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Ed Webb

Pushed out of Egypt for COVID-19 reporting - Columbia Journalism Review - 0 views

  • “They just want to see your visa,” a British embassy official told me on March 18, passing on a message from Egyptian security officials at the country’s visa and immigration office. I knew what that meant: Other journalists had been called to the same authority to have their visas revoked. Later that day, the British official called me again as I sheltered in a hotel room, after a lawyer advised me to flee my apartment in case it was raided by police. The security services had spoken to the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which had passed a second message to the British embassy. “They’re asking you to leave,”
  • I dodged the meeting at the visa authority by sending a lawyer in my place, after officials at the German embassy in Cairo—I’m a dual national—warned me I could be arrested or deported there. We think it’s best you get on a plane, they said. 
  • I’d reported for the Guardian that Egypt likely had more coronavirus infections than the country’s official total
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  • The number of infected people has become a metric for evaluating the Egyptian government’s control of the disease; the possibility that more people could be infected has become almost blasphemous in the eyes of the authorities. Even now, as confirmed COVID-19 cases in Egypt top 7,000, the size of the outbreak remains an inflammatory subject, with fear and nationalist pride working alongside a state that is practiced at concealing information
  • ranked 166th out of 180 countries on the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index
  • Citizens are routinely detained on charges of “spreading rumors and fake news,” including about COVID-19; the country’s public prosecutor recently warned that those accused of spreading “false news” about the virus face steep fines and up to five years in prison
  • Atef Hasballah, the editor of news site AlkararPress, who was bundled into the back of a police van and arrested on suspicion of “joining a terrorist organisation” after questioning the health ministry’s official infection count on his Facebook page
  • Accusations of “spreading panic,” or use of laws criminalising “fake news,” are also common, as in Egypt and Turkey, where citizens have been detained on these charges. A Chinese doctor was detained and reprimanded for “spreading false rumours” about the coronavirus; he was forced to sign a confession that he had “seriously disrupted social order,” shortly before he died of COVID-19. Turkmenistan went as far as to simply ban the word “coronavirus,” as though this alone could remove the spread of disease.
  • “We’d be blind to ignore the overlap between public health, economics, and socio-political issues. We try to stay on the public health side as much as possible. But of course people standing more in the sociopolitical realm select data according to their beliefs.” 
  • I was summoned, along with Declan Walsh of the New York Times, to the headquarters of Egypt’s State Information Service, the main government organ that handles the media. During the course of a nearly four-hour meeting, Diaa Rashwan, the head of SIS, demanded repeatedly that the Guardian retract the story, and that I publish a personal apology. 
  • Rashwan accused us of “spreading panic” about COVID-19. The next day, SIS revoked my press card.
  • in undemocratic countries, amidst a desire to control information as much as the disease, scientists, doctors, and journalists are frequent targets. Authorities in Venezuela, Iran, and Belarus have detained journalists or prevented them from publishing due to their COVID-19 reporting. China expelled dozens of American reporters in an ongoing dispute with the Trump White House about journalism credentials, taking the opportunity to do so while the world is distracted with the virus. 
  • My story, and the University of Toronto study, sparked outrage. This was more than angry phone calls from government officials, or the smattering of threatening tweets I’d received in the past. It appeared to be a coordinated campaign, one where publicly condemning my journalism had a political purpose.  Egyptian media, dominated by pro-government talk-show hosts and columnists decried the reporting. An army of online trolls attacked the Guardian under the hashtag “lies of the Guardian.” Alaa Mubarak, the son of former president Hosni Mubarak, described what he termed the “Guardian virus” as “no less dangerous than the coronavirus.” 
  • In Iraq, the government banned the Reuters news agency from operating in the country on April 3, after the outlet published reporting citing five sources including health ministry officials claiming that the country has a higher infection rate of COVID-19 than the official figure.  The government also issued a $21,000 fine while accusing the news agency of endangering public safety and hindering government efforts to prevent the spread of COVID-19. It demanded a public apology to the government and the people of Iraq. Reuters stood by the story, adding in a statement that the agency is “seeking to resolve the matter and…working to ensure we continue to deliver trusted news about Iraq.”
  • British officials attempted to negotiate with the Egyptian authorities. I understood that I had to leave, they explained, but with no more commercial flights I needed to wait until the airports reopened, allegedly in a few weeks’ time. Could they at least ensure I wasn’t arrested in the interim? The Egyptians offered no such reassurance, and continued to demand I show up at the visa office. They told my lawyer they were “offended” I hadn’t come in person. British officials offered for me to stay at the embassy in order to avoid detention.
arianny9

What Dutch Disease is and Why it's bad. - 3 views

Dutch Disease was briefly mentioned in our reading as a phenomenon that is caused by the "sudden influx of foreign currency." Foreign exchange is presented as a blockade/distortion to economic gro...

foreign exchange economic growth

started by arianny9 on 08 Feb 15 no follow-up yet
Ed Webb

U.N. Is Preparing for the Coronavirus to Strike the Most Vulnerable Among Refugees, Mig... - 0 views

