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“In order to defend ourselves in the future against other totalitarian regimes, we have to understand how they worked in the past, like a vaccine,” said Lukasz Kaminski, the president of Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance.

Reconciling with the past is an issue that has hovered over post-Communist Europe for decades. But today that experience has broader global resonance, serving as a point of discussion across the Arab world where popular revolts have cast off long-serving dictators, raising similarly uncomfortable questions about individual complicity in autocratic regimes. Arab nations are forced to grapple with the same issues of guilt and responsibility that Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe are once again beginning to seriously mine. Time makes the past easier to confront, less threatening, but no less urgent to resolve. The experience here, however, suggests that it may be years, decades perhaps, before the Arab world can be expected to look inward.

The resurfacing a generation later of these issues is not entirely without controversy, often driven by hard-line governments and prompting accusations of score-settling and political opportunism.

In contrast, Europe’s eastern and southern neighbors, Russia and the Muslim countries of the Near East, provide many examples of churches and mosques standing side by side. Most certainly not more democratic or liberal than Western Europe, Russia and the Muslim countries of the Middle East are more accustomed to and accepting of religious diversity and its architectural representations. A bewildering variety of Christian denominations and their churches adorn the Syrian landscape, and I was pleasantly surprised to find churches along with synagogues and mosques in Moscow and elsewhere in present-day Russia, despite the pervasive anti-Semitism and Islamophobia found in that country. Even in Turkey, where, as a result of nationalism, discriminatory policies and multiple wars in the first half of the 20th century, only a very small Christian minority remains today, one can nonetheless find hundreds of churches relatively intact. A comparison with the vanished mosques and minarets of Hungary, Greece, Spain, Sicily, Romania, Serbia and elsewhere in Europe is inescapable.

Tunisia’s leader claimed Sunday that some desperate youths are being paid to try to leave Tunisia illegally for Europe, saying the goal is to damage the country from within and hurt its ties with Europe.President Kais Saied made the remarks during a stroll down the iconic Avenue Bourguiba, the main axis in the Tunisian capital of Tunis, a week after firing the prime minister and other top officials and freezing parliament. He listened to passersby calling out his name and shouting “Tunisia!” but said nothing about his much-awaited next steps.

He claimed that some of his countrymen with political motives are paying desperate youth to make the trip, saying their intention is to repeat the mass illegal migration that began after the Tunisian revolution a decade ago.

Saied made the same assertion earlier Sunday when he formally accepted 1.5 million doses of anti-COVID-19 vaccines from Italy, warning against any “political exploitation” of the country’s youths.

Yet another clash between the two main Libya camps is now brewing, and events in recent weeks suggest that the fighting will be more devastating than at any time before—and still may not produce a definitive victory for either side.

Facing stiff resistance from disparate militias nominally aligned with the government, the LNA has failed to breach downtown Tripoli. On top of this, the marshal’s campaign, while destructive, has been hampered by gross strategic and tactical inefficiency. The resulting war of attrition and slower pace of combat revealed yet another flaw in his coalition: Few eastern Libyan fighters wish to risk their lives for Haftar 600 miles away from home.

the UAE carried out more than 900 air strikes in the greater Tripoli area last year using Chinese combat drones and, occasionally, French-made fighter jets. The Emirati military intervention helped contain the GNA’s forces but did not push Haftar’s objectives forward. Instead, it had an adverse effect by provoking other regional powers. Turkey responded to the UAE by deploying Bayraktar TB2 drones and several dozen Turkish officers to carry out roughly 250 strikes in an effort to help the GNA resist Haftar’s onslaught. The stalemate also inspired Russia to increase its own involvement in Libya.

the motorcycle-riding, leftist, feminist, pro-LGBTQ Canan Kaftancioglu, Istanbul district head for the Republican People’s Party (CHP).

