. For the oligarchies, privatization was the opportunity to plunder and control the benefits of oil and other raw materials but also to snaffle the grants of foreign aid. In each country the gap between oligarchy and society has widened. And rage has accumulated.
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The Islamists are (provisionally) the great beneficiary of a movement they call “Islamic awakening”. The main Islamist parties have abandoned the revolutionary utopian goal of the Islamic State and progressively transformed into conservative political parties accepting the parliamentarian game. These parties are rooted in urban middle class, professionals, civil servants, etc. the kind of people who aspire to law and order more than to the turmoil of Islamic revolution.
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Samir Amin, "The Electoral Victory of Political Islam in Egypt" - 0 views
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They support a form of "lumpen development" -- to use the term originally coined by André Gunder Frank -- that imprisons the societies concerned in a spiral of pauperization and exclusion, which in turn reinforces the stranglehold of reactionary political Islam on society.
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A strong, upright Egypt would mean the end of the triple hegemony of the Gulf (submission to the discourse of Islamization of society), the United States (a vassalized and pauperized Egypt remains under its direct influence), and Israel (a powerless Egypt does not intervene in Palestine).
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The planned failure of the "Egyptian revolution" would thus guarantee the continuation of the system that has been in place since Sadat, founded on the alliance of the army high command and political Islam. Admittedly, on the strength of its electoral victory the Brotherhood is now able to demand more power than it has thus far been granted by the military. However, revising the distribution of the benefits of this alliance in favor of the Brotherhood may prove difficult.
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At the end of protracted negotiations it was agreed that Morsi was the "winner" of the second round. The assembly, like the president, was elected thanks to a massive distribution of parcels (of meat, oil, and sugar) to those who voted for the Islamists.
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We will see how the revolutionary movement, which is still firmly committed to the fight for democracy, social progress, and national independence, will carry on after this electoral charade.
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And the Muslim Brotherhood is very well placed to take advantage of this decline and perpetuate its reproduction. Their simplistic ideology confers legitimacy on a miserable market/bazaar economy that is completely antithetical to the requirements of any development worthy of the name. The fabulous financial means provided to the Muslim Brotherhood (by the Gulf states) allows them to translate this ideology into efficient action: financial aid to the informal economy, charitable services (medical dispensaries etc.).
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Who's heard of the 'African Spring'? | openDemocracy - 0 views
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‘We’ve heard so much negativity, but can you tell us what you are actually doing about it?’ The question came from the back of the hall at the Africa Centre in London, where over 100 people had gathered to hear about the state of contemporary African protest movements from a panel of African activists including Ayanda Kota of the South African Unemployed Peoples’ Movement, Bayo Oyenuga of Occupy Nigeria, Osama Zumam of the Sudanese Communist Party and the respected commentator and political activist Yash Tandon.
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However, these events have rarely been articulated into an African narrative, with the result that western audiences end up being drip-fed stories reinforcing the impression of stereotypical African instability and ‘Afro-pessimism’. Yet if the under or mis-reported uprisings, protests, revolts and changes of regime in many parts of Africa over the past few years (including, amongst others Cote D'Ivoire, Malawi, Burkina Faso, Gabon, Ethiopia, Swaziland, Uganda, Nigeria, Sudan and Mozambique) have told us anything, it is that politics on the continent does not always, or mostly, take place at the point of a gun.
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Shrinking the state in Africa (an outcome of these policies as enforced by international donors) has produced the very conditions which protestors have revolted against: corruption, rising utility prices, and growing inequality.
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Of course, African protest movements do not face an easy route. Confronted with the deregulatory pressures of global development frameworks these movements must contend with mushrooming food and utility prices, and the violence meted out by states when faced with meaningful opposition to neo-liberal economic programmes. Indeed, the negativity questioned by the audience member in London referred to the state-sponsored violence visited upon African protestors which the different protestors repeatedly referred to.
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social change takes time, and requires a broader social base than just the urban middle class elite which characterised the Tahrir Square phenomenon.
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Calls for greater democracy in Africa are not framed purely within the actions of specific corrupt ruling elites. Rather it is the relationships between these ruling elites and the agents of global free-market capitalism which are the source of much public anger. It is these relationships which have amongst other things shrunk public services and robbed the continent of the bulk of the profits from its most valuable natural resources. And these relationships have been enabled by international donor policies which have shrunk the state in Africa in the belief that it is the state which has been the source of African’s problems.
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And so, if we search for images of recent African protests what we will find is not an overwhelming number of crowds with placards calling for greater openness in government, but a set of explicitly socio-economic demands relating to price rises and unemployment, or the withdrawal of affordable public services and utilities, all brought on by the skewed position of Africa in the global economy, and the enforced privatisation of land, energy and other resources which have largely fallen into the hands of foreign profit-extractive companies and their collaborators in the ruling elites of African countries.
