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"We are outraged and very concerned about the court's harsh decisions against the employees of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Cairo and the order to close the office," said German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle. "The course taken by the Egyptian judiciary is very worrying. It weakens civil society as an important pillar of democracy in the new democratic Egypt."

The U.S.-based groups were training Egyptians in advocacy, voter education and election monitoring. The Muslim Brotherhood, banned under Mubarak, has come under fire for proposing new regulations that would severely restrict independent groups. Seeking to ease the concerns, President Mohamed Mursi last week submitted a new draft law to parliament. But Western and Egyptian critics say the draft still falls short. The EU, a major donor to Cairo, said on June 2 it would unnecessarily constrain the work of NGOs in Egypt, while Washington said the bill imposed significant government controls on the activities and funding of civic groups.

the unions’ most dangerous intervention has been their advocacy for the “Prosecution of Abuses Against the Armed Forces” draft law. In 2015, after the passage of a counterterrorism law, police unions began pushing for the Ministry of the Interior-drafted bill, which would, according to an Amnesty International report, “authorize security forces to use lethal force to protect property even when it is not strictly necessary to protect life, contrary to international standards.” It would also outlaw the “denigration” of the security forces and criminalize the unauthorized publication of “national security” information—a vague law posing an obvious threat to journalists.

Yassine Ayari, a rebellious Tunisian MP, is one of the country’s youngest, at 37. He’s also the only MP to have called for the dissolution of a security union. In a clamorous cafe in the basement of Tunisia’s parliament, he said that at several critical junctures since the revolution, the unions have intervened to protect those in the security apparatuses caught up in cases of torture or murder—citing the unions’ 2011 besieging of a military court that was trying officers accused of killing protesters, their call for members not to attend hearings by Tunisia’s Truth and Dignity Commission, and their storming of a courthouse to stop a trial and release five colleagues accused of torture

When police units have been accused of torture, they have responded with vicious defensiveness

the police unions aren’t just hostile to individuals claiming police abuse. They also oppose post-revolutionary institutions aimed at reckoning with the past and achieving a semblance of accountability. Hammami said, “Police unions have also been very hostile to the IVD (the French acronym used for Tunisia’s Truth and Dignity Commission, charged with carrying out investigations of almost 60 years of abuses, whose mandate ended in December of last year). The IVD summons officers that might be involved in cases they’re investigating. [The unions] have encouraged their members not to cooperate. They issue statements publicly on Facebook. They put out the message to their members that they don’t have to cooperate with the IVD. Sometimes it’s even more aggressive, saying, ‘Don’t go.’”

Truth and Dignity Commission President Sihem Bensedrine said that she believes the security unions are one of the parties most responsible for the undermining of transitional justice in Tunisia. “One of the strongest anti-justice groups are the police unions,” she said. “We have in our final report published their communiqués where they call for police not to testify before the IVD, and where they say they will not assure the security of the courts judging the police officers.”

the old regime elements in government need the security forces if they want to maintain power and return Tunisia to the way it was before the revolution. “The old powers want to come back,” she said. “They’re trying to use the police unions to do this. They’re organizing themselves to repress our free voices and protect themselves from accountability,”

Organized by SOLIC (the division of Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict), the principal civilian advisor to the Secretary of Defense, the screening’s purpose was to cast doubt on the over-confident nation-building rhetoric of the neoconservatives in the Bush administration. The flier publicizing the screening warned that you can “win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas.” It gestured to disconcerting similarities between Algeria and events beginning to unfold in Iraq: “Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar?” Barely three months after Bush declared “mission accomplished” in Iraq, SOLIC was presenting a different scenario shaped by the tenets of counterinsurgency

After the film’s high-profile screenings at the Pentagon and the Council on Foreign Relations, it was rereleased by the Criterion Collection in a special three-disc edition. The bonus materials included a conversation with Richard A. Clarke, former chief counterterrorism advisor on the National Security Council and an outspoken critic of the Bush administration, and Michael Sheehan, who led SOLIC from 2011 to 2013 and who currently holds a distinguished Chair at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point — one of the Professional Military Education institutions where The Battle of Algiers is regularly taught. Both Clarke and Sheehan use the film to make the case that defeating an insurgency requires winning the “war of values and ideas.” With one eye trained on Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, they emphasize that having recourse to practices such as torture inevitably undermines any attempt at a political solution.