Kaftancioglu is widely recognized at home as a key factor in her party’s success battling President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. She is both a public iconoclast and a tireless behind-the-scenes worker—and at 48 years old, a symbol of generational change in a party traditionally dominated by older men. Her style of politics is an implicit rejection of the nationalist faction of her own party

Since becoming Istanbul district head 2018, she’s poured energy into teaming up with other opposition parties, mobilizing young professionals, and developing a new approach—grassroots in organization, conciliatory in tone—to win over segments of the population that had previously often been ignored by the party.

the confrontation is likely to reduce the level of pressure to reform until now put by Europe on Middle Eastern and North African autocrats. The shift in the attention of European leaders towards security in Eastern Europe will likely permit despots and autocrats to further consolidate and roll back the respect for human rights and good governance.  

authoritarian leaders in the Southern Mediterranean have over the past two decades successfully built leverage among Western leaders by posing as partners in fighting Islamist terrorism and as partners in fighting migration towards Europe

autocratic leaders in oil- and gas-exporting Middle Eastern and North African countries will in the short run be able to increase their political leverage among European leaders by posing as suppliers of Europe’s immediate energy gap. Algeria has already done so – and other countries like Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Iran are likely to follow.

Agricultural production in Western Europe is set to decline over the coming decade, with output in Africa and Asia expected to increase, the OECD and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization said

Middle East meanwhile faces a rising threat of food insecurity, the report said, as conflict, climate change and poor policy all have the effect of keeping the region overly reliant on imports

In sub-Saharan Africa, crop production is set to expand by 30 percent, with meat and dairy both set to grow by 25 percent

Ankara said today that it had launched Operation Spring Shield against the Syrian Arab Army on a day that saw Turkey down two Russian-made Syrian air force jets, and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to meet Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on March 5 over the unfolding Idlib crisis.

Turkey said it had destroyed several air defense systems, more than 100 tanks and killed 2,212 members of the Syrian forces, including three top generals in drone strikes since Feb 27

The dramatic escalation pitting NATO member Turkey against the far weaker Syrian Arab army followed Feb. 27 airstrikes that killed at least 36 Turkish soldiers in Idlib, sending shock waves throughout Turkey.

The ban on the Ülkü Ocaklari (Idealist Hearths), also known by the moniker “Gray Wolves,” is framed by various national parliaments as a crackdown on Turkish far-right extremism. In its annual Turkey report released last month, the European Parliament urged the EU and its member states to consider adding the Gray Wolves to the EU terrorist list and to ban their associations. This constitutes the first official bid to link the organization to terrorism. Firing back a rapid denunciation, Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesperson Tanju Bilgiç described the Gray Wolves as part of “a legal movement, which is associated with a long-established political party in Turkey.”

The Ülkücü movement is the outgrowth of the far-right Nationalist Action Party (which later became the Nationalist Movement Party, MHP) led by the party chairperson Devlet Bahçeli, a seasoned politician who has commanded do-or-die loyalty among the party’s rank and file since taking over from Alparslan Turkes after his death in 1997. The Idealist Hearths or Gray Wolves began as the party’s youth movement in the 1960s but gained notoriety for its daredevil brand of Turkish nationalism and nefarious role in armed violence in the Cold War modus operandi of the 1970s and 1980s that targeted so-called internal enemies in the murky underworld of the Turkish “deep state.” Among the more notorious members of the Gray Wolves is Mehmet Ali Ağca, the gunman behind the assassination attempt 40 years ago against Pope John Paul II, said to be “in revenge” for an attack on the Grand Mosque of Mecca.

Legend, folklore, and a romanticized history of conquest and victory are central to the Ülkücü worldview, not unlike other ideologically organized movements elsewhere. In Turkic mythology, a gray wolf in pre-Islamic times led ancient Turkish tribes out of the wilderness of Central Asia, where they had been trapped for centuries following military defeat, and into salvation.