  • United Nations is preparing to issue a major funding appeal for more than $1.5 billion on Wednesday to prepare for outbreaks of the new coronavirus in areas suffering some of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, including Gaza, Myanmar, Syria, South Sudan, and Yemen, according to diplomatic and relief officials familiar with the plan
  • the request—which would be in addition to ongoing humanitarian operations—comes at a time when the world’s leading economies are reeling from the economic shock induced by one of the most virulent pandemics since the 1918 Spanish flu
  • “Some of the biggest donors are seeing global recession about to hit them,” said one senior relief official. “How generous are they going to be when they have a crisis looming in their own backyards?”
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  • U.N. relief officials and aid organizations are bracing for what they fear could be a cataclysmic second phase of the pandemic: spreading in the close-quarters encampments of the world’s more than 25 million refugees and another 40 million internally displaced people.
  • More than 3 billion people lack access to hand-washing facilities, depriving them of one of the most effective first lines of defense against the spread of the coronavirus, according to UNICEF
  • the effort to ramp up an international aid response is being hampered by the quest to ensure the safety of international staff. Those concerns have been amplified by the announcement last week that David Beasley, the executive director of the Rome-based World Food Program, had been infected with the coronavirus. Some international relief agencies have recalled senior field officers, fearing they could be infected.
  • Konyndyk, who worked on the response to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa for the U.S. Agency for International Development, said that U.N. and relief agencies are having to balance ensuring the health of their own staff with delivering care to needy communities.
  • “You would have a hard time designing a more dangerous setting for the spread of this disease than an informal IDP settlement,” he said. “You have a crowded population, very poor sanitation … very poor disease surveillance, very poor health services. This could be extraordinarily dangerous … and I don’t think that’s getting enough global attention yet.”
  • In conflict-riven countries from Afghanistan to South Sudan to Yemen, dismal health care infrastructures are already overburdened after years of fighting
  • After five years of war, with millions of people on the brink of famine, Yemen’s population is more vulnerable to a coronavirus outbreak than those of most other countries. The conflict has left most of the country’s population effectively immunocompromised,
  • Guterres, meanwhile, expressed concern that the pandemic could claw back decades of efforts to raise international health standards and to scale back the most extreme levels of poverty, and undercut U.N. sustainable development goals, which are designed to improve the standard of living around the world by the year 2030.
  • In Gaza, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which provides primary care for about 70 percent of the territory’s more than 1.8 million people, is bracing for the likely arrival of the coronavirus in one of the most densely populated place in the world. The U.N. agency—which the Trump administration defunded last year and has sought to dismantle—has some 22 medical clinics in Gaza, putting it on the front lines of the defense of the coronavirus.
  • “I’m told that there are 60 ICU beds in the hospitals,” Matthias Schmale, the director of Gaza’s UNRWA operations, told Foreign Policy. “If there is a full-scale outbreak the hospital sector won’t cope.”
  • The leaders of major relief organizations are pressing donors to grant them greater flexibility to redirect funding from existing programs that are likely to be paralyzed by the pandemic and use that money for programs—including clean water and sanitation projects—that could help stem the crisis.
  • “As bad as it is now in the well-organized and affluent north, with health systems, good sanitation, and big infrastructure, imagine how it will be when it will hit crowded camps with refugees and displaced people,” said Egeland, who spoke by telephone from quarantine in Norway.
  • sweeping U.S. and U.N. economic sanctions imposed on governments in Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela are hampering relief efforts.
  • Egeland acknowledged that most U.N. sanctions regimes, including those for Iran and North Korea, include exemptions for the import of humanitarian goods. But the sanctions have scared financial institutions from providing vital financial services to relief agencies. “Not a single bank had the guts to transfer money, because they were all afraid to be sued by the U.S. government,”
  • The World Health Organization announced earlier this year that more than $675 million will be required through April—including $61 million for its own activities—to mount an international campaign against the virus. Though WHO’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said recently that more money would be needed. On Feb. 17, UNICEF issued an urgent request for $42.3 million to support the coronavirus response. It will be used to reduce transmission of the virus by promoting distance learning for kids who can’t attend school and public information aimed at shooting down misinformation.
  • “For many population groups, living in overcrowded conditions, social distancing is a challenge or impossible,” according to the Assessment Capacities Project report. Many countries that host refugee camps, such as Afghanistan and Bangladesh, are likely to be overwhelmed by the health needs of their own citizens. Nations with weak health systems “may struggle to screen, test, and contain the epidemic for the host population let alone the refugees,”
  • “COVID-19 is killing people, as well as attacking the real economy at its core—trade, supply chains, businesses, jobs,” Guterres said. “Workers around the world could lose as much as $3.4 trillion.”
  • “We need to focus on people—the most vulnerable, low-wage workers, small and medium enterprises,” Guterres said. “That means wage support, insurance, social protection, preventing bankruptcies and job loss. That also means designing fiscal and monetary responses to ensure that the burden does not fall on those who can least afford it. The recovery must not come on the backs of the poorest—and we cannot create a legion of new poor. We need to get resources directly into the hands of people.”
Ed Webb

Covid-19 kills scores of health workers in war-torn Yemen | Yemen | The Guardian - 0 views

  • At least 97 Yemeni healthcare workers have died from Covid-19 as the disease ravages the war-torn country, according to a report that gives an insight into the true scale of Yemen’s poorly documented outbreak.Yemen, already suffering from a five-year war that has caused the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, has proved uniquely vulnerable to the coronavirus pandemic, according to data published by the medical charity MedGlobal on Thursday.
  • Yemen’s official total number of cases is 1,610, with 446 deaths, so the high number of healthcare worker casualties outlined by the report suggests the true caseload and mortality figure is far higher. For comparison, in badly hit Italy, where 245,0362 people have caught the virus, 35,073 people have died, including about 100 doctors. Yemen currently has a 27% mortality rate from the disease – more than five times the global average.
  • In a country where half of all medical facilities are out of action, and aid funding shortfalls are exacerbating the existing malnutrition and cholera crises, the loss of just one medical professional has a devastating exponential effect. About 18% of the country’s 333 districts already have no doctors.
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  • “We have lost our best colleagues, people who can’t be replaced easily,” she said. “Coronavirus is also killing the morale of medical staff.”
  • The loss of five gynaecologists and midwives will also have a disastrous impact in a country where one in every 260 women die during pregnancy or childbirth.
  • the number of Yemenis facing high levels of acute food insecurity is forecast to increase from 2 million to 3.2 million over the next six months – about 40% of the population
Ed Webb

Syria: Cholera surge sparks fears of uncontrollable outbreak in Idlib camps | Middle Ea... - 0 views

  • the outbreak is linked to the presence of bacteria responsible for cholera in the waters of the Euphrates river, the river's water level has suffered a serious decline because of climate change and is, in many areas, transforming into swamp land.
  • “The lack of treated drinking water through water stations and the irrigation of vegetables from the Euphrates river were the main cause of cholera infecting my wife and child.”
  • "We do not have potable water because of the interruption of pipe water, which makes us buy water from tanks filled from surface wells, which are not subject to sanitary control at all,"
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  • cholera crisis is partly a result of the effects of climate change but also a consequence of the civil war
  • the war has damaged two-thirds of water treatment plants, half of pumping stations and one-third of water towers.
  • Turkey has justified stopping the pumping of the station, claiming it was due to the cutting off of electricity by the SDF, which controls the power station in al-Darbasiyah, which feeds the Ras al-Ain and Tal Abyad regions.
  • "We demanded several times that Alouk station come under international auspices and that a UN flag be raised on it in order [for it] not to be bombarded and interrupted," Sarhan said. "The conflict between Turkey, Russia, the SDF and Assad should not be at the expense of vulnerable people."
  • “Our concerns are not about the spread of cholera within cities, but its spread within the camps, which are an incubator environment for infectious diseases due to the weak humanitarian response in them,”
Ed Webb

