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Ed Webb

Is Iran on the Verge of Another Revolution? | Journal of Democracy - 0 views

www.journalofdemocracy.org/he-verge-of-another-revolution

Iran protests revolution analysis uprising

shared by Ed Webb on 10 Mar 23 - Cached
  • the most severe and sustained political upheaval ever faced by the Islamist regime in Iran. Waves of protests, led mostly by women, broke out immediately, sending some two-million people into the streets of 160 cities and small towns, inspiring extraordinary international support. The Twitter hashtag #MahsaAmini broke the world record of 284 million tweets, and the UN Human Rights Commission voted on November 24 to investigate the regime’s deadly repression, which has claimed five-hundred lives and put thousands of people under arrest and eleven hundred on trial.
  • This is neither a “feminist revolution” per se, nor simply the revolt of generation Z, nor merely a protest against the mandatory hijab. This is a movement to reclaim life, a struggle to liberate free and dignified existence from an internal colonization. As the primary objects of this colonization, women have become the major protagonists of the liberation movement.
  • Since its establishment in 1979, the Islamic Republic has been a battlefield between hard-line Islamists who wished to enforce theocracy in the form of clerical rule (velayat-e faqih), and those who believed in popular will and emphasized the republican tenets of the constitution.
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  • Only popular resistance from below and the reformists’ electoral victories could curb the hard-liners’ drive for total subjugation of the state, society, and culture.
  • The Green revolt and the subsequent nationwide uprisings in 2017 and 2019 against socioeconomic ills and authoritarian rule profoundly challenged the Islamist regime but failed to alter it. The uprisings caused not a revolution but the fear of revolution—a fear that was compounded by the revolutionary uprisings against the allied regimes in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, which Iran helped to quell.
  • once they took over the presidency in 2021 and the parliament in 2022 through rigged elections—specifically, through the arbitrary vetoing of credible rival candidates—the hard-liners moved to subjugate a defiant people once again. Extending the “morality police” into the streets and institutions to enforce the “proper hijab” has been only one measure—but it was the one that unleashed a nationwide uprising in which women came to occupy a central place.
  • the culmination of years of steady struggles against a systemic misogyny that the postrevolution regime established
  • With the emergence of the “people,” a super-collective in which differences of class, gender, ethnicity, and religion temporarily disappear in favor of a greater good, the uprising has assumed a revolutionary character. The abolition of the morality police and the mandatory hijab will no longer suffice. For the first time, a nationwide protest movement has called for a regime change and structural socioeconomic transformation.
  • Over the years, headscarves gradually inched back further and further until finally they fell to the shoulders. Officials felt, time and again, paralyzed by this steady spread of bad-hijabi among millions of women who had to endure daily humiliation and punishment. With the initial jail penalty between ten days and two months, showing inches of hair had ignited decades of daily street battles between defiant women and multiple morality enforcers such as Sarallah (wrath of Allah), Amre beh Ma’ruf va Nahye az Monker (command good and forbid wrong), and EdarehAmaken (management of public places). According to a police report during the crackdown on bad-hijabis in 2013, some 3.6 million women were stopped and humiliated in the streets and issued formal citations. Of these, 180,000 were detained.
  • This is the story of women’s “non-movement”—the collective and connective actions of non-collective actors who pursue not a politics of protest but of redress, through direct actions.
  • the uprising is no longer limited to the mandatory hijab and women’s rights. It has grown to include wider concerns and constituencies—young people, students and teachers, middle-class families and workers, residents of some rural and poor communities, and those religious and ethnic minorities (Kurds, Arabs, Azeris, and Baluchis) who, like women, feel like second-class citizens and seem to identify with “Woman, Life, Freedom.”
  • The thousands of tweets describing why people are protesting point time and again to the longing for a humble normal life denied to them by a regime of clerical and military patriarchs. For these dissenters, the regime appears like a colonial entity—with its alien thinking, feeling, and ruling—that has little to do with the lives and worldviews of the majority.
  • The feminism of the movement, rather, is antisystem; it challenges the systemic control of everyday life and the women at its core. It is precisely this antisystemic feminism that promises to liberate not only women but also the oppressed men—the marginalized, the minorities, and those who are demeaned and emasculated by their failure to provide for their families due to economic misfortune.
  • A segment of Muslim women did support the Islamic state, but others fought back. They took to the streets to protest the mandatory hijab, organized collective campaigns, and lobbied “liberal clerics” to secure a women-centered reinterpretation of religious texts. But when the regime extended its repression, women resorted to the “art of presence”—by which I mean the ability to assert collective will in spite of all odds, by circumventing constraints, utilizing what exists, and discovering new spaces within which to make themselves heard, seen, felt, and realized. Simply, women refused to exit public life, not through collective protests but through such ordinary things as pursuing higher education, working outside the home, engaging in the arts, music, and filmmaking, or practicing sports.