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African elites are not uniquely corrupt, nor do they exist in a vacuum of African corruption, but neither is Africa a pure victim of contemporary economic imperialism. African elites are as complicit in processes of resource and profit extraction as the multinational corporations such as Shell Oil who so often come in for the vitriol of social justice and anti-corporate activists.
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It is not enough for international donors to call for ‘free and fair’ elections, only for them to enforce, by dint of the implicit threat of aid withdrawal, a complicity amongst all the candidates with neoliberal economic orthodoxy. This is what we find repeatedly in African elections, and in this respect at least it would be fair to say that African elections differ very little from elections in many other parts of the world, including the UK.
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African activists have much to teach the rest of the world in resisting austerity, and the many obstacles that lie in the path of such resistance, and it is about time more of us started to listen.
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Trade unions and the construction of a specifically Tunisian protest configuration | op... - 0 views
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Yet, one local trade union may save the day. If it did, it would not be doing so for the first time. For this is no ordinary union. The Tunisian General Union of Labour (UGTT) has affected the character of Tunisia as a whole since the late 1940s. It impacted significantly the 2011 revolution and the transition period, and is likely to impact the future. In this, it is unparalleled elsewhere in the Arab world. And it is largely because of it that one may confidently say that Tunisia is not Egypt, or Syria or Yemen. Indeed, to understand Tunisia, one must get to grips with its labour movement.
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UGTT has been the outcome of Tunisian resistance and its incubator at the same time. For example, in 1984 it aligned itself with the rioting people during the bread revolt; in 2008, it was the main catalyst of the disobedience movement in the Mining Basin of Gafsa; and, come December 2010, UGTT, particularly its teachers’ unions and local offices, became the headquarters of revolt against Ben Ali.
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In 1978, UGTT went on general strike to protest what amounted to a coup perpetrated by the Bourguiba government to change a union leadership judged to be too oppositional and too powerful. The cost was the worst setback in the union’s history since the assassination of its founder in 1952. The entire leadership of the union was put on trial and replaced by regime loyalists. Ensuing popular riots were repressed by the army, resulting in tens of deaths.
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With a labour movement engrained in the political culture of the country, and at all levels, a culture of trade unionism has become a structural component of Tunisian society. There has not been a proper sociology of this. But the implications are important. I enumerate some of them here in the form of observations:
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One challenge to leftist parties after 2011 has been how to move away from being trade unionists and become politicians: in other words, how to think beyond small issues and using unionist means to tackle wider issues. This has been expressed by prominent leftists, such as the late Chokri Belaid, who challenged his heavily conformist party to think like a party, not like a union. This meant finding different, broader bases for political alliances and laying out projects for society at large.
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The radicalisation of UGTT in fact finds its roots in this evolution as the university in Tunisia, particularly in the 1970s and 80s was a space of radical activism and left wing politics.
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While the absence of women in leadership could be explained by the very nature of trade union work, which requires time and presence in public places which are not very friendly to women; but this remains a serious weakness of UGTT, and a profound challenge. In Tunisia, this is particularly important, as the role of women has been a marked feature of the society at large and of its protest culture in particular, throughout the post-independence period, both within and outside the labor movement.
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Post 2011, UGTT seems to have regained a cohesion it lacked during the Ben Ali period when the gap between the leadership and the grassroots was widening.
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A combination of the symbolic capital of resistance accumulated over decades, a record of results delivered for its members and a well-oiled machine at the level of organisation across the country and every sector of the economy, has made UGTT unassailable and unavoidable at the same time.
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The GCC oil sheikhs ‘paid’ $15bn in aid for the July 2013 coup in Egypt, but the handouts were quickly used up on buttressing the Egyptian pound and on a dismal $4.9bn stimulus package. The Egyptian pound has continued its slide, economic growth has stalled (at best its 1% in the first quarter of 2014), the budget deficit stands at14% of GDP, unemployment is 13.4%, inflation is 10%, while public debt and foreign debt are accelerating. GCC aid is not just monetary, and includes fuel and natural gas, which Egypt was cavalierly exporting until last year.
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Investors want to have their cake and eat it: no more corrupt Mubarakite officials, and at the same time no more challenges to corrupt investment deals (which often strip a state company of its assets and lay off workers, spiriting any profits abroad).
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The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) government tried to square the circle. It allowed the illegal privatisations to be challenged, turned back the massive corruption, and encouraged a new class of small and more devout businessmen to build a new Egypt, emulating the Turkish miracle which unfolded under the Islamists there. Egypt is ripe for such a development, but the paranoia of the secular elite and their unwillingness to make room for a less corrupt, more dynamic, more home-grown, non-Cairene strata of entrepreneurs means that the only way forward for Egypt has been crushed “in the near term”.