Tunisia grapples with racism, violence against Sub-Saharans - 0 views

  • Lawmakers say they are aware of the problems, but are struggling against both the workload of a country in transition and a culture that won't change overnight.“We are in the midst of re-making the institutions of the republic. Parliament is working around the clock, and hundreds of laws are pending," said Youssef Tlili, a member of Nidaa Tounes, the political party of Tunisian President Baji Caid Essebsi. Tlili said politicians are working “to accelerate the process of finding solutions to the problem of racism, a disease that plagues all societies", but cautions that it will take more than laws.“If we passed an anti-racism law today, what would that change?" Tlili asked. "We need to change the mentality."
  • “For many Tunisians, Ben Ali was a friend of the African community.”The perceived connection between Ben Ali and the Sub-Saharan community stems largely from the African Development Bank (AfDB). One of the world’s largest international financial institutions, the AfDB is normally based in the Ivory Coast.However, following the outbreak of the Ivorian civil war in 2002, the Ben Ali government welcomed the bank to temporarily relocate to Tunisia, where the AfDB remained headquartered until 2014.As thousands of well-off Sub-Saharan bank employees and their families arrived in the capital, Ben Ali warned Tunisians against any mistreatment of the newcomers, Toure said.“The Ministry of the Interior told the population to be very careful because they are the president’s invited guests,” said Toure. “Nothing bad is to happen to them.”
  • students from across Sub-Saharan Africa enrolling in Tunisia’s private, francophone universities. The timing was right. It had become progressively harder for students to obtain visas to the EU. Tunisia, on the other hand, automatically granted visas to citizens of numerous Sub-Saharan countries. For Sub-Saharan students seeking to study abroad, Tunis rapidly developed into an attractive plan B
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  • Whatever the exact nature and motivation behind Ben Ali’s relationship with AESAT and the AfDB, the perceived privilege of Sub-Saharans provoked anger among the wider populace, a frustration that is directly related to the recent spike in violence, experts say.“Before the revolution, Sub-Saharan Africans and foreigners in general were well protected by the government,” said Jonathan Bahago, president of Afrique Intelligence. "If you touched a Sub-Saharan, my goodness, what the police would do to you!”“But since the revolution,” he said, “there have been more attacks against Sub-Saharans, with people saying: ‘The one who was defending you before is gone’.”
  • Racism is still not criminalised in Tunisia. Though discrimination in general is illegal, perpetrators of ethnically motivated attacks, for example, cannot be charged with “racism” or “hate crimes”.
  • This absence of legal protection against racism is not unique to Tunisia, but remains an issue across much of the region. However, given Tunisia’s widely praised new constitution, activists say it is worth noting the ways in which legislation has not changed since the revolution.“These attacks happen all over the world. The problem here is the government’s non-recognition, the official denial,” said Toure, the programme officer at Maison du Droit et des Migrations. “In other countries, politicians and officials speak out. Why does this never happen in Tunisia?”
  • While reports of racism are widespread, many students said they still feel positively towards the country.
Ed Webb

Egypt forces Guardian journalist to leave after coronavirus story | Egypt | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Egyptian authorities have forced a Guardian journalist to leave the country after she reported on a scientific study that said Egypt was likely to have many more coronavirus cases than have been officially confirmed.
  • She cited a study accepted for publication in the Lancet Infectious Diseases journal, which had analysed flight records, traveller data and infection rates to estimate that Egypt could have had 19,310 coronavirus cases by early March, with the lower end of the range about 6,000 cases. The Egyptian government’s official count at the time period covered by the data was that three people were infected.
  • On 17 March, Michaelson’s press accreditation was revoked. The Guardian offered the Egyptian authorities the chance to write a letter for publication rebutting its report or the Canadian study, but received no response to the offer.
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  • British diplomatic officials and the SIS passed on the message to Michaelson that she needed to meet Egypt’s visa issuance authority.Michaelson, who is also a German citizen, said she was advised by German diplomatic officials in Cairo that she should not attend the meeting under any circumstances. “They said, ‘We do not believe it’s safe for you to go to this meeting. You’re at high risk of arrest and you should get on a plane,’”
  • “The national security agency told British diplomats that there was a plane one evening and they ‘wanted me on it’,”
  • Press freedom in Egypt has severely deteriorated since the military took power in 2013 and the former commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, became president the following year.
  • A spokesperson for the Foreign Office said: “The UK supports media freedom around the world. We have urged Egypt to guarantee freedom of expression. UK ministers have raised this case with the Egyptian authorities.”
  • Egypt had 366 confirmed cases of the virus by Monday with 19 deaths, according to the country’s health ministry.
  • Michaelson’s departure leaves the north African country with no full-time British newspaper correspondents. Bel Trew, a correspondent for the Times, was threatened with a military trial and expelled from Egypt in March 2018.
  • Domestic media has gradually come to be dominated by the state, which exercises widespread censorship. The office of the country’s last major independent news outlet, Mada Masr, was raided late last year. Access to its website from inside Egypt has been blocked.
Ed Webb

Why we need restrictions on coronavirus surveillance - 0 views

  • As governments around the world struggle to stave the spread of the disease they are understandably harnessing the power of technology. We must ensure this is done with respect for human rights and civil liberties and that we don’t weave a surveillance apparatus that can’t be undone.
  • These technologies are being deployed quickly and, it appears, without human rights impact assessments, sufficient privacy controls, or adequate restrictions on their use outside of the current context.
  • there’s an dearth of information about who has access to the data, how long it can be maintained, what sort of privacy rights people in the databases have, what types of restrictions are in place to ensure the data is only used as intended to combat the spread of the virus, and what could be done with the technology afterwards. If there is one thing we know from technological solutions, once a capacity is built it can be used for many purposes beyond that for which it was intended.
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  • The NSO Group, for example, sells sophisticated surveillance technology it says is for fighting terrorism to governments around the world, several of which have turned around and deployed it against journalists. Its Pegasus spyware has been linked to government surveillance of journalists in India, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and the United States, including associates of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Now the company is reportedly testing in a dozen countries a new technology that matches location data collected by national telecoms with two weeks of mobile-phone tracking information from an infected person to identify those vulnerable to contagion who were in the patient’s vicinity for more than 15 minutes.
  • implementing sunset clauses on any new surveillance powers is essential if we don’t want coronavirus to undermine our rights as well as our health
Ed Webb

Crisis of Governance: Local Edition | Foreign Policy - 0 views

  • , democratic Tunisia remains just as centralized as it was before the revolution
  • well into the sixth year of Tunisia’s revolution, a vast gap remains between government and citizens. And nowhere is that relationship more strained than in Kasserine
  • it turns out that it’s easier to replace the top level of politicians, and to design and implant a constitution, than it is to remake an entire national administration from top to bottom
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  • The Interior Ministry, which still nominally controls all local government, came up with an interim fix: a special committee representing various local interests — activists, doctors, the unemployed. The committee picked one of their number, the teacher Abbassi, as vice mayor. He served in that capacity for four years until the mayor resigned; Abbassi was then picked to replace him
  • The 2014 constitution explicitly stipulates the devolution of power to provincial and local governments, but actually putting those reforms into place has proven a challenge
  • Pre-revolutionary Tunisia was rigidly centralized, concentrating virtually all power in the national capital. The central government appointed all regional and municipal officials: They were little more than placeholders. They had minimal control over their own finances, and depended on the national government to allocate funds to them whenever it saw fit to do so
  • “We’re a poor municipality that lives on aid,” says Abbassi, who can only really increase his budget, he notes, by attracting money from international development institutions and nongovernmental organizations. “Citizens don’t pay [taxes]. The citizens that talk about corruption and ‘my money’ — well, it’s not their money.” The city gets most of its budget from the Interior Ministry in Tunis, and financing is hardly generous. While income tax payments are automatically deducted from the pay of public employees in Tunisia, tax avoidance is rampant among the rest of the population — especially since around half of the economy, according to estimates, operates in the unofficial sector
  • Life expectancy in the province is only 70, a full seven years less than in Tunis. Unemployment is 26.2 percent, almost 9 percent higher than the national average. The infant mortality rate is 23.6 percent, nearly 6 percent greater than the national rate. The local paper factory churns out mercury and chlorine byproducts that are polluting land and water resources, contributing to widespread health issues like cancer and neurological diseases
  • Khadraoui and his fellow protesters want the government to solve the problem by giving out public jobs to all applicants with university degrees. The old regime used to hand out state jobs as a way of tamping down public dissatisfaction, and their post-revolutionary successors have continued the practice (if not expanding it). This has predictably resulted in bloated public-sector employment rolls and painfully inefficient public services. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that one rarely encounters Tunisians who expect their jobs to come from the private sector
  • expectations gap is deeply corrosive
  • The current administration is doing little to advance the city’s development — and officials and citizens have entirely divergent ideas of the reasons for it
Ed Webb