  • At this point in time, Iran is far from a “revolutionary situation,” meaning a condition of “dual power” where an organized revolutionary force backed by millions would come to confront a crumbling government and divided security forces. What we are witnessing today, however, is the rise of a revolutionary movement—with its own protest repertoires, language, and identity—that may open Iranian society to a “revolutionary course.”
  • The disproportionate presence of the young—women and men, university and high school students—in the streets of the uprising has led some to interpret it as the revolt of generation-Z against a regime that is woefully out of touch. But this view overlooks the dissidence of older generations, the parents and families that have raised, if not politicized, these children and mostly share their sentiments. A leaked government survey from November 2022 found that 84 percent of Iranians expressed a positive view of the uprising. If the regime allowed peaceful public protests, we would likely see more older people on the streets.
  • Although some workers have joined the protests through demonstrations and labor strikes, a widespread labor showdown has yet to materialize. This may not be easy, because the neoliberal restructuring of the 2000s has fragmented the working class, undermined workers’ job security (including the oil sector), and diminished much of their collective power. In their place, teachers have emerged as a potentially powerful dissenting force with a good degree of organization and protest experience.
  • Shopkeepers and bazaar merchants have also joined the opposition. In fact, they surprised the authorities when at least 70 percent of them, according to a leaked official report, went on strike in Tehran and 21 provinces on 15 November 2022 to mark the 2019 uprising. Not surprisingly, security forces have increasingly been threatening to shut down their businesses.
  • Protesters in the Arab Spring fully utilized existing cultural resources, such as religious rituals and funeral processions, to sustain mass protests. Most critical were the Friday prayers, with their fixed times and places, from which the largest rallies and demonstrations originated. But Friday prayer is not part of the current culture of Iran’s Shia Muslims (unlike the Sunni Baluchies). Most Iranian Muslims rarely even pray at noon, whether on Fridays or any day. In Iran, the Friday prayer sermons are the invented ritual of the Islamist regime and thus the theater of the regime’s power. Consequently, protesters would have to turn to other cultural and religious spaces such as funerals and mourning ceremonies or the Shia rituals of Moharram and Ramadan.
  • During the Green revolt of 2009, the ruling hard-liners banned funerals and prevented families from holding mourning ceremonies for their loved ones
  • the hard-line parliament passed an emergency bill on 9 October 2022 “adjusting” the salaries of civil servants, including 700,000 pensioners who in late 2017 had turned out in force during a wave of protests. Newly employed teachers were to receive more secure contracts, sugarcane workers their unpaid wages, and poor families a 50 percent increase in the basic-needs subsidy.
  • beating, killing, mass detention, torture, execution, drone surveillance, and marking the businesses and homes of dissenters. The regime’s clampdown has reportedly left 525 dead, including 71 minors, 1,100 on trial, and some 30,000 detained. The security forces and Basij militia have lost 68 members in the unrest.
  • The regime’s suppression and the protesters’ pause are likely to diminish the protests. But this does not mean the end of the movement. It means the end of a cycle of protest before a trigger ignites a new one. We have seen these cycles at least since 2017. What is distinct about this time is that it has set Iranian society on a “revolutionary course,” meaning that a large part of society continues to think, imagine, talk, and act in terms of a different future. Here, people’s judgment about public matters is often shaped by a lingering echo of “revolution” and a brewing belief that “they [the regime] will go.” So, any trouble or crisis—for instance, a water shortage— is considered a failure of the regime, and any show of discontent—say, over delayed wages—a revolutionary act. In such a mindset, the status quo is temporary and change only a matter of time.
  • There are, of course, local leaders and ad hoc collectives that communicate ideas and coordinate actions in the neighborhoods, workplaces, and universities. Thanks to their horizontal, networked, and fluid character, their operations are less prone to police repression than a conventional movement organization would be. This kind of decentralized networked activism is also more versatile, allows for multiple voices and ideas, and can use digital media to mobilize larger crowds in less time. But networked movements can also suffer from weaker commitment, unruly decisionmaking, and tenuous structure and sustainability. For instance, who will address a wrongdoing, such as violence, committed in the name of the movement? As a result, movements tend to deploy a hybrid structure by linking the decentralized and fluid activism to a central body. The “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement has yet to take up this consideration.
  • a leadership organization—in the vein of Polish Solidarity, South Africa’s ANC, or Sudan’s Forces of Freedom and Change—is not just about articulating a strategic vision and coordinating actions. It also signals responsibility, representation, popular trust, and tactical unity.
  • if the revolutionary movement is unwilling or unable to pick up the power, others will. This, in fact, is the story of most of the Arab Spring uprisings—Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, for instance. In these experiences, the protagonists, those who had initiated and carried the uprisings forward, remained mostly marginal to the process of critical decisionmaking while the free-riders, counterrevolutionaries, and custodians of the status quo moved to the center.
  • Things are unlikely to go back to where they were before the uprising. A paradigm shift has occurred in the Iranian subjectivity, expressed most vividly in the recognition of women as transformative actors and the “woman question” as a strategic focus of struggle.
  • Those who expect quick results will likely be dispirited. But the country seems to be on a new course.
Ed Webb