With the coronavirus pandemic further squeezing already scant economic opportunities, Algerians and Tunisians are more determined than ever to reach Europe

60 people, mostly women and children, drowned off the Tunisian coast. But this has not put Hamid off. An engineer by profession, he has work, but is forced to live with his parents because his salary is not enough to rent a separate apartment

The migrants are known locally as “harraga”, “those who burn” — a reference to successful travellers setting their identity papers alight upon reaching their chosen destination, to avoid repatriation

Saied’s so-called emergency measures remain in place, and the U.S. State Department said Wednesday that no further action has been taken. “We are monitoring and engaged,” a State Department spokesperson told Foreign Policy. Some activists and regional experts say more concrete forms of pressure from the United States are needed. They say preserving democracy in Tunisia will be a test of U.S. President Joe Biden’s central commitment to what he has called a “defining question of our time”—that is, “Can democracies come together to deliver real results for our people in a rapidly changing world?” 

Critics like Dunne say the administration has fallen seriously short of what Blinken, in a major March 3 speech, said would be a new U.S. policy to “incentivize democratic behavior” and “encourage others to make key reforms … [and] fight corruption.”

“If this administration wants to be serious about protecting democracy as a broad policy approach, there are really few places more significant.” It wouldn’t cost a lot, Feldman points out. But making clear that Saied’s moves are unacceptable would “show we actually believe in democracy and we’re not being merely situational about it.”

Since Kais Saied's assumption of the Tunisian presidency in 2019, the number of African migrants who have arrived in Tunisia without being stopped or registered has dramatically increased. “Officially, 10,000 irregular migrants have crossed the borders from Libya to Tunisia during the first half of 2022”, M.E., a former UNHCR employee in Medenine revealed. In reality, the numbers are much bigger.

it is believed foreign migrants in Tunisia far exceed a million. 

Since the start of his tenure, Saied has put the army and the police at the behest of his political project. After his referendum on a new constitution, Saied sacked and replaced nine high-ranking police officers. Furthermore, Saied's Interior Minister Taoufik Charfeddine has been appointing his own friends to key positions in the police and the National Guard.

A friend of Mohamed’s, an unemployed telecommunications engineer named Nabil Selliti, left Douar Hicher to fight in Syria. Oussama Romdhani, who edits the Arab Weekly in Tunis, told me that in the Arab world the most likely radicals are people in technical or scientific fields who lack the kind of humanities education that fosters critical thought. Before Selliti left, Mohamed asked him why he was going off to fight. Selliti replied, “I can’t build anything in this country. But the Islamic State gives us the chance to create, to build bombs, to use technology.” In July, 2013, Selliti blew himself up in a suicide bombing in Iraq.

Tourism, one of Tunisia’s major industries, dropped by nearly fifty per cent after June 26th last year, when, on a beach near the resort town of Sousse, a twenty-three-year-old student and break-dancing enthusiast pulled an automatic weapon out of his umbrella and began shooting foreigners; he spared Tunisian workers, who tried to stop him. The terrorist, who had trained at an Islamic State camp in Libya, killed thirty-eight people, thirty of them British tourists, before being shot dead by police.

“The youth are lost,” Kamal told me. “There’s no justice.” Douar Hicher, he said, “is the key to Tunisia.” He continued, “If you want to stop terrorism, then bring good schools, bring transportation—because the roads are terrible—and bring jobs for young people, so that Douar Hicher becomes like the parts of Tunisia where you Westerners come to have fun.”

The appeal of the ideology of Daesh, al Qaeda, and other affiliates will not easily go away. Terrorist acts on our streets were carried out before Daesh and would continue independently of its armed operations in the Middle East. The fight against terrorism must continue with full vigor but with greater emphasis on timely intelligence gathering, financial measures, and anti-recruitment and radicalization measures.

Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and other countries in the Middle East face destructive pressure from transnational forces that threaten their survival. Their difficulties in turn provide an excuse and opportunity for all sorts of interventions by all sorts of countries and nonstate actors. The result isn’t just a blood bath but massive migration and terrorist pressure against Turkey and the rest of Europe, which is at its doorstep. Their chaos also acts as an incubator of hatreds and threats against the United States. Resilient nation-states must form the basis of any order and stability in the Middle East. The vision of Bashar al-Assad will eventually lose, but a united Syria must ultimately win the long war.