El Khadra Still Can't Breathe | Foreign Policy - 0 views

  • Pollution, it seems, is one of the problems for which revolution has brought no answers.
  • “We can’t stay here. There’s too much smoke. We wake up at night feeling asphyxiated, our eyes and noses burning.”
  • Many in El Khadra suffer from severe respiratory ailments, and they have good reason to believe that their illnesses are directly related to the plant
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  • all the cases he represented are related to specific leakage incidents, and that so far there have been no lawsuits for the other types of pollution caused by the factory
  • A chronic lack of financial resources in the area means that there are still no scientific studies confirming any connection between poor health conditions in the area and emissions from the factory
  • Tunisian law stipulates that polluters must fix the damage they do to the environment. But a common problem, which also applies to the SNCPA, is that many industries are owned by the government. The post-revolutionary Tunisian government so far appears unwilling to allocate the funds needed to cleanse the environment of the toxic materials the factory has released over the past half century. The plant itself has been facing financial problems, which means that investing in safer disposal of toxic waste is low on its list of priorities.
  • Kasserine’s agricultural land and water table consistently show much higher levels of mercury than average, says Majed Hagui, an agricultural engineer serving as Kasserine’s regional environment representative.
  • The SNCPA also discharges liquid waste containing toxic and corrosive substances such as hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, and sodium hydroxide, which then flows into a nearby river that farmers use for irrigation. According to Mhamdi, the toxins are leaching into the soil in areas bordering the river. Because few farmers in the region are aware of the danger, they continue to use the contaminated water for irrigation. Exposure to liquid waste from the factory can cause kidney disease and gastrointestinal infections as well as interfering with human reproduction. “To sum up, the environmental situation in Kasserine is catastrophic,”
  • Even though he doesn’t use the river water to irrigate his trees, he said as many as 100 of his olive trees were damaged because of their proximity to the river. “My trees used to produce 300 kilograms of olives each,” Saheri says. “Now we harvest between 30 and 50 kilograms. They produce less every year. I even had to destroy some trees.”
  • estimates put the cost of a “demercurization” process at 60 million dinars ($27 million)
  • the highly centralized decision-making process in local government is at fault. While local activists are often eager to find solutions, officials see few incentives to take action. “The government usually chooses to turn a blind eye to ecological issues, usually citing the need to create jobs and revive the economy,”
  • need to maintain jobs is vital in Kasserine, where the unemployment rate, at 26.2 percent, is more than 10 points higher than the national average of 15.4 percent. The SNCPA employs more than 500 people — meaning that locals are inclined to think twice before demanding that the factory move or shut down. Mhamdi says there are many potential solutions to the environmental problems caused by the factory that don’t have to involve closing it. Installing special filters could reduce up to 90 percent of toxic emissions into the atmosphere, while a water treatment station could neutralize toxins being released into the water. But there is no political will to tackle the problems.
Ed Webb