All of the defense professionals whom I spoke with tied their interest in the film to their advocacy of counterinsurgency strategies that emphasize political solutions and reject tactics such as torture

In one of the film’s most famous scenes, women who are about to set off bombs in the European quarter are shown unveiling and changing their appearance in order to look more French. In reality, the women responsible for setting bombs were mostly students who already dressed in European style. Though the film shows them acting under the tutelage of Saadi Yacef, they were often better educated than their male colleagues. Since gender remains a focal point of American foreign policy in the Middle East, it’s important to recognize that depictions of Muslim societies frequently distort or oversimplify the nature of their gender relations.

To hold that it’s better to win people over with values and ideas rather than by force is good in principle, but it assumes that there are social and political principles that could unite all parties. This seems highly questionable in a situation such as Iraq, where the objectives of the US presence have been far less straightforward than those of the French in Algeria, and where “insurgency” has become increasingly protean.

The film seems to be taught in military colleges as a mirror of history, while history is approached as a reservoir of examples from which lessons can be drawn. Ben Nickels, an associate professor at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, observed that this approach is somewhat symptomatic of the field of military history as a whole. Over the last 30 years, military history has all but vanished from the academic mainstream, flourishing only in professional military education, where it has been sheltered from historiographical practices that focus on primary documents as contingent representations.

important to acknowledge the selective, largely symbolic ways in which it frames the war. Consider, for example, its famous treatment of the issue of torture. Though the film examines torture as a moral and political problem, it nonetheless approaches it in the same way that counterinsurgency theory does — as a form of muscular interrogation whose purpose is to obtain actionable intelligence. Yet as Raphaëlle Branche, the leading authority on the question, has shown, torture was used in Algeria not only to extract information but also — as in Latin America and more recently Iraq — as a mode of psychological warfare. Practiced on women as well as men, and often taking the form of rape, it became, above all, a way of inflicting humiliation.

the inescapable lesson of The Battle of Algiers is that if you act as the French did in Algeria, you’re going to lose

A half century after the film’s making, the film inspires more left-wing nostalgia than genuine revolutionary fervor

On Nov. 8 and 15, two episodes of the news satire Al-Basheer Show were jammed, as soon as the broadcast began on the German DW channel. Jamming would start at 9 p.m. while the episodes were being shown, and would end an hour later at 10 p.m., when the show was over.

The government clampdown on the media and journalists has taken several forms, ranging from obscure threats to the shutdown of media institutions to jamming channels or not offering security protection. There were also insinuations that media channels have been inciting people to protest.

“I received a text message on my personal phone threatening to kill me and attack my family if I continue to use my phone to contact the channel where I work.”

The Iraqi Media House, a civil society organization in Iraq, reported that “as a result of the internet ban, 90% of Iraqi media coverage was cut off, and 70% of social media coverage was dead. Fears of targeting media channels and journalists also reduced coverage.”

The Press Freedom Advocacy Association in Iraq reported that there had been “89 violations against journalists," 33 death threats and the shutdown of or warnings to 17 offices and headquarters of media institutions.

One of Rowland’s sons, a senior executive at the Luxembourg-based bank, emailed the plan to Will Tricks, who had swapped a career in the U.K.’s foreign intelligence service MI6 for a job advising MBZ. Tricks, who acted as a go-between for the Rowlands, was paid as a contractor by Banque Havilland. The presentation found its way to the UAE’s ambassador to the U.S., who stored it on his computer under “Rowland Banque Havilland.”

Last year, Qatar sued Banque Havilland in London, accusing it of orchestrating a campaign that cost the country more than $40 billion to shore up its banks and defend its currency peg against the U.S. dollar. While the lawsuit has received attention in the media, the extent of other work Banque Havilland did on behalf of MBZ hasn’t been previously reported. Nor has the role of Tricks.