The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer: Algeria: Middle East's next revolt if soccer... - 0 views

mideastsoccer.blogspot.com/...ddle-easts-next-revolt-if.html

Algeria football soccer protests

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • The most recent protests are part of an upsurge in soccer-related violence in Algeria, an indicator that increased wages and government social spending is failing to compensate for frustration with the failure of the country’s gerontocracy in control since independence to share power with a younger generation, create jobs and address housing problems.
  • The protesters’ retreat into the stadiums amounted to a tacit understanding between Algerian soccer fans and security forces that football supporters could express their grievances as long as they did so within the confines of the stadiums. “Bouteflika is in love with his throne, he wants another term," is a popular anti-government chant in stadiums.
  • Algeria’s domestic fragility is highlighted by almost daily smaller protests in towns across the country sparked by discontent over lack of water, housing, electricity, jobs and salaries. Protests have led to suspension of soccer matches. Soccer was also suspended during last year’s legislative elections.
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  • General Bachir Tartag was recalled from retirement in 2012 to head the Directorate for Internal Security (DSI). Gen. Tartag, who is believed to be in his sixties, made a name for himself during the civil war against the Islamists as one of Algeria’s most notorious hardliners and a brutal military commander.
Ed Webb

Morsi Manages Egypt's Economic Decline - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East - www... - 0 views

www.readability.com/...meczik7j

Egypt economy Morsi Morsy MB ikhwan politics analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 10 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • As fear for the economy grows in Egypt, a comparison to the conditions faced in the ’70s and early ’80s becomes more plausible.
  • During the ’70s, Sadat had limited resources due to the closure of the Suez Canal and the occupation of Sinai. The tourism industry was badly hit, and cash remittance from Egyptians working abroad was not great (at least initially). He opted to manage the economy and prevent its collapse while aborting any revolts. The release of Islamists from prison in 1971 was not just intended to undermine the pro-Nasser side, but also to appease their supporters in rural Egypt. As part of his coping strategy, he turned a blind eye to their unregistered and unregulated charity works. He also assigned certain economic privileges to army personnel and policemen to guarantee their loyalties.
  • whatever economic policies Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood pursue, it will mostly affect the middle class — the urban communities that are already against him. Excitement about protests in this section of society has mostly dissipated and been replaced by a deep sense of despair, mainly due to divisions among the opposition. Even if some revolt, it will never be enough to turn the tide without the support of the wider rural community
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  • there are many stark differences between the conditions of 1977 and those of 2013
  • Morsi’s rush to secure political power has cost him a lot on the economic front. However, he doesn't have to save the economy to survive as president. He just has to manage its decline well enough to prevent an acute dip toward bankruptcy and default
  • Mubarak was arguably ousted not because thousands poured into Tahrir Square, but because most elements in society were united against him. If Morsi succeeds in managing a declining economy and securing loyalties, he can avoid the same fate. That is what autocrats in Iran and Sudan have been doing successfully for decades
Ed Webb

Egypt's Coming Revolt of the Poor | Foreign Policy - 1 views

foreignpolicy.com/...ypts-coming-revolt-of-the-poor

Egypt military economy military-industrial_complex Sisi poverty IMF riots food

shared by Ed Webb on 04 May 17 - No Cached
  • The bread riots are symptoms of a crisis tracing back to last November, when the International Monetary Fund approved a loan of $12 billion to Sisi’s regime. The loan agreement requires Egypt to fix its chronic budget deficit through substantial cuts in subsidies and other forms of public spending. The agreement also necessitates steps to encourage the private sector to boost job creation and growth.
  • the Egyptian army has used the agreement to punish the lower classes while maximizing its commercial gains. The military establishment, which fully controls the economic reform plan, has selectively implemented the loan’s conditions. While it enthusiastically reduces subsidies to impoverished civilians, it has expanded its domination of many economic sectors and reaped huge profits at the expense of the private sector.
  • generals in uniform manage monopolistic conglomerates of unaudited, untaxed enterprises, such as commercial farms, food packaging mills, construction companies, pharmaceutical plants, gas stations, fisheries, and cement and steel factories
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  • former officers occupy key government positions in charge of running the national economy
  • The IMF loan agreement failed to fully account for the military’s domination of the economy and the state bureaucracy
  • the military positioned itself as the savior of a crisis of its own creation and further squeezed its private sector competitors. Alexandria’s military governor pledged to end the sugar crisis, blaming it on greedy private merchants. Meanwhile, the Defense Ministry’s “al-Salam Company to Sell the Armed Forces’ Products” sold 3,000 tons of affordable sugar in poor neighborhoods of the city. Sugar eventually resurfaced on the market — after the military minister of supply doubled its price.
  • Although seeking to shrink the bureaucracy, the regime enhanced its ability to place loyalists in key positions. One article in the new legislation retained a rule from the Hosni Mubarak era by reserving the authority to appoint officials in leadership positions to the president. Sisi has energetically exploited these powers, placing an increasing number of fellow former officers in top civilian jobs in the government and the public sector as soon as they retire
  • In the past three years, Egypt’s president issued six decisions to raise military pensions by a total of 35 percent. Furthermore, the parliament supported a new fund to provide medical and social services to military judges
  • These cascading crises called for urgent poverty-alleviation efforts. The military stepped in with mega-construction projects that the government’s propaganda machine portrayed as designed to lift up the lower classes — social housing for inhabitants of slums and reclamation of new land for distribution to lower-class youths. Military contractors took charge of executing these over-ambitious projects, while the army’s Department of Morale Affairs made uplifting videos on their progress.
  • although the project was advertised as an initiative to support the rural poor, the reality on the ground was far different. Army soldiers confiscated the desert land of numerous farmers in Qina, a poor province in southern Egypt, which they had reclaimed and cultivated for decades. The army accused the farmers of encroachment on state property and evicted them in order to annex their land to the project. Qina’s governor, a former general, used heavy loaders to demolish farmers’ properties on 100,000 acres. Helpless civilian owners could only send complaints about the governor to Cairo’s General Authority for Agricultural Development Projects, then chaired by yet another fellow former general.
  • Cutting public expenditures on basic goods, for instance, didn’t stop the military from lavish spending on arms procurement. From France alone, it struck deals worth over $2 billion last March. The Defense Ministry didn’t pay for those arms from the accumulated revenue of its commercial activities, but rather took loans from French banks. The military usually insists that its lucrative commercial enterprises are aimed at securing its self-sufficiency in goods and weapons, but in this case the army didn’t pay for its large shipment from its own accounts. Rather, it asked the civilian Finance Ministry to guarantee the large loan and foot the bill if the army defaults
Ed Webb