Invisibility and Negrophobia in Algeria - Arab Reform Initiative - 0 views

  • In post-independence Algeria, autocratic elites have chosen to characterize the Algerian people as a homogenous block with a single culture (Arab-Islamic), religion (Islam), and language (Arabic) because they consider diversity to be a source of division and a threat to the country’s stability and their hold on power. Identity issues, which the regime insists on controlling, are also used to divide and rule. Aware of this, from the beginning, the Hirak downplayed identity and difference within the movement while focusing on getting rid of le pouvoir (Algeria’s military elite and their civilian allies that rule and exploit the country) as a whole, root and branch.
  • placing pressure on existing tensions between Arabs and Amazighs (Berbers) and between Islamists and secularists
  • Black Algerians find themselves in a perplexing situation during the current slow-moving peaceful Hirak for democracy. Concentrated in the Saharan south of the country, to an extent, Black Algerians are literally not visible to other Algerian citizens – self-identified white Arabs and Amazighs – who are overwhelmingly found on the northern Mediterranean coast. Nevertheless, Black Algerians are indigenous to Algeria’s Sahara,7Marie Claude Chamla, “Les populations anciennes du Sahara et des regions limitrophes,” Laboratoires d’Anthropologie du Musee de l’Homme et de l’Institut de Paleontologie Humaine, Paris 1968, p. 81. and hundreds of thousands of others, across 13 centuries, were enslaved and forced across the desert to Algeria from sub-Saharan Africa. The history of servitude has stigmatized Black Algerians, generated Negrophobia, and fostered a need – so far unrealized – for the mobilization of civil society organizations and the Algerian state to combat anti-Black racism in the country
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  • Anti-Black racism has only increased in Algeria with the arrival of tens of thousands of sub-Saharan Black, largely clandestine, migrants over the last two decades, who enter Algeria for educational or economic opportunities, or more often, to travel through the country en route to Europe.
  • 20-25% of Algerians are native Amazigh speakers (Tamazight), and many more are Arabized Amazighs. The indigenous Amazighs have been struggling for equality since independence against a state determined to impose an Arab Muslim identity on the country’s entire population
  • When Algerians think of “racial” discrimination, it is likely that they first think of the treatment Algerian Arabs and Amazighs received at the hands of the French during the colonial period (1830-1962), and afterwards in France.27Kamel Daoud, “Black in Algeria? Then You’d Better be Muslim” The New York Times, May 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/opinion/kamel-daoud-black-in-algeria-then-youd-better-be-muslim.html . See also Seloua Luste Boulbina, “Si tu desires te Moquer du Noir: Habille-le en rouge”, Middle East Eye, 24 November 2018. https://www.middleeasteye.net/fr/opinion-fr/si-tu-desires-te-moquer-du-noir-habille-le-en-rouge-0 The debate over Algeria as a post-colonial society has been fully engaged. However, in another sign of the invisibility of Algeria’s black citizens, consideration of Algeria as a post-slave society – and what that means for black Algerians today – has not
  • Black people, who were present in southern Algeria even before the 13- century-long  trans-Saharan slave trade, can be considered to be as indigenous to Algeria as the Amazigh population.
  • following a regional trend to repress diversity issues, the Algerian government has never taken a census to ascertain the total number of Algerian black citizens in the country, most of whom remain concentrated in the Saharan south. Ninety-one percent of the Algerian population lives along the Mediterranean coast on 12% of the country's total land mass.
  • Because most black Algerians are scattered in the vast southern Sahara, an area of the country about which many Algerians are not familiar, white Algerians may be only dimly aware, if aware at all, that they have black compatriots.25Ouzani, op.cit. Certainly, many black Algerians have reported that they face incredulity when claiming their national identity in northern Algeria at police roadblocks, airports, and even in doing everyday ordinary things like responding to a request for the time, “When I walk in the street and someone wants to ask me the time, he does it in French, convinced that he is dealing with a Nigerien or a Chadian, a way of indicating that an Algerian cannot be black.”
  • Amazigh activists have challenged the state’s assertion of Arab-Muslim homogeneity. Amazigh activism, in the form of mass protests and the undertakings of Amazigh-dominated political parties and civil society organizations, has pressured the state to constitutionally accept Amazigh identity as one of the components of Algerian identity, integrate the Amazigh language in secondary education, and recognize the Amazigh language as a national and later an official language of the state, in addition to Arabic
  • elites were also leaders of Third Worldism, and officially believed in pan-Africanism. Ahmed Ben Bella, Algeria’s first post-independence president, declared in Accra, Ghana, in 1963: “It was the imperialists who tried to distinguish between the so-called white and black Africans.”
  • in Saharan areas, the slave trade continued throughout the period of French settler colonialism (1830-1962)
  • Arab-Berber whites constructed an economy that relied on black slave labour from their Haratins (enslaved or recently freed Islamicized and Arabized Blacks, who are still susceptible to forced labour practices).31These ambiguously freed black slaves in Saharan areas of Algeria are also called Bella or Ikelan if they were enslaved by Amazighs, including Tuaregs. Today Haratins, mostly sharecroppers, work under harsh labour conditions that some have described as a modern form of slavery, they “dig and tend wells, excavate and maintain the underground channels of foggara, irrigate gardens, tend to flocks, and cultivate dates”.32Benjamine Claude Brower, “Rethinking Abolition in Algeria,” Cahier D’etudes Africaines 49, 2009 Some argue that without the labour of enslaved Black people, the Sahara would never have been habitable at all.33Ibid. The arduous and relentless work to irrigate in a desert includes digging channels tens of feet into the sand with the risk of being drowned under it.
  • The French accommodated slavery in the Algerian Sahara more than anywhere else. Slave masters and merchants were given permission to trade in slaves and keep those they owned well into the twentieth century.35Ibid. In exchange, slavers and merchants provided intelligence on far-off regions to colonial authorities
  • there is reason to believe that enslaved black people continue to be exploited for agricultural work in the southern oases of Ouargla and Ghardaia provinces to this day (among wealthy families, owners of large palm trees, fields, and farms) and in some instances among semi-nomadic Tuareg
  • The Algerian state has never adopted any policies, including any affirmative action policies, to help their black community emerge from the impact of generations of servitude and brutalization.40Brower, op.cit. Instead, it has sought to legitimize the country’s white Arab-Muslim identity only
  • descendants of freed Black slaves (Haratins) in Saharan regions of Algeria often remain dependent upon former “masters.” Most work as sharecroppers in conditions similar to slavery
  • Black Algerians also face discrimination in urban areas of the country. They encounter the same racist attitudes and racial insults as any other person with dark skin within Algerian borders.
  • Either by their colour, k’hal, which is twisted into kahlouche (blackie), mer ouba (charcoal), guerba kahla (a black gourd to hold water made out of goatskin), nigro batata (big nose that resembles a potato), haba zeitouna (black olive), babay (nigger), akli (Black slave in some Berber areas), rougi  (redhead or Swedish to imply that the black person is culturally and socially white, as everyone must want to be), saligani (from Senegal) 46Khiat, op.cit., Calling black Algerians Saligani (from Senegal) has a different history. It refers back to the early decades of the 20th century when the French utilized black West-African soldiers in their colonial army to do the dirty work of colonialization, including brutalizing members of the population that resisted French rule, taking food from farmers, and rape. or by direct references to past servile status: hartani (dark black slave or ex-slave forced to work outside the master’s house), khadim (servant), ouacif (domestic slave), ‘abd (slave), ‘abd m’cana (stinky black slave).47Ibid. Using these terms against a black Algerian passerby establishes difference, contempt, strangeness, rejection, distance, and exclusion
  • In addition to racial insults, a black Algerian academic has noted, “Our community continues to symbolize bad luck. Worse: in the stories of grandmothers, we play the bad roles, kidnappers of children, looters, or vagrants. [While Arabs and Berbers can both point to a proclaimed noble history in Algeria] there is no place for a black hero in the collective memory of my people.”
  • In addition to rejection of interracial marriages, an Algerian intellectual has reported cases of “white” Algerians refusing to room with Blacks or study with them at university
  • A step forward in reducing Negrophobia, the selection of Khadija Benhamou, a black woman from the Algerian Sahara, as Miss Algeria in 2019 has been marred by the subsequent deluge of posts on social media virulently claiming that she did not represent the beauty of the country, with many direct attacks against the colour of her skin.
  • Partly due to pressure on Algeria to control its borders from the European Union, Black sub-Saharan African migrants have been vilified by the Algerian government and some of the press;59https://insidearabia.com/algeria-desert-deportations-eu-migration/ accused – usually falsely – of violence, selling drugs, promiscuity, spreading venereal diseases, perpetuating anarchy, and raping Algerian women.
  • Without irony, some graffiti and social media posts called on the migrants to “Go back to Africa.”
  • Three generations after independence, the Algerian state is still resisting the open public debate and civil society engagement needed to reflect the country’s pluralism and to begin to reckon with slave legacies and racial discrimination
Ed Webb

