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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

Opposition Gains Shift Kuwait's Balance Of Power - Carnegie Endowment for International... - 0 views

  • Kuwait’s government took steps to mitigate opposition wins by enforcing new laws barring those who criticized the emir or religion from running. During the short campaign season Kuwait’s courts annulled the candidacy of dozens of opposition candidates. The government also turned a blind eye to illegal tribal primaries that took place in several electoral districts in Kuwait to avoid further agitating tribal opposition. While these primaries had taken place in previous elections, this time the results of many of them were posted on social media without fear of repercussion. Despite these measures, opposition candidates returned from four years of boycotts to capture almost half of the parliament’s 50 seats. In fact, only 20 MPs were re-elected by polls whose turnout reached 70 percent.
  • these results indicate a deep dissatisfaction with the government’s policies. These frustrations are shared by citizens across the Gulf Arab countries, whose governments have struggled to react to the economic fallout of low oil prices. Kuwait is unique, however, in that its politics are relatively democratic. Kuwait’s parliament can introduce legislation and interrogate government ministers. These powers allow citizens to challenge the government through formal institutions and amplify the importance of parliamentary elections in Kuwait as opposed to other Gulf Arab countries
  • The new parliament’s opposition is diverse—including Islamists, nationalists, and leftists—but likely to unite around common economic frustrations
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  • Kuwait’s new parliament includes representatives from less-powerful tribes, including the Anazzah and Dosari. Yet the broader representation of tribes in parliament may make it more difficult for the opposition to unify. While these tribes are large in number, they receive less state patronage and thus have a less developed relationship with the government than the Mutair and Ajman—meaning they also have less incentive to support the government’s agenda. The less-powerful tribes may use their increased influence to take stances with which the more powerful tribes disagree. Thus while the government now faces a larger opposition, it is also a more diverse one. By exploiting these divisions, Kuwait’s government may be able to mitigate opposition gains
Ed Webb

Sudanese opposition leader's daughter jailed over protests | Middle East Eye - 0 views

  • The deputy head of Sudan's opposition Umma Party was sentenced to a week in prison on Sunday for demonstrating against the president, a party official and a lawyer said, as activists protested against emergency laws imposed last month.
  • Mariam Sadiq al-Mahdi, also a daughter of Umma leader Sadiq al-Mahdi, was among 16 people detained while demonstrating in front of Umma's headquarters in Omdurman, across the Nile from the capital Khartoum, defence lawyer Khalafallah Hussein was cited by Reuters as saying.
  • Another of Sadiq al-Mahdi's daughters, Rabah, was also arrested and fined 500 pounds, according to Hussein.
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  • another emergency court in Khartoum sentenced nine women to 20 lashes and a month in prison for joining protests
  • On Sunday afternoon, hundreds took to the streets in different areas of Omdurman to protest against the emergency laws
  • Officials say 31 people have died in protest-related violence so far, while Human Rights Watch says the death toll is at least 51 and includes medics and children.
Ed Webb

How Morsi and the Brotherhood Lost Egypt - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East - 0 views

  • This controllable prosecutor-general, against which almost the entire prosecutorial corps protested and nearly succeeded in firing, was used quite clearly at will to go after the private media and the opposition as a direct extension of Morsi and the Brotherhood, while substantially legally shielding the Brotherhood at the same time.
  • In another breach of revolutionary consensus, Morsi and the Brotherood tightened control over state media and retained the nationally rejected role of information minister, already abolished briefly after the toppling of Hosni Mubarak. State-owned papers and channels were subjected to appointments of allied or controllable leaderships. The media often ran familiar propaganda-esque headlines that seemed taken out of the Mubarak days. Furthermore, the press did not provide neutral and balanced coverage of events, and state TV was almost always forced to host a Brotherhood guest on every talk show, or at the very least not host an opposition figure on his own. Reports of guest blacklists also began to surface once more. Charges of “insulting the president” and “contempt of religion” began to pile up against media figures, often made by Brotherhood allies rather than directly by the Brotherhood (though the presidency did press some charges before retracting them under local and international pressure). Morsi and the Brotherhood seemed to care very little about fixing the problematic legislative framework for media, and gradually appeared to find it handy, especially with a prosecutor-general that was under full control. 
  • Although the original claim was that the Shura Council would only rubber stamp consensus legislation until the lower house would be elected, it was turned into a full parliament. It discussed far-reaching and controversial drafts, including: a non-governmental organization law that was widely seen as capable of stifling civil society in Egypt; divisive electoral and political rights laws that were criticized as favoring the Islamists; and even a disastrous judicial reform law that would have axed around 3,500 existing judges in an already choking legal system. The latter draft was openly seen as a move to get rid of judges that were problematic to the Brotherhood’s expansionary plans, while there were wide fears of intentions to replace them with a new generation of more sympathetic judges or outright Brotherhood members.
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  • Christians increasingly felt marginalized under Morsi. Brotherhood-allied media regularly used sectarian language and claims. Many Christians felt unprotected from sectarian violence and that official moves were meant as decorative and to appease international opinion. Many also were deeply perturbed by Morsi's failing to show up for the pope’s enthronement. Few Christians were appointed to high-ranking positions in the state, and claims that the president would appoint vice presidents and include a Christian were not fulfilled.
  • Immediately after his speech, the investment authority and the prosecutor’s office began to move against the opposition media again, including putting the owner of an opposition channel on a no-fly list, reportedly restarting investigations against media figures. One channel was even taken off the air, and there was wide acceptance that other private media channels and figures were going to be decisively pursued once the June 30 protests would amount to nothing. There were even considerable leaks within the opposition before the uprising that the prosecution was planning to crack down on them after the June 30 protests, though that is a claim more difficult to substantiate. The lead management of a government-run conference center, which had recently hosted opposition press, was also sacked the following day.
  • Egypt will never find stability, and its democracy will never thrive, without inclusiveness, fairness, due process and separation of powers. The Brotherhood and its big base cannot be excluded or treated outside of due process. Repression, especially of a genuinely sizable, believing and passionate public group, will only lead to an explosion.
Ed Webb

'Seni bilen hayran, bilmeyen dusman' or, Why Erdogan Remains so Popular - 0 views