The Other Regional Counter-Revolution: Iran's Role in the Shifting Political Landscape ... - 0 views

newpol.org/l-landscape-of-the-middle-east

KSA analysis opinion politics militias revolution counterrevolution Saudi Iran Syria Lebanon Iraq IRGC

shared by Ed Webb on 11 Jul 21 - Cached
  • Saudi Arabia’s role as a counter-revolutionary force in the Middle East is widely understood and thoroughly documented. Historian Rosie Bsheer calls the Saudi kingdom “a counter-revolutionary state par excellence,” indeed one that was “consolidated as such.”[2] The Saudi monarchy has gone into counter-revolutionary overdrive since the onset of the Arab uprisings, scrambling to thwart popular movements and keep the region’s dictators in power — from Egypt and Bahrain to Yemen and Sudan (and beyond)
  • less understood is the counter-revolutionary role that Iran plays in the region’s politics
  • Iran as a “revolutionary” state has been dead for quite some time yet somehow stumbles along and blinds us to what is actually happening on the ground in the Middle East
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  • The defining slogan of Lebanon’s uprising — “all of them means all of them” (kellon yani kellon) — called out the country’s entire ruling class, which includes Hezbollah. One pointed variation on the slogan was “All of them means all of them, and Nasrallah is one of them.”
  • Hezbollah’s attacks on the demonstrators were not only physical but rhetorical, framing the popular revolt as part of a foreign plot against Hezbollah and its regional allies in the “Axis of Resistance” — accusations that were “met with ridicule
  • Hezbollah is “now viewed by many demonstrators as part of the corrupt and morally bankrupt political establishment that must be replaced,”
  • The Lebanese writer and podcaster Joey Ayoub captures the Orwellian upside-down-ness of this ideological sleight of hand in his formulation “Hezbollah’s Resistance™ against resistance.”[33] Hezbollah, he shows, tries to have it both ways: on the one hand, defending the status quo and maintaining Lebanon’s “sectarian-capitalist structures,” while at the same time banking on its membership in the so-called “Axis of Resistance.” That is, posturing as a force for “resistance” — a zombie category amid Lebanon’s current political landscape — while attacking people engaged in actual resistance to the ruling system and undermining progressive social movements.
  • The parallels between the Iraqi and Lebanese revolts are manifold, starting with their timing: mass protests engulfed both countries starting in October 2019. Iraqi and Lebanese protesters were conscious of the connections between their struggles: “in the different protest squares people are shouting: ‘One revolution, from Baghdad to Beirut,’” notes Sami Adnan, an activist in Baghdad with the group Workers Against Sectarianism.[34] It’s also important to see the two upheavals in their wider regional context, as part of the “second wave” of Arab uprisings that also included momentous popular movements in Algeria and Sudan — or, as some argue, the uprisings that have been ongoing across the Middle East and North Africa since December 2010.
  • in the face of popular uprisings expressing emancipatory demands, Iran sides not with the protesters but with the ruling establishments they’re protesting against
  • the 2019 protests represented “the most serious challenge yet to the post-2003 political order,” the Iraq scholar Fanar Haddad observes
  • the movement “classified itself as a ‘revolution’ in terms of discourse, demands, and objectives.” “[E]ven if the current movement fails to achieve a political revolution,” Haddad argues, “and even if it is not a revolution, it is undoubtedly a revolutionary movement that has already achieved a cultural revolution.”
  • As Berman, Clarke, and Majed note: A movement demanding wholesale political change represented a real threat to the system of cronyism and rapaciousness that has enriched Iraq’s politicians over the last two decades, and these elites quickly mobilized an array of state and non-state security agents in an attempt to quash this challenge.[54] Mohammad al Basri, a figure affiliated with Iraq’s paramilitary Popular Mobilization Units, expressed this mindset with rare bluntness: “Do they really think that we would hand over a state, an economy, one that we have built over 15 years? That they can just casually come and take it? Impossible! This is a state that was built with blood.”
  • Iran is deeply implicated in this counter-revolutionary repression — both indirectly, as the chief political ally and patron of the Iraqi government over the last 15 years, and directly, through the web of militias and paramilitary forces coordinated by the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which have opened fire on protesters
  • Tehran also intervened politically, maneuvering to keep Iraqi Prime Minister Abdel Abdul Mahdi in power in the face of demands from protesters that he step down.[66] (Mahdi eventually did resign, in late November 2019 — a major victory for the protest movement that Tehran endeavored to circumvent.)
  • Iraqi protesters weren’t just rebelling against Iran’s local allies, but against Iran itself. Protesters in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square smashed banners of Khamenei with their shoes.[67] Others put up a white banner with red Xs drawn through photographs of Khamenei and Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, the architect of Iran’s regional policy.[68] “Images of Ayatollah Khomeini were removed from cities like Najaf, and pro-Iran political parties with prominent militias that were involved in the violence against the protesters had their branch offices attacked and burned,” Alkinani notes.[69] Most spectacularly, protesters set fire to the Iranian consulate in Karbala and Najaf amid chants of “Iran out of Iraq”.[70]
  • The protests that erupted in Iraq in October 2019 were arguably the “biggest grassroots socio-political mobilization” in the country’s history.[37] At root, that mobilization was “about the poor, the disempowered and the marginalized demanding a new system,” notes the Iraqi sociologist Zahra Ali.[38] The Tishreen (October) uprising, as it came to be known, quickly spread to “cities and towns across central and southern Iraq”[39] and eventually “engulfed virtually the whole country (though they were most concentrated in Baghdad and the Shia-dominated southern governorates).”
  • Iran’s official narrative is that its role in Syria is all about fighting terrorism — specifically Al Qaeda and ISIS. But this is a classic case of reading history backwards. In fact, Iran rushed to the defense of the Assad regime as soon as the uprising began — when there was no Al Qaeda or ISIS presence whatsoever (the only jihadists were the ones the regime intentionally let out of its prisons as part of its jihadization strategy).[78] “From the very moment Assad faced popular protests, the Quds Force and Tehran were ready to do all they could to save the rule of the Baath Party,” notes Arash Azizi. Indeed, the Islamic Republic’s emissaries “were pushing on Assad to suppress the uprising mercilessly.”[79] And that is precisely what the regime did
  • The Islamic Republic’s “first reaction” to the demonstrations in Syria “was to open its own playbook and show Assad pages from the post-election protests in 2009,” he observes. “Decision-makers appear to have hoped that Assad would use enough brute force — arrests, beatings, and a limited amount of killings — to spread fear and quickly re-establish control.”
  • Iran helped flip the script and present the Syrian protests not as part of the wave of Arab uprisings — which it decidedly was — but as a foreign-inspired terrorist plot. This rhetorical framing was awkward for the Islamic Republic, which had voiced support for other Arab uprisings — those in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, and Libya. This put Tehran in a bind, praising the people of the region for rising up against the dictators that oppressed them but siding with the dictator in Syria.[84] Amin Saikal characterizes this Syrian exception as “an intervention that ran counter to Tehran’s declared rhetoric of supporting the downtrodden masses.”
  • the Islamic Republic intensified its support for the Assad regime in 2011 but its stalwart support for the dynastic dictatorship in Damascus goes back several decades — and while the Assad regime exponentially heightened its level of repression in 2011, violence has been at the very core of its rule throughout
  • “[t]he ‘revolutionary’ slogans of Iran’s ‘resistance’ are empty rhetoric that merely back whatever policies benefit the corrupt ruling elite in Tehran.”
  • the so-called Axis of Resistance, “ostensibly dedicated to furthering the emancipatory aspirations of the Arab and Muslim masses,” has in reality “played a critical role in containing regional revolution and preventing the emergence of a more democratically oriented regional order.”
  • The Islamic Republic “sounds more and more like those same sclerotic rulers it once railed against,” Daragahi observes — “suspicious of any new development that threatens the status quo it dominates.”
  • We need to retire zombie categories — like that of Iran as a “revolutionary” force in the Middle East, and the fiction of the “Axis of Resistance”
  • Both the Islamic Republic and the Saudi Kingdom play counter-revolutionary roles in the Middle East. They are competing counter-revolutionary powers, each pursuing its counter-revolutionary agenda in its respective sphere of influence within the region.
Ed Webb