How Twitter is gagging Arabic users and acting as morality police | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • Today, Twitter has a different story, and it is not one of speaking truth to power. Twitter is no longer empowering its users. Its platform cannot be considered neutral. Twitter’s actions suggest it is systematically suppressing voices in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.
  • What started out as an investigation into the mass suspension of accounts of Egyptian dissidents, uncovered a mass censorship algorithm that targeted users who use Arabic flagging their text as hateful conduct. This story is still unfolding. As you read this, mass and unjustified systemic locking and suspension of Twitter Arabic accounts continues. Users are angry and bewildered.
  • draconian yet lazy algorithms have systematically shut down voices of dissent – and pulled unsuspecting social media users down with them
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  • The effects of these suspensions was not just hiding a set of tweets critical of the government, but completely disabling the influence network of Egypt’s dissidents. This is potentially the first documented politically motivated mass shutdown of twitter accounts at a time when online interaction was high and translated to possible action on the ground
  • accusations are not limited to Egypt but the entire region who have a sense that being critical of their governments was met with punitive measures by Twitter against them
  • many of those suspensions had a common denominator: being critical of the Egyptian government
  • suspensions seemed to have happened around late September and lasted from one day to a few days. In many cases Twitter had responded that they had suspended the accounts by mistake. The accounts affected varied from having a few followers to hundreds of thousands
  • a trending anti-Sisi hashtag disappeared suddenly in July 2018, and then later on in 2019. It didn’t help either to find that an officer in the British Army information warfare unit was head of editorial in Twitter for the MENA region.
  • I interviewed @OfficialAmro1, a user affected by mass suspensions with over 265K followers and 115K tweets. He was suspended without cause and added, “I don’t even curse.”To which I foolishly replied, “Cursing would not suspend your account, particularly if directed against a public figure. Incitement will.”“No, now it does,” he replied. He also added that if you criticize a figure loyal to the Arab regimes, you can get your account locked or suspended.
  • The 'hateful conduct' policy as defined by Twitter states: You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.Analyzing the message contents that were flagged for hateful conduct I saw that most did not violate Twitter’s rules. Soon I began to discover that what @OfficialAmro1 had told me was true. The content I was seeing contained profanity. But that wasn’t the whole story.Arabic curse words are used often. I sampled around a little under 50 claims, with over 30 screenshots that contain Twitter’s email identifying the violating tweet. It was clear that profanity alone was not causing the suspensions.
  • Tragically funnier still are those who were joking around with their friends using their usual language that has profanities @ism3lawy_ ended up cursing Egypt’s Zamalek football club and for that his account was suspended permanently along with that of one of his friends. In a separate conversation, his friend @EHAB_M0 was also joking around with his friends and eventually got a permanent suspension.
  • Within seconds of my post, the algorithm identified the curse words and locked my account for 12 hours. It was my first violation ever. The irony of documenting this as a reply to the platform’s account is probably lost on them.
  • the most dangerous and disconcerting of my findings is that the appeal system in Twitter for MENA is broken.
  • Even things like talking about prostitution can get you banned
  • There is an element of guardianship that is present in despotic Arab regimes, and that moral guardianship is reflected in the algorithm by Twitter as was shown through the numerous examples above.
  • With my limited access to Twitter’s data, I have found nearly 20 accounts probably wrongfully and permanently suspended. I imagine hundreds or even thousands more have been kicked off the platform.
  • “Thank you for trying to help make Twitter a free space once again.”
Ed Webb

COVID-19 drive-thru testing rollout blurs lines between public, private sectors | | Mad... - 0 views

  • Why did the Health Ministry prohibit the private sector from selling PCR tests to citizens? Why did it only bless one private sector company, which offered the service at double the price of its central laboratories?
  • The ministry had designated its central laboratories as the sole PCR test providers, charging LE1,050 per test. Then testing shortages helped foster a black market for tests, a Health Ministry official told Mada Masr. But the government has endorsed just one private company to provide testing: Prime Speed Medical, in which Tamer Wagih, a former executive of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s 2014 election campaign, is a major investor.
  • because the government does not recognize the reference lab’s results, its positive results are not included in Egypt’s official coronavirus numbers
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  • The Ministry of Higher Education got approval from the prime minister to allow a laboratory affiliated with the Supreme Council of University Hospitals to offer testing services for a fee. Since the beginning of March, the laboratory has offered tests for LE2,600 and has signed contracts with public and private entities to test their employees.Then, the Higher Education Ministry-affiliated laboratory contracted Prime Speed to offer drive-through testing to people for LE2,000, which is double the price determined by the Health Ministry.
  • Asked whether Prime Speed sends information on patients whose coronavirus tests come back positive to the Health Ministry, an official at the drive-through service says that his company does not deal with the ministry, nor does it provide it with any information. Yet he also emphasized that they coordinate operations with all relevant bodies, without specifying which ones.
  • Unlike the immunity from oversight the reference laboratory enjoys, given its affiliation with the Ministry of Higher Education, private labs are subject to the authority of the Health Ministry’s Central Department for Free Treatment. According to the same source, the department closed two of Speed Medical’s labs before the drive-through service was launched because they violated the Health Ministry’s decisions by conducting tests.The source says that Prime Speed took advantage of the contradiction between different ministerial policies. On the one hand, the Ministry of Higher Education has a laboratory that offers tests for a price without restrictions. On the other, the Health Ministry limits free testing to its hospitals and central laboratories and prohibits the private sector from conducting patient tests.
  • it violates the Constitution, which stipulates that the state is required to provide health services in the form of health insurance or otherwise to all citizens for all diseases without trying to make a profit
  • kept the operations of the reference laboratory — which is affiliated with the minister of higher education — immune from oversight by the health ministry.
  • She stressed that not recognizing her lab’s results is “arbitrary” and that the ministry “wants to expropriate the service.” She adds: “They’re fighting all labs and don’t allow anyone to do testing even though they’re unable to cover everyone who needs a test and refuse to test a lot of people.”
  • A source at the Health Ministry acknowledges that the state’s policies have contributed to creating a black market for testing. The ministry has been unable to compel private laboratories to offer testing at a specific price. “There were large hospitals that brought us samples and paid LE1,050 per sample, then sold them to patients for LE4,500 and 5,000,” the source says. “There were senior doctors who would strike deals with government hospitals, like the fever hospital and others, to send them samples to test at central laboratories for free, then turn around and charge patients large fees.” 
Ed Webb

Saving Turkey's Children - 0 views

  • By the time Albert Eckstein died in 1950 at the age of 59, he had served as a German soldier in the First World War, suffered exile at the hands the Nazi Party, and helped to lower the rate of child death in Turkey that claimed nearly one in every two children in rural Anatolia during the 1930s.
  • Covering the period from 1935-39, the Eckstein Albums document a medical survey of maternal fertility and infant mortality in a country that had only come into being just over a decade earlier, following the Ottoman Empire's defeat in the First World War.
  • the social and economic realities of rural Anatolian villages
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  • He became one of the country's leading researchers in the study of childhood illnesses, but as 1930s Germany descended into the grip of Nazi tyranny, the German Jew was subjected to years of harassment and humiliation by the fascist regime. In 1935, when the letter signed by Hitler and Goring relieved him of his position, he sought refuge elsewhere. Despite offers from Glasgow and the US, Eckstein accepted a contract from the Turkish government for a university chair in Ankara.
  • Eckstein, an expert in preventative paediatrics, was an ideal candidate for the ambitious public health agenda of the early Turkish Republic.
  • The Eckstein Albums offer a unique insight into Turkish medical history and the engagement of Jewish migrants in Atatürk’s health and social reforms. These include the campaign for healthy children, a drive for basic health and hygiene education, and major campaigns against specific widespread and debilitating diseases such as trachoma or malaria.
  • a period of radical reforms in public health, education, transport, and other national infrastructure. The sites of Albert’s research were provincial, but his subjects were central to a project of rapid modernisation
  • welcomed into Ankara by Refik Saydam, Atatürk’s Minister for Health, through the Emergency Organization for German Scientists Abroad
  • The level of rural poverty documented in these photographs highlights the difficulties the early Republic faced in its attempt to improve the medical conditions and lower rates of infant and maternal mortality.
  • His primary subjects are women and infants, and he captures them in their architectural and archaeological surroundings — backdrops that demonstrate the importance of housing to health and hygiene; of statues and symbols to nation-building; and of pre-history to the construction of Turkish modernity.
  • "What makes these photographs particularly special is that although they reveal the poverty and stark conditions of life, they also portray a lightness and warmth, and a close connection between the photographer and subject which gives the images an intimacy and spontaneity rarely seen in photos from this period."
  • Eckstein’s medical interest in maternal and infant health mirrored the important position of woman and children to the identity of the Turkish Republic. The new government had embarked on a targeted epidemiological strategy to replenish its population after many years of war. On average, Turkish women bore more than the four children each required to replace the population after years of high mortality.
  • This collection provides visual evidence of Anatolia’s ethnographic profile and family structure, for example, the role played by older children in caring for their siblings and the significance of female labour in farming.
  • there were approximately one million widows recorded in the 1927 census.
  • Women and children were also heavily involved in the production and preparation of wool and cotton; they are pictured at the looms in Denizli spinning wool in Niğde. Eckstein’s portraits depict bold, smiling, working women, who appear unafraid to pose for a foreign male doctor.
Ed Webb