  • a poster held aloft at the Bakırköy rally: Seni bilen hayran, bilmeyen düşman. “Those who know you are your followers, those who don’t are your enemies.” What struck me about this slogan was that it perfectly summed up the strength of the political message Erdoğan is espousing. It is a mantra that encompasses both support and resistance; it presupposes, even requires, opposition, while simultaneously dismissing that opposition as illegitimate
  • his narrative becomes even stronger the more he is seen to be under attack by his “enemies.”
  • Erdoğan’s slogan of the “national will”—a concept that sounds deeply creepy concept to many people—is far more compelling and less nebulous to many Turks than notions such as “the separation of powers” and “the rule of law,” particularly given that law itself has been tainted by the motives of the Gülenists.
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  • Opponents of the government view these accomplishments with a jaundiced eye. To them, physical buildings seem insignificant when compared to fundamental rights that are denied or threatened: a woman’s right over her body, for instance, which Erdoğan constantly contests with his threats against abortion and his oppressive glorification of motherhood. There is a large portion of the population, however—and in general a poorer segment of the population—to whom the AKP’s concrete achievements are far more substantial than a series of concepts, which, when they do impact their lives (a conservative girl forced to have a backstreet abortion, for instance), tend to not to be view in politicized terms: as part of fate, or the will of God, or the way of the society.
  • the AKP is performing—unlike many of its predecessors—the basic functions of a government. Without drawing attention away from the corruption, lack of consultation, and environmental destruction underlying much of its development (though the latter issue lacks popular traction in Turkey), the opposition should acknowledge clearly and unequivocally the massive material progress of the last decade, and the AKP’s role in it
  • Unlike in Gezi, where the government’s “coup” allegations were patently ridiculous to outsiders, no one really disputes that Erdoğan is correct when he claims the graft probe is an attempt to overthrow him. In the eyes of many Turks, it is this fact, rather than the truth or falsehood of the allegations themselves, which resonates most strongly, tying the graft probe into a long-established and deeply emotive historical and political narrative.
  • Drawing on the idea that he is facing a coup-like attack, Erdoğan repeatedly seeks to channel the spirit of Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, another charismatic populist who took an authoritarian swerve in his later years and was ultimately deposed in a military coup ın 1960 and hanged following a show trial. “What they did to Menderes, they want to do to me,”
  • whatever the veracity of the corruption allegations, they have undoubtedly been raised as a calculated attempt either to eject Erdoğan from office, or to weaken him as much as possible at the polls
  • Just as Turkey’s opposition misapprehend the solidity of government support and the deep resonance of Erdoğan’s message, so his own camp misapprehends the significance of the still-fractured opposition ranged against him. This misapprehension issues from Erdoğan’s narrative itself (and the endemic divisiveness of Turkish politics), namely the claim that he and his supporters are synonymous with the concept of democracy. It is this belief that allows him to claim with a straight face that winning 49.9 percent of the vote in the last general elections allows him to claim ownership of “the national will,” even though more than half of the electorate voted for someone else
  • What is missed here is that the success of the AKP in its first decade, and the reason Turkey was viewed with such high regard by much of the outside world during this time, was that it was a democracy operating with the consent of almost all its people. Even those who despised the AKP acknowledged its right to govern. Erdoğan, of course, still has a very strong democratic mandate in the basic sense, and he may hold on to it in upcoming elections. But he will no longer be able to have stability unless he is willing to enact drastically repressive measures, and that will cost Turkey its democracy.
  • the rising perception that given the extent of the government’s alleged corruption and the high stakes (Erdoğan could end up in prison if he ultimately loses power), the elections may be rigged
  • Erdoğan may be deeply alienated from half of the population, but he absolutely has his finger on the pulse of the other half, and he knows it.
Ed Webb

Neither Heroes, Nor Villains: A Conversation with Talal Asad on Egypt After Morsi - 0 views

  • It is true that this president did not win by a vast margin, but there is no requirement in a liberal democracy that that be a condition of electoral success. And even if, as the protesters have also insisted, he has been acting largely on behalf of his Freedom and Justice Party rather than the country as a whole, that by and large is how politics works in liberal democracies. There is much rhetoric about “the nation” and “the people,” but electoral democracies work not in favor of all citizens but rather of special interests represented by the party that wins in the elections. 
  • The trouble, as I see it, is that the pro-democracy movement has not thought critically enough about how the grand alliance against Morsi has come about and how the aims of that alliance conflict with their own aims. They seem to take it for granted that, having been on the winning side in the conflict with the Morsi government, they can now successfully confront the army and its civilian allies (i.e., big business, the media, the judiciary, etc.).
  • there are so many forces already arrayed against them that there was not much scope for the Morsi government for independent action. Morsi could have tried military officers for crimes? You must be joking. He could have restored a bankrupt economy in a world where powerful institutions and governments, who have their own political agendas, control the flow of capital? He should have reduced poverty in a country dominated by a powerful neoliberal elite? This is not where the real evidence of their incompetence lies–especially considering the short period of one year in which he was president. In my view, their total incompetence, their total stupidity, lies in not anticipating, to begin with, that they would be demonized if they acquired governmental authority. And demonized they were, with a vengeance. Part of this can be related to the crude secularist ideas that dominate most Cairene intellectuals. They were also highly incompetent in their inability, or unwillingness, to reach out to parts of the opposition. In any case, in my view they should never have aspired to the presidency–first of all as a matter of principle, and secondly because the uprising had created colossal practical problems which would be extremely difficult to address by any government. Winning an election does not mean that you are strong, as the Muslim Brotherhood thought it was. It means you are responsible for failures of the state and economy. And, despite their electoral win, the Muslim Brotherhood and its Freedom and Justice Party are and were always weak. One of the things of which they were often accused was that they wanted totalitarian control of society, that they were on the verge of getting what they wanted, which is absolute nonsense, of course. They did not have such control, they could not acquire such control, and there is no real evidence that they wanted such control. This is one part of their stupidity: To be seen to behave as though they had real control of the state.
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  • I am worried that now there is a total vacuum that will be filled for a long time by the army, despite the fact that the temporary president, appointed by the army (and who was head of the pro-Mubarak Supreme Constitutional Court), has been accorded powers that exceed those which the suspended constitution gave to Morsi, the elected president.
  • the opposition consists largely of an elite that is still in power: the rich businessmen who established themselves during Mubarak’s neoliberal regime; high court judges that maintain close links with the army; ambitious politicians and ex-politicians; television directors and show hosts; famous newspaper journalists; the Coptic Pope and the Shaykh of al-Azhar; and so forth. The fact is that the senior army officers are very much part of this elite
  • The people” is a fantasy. Elections do not express “the common will” of the people. Elections are necessary because there is no common will. At best, elections are a way of resolving differences. In other words, if you recognize that there are deep differences, and you wish to resolve them without resort to force, you may turn to elections. But if elections have nothing to do with expressing “the people’s will,” then nor do popular demonstrations that invite the army to claim that they must respond to “the people’s will.” That kind of rhetoric on the part of the army, as well as on the part of the opposition, has been most puzzling. In a situation of violent conflict there is no such thing as legitimacy. Claims to legitimacy in that situation (as in the terrible Syrian civil war) are simply ways of trying to keep partisan spirits up.
  • The point is that the army generals took advantage of a political struggle to present themselves again as an umpire, and as an umpire who needs to act only when needed. (The slave-master uses his stick only when it is needed.) 
  • If further turbulence provides the generals with excuses to stay on “to restore order” and “to oversee the roadmap,” that is bad. If they do actually withdraw after a brief period, they will have helped openly restore a status quo ante, and provided a bad precedent.
  • There really was a popular unity among the opposition during the weeks that eventually led to Mubarak’s ouster. The beneficiaries of the Mubarak regime (i.e., the fuloul) were on the whole very quiet and did not come out too openly. But in the present case there were two great demonstrations, anti- and pro-Morsi. It is all very well talking about the opposition being the popular will, (“the greatest popular demonstrations in Egypt’s history” I read somewhere), whatever that means. But there were people who supported Morsi.
  • the army formally intervened in a situation that was already polarized
  • the biggest crime Mubarak perpetrated against Egypt was not so much the financial one but the corruption of an entire society
  • it seems to me a grave mistake to suppose that claiming “revolutionary legitimacy” achieves anything significant.
  • One cannot respect all the rights of the rich and powerful if one wants to help the downtrodden.
  • the dependence of so many people with the regime in place made it very difficult to reform one part of society without immediately affecting all of it
  • if you call in the army, it will repress the one determined attempt to shift things, whatever that turns out to be, whether positive or negative, and the army will want to stop that.
  • reposing of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization within the national discourse in Egypt
  • the Muslim Brotherhood has these conflicts within it, and many of those dissatisfied with it have left it. But then, many of these have rallied to the support of Morsi on the grounds that the military is the primary danger to a just society. And that has led them to being called terrorists by the anti-Morsi media
  • talk of actual or potential “terrorism” can be very useful. The United States uses it, after all, all over the world, and uses it to do all sorts of exceptional things even within the United States. So it is not surprising that this rhetoric has been used, and continues to be used by the present supporters of the state to maintain and extend control.
  • What happens to the future of “democracy” when a new era begins and continues with a savage repression?
  • it was the de facto alliance between Tamarod (with its claim to speak for “the people,” for “Egypt,” for “democracy”) on the one hand, and those who controlled the financial, communicational, and repressive apparatuses of the state on the other hand, that was effective
  • instead of always speculating about the various political actors’ real motives in doing what they did in their stated objective of ejecting the elected president by force (on the grounds that he was authoritarian and that he considered himself to be above the law), we must focus on the fact that the revolutionary leadership did join the Mubarak beneficiaries in calling for military intervention, and that it did welcome the coup when it happened!
Ed Webb