Havilland is facing a criminal investigation in Luxembourg for, among other things, its dealings with the family of another head of state, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev. It has also had communications with regulators in Luxembourg and the U.K. about the Qatar plan

Devising a plan for economic sabotage, whether implemented or not, is beyond the remit of most private banks. But Banque Havilland is no ordinary financial institution. The firm specialized in doing things others might balk at, the documents and emails show. Its clients included kleptocrats and alleged criminals in corruption hotspots including Nigeria and Azerbaijan. Its owners solicited business in sanctioned countries such as North Korea and Zimbabwe.

Not all of its clients were pariahs, and none was as important as MBZ, people with knowledge of the matter say. The crown prince, 59, is one of the Arab world’s most powerful leaders. A graduate of Britain’s Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, he commands one of the best-equipped armies in the region and has waged wars in Yemen, Libya and Somalia. He’s not as well-known as his protégé and neighbor Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince. And he isn’t president of the UAE, a title held by a half-brother.

When MBZ wanted to develop a foothold in southern Africa’s commodities market in 2011, Tricks worked with the Rowlands on sourcing potential investments, documents and emails show. They picked Zimbabwe as a hub for the region, but there was a problem. The country was subject to U.S. and European Union sanctions that banned dealings with President Robert Mugabe’s inner circle and many of its state-owned companies. Tricks passed on advice about setting up a trust in Abu Dhabi for any Zimbabwe deals to hide the identities of investors from the U.S. Treasury Department, which oversees sanctions enforcement

the UAE is now a major trading partner with the country despite continuing U.S. sanctions, and it opened an embassy there in 2019

Robeson, the foundation’s chairman, was elected to the Human Rights Watch board a few months later, in April 2012. He was named to the advocacy group’s Middle East and North Africa advisory committee. “We have been given the complete list of projects currently being undertaken by Human Rights Watch in the Middle East and North Africa,” Robeson wrote soon after joining the board, in a memo he emailed to Jonathan Rowland that he asked him to share with his father. Robeson also said he’d been given detailed notes of a meeting between the group and Britain’s then-Secretary of State for International Development Andrew Mitchell, along with other private briefings.

The foundation appears to have had no other purpose than making the Human Rights Watch donations. It was registered in Guernsey after the first gift and wound down when Robeson left the board in 2016.

Emma Daly, a spokeswoman for Human Rights Watch in New York, said the organization vetted Robeson at the time he was being considered for the board and couldn’t find any conflicts. She said the group didn’t know about Rowland’s or the bank’s connections to MBZ. Its most recent report on the country noted that, “Despite declaring 2019 the ‘Year of Tolerance,’ United Arab Emirates rulers showed no tolerance for any manner of peaceful dissent.”

The presentation is now a key part of the case in which Qatar accuses the bank of orchestrating an illegal UAE-backed campaign to create false impressions about the country’s stability. The UAE is not a defendant. The plan called for setting up an offshore vehicle into which the UAE would transfer its holdings of Qatari debt before buying more of the securities. The fund would also purchase foreign-exchange derivatives linked to the Qatari riyal and buy enough insurance on its bonds—a barometer of a country’s creditworthiness—to “move the price sufficiently to make it newsworthy.” Working with an affiliated party, it would then flood the market with the bonds to create the impression of panicked selling. The presentation also described a public relations drive to “add more fuel to the fire” and suggest Qatar might be struggling to access U.S. dollars.

Within weeks of the plan being sent to Tricks, the riyal—under pressure since the beginning of the blockade in June 2017—went into freefall and hit a record low. The yield on Qatar’s 10-year bonds also soared, as did the cost of insuring the country’s debt against default. The currency didn’t recover until November of that year, after the Intercept reported on the Banque Havilland plan.

Although the talking points about protecting the family echo those espoused by some right-wing politicians in the United States, there are other influences closer to home, specifically Russia.

Russian videos with Turkish subtitles were proliferating on social media, promoting a new law in Russia that makes it illegal to spread “LGBT propaganda.”

Tarek Zeidan, the director of Helem, a Lebanese LGBTQ advocacy group, told The Post of “a cloud of fear and anxiety among the community.” Last week, he said, the organization received “dozens of calls” from people asking for assistance in leaving the country and advice on what to do if they were attacked.

the moral panic over LGBTQ people is ultimately a deflection strategy, “to shift the tension away from the actual problems” in a region beset by economic troubles, political stasis and climate woes.