Erdoğan's Turkey and the Problem of the 30 Million - War on the Rocks - 0 views

  • Erdoğan’s brand is waning in the cities, the coasts, and among young people. Neither the new Erdoğan-shaped presidential system, nor his expansionist foreign policy are popular in these parts. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, chronic unemployment and inflation extinguished any hope of him bouncing back in the polls. Despite his total control over the state, mainstream media, and major capital groups, the president is unlikely to ever get much more than half of the popular vote.
  • The Erdoğan government now faced a question that all successful populist regimes must solve: What to do with the minority? They certainly can’t be granted free and fair elections, lest they attain the means to exact revenge. Nor can they be deprived of all their rights of representation, lest they be driven to revolt or treason. So how does a very slim majority of a country suppress the other half indefinitely? How does it rest easy, knowing that its hegemony is locked in?
  • The Erdoğan government surely knows that an attempt to “nationalize” all of the 30 million would be unrealistic. Rather, it seeks to separate the leftists and Kurds among them and brand them as terrorists, then turn around and securely pull the center opposition into the nationalist opposition.
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  • the government first needs to contain the spread of the left
  • the People’s Republican Party (CHP), Turkey’s founding and currently main opposition party, has tried to contain this “patriot-terrorist” polarity. Its umbrella candidates for the presidency, ranging from the soporific Ekmeleddin Ihsanoğlu in 2014, to the firebrand Muharrem Ince in 2018, have failed. In the 2019 municipal elections, however, the CHP’s mayoral candidates did well, uniting the Kemalist-nationalist camp, Islamists, liberal cosmopolitans, as well as leftists and even some sympathizers of the Kurdish movement. These candidates won against Erdoğan’s men in all major cities, including Ankara and (in a repeat election) Istanbul. This was the first, and so far only, time Erdoğan’s containment of the left had been breached.
  • Many in the urban middle class, who are fairly indifferent about Kurdish rights, wanted to see Demirtas grow the HDP into a Turkish-Kurdish version of the European Greens. The idea at the time was to also expand into a grand center-left coalition that would prevent Erdoğan from establishing his hyper-centralized presidential system. Their momentum was cut short when months after the coup attempt, in December 2016, the government detained Demirtas on charges of terrorism and began a ruthless crackdown on the HDP’s activities that has since only gained in intensity.
  • The second part of the government’s strategy is to keep the left — crippled and branded as terrorists — within the political system. While Turkey’s politics is polarized between the government and the opposition, this creates a second polarization, this time within the opposition camp. It is this second polarity where the vast majority of political discourse takes place. From the perspective of a nationalistic system of valuation, in which being “local and national” reigns supreme, this is a fatal flaw. On the one hand, the various factions of the opposition can’t win a national vote unless they partner with the HDP to form a 50 percent bloc against Erdoğan. On the other, the nationalists within the opposition cannot be seen working with the “terrorists” of the pro-Kurdish left.
  • The left, however, puts up genuine systemic resistance: They reject the idea that the Turkish nation is pure and infallible. Like leftists elsewhere, they deconstruct official history, focusing on massacres of minorities and exploitation of the working classes. There is also an inextricable tie to the Kurdish movement, which in turn is linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) — an insurgency that has been waging war on the Turkish state for over four decades. The connection between the non-Kurdish left and the Kurdish movement is complicated and has gone through various stages in the recent past. For the Turkish right, there is little difference between leftist subversion and Kurdish insurrection. “I joined the police to beat up Communists” a crescent-mustached officer once told me, and he was talking about arresting Kurdish protesters.
  • the Erdoğan government finally seeks to pull the entire bloc to the right. This means focusing on liberal-minded urbanites whose nationalism has lapsed, and rekindling their faith in the national mythos. This is the most challenging aspect of its effort, and where it has done most poorly.
  • restructuring of the media. For the past few years, the government has been taking over media channels that centrist voters traditionally follow, then gradually shifting their tone to favor the government. The Dogan Media Group, owner of Hurriyet (Turkey’s former newspaper of record) and CNN Turk (a 24-hour TV news channel) used to cater to a secular, urban, and increasingly progressive audience. The group’s main audience overlapped with the centrist-opposition CHP’s voter base, whose older members are secularist-nationalists and younger members (often their children) are leftist-progressives. In March 2018, the media group was sold to an Erdoğan-friendly conglomerate, which fired many of its veteran journalists and changed editorial guidelines. The result has been a desensitized, less colorful version of the jingoist carnival running across Erdoğan’s formal channels. CNN Turk, especially, became a tool for the government to enter the living rooms of CHP voters and tell them that they were voting for terrorist collaborators. So insidious were these attacks that the CHP had to ban its members from getting on the channel, and call upon its electorate to boycott it.
  •  Erdoğan said “We have 18 martyrs and close to 200 wounded. In our country, we have the terror group’s so-called political organism. Aside from that, our nation is now in a state of Yekvücut.” The term is a favorite of the president. It is a combination of the Farsi term “Yek” meaning “single” and the Arabic word “vücut” meaning “existence,” or in the Turkish use, “body.” Erdoğan was thinking of the nation as a single biological organism, with the leftists and the Kurdish movement as foreign bodies
  • The opposition media — largely relegated to the internet — was reporting on the plight of the working class and the brewing economic crisis. Like free media across the West, they also questioned the quality and veracity of their government’s COVID-19 data. In a speech delivered in May, Erdoğan was unusually angry. He had clearly expected a Yekvücut moment and was struggling to understand why it hadn’t come about. His strategy to create a “local and national” opposition wasn’t working, and the frustration of it seemed to hit him head on. “I want to warn once again the media and other representatives who are in league with the CHP’s leaders,” he said, before launching into what was — even for him — an unusually vituperative attack: “You are not national, and your localness is in question,” he said, “you have always sided with whoever was treacherous [bozguncu], whoever was perverted, whoever was depraved” adding, “you are like the creatures in mythology that only feed on enmity, hate, fear, confusion and pain.”
  • The absurd accusations of fraud and coup-abetting aside, there is something to the idea that the opposition wants things to get worse. The Erdoğan government’s consolidation over the past decade has been so suffocating for opposition voters that many do look for deliverance in economic or natural disaster.
  • The Erdoğan government may have cut short the HDP’s rise, but it hasn’t been able to prevent leftist ideas from spreading. The CHP’s youth wings today are highly class-conscious and hostile to militant nationalism. Figures like the CHP’s Istanbul provincial head Canan Kaftancıoğlu , who campaign on a mix of feminism, workers’ rights, and anti-fascist slogans, are gaining a national following. The polarization within the opposition is likely deepening, with part of the 30 million become more “national,” while another part is becoming more leftist. This means that the great mass of right-wing sentiment is growing, but so is the left-wing minority. The “problem,” in the government’s view, may no longer be 30 million strong, but it is more acute, and perhaps more vexing, than before.
  • (gun ownership has soared since the 2016 coup attempt)
  • To Turkey’s governing class, the military coup of their imagination is not a matter of defending against an armed force trying to take over the government. Rather, it is a night of free-for-all, in which politics is stripped down to its violent core, and a majority at the height of its powers can finally put down the enemy within: the haters, the doubters, the creatures of mythology.
  • “Turkey will not only reach its 2023 goals [the centennial of the Republic], it will also be rid of the representatives of this diseased politics,” he said in May, hinting that he might cut the left out of the political system entirely. If this should happen, politics would be an uneven contest between Islamist, pan-Turkic, and secularist hues of Turkish nationalism. Far off, in the back streets of the big cities and in the Kurdish provinces, in second-hand bookshops and hidden corners of the internet, there would be a progressive left, weathering out what is surely going to be a violent storm.
Ed Webb