Tunisia's political impasse | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • Ennahdha insists that a new government should be grounded in legal legitimacy. Moreover, it holds that forming an apolitical government would marginalize Tunisia’s October 2011 electoral experience, dissolving a democratically elected government and replacing it with the old top-down ruling style of the past. This would effectively turn Tunisia’s political clock back to January 13, 2011 -- the night preceding Ben Ali’s escape to Saudi Arabia.  Conversely, the opposition argues that no legitimacy derived from an electoral victory could ride out the murder of political leaders for which it claims Ennahdha is responsible, or the incompetence it argues Ennahda has displayed in running the state. “Their compliance with political violence and perpetual attempts to ‘conquer the state apparatuses’ is conspicuous and intolerable,” said Hamma Hammami, spokesman for a major opposition front, Jabha Chaabia, in an address to protesters in front of the NCA building last month. “We will continue to mobilize the people to occupy governorates and bring down the traitorous government and Constituent Assembly.”
  • In February of this year, following the assassination of leftist politician Chokri Belaid, the opposition succeeded in pushing one government into resignation and forced Ennahdha to make tough concessions and ultimately withdrew its ministers from heading the foreign, justice and interior ministries. Remarkably though, the quota of political pressure on Ennahdha did not abate as the opposition kept boosting more demands adding more confusion to the ongoing struggle for a genuine consensus with the Troika.
  • Ennahdha’s biggest vulnerability has been its failure – either because of lack of will or inability -- to push the judiciary into faster substantial reforms. Ennahdha has likewise failed to reverse the rotten arsenal of laws through which those past abuses were carried out, leaving Tunisia’s old regime-era penal code intact
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  • Today the speed of progress between the Troika and the opposition relies largely on how far Ennahdha goes in acknowledging Nidaa Tounes as a legitimate political entity. In other words, how much legitimacy Ennahdha is willing to cede to Nidaa Tounes before the next elections and before trying to pass the transitional justice law which would launch comprehensive investigations into past crimes.
  • The recurrent incidents of insecurity, economic instability and social unrest constantly challenge the people’s patience, plungeing them into speculation over the country’s elite capacity to realize the revolution’s core demands: employment, freedom and dignity.
Ed Webb

The Failure of Egyptian Politics - 0 views

  • Two years after launching their historic revolution, Egyptians are more divided than ever, and as the weekend’s deadly clashes have shown, violence has become the rule rather than the exception at Egyptian protests
  • deep and growing fissures in Egyptian society along generational, class, and sectarian lines
  • the election of the country’s first civilian president last summer and the adoption of a new constitution last month have only deepened the atmosphere of polarization and mutual delegitimization that has dominated Egypt’s transition since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak
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  • above all a failure of Egypt’s political class
  • the vast majority of Egyptian political forces opted to negotiate with the SCAF—much as they had under Mubarak and his predecessors—rather than find ways of working together, giving the ruling military council a virtual free hand to manipulate the process and sowing the seeds of future instability
  • For all its electoral prowess and mastery of retail politics, the Muslim Brotherhood has been spectacularly inept at nearly every other aspect of politics
  • Faced with periodic unrest and a recalcitrant bureaucracy the Brotherhood may finally be starting to realize that there is more to politics than elections, and that its ability to govern—at all if not effectively—requires a modicum of good will and political consent
  • Despite representing sizeable constituencies, the various secular, liberal and revolutionary groups that make up the opposition camp remain highly fractious and lack both a coherent political vision and a reliable political base on the ground. In lieu of a strategy, opposition forces continue to fall back on the over-used and increasingly ineffective tactics of protest and boycott. In addition, the opposition has failed to cultivate and mobilize what should have been a natural constituency: the highly energized but politically unsavvy youth movements that spawned the Jan. 25 uprising and that have remained a vanguard for change ever since
  • If the Brotherhood presides over a government that cannot govern, the NSF represents the equally absurd specter of an opposition that won’t oppose
  • In addition to crippling basic governance, Egypt’s chronic instability is steadily eroding basic law and order and battering its already shaky economy—all of which fuel the cycle of unrest
  • Despite high levels of enthusiasm in the early stages of the transition, voter apathy has increased steadily over the past two years. Each round of voting has witnessed successively lower voter turnout, culminating in December’s constitutional referendum in which just 32% of eligible voters turned out
  • Egyptians have no choice but to learn to deal with each other. Like it or not, Egyptians may have no choice but to engage in a genuine national dialogue aimed at reaching a broad-based consensus. Indeed, a credible process of consensus-building may be the only way to militate against the Brotherhood’s majoritarianism and the opposition’s spoilerism
Ed Webb

Kuwaiti activists targeted under GCC security pact - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middl... - 0 views