Between death and the gallows: my Sarah Hegazi friend died - 0 views

news.trust.org/...20200721082326-7jng9

Egypt LGBT LGBTQ asylum refugees opinion activism mentalillness

shared by Ed Webb on 22 Jul 20 - Cached
  • Egyptian activist Sarah Hegazi died on June 13, 2020 in Toronto, Canada. In life, Sarah was compelled to revolt. More accurately, society revolted against her, and she had no choice but to respond. Sarah was arrested on October 2, 2017 after raising the rainbow flag at a Mashrou’ Leila concert in Cairo, Egypt. She was accused of inciting debauchery and joining an illegal group offending public stability and social coexistence. During three months in prison, Sarah was tortured with electric shocks. Other prisoners were informed she was homosexual, putting her at risk of sexual assault.
  • Sarah knew that she could not return to Egypt and felt alienated. Her mother's death made it worse. She told me, “I was arrested in Egypt and now I am arrested in Canada as I can do nothing for my family in the midst of this disaster.”  In exile, she could not even say goodbye to her mother, who left the world without seeing her daughter one last time.
  • Sarah regarded Canadian psychiatry as an insensitive machine ignorant of the Middle Eastern problems and which treated refugees with pity, which she considered an insult.
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  • Sarah was ultimately unable to integrate. She felt helpless in the face of complex bureaucratic procedures that accompanied asylum and her new life. She needed a social worker to support her in all those tasks, but she never felt confidence in those assigned to her, and they checked with her infrequently. Sarah was further challenged by having to do this all in English, a new language that she struggled with due to learning disabilities.
  • She was killed by the system: from the authorities who arrested her, ignored the violations committed against her and falsely accused her, to the merciless regime that continues to annihilate all dissent. The ending of Sarah's life started with hatred and bullying campaigns, prison and the deteriorating situation in her exile in Canada until, ultimately, the girl took her own life.
  • critical questions about the support system for asylees who suffer from trauma, disability, and inability to integrate in their new home
Ed Webb

What does 2022 hold for democracy in the Middle East? - 0 views

english.alaraby.co.uk/...022-hold-democracy-middle-east

authoritarianism analysis opinion democracy MENA ArabWorld Tunisia Sudan Egypt Syria Yemen UAE

shared by Ed Webb on 09 Jan 22 - Cached
  • “It was hoped that because of [the Arab Spring revolts of 2011 and the Iranian Green Movement in 2009], the ground had shifted in the direction of democracy but for various political, not religious, reasons, this did not happen,” said Dr Nader Hashemi
  • Dictators and despots all over the Arab world have benefited from the myth of authoritarian stability, which many in the West fully embrace. After the Arab Spring revolts, widespread violence unleashed across the MENA region led many cynics in the West to conclude that Arabs shouldn’t be entitled to democracy
  • many regimes in the MENA region concluded that the messiness which followed the Arab Spring stemmed from their perceived failure to be sufficiently authoritarian
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  • With strong support from some Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states - chiefly the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the patron of the counterrevolution - the leaderships in Egypt, Tunisia, Sudan, and other Arab states have been emboldened in their crackdowns on civil society and pro-democracy movements
  • “Not only have these regimes not paid a price for their ruthless suppression of civil society but many of them have been rewarded by Western democratic governments. Last year, for example, Emmanuel Macron hosted Egypt’s fascist dictator in Paris and gave him the ‘Legion of Honor’ award for great leadership and statesmanship. A month earlier, Germany did something similar.”
  • Biden’s administration is quite like Donald Trump’s in terms of being indifferent to democratisation in the Arab world
  • Just as the Obama administration never determined that Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi’s ouster in 2013 resulted from a “coup”, the current leadership in Washington has refused to designate either last year’s autogolpe in Tunisia or General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s takeover of the Sudanese state as a “coup”. The Biden administration’s responses to both have been mild and cautious.
  • n Washington, there will be more of a willingness to accommodate greater autocracy in countries that have official diplomatic ties with Israel or at least are non-confrontational toward Tel Aviv
  • “The pandemic has helped authoritarian regimes reassert control over society and environmental conditions have increased the level of suffering, despair, and mass pauperisation. For many people in the region, the focus is on survival, not democratisation.”
  • Citizens of MENA countries are willing to die for democratisation, exemplified by recent events in Sudan
Ed Webb