Turkey’s Operation Olive Branch, which has involved a military incursion into Syria, is above all an act of self-defense against a build-up of terrorists who have already proved aggressive against our population centers. As host to 3.5 million Syrians, Turkey also intends Olive Branch to clear roadblocks to peace in Syria posed by opponents of the country’s unitary future

Some have attempted to make the Arab spring ‘unknowable’ as a socio-political phenomenon, all the better to obscure the intentions of its subjects and justify counterrevolution. But the reality is that its aims of establishing freedom and democracy in a region run by decades-old systems of tyranny exists beyond its popularly accepted timeline

In almost every national situation where counterrevolution has triumphed, it has been allowed to do so without any hindrance by the democratic West – in fact, in many cases it’s with direct or indirect support from it

There was never any true support for democracy from those who pretended to be its bastions and patrons, all while powerful foreign anti-democratic forces, such as Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, mobilised viciously on the side of counterrevolution to crush nascent democracy

Kuru postulates that domestic political relations between rulers and the intellectual, economic, and religious classes, and the rearrangement thereof, explains the ascendance of Muslim-ruled areas in the eighth to twelfth centuries, their subsequent decline and the simultaneous dominance of Western Europe beginning in the early modern period. According to Kuru, “In early Islamic history, Islamic scholars’ independence from the state and the economic influence of merchants” created a space for philosophical and intellectual freedom outside of state control. Later political authorities, most notably the Seljuks, would bring the Islamic religious establishment, the ulema, under state control. The Seljuks would also introduce land and tax reforms that curtailed the economic and political influence of the merchant class. Western Europe, in contrast, underwent the opposite political and economic process in the early modern period: political and religious authorities fought and gradually disentangled from one another, universities fostered intellectual growth, and a merchant class emerged and wielded increasing political and economic power.

the religion-state entanglement that Kuru sees as the primary force hampering intellectual progress and innovation

his major claims – that Islam can be interpreted to support many different political, social, and economic projects, that neither colonial rule nor Islam fully explains the political and social conditions of Muslim-majority countries, and, most crucially, that the ulema’s conservatism and political co-option has made it difficult to counter extreme interpretations of Islamic theology and social organisation.

appeals to nationalism and the worst inclinations among voters are precisely what worry so many of Erdoğan’s critics. Not only is the country in an official state of emergency marked by sweeping purges and vicious terrorist attacks, but the president is also using the sort of violent rhetoric one expects to hear from would-be authoritarians in countries like the Philippines or United States. It is this tendency to dismiss or demonize opponents in conjunction with the new powers the referendum gives Erdoğan that have led so many commentators in America and Europe to prophesy the “end” of democracy in Turkey. Others point out the that electoral campaign has not been “free or fair,” which suggests that the victory was largely preordained, merely a reflection of a “slide” into dictatorship already occurring.[3]

since taking office, and despite terrorism and coup attempts, President Erdoğan has been unable to mobilize some of his most vocal supporters to grant him greater powers.

As for the provinces where the YES vote was higher than the November 2015 AKP vote or the 2014 Erdoğan vote, these occurred almost entirely in the southeast. While it is possible that voters in this region have grown sick and tired of PKK militants using urban areas as a base and provoking government reprisals, the numbers suggest an alternative: namely, that two years of violence and the government’s crackdown on regional political organizations have made mobilization difficult.

Before the pandemic spread, a number of countries in the Middle East and North Africa had been experiencing a wave of public protests for more democratic and accountable rule akin to the so-called Arab Spring of 2011. "The crackdown started several months before the pandemic, but has been exacerbated by the emergency laws and extrajudicial tools regimes are employing under the guise of the pandemic," Sarah Yerkes, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace Middle East Program. 

"Regimes across North Africa are exploiting the pandemic to crackdown on activists, journalists, and anyone critical of the regime, particularly those using social media."

In Algeria, with the popular anti-government protest movement known as the Hirak put on hold for safety reasons since March, the repressive climate, arguably the worst in North Africa, has worsened with the continued arrests of journalists and activists, which has been a maintained pattern since President Abdelmadjid Tebboune took office in December.