  • Kuwaiti civil society is one of the most vibrant in the Gulf, hence its early rejection of the GCC Internal Security Pact, which was interpreted as yet another attempt to silence dissent in their own country. Many Kuwaiti activists resented Saudi hegemony, which the pact is meant to strengthen not only in the small emirate but the other ones, too. It is evident now that criticizing Saudi Arabia is taboo, the violation of which definitely leads to perhaps several years in prison. Kuwaiti apprehensions were not unfounded but they couldn't do much about the treaty that was ratified by their parliament. Several opposition groups boycotted the elections that eventually produced a docile body. On the other side of the border, there was no debate or controversy related to the pact as Saudis are completely disenfranchised. The only consultative council they have is appointed by the king and has no power to discuss security pacts with the GCC or other countries.
  • there is more to the recent detentions at the request of Saudi Arabia than simply freedom of speech. Regardless of their ideological affiliations, all the detainees belong to tribes that have historically lived between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Also all the detainees have gone beyond their Bedouin way of life to acquire education, political visions and determination to be part of states established when they were lacking skills. The governments of most GCC countries prefer the tribal Bedouin population to remain as part of folklore. Their ancient tents, camels and coffee pots are a reminder of a pure Arabian heritage, lost under the pressure of globalization, foreign labor populations and the ethnic diversity of the coastal states. So Gulf leaders, including the Kuwaitis and Saudis, prefer the Bedouin to be in the museum and the folklore heritage festivals rather than in public squares, demonstrating against corruption and calling for true citizenship
  • Today, not only Saudi Arabia but also Kuwait have to manage a different citizen, namely the "tribal moderns” who speak the language of human rights, freedom of speech, civil society, accountability, anti-corruption, elections and democracy. Such slogans are written on placards, chanted in demonstrations in Kuwait and virtually circulated in Saudi Arabia, as demonstrations are banned.
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  • The tribal moderns may endorse Islamism, or liberal democracy, but the fact of the matter remains constant. From the perspective of regimes, they are a dangerous bunch, simply because if they invoke tribal solidarities, they may be heeded by their fellow cousins, both imaginary and real.
  • No doubt, activists in Kuwait and other GCC countries will fall under the heavy weight of a pact designed above all to control, monitor and punish dissidents. The GCC itself may not move from cooperation to unification in the near future but it has certainly become yet another mechanism to silence peaceful and legitimate opposition across borders. Read More: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/03/saudi-gcc-security-dissident-activism-detention-opposition.html Madawi Al-Rasheed Columnist  Dr. Madawi Al-Rasheed is a columnist for Al-Monitor and a visiting professor at the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has written extensively about the Arabian Peninsula, Arab migration, globalization, religious trans-nationalism and gender. On Twitter: @MadawiDr !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs'); function target_popup(a){window.open("","formpopup","width=400,height=400,resizeable,scrollbars");a.target="formpopup"}
Ed Webb

Global Protests Round-Up: Authoritarian Adaptation, Data Gathering, and the Role of Cla... - 0 views

  • Erica Chenweth begins “Trends in Nonviolent Resistance and State Response: Is Violence Towards Civilian-based Movements on the Rise?” (Global Responsibility to Protect[1], July 2017) with the following rather discouraging statement, at least if you’re a protester: Through 2010, nonviolent mass movements tended to be surprisingly effective in removing incumbent leaders from power or achieving territorial independence, even when they experienced some repression from the government. However, since 2010, the success rates of nonviolent campaigns have declined by a staggering rate (about 20% below the average)
  • She speculates that the cause of the this decline is due to Authoritarian Adaptation: the ability of authoritarian governments to adopt more politically savvy repressive tools may be part of the reason for the decline in success rates in the past six years.21. Authoritarian leaders have begun to develop and systematize sophisticated techniques to undermine and thwart nonviolent activists.
  • Dana R. Fisher, Kenneth T. Andrews, Neal Caren, Erica Chenoweth, Michael T. Heaney, Tommy Leung, L. Nathan Perkins, and Jeremy Pressman in “The science of contemporary street protest: New efforts in the United States” (Science Advances, October 23, 2019). This is a fascinating article, which I encourage all big data fans to read in full. From the abstract: This article reviews the two most central methods for studying street protest on a large scale: building comprehensive event databases and conducting field surveys of participants at demonstrations.
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  • Unique to today’s environment is the sheer number of sources and the time-limited nature of the discovery-and-review period: Given the transience of information on the internet compared to print media, thousands of sources produce reports of variable reliability on a daily basis. Researchers must archive and extract information such as where, when, and why a protest took place, as well as how many people attended, before that content is moved behind a paywall, deleted, or otherwise made unavailable.
  • Moving forward, best practices will require forming teams of scholars that are geographically dispersed in a way that corresponds with the distribution of the events under investigation. While previous studies have concentrated on conducting surveys in different regions and in major cities, the datasets would be more representative if data were collected in multiple locations simultaneously in a way that represents smaller cities, suburbs, and rural areas.
  • What this article does show, however, is how blind the public and the press are flying
  • Sirianne Dahlum, Carl Henrik Knutsen, and Tore Wig, “Who Revolts? Empirically Revisiting the Social Origins of Democracy” (The Journal of Politics, August 2019)
  • We expect that both the urban middle classes and, especially, industrial workers have the requisite motivation and capacity to engender democratization, at least in fairly urban and industrialized societies. Other social groups—even after mobilizing in opposition to the regime—often lack the capacity to sustain large-scale collective action or the motivation to pursue democracy. We collect data on the social composition of opposition movements to test these expectations, measuring degree of participation of six major social groups in about 200 antiregime campaigns globally from 1900 to 2006. Movements dominated by industrial workers or middle classes are more likely to yield democratization, particularly in fairly urbanized societies. Movements dominated by other groups, such as peasants or military personnel, are not conducive to democratization, even compared to situations without any opposition mobilization. When separating the groups, results are more robust for industrial worker campaigns
  • we expect opposition movements dominated by the middle classes or industrial workers to be related to subsequent democratization. Yet, we anticipate a clearer relationship for industrial worker campaigns, due to their multiple sources of leverage and especially strong organizational capacity allowing for effective and sustained challenges to the regime.
Ed Webb