Egyptian police protest in Sinai, Cairo demanding weapons - Politics - Egypt - Ahram On... - 0 views

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Egypt police policing strikes

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 06 Mar 13
     
    Hard to maintain order if the cops are in revolt.
Ed Webb

Egypt's New Year Resolution - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gypts-new-year-resolution.html

Egypt revolt revolution opinion analysis authoritarianism legitimation democratization

shared by Ed Webb on 07 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Throughout my life I have never seen Egyptians expressing such an intense feeling of national ownership. This is one of the most important rewards of the revolution. The people are thirsty for real democracy after the revolution empowered them to seek their rights
  • We are no longer fearful of our government
  • The organization of society along the lines of Islamists, liberals and a silent majority is not much different from what exists in established democracies. What is new and different for Egyptians is that the fear has disappeared and has been replaced with a sense of the power to shape their collective destiny
Ed Webb

The Real Arab Demand - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-real-arab-demand.html

MENA ArabSpring revolt revolution uprisings opinion analysis authoritarianism legitimation

shared by Ed Webb on 07 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Leave aside the simplistic Western narrative about the Arab uprisings representing the final unspooling of a universal urge for “democracy.” Far more threatening to this moment’s legacy is the way in which Arab leaders across the region are seeking to redirect the passion of an engaged public toward canards and chimeras, new and old.
  • The roots of the Arab Awakening are as explosive as they are straightforward: a demand for government that is legitimate in its relationship with the governed and one that is accountable for its actions
  • their quest, finally, to live as citizens, and not merely as subjects
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  • too many Arab leaders are betting on a mix of fear, inertia and confusion to change the subject. Masters of distraction, they are seeking to replace the alibis of old — “resistance” to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and resentment of the power of the United States — by stoking new, and far more dangerous, fears
  • Much as many of the region’s embattled leaders wish to deceive their allies in the West, themselves and their people that this is about perfidious Persia, Shiite sectarianism or political Islam (as threat or savior), the reality is much simpler: The Arab young want competent, responsive and responsible rule
  • in response to an expression of concern about human rights abuses in Egypt, Mubarak abruptly changed demeanor and delivered his standard ultimatum: It’s him or the Muslim Brotherhood. Was Mubarak right? Well, yes, but only up to a point, and only because he made it so by ensuring that the only effective opposition to his rule was channeled through the mosque
  • Power’s purpose has never been so contested, or so contingent, as it is today in the Middle East. Genuine legitimacy must now be earned, and re-earned, through the accountable exercise of power
Ed Webb

Egypt military chief-of-staff says army will avoid politics - Politics - Egypt - Ahram ... - 0 views

english.ahram.org.eg/...65021.aspx

Egypt military politics

shared by Ed Webb on 17 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • "We are not political, we don't want to participate in the political situation because we suffered a lot because of this in the last six months," he said. "But sometimes we can help in this problem, we can play this role if the situation became more complicated," he said without elaborating. Diplomats and analysts suggest the army, fearful of further damaging a reputation that took a beating during a messy transition period when it was in charge, would only act if Egypt faced unrest on the scale of the revolt that toppled Mubarak.
Ed Webb

Poland Leads Wave of Communist-Era Reckoning in Europe - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...t-era-reckoning-in-europe.html

CEE Poland Hungary Romania communism history memory MENA authoritarianism transition

shared by Ed Webb on 22 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • “In order to defend ourselves in the future against other totalitarian regimes, we have to understand how they worked in the past, like a vaccine,” said Lukasz Kaminski, the president of Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance.
  • Reconciling with the past is an issue that has hovered over post-Communist Europe for decades. But today that experience has broader global resonance, serving as a point of discussion across the Arab world where popular revolts have cast off long-serving dictators, raising similarly uncomfortable questions about individual complicity in autocratic regimes. Arab nations are forced to grapple with the same issues of guilt and responsibility that Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe are once again beginning to seriously mine. Time makes the past easier to confront, less threatening, but no less urgent to resolve. The experience here, however, suggests that it may be years, decades perhaps, before the Arab world can be expected to look inward.
  • The resurfacing a generation later of these issues is not entirely without controversy, often driven by hard-line governments and prompting accusations of score-settling and political opportunism.
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  • In most cases these revolutions were not complete overthrows, but moderated transitions of power. The Communist authorities stepped aside, but with conditions. In Poland the return of the post-Communists came even more quickly than in Hungary, with the Democratic Left Alliance winning in 1993, reinforcing cleavages in Polish society between those ready to move on and those who could not. “I expected some kind of Nuremberg for Communism,” said Tadeusz Pluzanski, whose father was tortured by the Communist secret police. “There was no revolution,” he said, “just this transformation process.”
  • “With dictatorship comes a dark heritage and after the dictatorship is gone; at first no one wants to deal with it,” said Antoni Dudek, a member of the board at the Institute of National Remembrance in Poland. “Usually it comes with the new generation that is ready to ask inconvenient questions.”
Sherry Lowrance