The Arab and Muslim Evolution of 'Deviance' in Homosexuality - New Lines Magazine - 0 views

  • before the 20th century, Arabs and Muslims never used shudhudh jinsi to describe homosexuality. For more than a millennium, many learned elites, including religious scholars, linguists and poets, discussed all kinds of sexual relations, including what they called “liwat” and “sihaq” (which refer to male and female sexual acts respectively), that were close to our modern understanding of homosexuality, without using terms like deviant, abnormal or unnatural
  • When it was first introduced in Arabic in the early 20th century, shudhudh did not exclusively mean homosexuality. Instead, it was more of a scientific and medical category and included a wide range of sexual activities deemed “deviant,” like masturbation, sadism, masochism, fetishism, etc. And contrary to what opponents of homosexuality often claim, mithlyah is not a recent translation of homosexuality that aimed to replace the term shudhudh and normalize homosexuality. Rather, it was the original term that earlier Arab translators chose for homosexuality, coined at the same time as the term shudhudh and within the same movement of translating modern European psychological and sexologist literature. It then took more than three decades for shudhudh to become a synonym of homosexuality and the favorite term in the anti-homosexuality Arab discourse.
  • (The Quran uses different words when referring to the condemned deeds of Lut’s people: “fahisha,” or obscenity, and “khaba’ith,” or lewdness. Both terms encompass acts beyond same-sex sexual relations, such as highway robbery and dealing in unspecified dishonorable or shameful acts in their assembly.)
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  • not only that pre-modern Arab-Islamic thought never used shudhudh in reference to homosexuality; it also had no term for the concept of homosexuality as understood today
  • In his book “Desiring Arabs,” Columbia University professor of modern Arab thought Joseph Massad shows how modern Arab Nahda intellectuals adopted a variety of strategies to explain away certain aspects of their culture that did not fit with Victorian notions of what is shameful and appropriate
  • Emerging 19th-century fields such as psychology, psychiatry and sexology focused on identifying sexual abnormality and its boundaries. In the process, however, these fields also played a role in reinforcing the familiar. Unlike pre-modern moralists and anatomists who thought that a weak moral will or a biological malfunction in the genitals caused sexual “perversions,” the main argument advanced by these specialists was that functional diseases of sexual instinct caused sexual deviance. At the core of this argument is the claim that there is something called sexual instinct, that it is naturally linked to its object — the opposite sex — and its purpose is reproduction. It also presumes that this instinct emerges in the human body during puberty and slowly decays thereafter.
  • Ten years after El Saadawi’s transformation of the shudhudh phenomenon from a psychological to a social one, Egyptian author and journalist Muhammed Jalal Kushk represented the second transformation, when he claimed that homosexuality is basically a civilizational issue
  • Kushk uses the premise of “sex as virtue” to declare that most sexual desires and activities are not abnormal or deviant. He rejects prohibition of masturbation, anal intercourse between males and females, oral sex and other behaviors.Yet the only activity that he insists on keeping as shudhudh is homosexuality. This is not because he thinks there is something inherent in the sexual activity itself that renders it to be shudhudh but because he considers homosexuality to be a moral indicator of civilizational decline
  • For him, homosexuality represents the extreme expression of individualism and thus the extreme form of rejection of what he considers an imperative moral responsibility to one’s civilization and future generations. In this way, Kushk explains the growing visibility and recognition of homosexuality in the West as a sign of the beginning of the West’s decline.
  • the narrow meaning of shudhudh to exclusively mean homosexuality occurred only in the last third of the 20th century. It was also during this time that the term started to be used in a derogatory manner. The exact moment of this change is unknown but happened amid a rise in Islamist movements in the region starting from the 1970s and the global anti-homosexuality discourse associated with the spread of the AIDS pandemic.
  • The final transformation of the term shudhudh occurred in the past decade and it involved the fact of its becoming the central notion in an anti-homosexuality discourse that has become dominant and officially supported
  • Among the ways that Arab states substitute their lack of democratic legitimacy is by assuming moral authority. In the past five decades, this moral authority was exercised through regulating religion and subjugating Arab women. This is why gender and religious issues were among the hottest controversial topics in this period. But recently, and in reaction to the Arab Spring, the new authoritarian Arab regimes have changed how they treat both religion and women. If you are an Arab dictator and want moral legitimacy, but you do not want to derive it from Islam or gender, what is the most convenient source that fits your new secular conservative agenda? Arguably, the answer is adopting anti-homosexuality and, to a lesser degree, anti-atheism discourse.
Ed Webb

Egypt: Why inmates are dying in Sisi's new 'model' prison | Middle East Eye - 0 views

  • Since becoming president in 2014 Sisi has built at least 28 new prisons, more than a third of Egypt's total number, which is now estimated to be 81.
  • Sisi promoted the new prison facilities as a model in human rights compliance, but rights groups have criticised them for falling short of international standards. 
  • Badr 3, where many high-profile political prisoners have been held after being transferred from the notorious Tora Prison complex in mid-2022
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  • Several Egyptian and international rights organisations have denounced the poor human rights standards at Badr 3, which they claim have led to the deaths of several detainees and prompted mass hunger strikes. Amnesty International said its detention conditions are "comparable to or even worse" than Tora.
  • bans on family visits and inadequate healthcare
  • prisoners said "we are dying", citing poor living conditions, lack of healthcare, inadequate food, absence of winter clothes, and the spread of diseases among detainees
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