Canan Kaftancioglu Is the Motorcycle-Riding Leftist Feminist Coming for Turkish Preside... - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • Under Kaftancioglu’s guidance, Imamoglu and other mayors took a new tack, dubbed the “Radical Love” strategy, which is the antithesis of Erdogan’s ferocious style of polarization and antagonism. This involved making overtures to marginalized groups, using positive, inclusive language (extremely rare in the vicious world of Turkish politics), and trying to heal the cultural fault lines that Erdogan has taken a jackhammer to. Imamoglu’s positive slogan was “Everything’s going to be OK,” and he recited a prayer at a mosque—a rare move for a CHP politician—as a form of outreach to pious Muslims.
  • “This is the first time I’ve seen the CHP this organized,” said Nevsin Mengu, a columnist from a CHP background. “Kaftancioglu has played an important role in this.”
  • She has expressed opinions that are extremely controversial within the party and indeed the country, acknowledging the Armenian genocide, calling the state a “serial killer,” and criticizing a popular Kemalist slogan for its militant language, tweeting “I refuse to say we are the soldiers of Mustafa Kemal, but we are his comrades.”
  • Within 48 hours of Kaftancioglu being elected the party head for Istanbul in 2018, a prosecutor opened a terrorism investigation into her (she’s now appealing a 10-year jail sentence) and Erdogan himself devoted 10 minutes to slamming her during an AKP meeting the next day, reading each of her tweets that he took issue with.
  • the government’s wider antagonistic strategy of treating any and all opposition as an existential threat
  • More recently, a criminal complaint and investigation were opened against Kaftancioglu after the CHP Istanbul municipality lodged a complaint against Erdogan’s powerful Communications Director Fahrettin Altun for allegedly building illegal constructions in Istanbul.
  • “I’ve been subjected to hundreds of sexist, nationalist, ultrareligious groups’ threats, and it still goes on. I knew that as a woman I was going to face this, but I never thought of taking a step back,”
  • “If [the government] can’t identify an enemy outsider, they create abstract enemies and pretend to be in a fight with them. Sometimes they call it foreign powers, sometimes terrorism, sometimes secular people.”
  • “What really makes her a juicy target is her flagrant absence of the ‘yerli ve milli’ [local and national, a favorite phrase of the government], the national spirit. She and the people around her … don’t just exist outside of the national spirit type of thing, they deny that kind of nationalism,” Koru said. “Erdogan can get up and say, ‘Look, this is being disrespectful on purpose. She hates you, she hates what you are, and she wants to change you in the way that Kemalists wanted to change you, in the worst possible way.’”
  • just as Kaftancioglu’s approach turns many people off, it also caters to others who previously may have felt excluded, such as younger people, leftists, liberals, and religious and ethnic minorities. “A certain segment of the party … didn’t like her iconoclastic approach to politics,” he said. “But it may also be that some other people who previously [felt] alienated from the party are now more interested for the same reason.”
  • the CHP’s increasingly national ambitions. The party hasn’t won an election since 1977, but its most popular figure, Imamoglu, polls almost as high as Erdogan. It’s far too early for the party to announce a presidential candidate, but two of the main contenders would likely be Imamoglu or Mansur Yavas, the popular mayor of the capital, Ankara. Kaftancioglu will likely continue her behind-the-scenes role.
  • Some governance experts no longer consider the country a democracy, but rather a competitive authoritarian system, especially after Erdogan was left with few limits on his power when the government was transformed into an “executive presidential” system following a referendum in 2017, which Kaftancioglu describes as “one-party rule transformed into one-man rule.”
  • “For the first time in a long time people are talking about the CHP like it can realistically win national elections.”
Ed Webb

Source: Qatari authorities ask 100 Egyptian nationals affiliated to Muslim Brotherhood,... - 0 views

  • About 100 Egyptian nationals living in Qatar have been asked by Doha authorities to leave the country within a few weeks time, according to an Egyptian opposition figure based abroad who spoke to Mada Masr on condition of anonymity.  The move by Qatar comes after Egypt requested that the figures — all of whom are affiliated with Islamist groups — be delivered to Egyptian authorities, said the source.
  • Qatar has given the Egyptian nationals notice to leave the country amid a diplomatic rapprochement between Doha and Cairo that has blossomed over the past year. 
  • Helping bridge the distance between Doha and Cairo are the increasingly strained relations between the current Egyptian administration and its long-standing Gulf backers in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, as well as a number of economic investment opportunities, with potential for Egypt’s need for foreign direct investment to soothe its distressed balance of payments to align with Qatari interest in a number of key strategic economic sectors, including agriculture and telecommunications. 
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  • Qatari authorities requested 250 Egyptian nationals, including Islamist opposition figure Abdallah al-Sherif, who ran a series of satirical programs on YouTube and Al Jazeera, to leave the country when diplomatic ties were first being established in 2022
  • With Cairo and Ankara establishing closer ties in 2021, the Turkish government instructed opposition media channels broadcasting from Turkish soil to stop criticizing Sisi and his government.
Ed Webb

The Jordanian State Buys Itself Time | Middle East Research and Information Project - 0 views

  • the elections have afforded the regime room to breathe
  • For the moment, the state seems confident that it commands the loyalty of the silent majority. For years, polls have found that most Jordanians are politically conservative, holding positive impressions of the king and royal family and darker views of political parties -- including the Islamists. Jordan has long been regarded as an oasis of stability compared to its neighbors who have faced invasion, foreign occupation and insurrection. Polls and interviews indicate that Jordanians put a high premium on a sense of security, the maintenance of which is of course a mainstay of regime rhetoric.
  • The opposition, on the other hand, draws its strength primarily from concerns about the economy and complaints about corruption in the cabinet and Parliament. Many in the opposition also note the state’s well-documented history of using “political reform” as a sop to critics. [3] In tough times, the regime pledges to open up the political system, but then offers changes that do little to alter the established power structure.
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  • holding an election that is pronounced clean and successful may be of less value to the state than is now apparent. As the year progresses, the public is likely to evaluate the new parliament and government by their ability to address popular concerns
  • High turnout and good reviews of election day are the foundations of the state’s claim to have a new mandate. But election monitors in Jordan have made the same point time and time again: An election is much more than the casting of ballots, and a successful poll does not equate to the advent of democracy.
  • monitors were also unanimous in their assessment that the system underpinning the vote falls considerably short of ideal. Their criticism centers on the distorted representation inherent in the election law and the political culture that gerrymandering promotes. Jordan’s voting system boosts the fortunes of candidates whose support base lies in large tribes or localities, while handicapping political parties and unaffiliated candidates who have national agendas. In Jordan’s last five parliamentary elections, most of the seats have gone to such independent or “tribal” candidates. Once elected, the MPs have little ability to shape national policy in any event, since the king appoints all other branches of government.
  • The incentives created are perverse. Voters may feel pushed to back the candidate who returns home bearing spoils from the treasury, rather than the one who represents their vision for the nation. Indeed, deputies in past assemblies have been lambasted for passing out rewards to supporters while ignoring national issues -- one voter, on election day, derided previous parliaments as “service departments.” Polls have found that large portions of the public see parliamentarians as highly corrupt. It is easy to see how this system becomes self-reinforcing. Voters feel that their vote means little on the national stage, while candidates for office seek to become local patrons while feathering their own nests. The result can be vote buying and coercive campaigning.
  • the “tribal” bias of the election system boosts turnout, since the groups that benefit directly from the parliamentary spoils system show up to keep the spoils coming
  • ambient mistrust
  • According to a July 2012 poll by the International Republican Institute, more Jordanians think the country is going in the wrong direction than the right one and many feel deep discontent with the weak economy and perceived government corruption. The same poll found Jordanians taking a dim view of politicians in general, and parliamentarians in particular, who despite being elected appear less popular than royally appointed officials. And in a September 2012 CSS survey, a big portion of the public said the state's reforms had been insufficient -- though large majorities still said it was better to change the system through political action than through street protest.
  • There are indications that the new parliament is more representative -- or at least more diverse -- than the old one. Candidates from al-Wasat al-Islami, a centrist Islamist party, came away with 16 seats, a substantial increase in their representation. Leftists also picked up around a dozen seats (depending on who is counting). Whether either of these groups will be credible to the protesters in the streets is an open question: In the past, many leftist and Islamist MPs have been characterized as “safe,” regime-aligned candidates rather than a genuine opposition. Palestinian Jordanians likewise seem to have gained ground, now holding roughly 35 seats as opposed to 20 or so in the last parliament. Women’s representation also increased slightly, with women taking two national list seats and two district seats, in addition to 15 seats from the 10 percent quota they are allotted under the election law.
  • If Parliament is unable to make serious progress toward improving the economy, an item which usually tops the list of the public’s grievances, that will also have consequences. The first challenge the new deputies will face, the yearly budget, will be doubly critical, establishing both the MPs’ economic credentials and their ability to have a serious debate
  • What the state has won is time, which it may use to carry out a reform program, to appease its core constituents or to do a bit of both. In the past, Jordan’s electoral exercises have generally been preludes to consolidations of regime power. But history is not destiny. The state may travel down the path of reform it has laid out, toward parliamentary government and constitutional monarchy, even at the cost of upsetting its traditional clients. Or it may attempt to delay reform again, using the same bait-and-switch it has employed for decades
  • The unfolding disaster in neighboring Syria will likely keep security high on the local agenda; on the other hand, the state faces another moment of potential crisis, as sometime early in 2013, probably April, conditions of Jordan's IMF loan agreements will require the state to engage in another round of subsidy removal like the one that triggered the November 2012 unrest
Ed Webb