The Reawakening of Nahda in Tunisia | Middle East Research and Information Project - 0 views

www.merip.org/mero043011

Tunisia Islamism protests

shared by Sherry Lowrance on 17 May 11 - No Cached
  • The essays were supposedly an inspiration for the Turkish party’s so far deft strategy of being a mildly Islamist government in a resolutely secular state.
  • Overwhelmingly, Tunisians insist that their revolution was a spontaneous, youth-driven affair, propelled by the anomie felt amidst rising education, rising expectations and rising unemployment. Facebook activists amplified the voices of revolt i
  • But to claim for Nahda a privileged place in the “pressure” that caused the revolution is to invent a lineage that does not exist -- and many Tunisians resent the attempt.
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  • Victimhood has been Nahda’s signature
  • pieces of political theater: Nahda is trying to inscribe itself in the annals of a revolution from which, as an organized political force, it was largely absent.
  • But if Nahda’s political role was muted in the first Tunisian revolution, it was loud in the second
  • January 30, he and his movement increasingly defined the themes for the post-Ben Ali transition.
  • the Committee to Defend the Revolution, an alliance of 25 organizations including the powerful General Union of Tunisian Workers, the National Lawyers’ Movement, the Tunisian League of Human Rights and the Communist Workers Party of Tunisia, a group that is particularly strong among university students.
  • The women among the activists are particularly keen to safeguard the country’s personal status code, which bans polygamy, grants women equal pay and permits the legal right to abortion.
  • We will not try to change the code in any way,” vows Ghannouchi with emphasis. “We see it as compatible with Islamic law.
  • To national and foreign media alike, Ghannouchi has said that the code derives from shari‘a; that wearing hijab is a matter of personal choice; and that stoning and amputation cannot be seen as contemporary punishments.
  • In policy, alliances and even ideology, it would seem that Nahda’s future is to be the Tunisian equivalent of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party: an Islamist movement that operates within the confines, if not of a constitutionally secular state, then of a heavily Europeanized and secularized one.
  • No one knows the salafis’ strength. Most think the groups are small. But, powered by Saudi money and the fervor of Tunisian cadre who learned their creed in the Afghan and Pakistani jihad, they could grow, especially if the economy remains in rough shape.
  • One of the very few political parties the Higher Committee barred from running in the July 24 elections was Hizb al-Tahrir, a salafi youth movement that had called for an Islamic caliphate and the abolition of political parties.
Ed Webb

Smuggling in North Sinai Surges as the Police Vanish - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...15sinai.html

Egypt Libya Israel Palestine Gaza smuggling security policing

shared by Ed Webb on 15 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • The Mubarak government practiced an inconsistent combination of tacit tolerance for some smuggling combined with capricious half measures to cut it off, including the occasional prosecution
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 15 Aug 11
       
      Inconsistency and capriciousness are in some senses the essence of authoritarianism.
  • In the past, smugglers said, the relatively few smuggled cars were surreptitiously imported to the Egyptian city of Port Said, where officials accepted bribes of about $600 to issue false papers so a car could be driven to Rafah. But since the revolt broke out in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi, it is cheaper to get cars from Libya. Each Libyan is allowed to drive one across the border, so Egyptian smugglers say they pay about $200 to a Libyan for driving a car into Egypt. The smugglers insist that most cars are bought legally in Libya. But the boom in business has also been a mixed blessing. Gaza car prices have come down since Egypt loosened its border restrictions to allow more people to cross over, because Palestinians can now more easily see what cars cost in Egypt. One smuggler said he now found himself with one compact car and four Toyota minivans he had been unable to sell because Hamas had cut down on imports.
  • As law enforcement returns elsewhere in Egypt six months after the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, there is still almost no sign of the police in Bedouin-dominated North Sinai, the region along the border with Israel that has long been a center of criminal activity. Mr. Mubarak treated it as virtual enemy territory and flooded it with police officers as he sought to help enforce an Israeli blockade of Gaza. And now the withdrawal of his security forces has unleashed not only a smuggling bonanza but also a more violent backlash against his Israel policy. Six unexplained bombing attacks (the first one failed to go off) have repeatedly shut down a pipeline that delivers natural gas to Israel under a Mubarak-era contract that is wildly unpopular because of its association with both Israel and corruption.
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  • The smuggler spoke on condition of anonymity because, after all, his work was illegal, though he and others said that since the revolution the authorities seemed to worry only about political activities, not criminal acts. “We have had no problems at all since the revolution — not even close calls,”
Ed Webb

The battle over the memory of Egypt's revolution | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...r-memory-of-egypt-s-revolution