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The Egyptian military saw the MB as too sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, in particular, Hamas in Gaza, and feared the MB was distancing itself from the Egypt-Israel peace treaty
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The MB were also beginning to move the Israeli mountain by refusing polite negotiations, working directly with Hamas (and mediating Hamas-Fatah talks) and developing an ambitious plan to transform the Sinai, including building civilian infrastructure, creating industry, and strengthening its internal and military security, in defiance of the US-Israeli assumption that it was a no-man’s buffer zone.
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The emerging approach could help slow the pace of upheaval to avoid further violence, the administration's top priority, and help preserve important strategic alliances. At the same time, the approach carries risk. Autocratic governments might not deliver on their reform promises, making Washington look like it was doing their bidding at the public's expense.
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Indeed, administration officials say the White House is not "unconditionally" behind the monarchy in Bahrain, and has made clear that the U.S. expected to see quick progress on reforms and restraint by security forces.
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The Arab diplomats found a particularly receptive ear in the Pentagon. As Egypt began to sway, some U.S. military officers had doubts about the administration's approach. The U.S. military has strong ties with the country. Some worried that the U.S. was moving too quickly to push aside a steadfast ally and that radical change in Cairo could destabilize the region.
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Though skeptical of Bahraini claims that Iran and its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, were instigating Shiite protests, U.S. and European officials fear the crisis could benefit Tehran. The Mideast turmoil has driven up oil prices, helping Tehran refill its coffers and withstand international sanctions aimed at curbing its nuclear program.
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The US and Israel are terrified of the threat of something similar occurring in the Arab world — should the democratic revolutions be successful and extend to exerting democratic control over oil and other resources.
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However, as Santiago Alba Rico and Alma Allende said in a February 24 Rebelion article “From the Arab world to Latin America”, Venezuela and Cuba’s failure to condemn the brutal repression being carried out by the regime of Muammar Gaddafi’s against a popular revolt will have negative consequences for the anti-imperialist project in Latin America.
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Ignoring the brutal reality of Gaddafi, who has been a friend in recent years of the West and its allied dictators, risks breaking ties with popular Arab movements, they pointed out.
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One thing is clear, just as the US has sought to prop up dictatorships in the Arab world, it will continue its struggle to defeat the popular revolutionary movements in Latin America.
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If the IMF leadership praised the dictatorship, insisted on austerity and advocated squeezing poor people for more taxes, what business does it have today in giving similar advice to Tunisia, or anywhere in the Middle East and North Africa, or for that matter Europe or anywhere at all? What can we learn about IMF thinking in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, as well as Palestine?
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In contrast, there was no IMF conditionality aimed at reforming the dictatorship and halting widespread corruption by Ben Ali and his wife's notorious Trabelsi family, or lessening the two families' extreme level of business concentration, or ending the regime's reliance upon murderous security forces to defend Tunisian crony capitalism, or lowering the hedonism for which Ben Ali had become famous.
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In addition to expanding Public Private Partnerships (PPPs, a euphemism for services privatization and outsourcing), the IMF named its priorities: "adopting as early as possible a full-fledged VAT, complementing energy subsidy reform with better-targeted transfers to the most needy, and containing the fiscal cost of the pension and health reforms."
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Resuming privatization and increasing the role of carefully structured and appropriately priced PPPs should assist fiscal adjustment and mobilize private resources for infrastructure investment.
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In that document, IMF staff worried that "managing popular expectations and providing some short-term relief measures will be essential to maintain social cohesion in the short term," and that this would come at a price: "external and fiscal financing gaps of US$9-12 billion... which would need to be filled with exceptional support from Egypt's multilateral and bilateral development partners, particularly given the limited scope for adjustment in the short term."
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As Adam Hanieh from London's School of Oriental and African Studies concluded just after the G8 summit and allied Arab states pledged $15 billion to Egypt, The plethora of aid and investment initiatives advanced by the leading powers in recent days represents a conscious attempt to consolidate and reinforce the power of Egypt's dominant class in the face of the ongoing popular mobilizations. They are part of, in other words, a sustained effort to restrain the revolution within the bounds of an "orderly transition" - to borrow the perspicacious phrase that the U.S. government repeatedly used following the ousting of Mubarak.
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If successful, the likely outcome of this - particularly in the face of heightened political mobilization and the unfulfilled expectations of the Egyptian people - is a society that at a superficial level takes some limited appearances of the form of liberal democracy but, in actuality, remains a highly authoritarian neoliberal state dominated by an alliance of the military and business elites.[10]
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They welcomed Libya's strong macroeconomic performance and the progress on enhancing the role of the private sector and supporting growth in the non-oil economy. The fiscal and external balances remain in substantial surplus and are expected to strengthen further over the medium term, and the outlook for Libya's economy remains favorable (emphasis added).[12]
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The fund's mission to Tripoli had somehow omitted to check whether the "ambitious" reform agenda was based on any kind of popular support. Libya is not an isolated case. And the IMF doesn't look good after it gave glowing reviews to many of the countries shaken by popular revolts in recent weeks.[13]