Egypt politicians renounce violence at crisis talks - Yahoo! News - 1 views

  • Egypt's feuding politicians renounced violence on Thursday after being summoned by the country's most influential Muslim scholar to talks to end the deadliest unrest since President Mohamed Mursi took power. It remains to be seen whether the pledge to end confrontation will halt a week of bloodshed on the streets that killed nearly 60 people. Opposition groups did not cancel new demonstrations scheduled for Friday. But participants at the meeting, including leaders of Mursi's Muslim Brotherhood and its secular rivals, described their joint statement as a major step towards ending a conflict that has made the most populous Arab state seem all but ungovernable two years after an uprising toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak.
  • Al-Azhar, one of the main seats of learning in Sunni Islam worldwide, has tended to keep itself above Egypt's political fray. Its extraordinary intervention follows a warning by the army chief on Tuesday that street battles - which erupted last week to mark the second anniversary of the uprising that toppled Mubarak - could bring about the collapse of the state.
  • The secularists are nonetheless likely to continue to press for inclusion in a national unity government, a call also backed by the hardline Islamist Nour party in an unlikely alliance of Mursi's critics from opposite ends of the political spectrum. The Brotherhood rejects a unity government as an attempt by Mursi's foes to take power they could not win at the ballot box.
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  • Ejijah Zarwan, who analyses Egyptian politics for the European Council on Foreign Relations, said Thursday's intervention by al-Azhar was important, but it was far from clear whether it would be enough to calm the streets. "It's a good first step. Certainly it will help the formal opposition to be very clearly on record as opposing violence," he said. But he added: "The people fighting the police and burning buildings are not partisans of any political party. They might not even vote." "There's a political crisis and there's a social and economic crisis. A negotiated solution to the political crisis will certainly help but it's just a necessary first step towards resolving the social and economic crisis."
Ed Webb

Open-letter-to-President-Obama - Al-Ahram Weekly - 0 views

  • the stances of your administration have given political cover to the current authoritarian regime in Egypt and allowed it to fearlessly implement undemocratic policies and commit numerous acts of repression
  • Statements that “Egypt is witnessing a genuine and broad-based process of democratisation” have covered over and indeed legitimised the undemocratic processes by which the Constituent Assembly passed the new constitution, an issue which has in turn led to greatly heightened instability in the country. Calls for “the opposition [to] remain non-violent” and for “the government and security forces [to] exercise self-restraint in the face of protester violence” have allowed the police and the current Egyptian administration to shirk their responsibilities to secure demonstrations and to respond to the demands of the Egyptian people, and have allowed them to place the blame for violence and instability on protesters themselves. Urging “the opposition [to] engage in a national dialogue without preconditions” undermines the ability of the opposition to play a real role in the decision-making processes of the country, as these “dialogues” seldom result in anything more concrete than a photo-op with the president.
  • when these statements come from the world’s superpower — the one most able to have a positive or negative impact on policies in Egypt and the region, not to mention the biggest donor and material supporter of the Egyptian regime for the past 35 years — they become lethal ammunition, offering political protection to perpetrators of murder, torture, brutality and rape.
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  • My request is quite modest: that spokespeople and officials in your administration stop commenting on developments in Egypt.
  • When in December I met Michael Posner, assistant secretary of state for human rights and that rare person in your administration who is motivated by human rights concerns, I asked that he pass on this modest request to administration spokespeople: that as long as they cannot speak the truth about what is happening in Egypt, they keep silent.
Ed Webb

Turkish opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet finds a voice in German media | Middle East Eye - 0 views

  • Germany's leading newspapers have together offered their support to Turkish opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet, which has been raided by authorities, with the publication of a guest editorial.Thirty-seven German newspapers and their websites, including Spiegel Online, Die Welt, Die Zeit and Sueddeutsche Zeitung, ran the article on Tuesday as German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier visited Turkey.
  • "When the existence of civil society is threatened, then democracy is also threatened.”
Ed Webb

Socialist Project | The Bullet - 0 views

  • he broad-based opposition movement has continued to subvert the Islamic Republic's ideological, political, and religious symbols and occasions through a range of sophisticated and creative means.
  • The false dichotomies of secular versus Islamic, and/or imperialist versus anti-imperialist which at one point may have applied to Iranian political discourse, are not applicable to the current national opposition movement in Iran.
Ed Webb