Egypt Bahrain memory history revolution #jan25 military authoritarianism

shared by Ed Webb on 23 Feb 19 - Cached
  • The once-embattled ancien regime is back with full force. Not only to consolidate its power in the present, but also to control the past. Yet, since the outbreak of the January 25 Revolution, besides the Islamists, two distinct communities were – and still are – in conflict, among other things, over the revolution’s nature and principles: the regime and the revolutionary activists. What follows is an exploration of these communities’ strategies to permeate the people’s collective consciousness and to enforce their own narratives of the revolution and its memory, across three different domains: Egypt’s public space; Egypt’s online sphere; and outside Egypt.
  • in the revolution’s early years, Egypt’s public space was representative of the young activists’ creativity and rebellion
  • Through graffiti on walls, images, texts and structures, the activists created from the country’s streets and squares memorials to keep the memory of the brave martyrs as well as the revolution’s ideals alive. Walls of Freedom, a 2014 book by Hamdy and Stone, offers thorough insights into the revolution and its artistic works. Young Egyptians’ independent cultural activities, including concerts and exhibitions, played a role in enhancing the historical narrative of the pro-revolution community.
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  • the activists’ 2012 campaign: Askar Kazeebon (Lying Military) whose modus operandi was to broadcast videos and documentaries to pedestrians that falsify the military’s accounts of various events and expose the soldiers’ crimes and human rights violations that official and regime-friendly media ignored
  • the military, Egypt’s central power, endeavoured to restrict the public space and erase the memory of the January 25 revolution. For this power knows that while memories are linked to the past, they determine how many Egyptians will perceive the future. The military pursued 1984’s Orwellian prophecy: ‘he who controls the past controls the future’.
  • the walls of revolutionary graffiti were repainted, CCTV cameras were installed in central spaces, and governmental offices were relocated away from the heart of Cairo
  • in dismantling the revolutionary symbols, the regime intended to construct a collective memory that excludes rival interpretations of events to its own. That is reminiscent to the Bahraini government’s destruction of Pearl Roundabout, the rallying point of the 2011 mass anti-government protests.
  • In November 2013, a few hours after Prime Minister Beblawi inaugurated it, protesters vandalised a memorial that the government built for ‘the martyrs of the revolution’. In his inaugurating speech, Beblawi referred to January 25 and June 30 ‘revolutions’ as well as the martyrs of the police and the army. That was interpreted by the protesters as another attempt to conflate the meanings and disrupt the image and the perceptions of the January 25 Revolution in the Egyptians’ collective consciousness
  • The unprecedented crackdown on dissent and the draconian laws that reportedly imprisoned tens of thousands of activists had prompted many to surrender the public space. Some are silent out of fear or disappointment. Others tried to put the memory of the revolution aside, so that they can go on with their own personal lives
  • Since the 2013 military coup, state and private media outlets – mostly controlled by the regime’s clientele – have kept glorifying the military’s role in recent years as well as defaming the revolution and activists as tools of the west to destroy Egypt
  • tech-savvy young activists already utilised memorialisation to foment the democratic uprising. We Are All Khalid Said, a Facebook page created to commemorate the 28-year old Khalid Said who was brutally tortured and killed by police, in 2010, became the January 25 protests’ virtual rallying point and main coordinator.
  • there are many initiatives to resist forgetting the revolution and silencing its voices. The most recent of which is Mosireen Collective’s 858 archive of resistance. In the Collective’s own words, the archive includes raw photographs, videos and documents that ‘present thousands of histories of revolt told from hundreds of perspectives. While the regime is using every resource to clamp down on public space and public memory the time has come to excavate and remember and re-present our histories.’
  • Wiki-Thawra whose slogan is ‘so we don’t forget’; UCLA’s Tahrir Documents; AUC’s University on the Square; and MIT’s 18 Days in Egypt.
  • After the 2013 military takeover, thousands involuntarily left the country to live in exile abroad. A minority among the exiled are still engaged in telling stories of the revolution and protesting al-Sisi government’s human rights violations and destruction of Egypt’s democratic hopes. Using art and satire, they continue to disturb the regime’s hegemonic revolution-defaming narratives.
  • it is still uncertain whether the regime has successfully dominated the Egyptian collective memory of the January 25 Revolution. That is because collective memory is not a static realm but rather a fluid construct that shapes – and is shaped by – current conditions and future aspirations.
Ed Webb

There is Nothing Inevitable About Dictatorships in Muslim States | Opinion - 0 views

www.newsweek.com/-states-not-inevitable-1282038

authoritarianism Islam analysis MENA ArabWorld

shared by Ed Webb on 09 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, who ruled Egypt as an autocrat for three decades, appeared as a witness against imprisoned former Egyptian president, Mohammed Morsi, who was Egypt’s first freely elected leader. Besides being former Egyptian presidents, they had something else in common: their religious supporters both considered revolting against them to be a forbidden form of "khuruj ‘ala al-hakim" – "withdrawing from the ruler." This wasn’t just an idle sentiment; it was expressed by Ali Gomaa’, the-then Mufti of Egypt whose words I heard when in Cairo during the revolutionary uprising of 2011. “Khuruj ‘ala al-shar’iyya haram, haram, haram” – ‘exiting’ from [political] legitimacy is religiously forbidden, forbidden, forbidden.”
  • Supporters of Arab autocratic regimes of Mubarak and others that faced the Arab uprisings were not the only ones to use this tool
  • it is undeniable that the world has changed a great deal since the concept had widespread currency among Muslims and was applied to pre-modern modes of government. Whether Muslim religious establishments have collectively realised this or not, the modern autocratic ‘president’ holds far more power—if only due to technology alone—than the medieval sultan. And far more destructive than that is that civil society in today’s world is far weaker—especially in the modern Arab world—than it was in pre-modern Muslim societies
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  • Pre-modern Muslim communities were governed by far more libertarian systems—systems that were underpinned by social institutions, rather than the crippling and coercive powers of the modern state
  • much—if not all—of the region has since been shaped by a new trauma in post-colonial states. That trauma is what results in much of the autocracy that we now take for granted
  • The modern autocrat or dictator in Syria owes far more to the system of colonialism that immediately preceded it, than it does to intrinsic Arab or Muslim systems of governance from past centuries
  • the system of autocracy and dictatorship faces a deep contradiction with the internal logic of the Islamic tradition of scholasticism. Islamic religious authoritativeness depends in large part on the equivalent of academic peer review among scholars, and then upon the popularity of scholars among the wider population. How can such ‘peer review’ take place without a corresponding atmosphere of intellectual freedom and accountability?
  •  If Muslim religious scholars today seek to revive and rejuvenate religious discourse, they urgently need environments of creative and open enquiry. The ethics of the Islamic tradition cannot exist otherwise.
  • autocrats are loathe to imagine any such environments – and that is the underpinning of the counter-revolutionary waves endemic throughout much of the wider region today.
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