Domestic politics, Idlib sway timing of Turkey's Syrian operation - 0 views

  • Urgent necessities of a domestic nature have determined the timing of Operation Peace Spring that Turkey launched Oct. 9 along the Syrian border east of the Euphrates against the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), which has been building a self-rule in the region thanks to US protection and military support.
  • the operation came in the wake of the local elections earlier this year in which the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) suffered major losses. The economic crisis bruising Turkey proved a major factor in the party’s debacles in big cities in the March 31 polls and the June 23 rerun of the mayoral vote in Istanbul, giving impetus to rupture trends within the AKP.
  • Ankara is greatly concerned over the prospect of a new refugee influx from Idlib that would further entangle Turkey’s Syrian refugee problem. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had warned in September that Turkey cannot tolerate another refugee wave atop the 3.6 million Syrians it is already hosting
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  • the Syrian refugee problem has proved increasingly costly for the AKP in terms of domestic politics
  • Across Turkey and in big cities in particular, most of the Syrian refugees live in close proximity to AKP voters, either in the same neighborhoods or adjoining ones. Under the impact of the economic crisis, tensions between locals and refugees have grown, contributing to a gradual disenchantment with the government among AKP voters
  • While announcing the launch of Operation Peace Spring, Erdogan said the campaign would “lead to the establishment of a safe zone, facilitating the return of Syrian refugees to their homes.” The political motive underlying this pledge rests on the fact that the Syrian refugee problem is becoming unbearable for the government.
  • Syrians who could be forced to flee Idlib in the near future could perhaps be placed in tent cities in this “security belt” without being let into Turkey at all and instead transferred via Afrin and al-Bab, which are already under Turkish control.
  • the web editor of the left-leaning BirGun daily, Hakan Demir, and the editor of the Diken news portal, Fatih Gokhan Diler, were detained on the grounds that their coverage of the operation amounted to “inciting hatred and enmity” among the people. The two journalists were released on probation later in the day.
  • The intensive employment of a nationalist narrative, in which the operation is depicted as a struggle of “national survival” against terrorism and quitting the AKP is equated to treason, would not be a surprise. 
  • already omens that this state-of-emergency climate, nurtured through the operation, will be used to further suppress the opposition, free speech and media freedoms. 
  • Ali Babacan, the AKP’s former economy czar who has already quit the party, is expected to create a new party and join the opposition ranks by the end of the year. Ahmet Davutoglu — the former premier and foreign minister who, together with Erdogan, designed and implemented the failed policies that spawned the grave “Syria crisis” that Turkey is experiencing today, both domestically and in its foreign policy — is gearing up to get ahead of Babacan and announce his own party in November. These political dynamics have already triggered a spate of resignations from the AKP, and the formal establishment of the new parties could further accelerate the unraveling
  • prosecutors launched an investigation into the co-chairs of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), Pervin Buldan and Sezai Temelli, on charges that their critical comments about the operation constituted “spreading terrorist propaganda” and “openly insulting” the government. 
  • Erdogan already lacks any political ground to try to win over the Kurds, but Kurdish voters are likely to develop resentment against the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) as well over its support for the military campaign. This, of course, could be one of the side objectives the government seeks from the operation, given that the backing of HDP voters was instrumental in CHP victories in big cities such as Ankara, Istanbul and Adana in the local polls after the HDP opted to sit out those races.
  • Trump's threats to “obliterate” the Turkish economy if Ankara goes “off-limits” in the operation offers Erdogan the chance to blame the economy’s domestic woes on external reasons and portray the ongoing fragility of the Turkish lira as an American conspiracy.
Ed Webb

As Discontent Grows in Syria, Assad Struggles to Retain Support of Alawites - 0 views

  • Though the choreographed optics are intended to placate the community, pictures of Assad meeting with the distressed and offering shallow assurances are unlikely to offset the sight of cataclysmic flames devouring their homes. In a video shared on Twitter, an Alawite man films a fire surrounding his home. He sarcastically thanks the state for enabling its spread “because it’s irrelevant if we live or die.” In another video, a group of Alawites is seen criticizing government officials for their indifference, including a minister, whom they claim arrived for a photo op then subsequently drove off to avoid answering questions. The demographic’s small size and geographic concentration guarantees that word of such transgressions spreads quickly. The author’s Alawite sources on the coast echo these frustrations and claim they are widespread. They angrily questioned why neither the state nor its Iranian and Russian allies had assisted, especially given the proximity of the latter’s airbase at Khmeimim to the coastal mountains. 
  • On Oct. 9, state media’s Alikhbaria broadcast a video depicting a handful of Syrian soldiers struggling to put out small fires. Owing to severe water shortages, the troops were forced to use tree branches in lieu of hoses or buckets of water. The video was later shared on Twitter, where it elicited a mixture of mockery and condemnation from opponents of the regime. However, Alawite overrepresentation in the military means that these visuals denote a sense of loss and despair to the community.
  • The armed forces make up a key pillar of Alawite identity and have for nearly a century constituted their main institutional vehicle for attaining upward social mobility and prestige. The community’s loss of more than one third of their men of military age fighting for the regime against an overwhelmingly Sunni armed opposition has further entrenched this interdependence
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  • Conversations within the community center on the divide between the elites and the impoverished Alawites who are commonly linked to the discourse of sacrifice. Economic implosion and the decimation of the Syrian pound have effectively thrust a formerly comfortable middle class into poverty. Whereas Alawites are disproportionately represented in the public sector, the average state salary – a meager 50,000 SYP ($21) per month – means that the vast majority live well below the poverty line, as the average family, according to a Syrian newspaper, requires 700,000 SYP ($304) per month in order to live comfortably. 
  • In October alone, the price of gasoline increased twice, while the cost of diesel – used for residential heat and cooking, in addition to operating bakeries and fueling Syria’s cheapest mode of transportation, microbuses – more than doubled. Basic necessities have become virtually unaffordable.
  • Many of the communities impacted by the fires are subsistence farmers that depend on the profits accrued from harvesting crops such as olives, citrus, and tobacco. They commonly require a mixture of short- and long-term loans from the state’s Agricultural Cooperative Bank. Yet systemic corruption, mismanagement, and a collapsed economy have depleted state coffers, making it unlikely that the regime will compensate those whose homes and livelihoods have been destroyed.
  • in an interview with pro-regime radio station Sham FM, a resident of Alawite al-Fakhoura asserts the funds are being distributed by local officials in a nepotistic fashion. This example illustrates that, in the improbable case that Assad secures the necessary finances, his regime cannot prevent its clientelist networks from capturing them
  • diffusion of power since 2011 has led to unprecedented corruption amid the rise of relatively autonomous war profiteers, from militias to businessmen
  • Outside of individual members hailing from a class of intellectuals, artists, and political dissidents, few Alawites actively joined the uprising in 2011. Those who did generally partook in cross-confessional protests that stressed national unity.
  • In August 2015, the president’s cousin, Suleiman al-Assad, shot and killed a decorated Syrian Air Force colonel in Latakia City in a bout of road rage. According to the colonel’s brother, Suleiman had disparaged the Syrian military before killing the officer. Protests calling for Suleiman’s execution ensued in the Alawite neighborhood of Al-Zira’a. The debasing of the army – viewed as the only buffer between Alawites and a vengeful, sectarian opposition – by a privileged member of the ruling class struck a political nerve.
  • The spread of parasitic pro-regime militias operating with impunity and their disregard for breadlines, gas queues, and ration restrictions, in addition to their harassment of people desperately awaiting their turn, has contributed to an atmosphere in which fights break out. In Latakia and Hama, these fights have reportedly resulted in a few deaths.
  • time-tested tactic of externalizing blame and deflecting responsibility is currently being sustained by several exogenous factors. These include the presence of Turkish and American troops on Syrian soil and their support for rival armed actors, the sporadic persistence of Israeli strikes, and the implementation of U.S. sanctions through the Caesar Act, which collectively breathe life into the regime’s otherwise exhausted rhetoric
  • People considering organizing widespread civil disobedience are deterred by the specter of pre-emptive detention by the dreaded mukhabarat. The regime’s periodic security reshuffling further blurs the ability to identify potentially dangerous agents within their own community, magnifying the perceived threat posed by the omnipresence of informants.
  • the regime’s inability to check its repressive impulses could lead to a situation in which Alawites related to members of the officer corps are arrested and tortured – or worse, disappeared – for public critiques of the government, causing backlash from its own coercive forces
  • the deterioration of living standards could ultimately lead to a breaking point. 
  • Any organized dissent would require the support of its rank-and-file soldiers, most of whom share similar, if not identical, grievances with the wider community, and could thus be sympathetic. This could potentially cause a schism within the Alawite community as familial allegiances are weighed against loyalty to the Assad dynasty and its regime, particularly if ordered to repress protests in Alawite areas.
  • The only conceivable scenario in which Assad’s departure can occur at the hands of the Alawites while salvaging the state and avoiding further regional instability would be through a palace coup led by disgruntled officers and backed by Russia. However, the likelihood that Russia could simply replace or abandon Assad, its growing frustrations notwithstanding, is low, not least due to lack of an alternative.
  • Iranian entrenchment, both within the formal institutions of the regime and the state’s security landscape more broadly, continues to exploit Assad’s tenuous authority in order to obstruct Russian attempts to monopolize patronage.
  • Iran is a force for regime continuity. By creating a parallel network of control that bypasses the state, Iran has thus far been able to reproduce its influence, particularly through its ongoing relations with a patchwork of non-state militias, while resisting Russian efforts at vertically integrating these actors into the formal structures of a centralized Syrian state
  • the regime played the leading role in engineering facts on the ground critical to corroborating the false binary at the heart of its survival: Either accept the stability and security of the state – however perilous – or test the genocidal dispositions of the “jihadist” opposition.
  • This idea – that the president is innocent despite being surrounded by villains – is not uncommon among the Alawites.
  • Apart from the Turkish-backed factions in the north, the threat of Sunni reprisals occupies less of an immediate concern to most Alawites than their ability to secure food, shelter, and transportation amid a shattered economy and unstable currency
Ed Webb

Kuwait Muddles through Its Confusing Politics | Arab Center Washington DC - 0 views

  • the major issues that have dominated the first year of Emir Nawaf Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al Sabah’s leadership and the prospects for Kuwaiti politics, which is once again in a state of ferment with no clear resolution in sight
  • Sheikh Sabah’s time as ruler was marked by an initial period of political deadlock that saw six parliamentary elections and more than a dozen cabinets come and go between 2006 and 2013, and then a calmer spell that culminated in the election of the National Assembly in November 2016, which became the first in nearly 20 years to serve its full four-year term.
  • relations between the government and the National Assembly have deteriorated in recent months to the point that, now, there is barely a working relationship at all
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  • fallout from the corruption cases overshadowed much of the final year of Emir Sabah’s life and has continued to loom over the opening months of the rule of Emir Nawaf al-Ahmad Al Sabah. The allegations, including one linked to the explosive fallout from the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) scandal and another over $789 million said to have gone missing from the Army Fund, have implicated members of the ruling family and senior officials and further sapped public trust. In a move unprecedented for Kuwait, the former prime minister, Sheikh Jaber Al-Mubarak, was detained in April 2021, as was Sheikh Khalid al-Jarrah Al Sabah, a former Defense (2013-17) and Interior (2017-19) minister. A leaked court document also indicated that Sheikh Jaber had repaid $180.7 million in funds that prosecutors had accused him of misappropriating
  • the fact that the Al Sabah quickly cohered around the choice of Sheikh Mishaal as crown prince in 2020 has only delayed the moment when the ruling family must identify a next generation of leadership to eventually take over from Emir Nawaf, who is 84, and Crown Prince Mishaal, who is 80
  • only transitioned from one generation to another twice in the past century, in 1921 and again in 1977
  • Sheikh Mishaal has become important, creating a National Security Council, under his leadership, in March 2021 and visiting Saudi Arabia at the end of May. Ties between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait had been strained by the prolonged shutdown of two oil fields in the Neutral Zone along their border and by a visit by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to Kuwait in September 2018. This visit was cut short over disagreements that included Kuwait’s preference for a diplomatic resolution of the Qatar blockade
  • The fact that Kuwaiti politics was less stormy between 2013 and about 2019 did not, however, denote that any of the contentious underlying issues had been resolved, such as the relationship between the mostly appointed cabinet and the elected (and strongly populist) MPs
  • 38 MPs backed a motion to question the prime minister, Sheikh Sabah al-Khalid Al Sabah, over claims of constitutional irregularities in forming the government, leading ultimately to the cabinet submitting its resignation in January 2021
  • the replacement of four cabinet ministers, including the Minister of Interior, Anas al-Saleh—who had become a lightning rod for opposition criticism—failed to significantly placate opposition MPs, who sought unsuccessfully to block the swearing in of the new cabinet in April and criticized a decision to postpone all parliamentary questioning of the prime minister until 2022.
  • the political opposition in the National Assembly lacks consensus of its own on policy objectives and the degree to which it should negotiate with the government on specific issues. So long as there are no changes to Kuwait’s electoral law or to procedural (and constitutional) aspects of the way politics is conducted, and the government and parliament coexist, little in practice is likely to change. The populist streak that has long been such a characteristic feature of Kuwaiti politics continues to complicate efforts by the Kuwaiti authorities to respond to public policy challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the oil price collapse of 2020 that, itself, followed years of growing budget deficits
  • Kuwait has not run a budget surplus since 2014 when the long oil price boom that began in 2002 ended, and fiscal deficits have risen sharply. Whereas officials in other Gulf states responded to revenue declines by scaling back subsidies and introducing a variety of new taxes and fees on their citizen and resident populations, the maneuverability of Kuwaiti authorities was constrained by the difficulty of securing National Assembly support for such measures
  • almost 72 percent of spending in the budget proposed in June 2021 will go to salaries and other entitlements
  • While Kuwait remains one of the wealthiest countries in the world, the authorities have had to resort to short-term measures, such as withdrawals from its General Reserve Fund, to plug spending gaps, actions that are poor substitutes for a long-term solution
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