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mehrreporter

Cartoon of the day - 0 views

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    TEHRAN, YJC. Ban Ki-moon invites, Ban Ki-moon withdraws.
Ed Webb

Good News Before More Battles in Egypt - carnegieendowment.org - Readability - 0 views

  • Morsi’s victory does not mean that democracy has triumphed in Egypt
  • The Muslim Brotherhood has already denounced the constitutional declaration, but the SCAF is unlikely to give in on that point after conceding Morsi’s triumph.
  • the secular parties that claimed that their past performance in the elections was poor because they did not have adequate time to organize do not appear to be making the massive effort to build their parties that they need in order to be successful the next time around
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  • The old regime still controls the institutions
  • two highly political legal suits currently pending in front of the administrative court—one seeking to ban the Muslim Brotherhood and one seeking to ban its Freedom and Justice Party. Both cases will be adjudicated in September
  • Morsi is the first president that came to power on the basis of a popular vote rather than by rising through the ranks of the military. But it is only one step in a process of transformation that will take time, be punctuated by many acrimonious battles, and in the end may not lead to democracy
Ed Webb

Boston Review - Madawi Al-Rasheed: No Saudi Spring - 0 views

  • Unlike Egypt and Tunisia, Saudi Arabia has no civil society of any significance. As a result, online calls to protest—beloved of so many “cyber-utopians”—had no place to take root.
  • The protests reflected a growing sense of disappointment with King Abdullah, who has failed to implement a single political demand from previous petitions. However, in spite of their disappointment, reformers from a wide range of political ideologies—Islamists, nationalists, leftists, and liberals—are being cautious because the future could be worse. Many intellectuals and professionals are haunted by the prospect of losing their positions when Crown Prince Nayif becomes king. Abdullah has developed a quasi-liberal constituency and cultivated its interest in the state, business, and media. Reformers nonetheless loyal to Abdullah fear that Nayif’s iron fist will come down on them: functionaries of the ancien régime to be replaced.
  • Another group, the National Coalition and Free Youth Movement, formed on Facebook and Twitter in spite of having no offline organizational presence. Their Web pages would disappear amid government censorship only to reappear at different addresses. Many pages gathered thousands of supporters, but it is difficult to claim that all were authentic. Cyber-warfare pitted activists and non-ideological young men and women against regime security, complicating the headcount.
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  • There are essentially no non-state institutions in the country. Saudi Arabia has not had trade unions since the 1950s, when the government banned them in the oil-rich province where the then-American oil company ARAMCO was based. Likewise, there are no legal political parties, youth associations, women’s organizations, or independent human rights organizations.
  • By intervening, the Saudis hoped not only to protect their Bahraini ally, but to split their internal opposition using sectarian politics. As the protests grew and the GCC deliberated, the Saudi official press peddled the regime’s line: an Iranian-Shia conspiracy was targeting the Sunni heartland. The champions of Sunni Islam would save the Gulf from the Iranian-Shia takeover. The Saudi regime proved not only to its subjects, but also to Western governments, a determination to crush protest and expel Iranian and Shia influence from the peninsula. The message to President Obama was to think twice before supporting democracy and human rights in the Arabian Peninsula. The message to Saudis was that critics would be tarred as traitors to the nation and enemies of the faith.
  • All local newspapers reported on it favorably.
  • Many in the younger generation are critical of the regime’s repressive gender policies, but they support its opposition to the Shia as alien, heretical, and loyal to Iran.
  • the “liberal press”—also officially controlled—published articles denouncing sectarianism. Liberal authors attacked sectarian preachers of hate and instead celebrated national unity, wataniyya. Not that these liberal authors favored political protest or close ties with the Shia. Rather, they offered Saudis an alternative discourse that still served the regime’s interests. With society divided between supposedly liberal intellectuals and hateful preachers, the regime confirms in the minds of people that it alone can broker between the fiercely opposed groups.
  • Protesters avoid arrest by supporting the king and demanding that bureaucrats respect his royal decrees. Anger is therefore channelled toward low-level civil servants without challenging the regime directly or insisting on royal intervention. As long as protests do not question the policies of senior members of the royal family, they are tolerated, perhaps to some extent welcomed as a means to vent public anger.
  • The press has dubbed the wave of small-scale demonstrations “protest fever.” Importantly, women are uniting in pursuit of their interests and rights, suggesting that this is the beginning of a civil rights movement. Saudi women have agitated before—in 1990 some were arrested for violating a driving ban—but the 2011 protests are different. At local and regional levels, women’s demands are more fundamental than before. They want employment, the right to vote in municipal elections, and freedom of speech.
  • When protesters agitate for the end of the regime, they are shown no mercy. As of this writing, seven demonstrators have been shot and killed by Saudi security forces. In the virtual world, government agents continue to use propaganda, counterarguments, and rumors against calls for protest.
  • should pressure start coming from the West, the Saudi regime knows how to exploit its allies’ weak spots: fear of terrorism and an insatiable appetite for oil and military contracts.
  • Digital activism will continue to provide an outlet to a population denied basic freedom. But with popular unrest largely under wraps and the West silent, the regime faces no threat in the short term.
  • The economic and social deprivation, political oppression, and corruption that triggered revolutions elsewhere are all present in Saudi Arabia, but these alone are not sufficient to precipitate an uprising. Saudi Arabia does not have trade unions—the majority of its working population is foreign, which has stunted the growth of organized labor—a women’s movement, or an active student population, three factors that helped to make protests in Tunis and Cairo successful. Elsewhere in the Arab world, in the absence of these important factors, revolt stumbled, turned violent, and could not progress without serious foreign intervention. Libya is a case in point.
  • where the state is the only institution that matters, effectively bringing people together offline may be impossible
Ed Webb

With Yemen's Saleh gone, attention turns to problem of qat - 0 views

  • One in every seven working Yemeni is employed in producing and distributing qat, making it the largest single source of rural income and the second largest source of employment in the country after the agriculture and herding sector, exceeding even the public sector, according to the World Bank. Many of Yemen's poorest families admit to spending over half their earnings on the leaf. "Qat is the biggest market in Yemen, bigger than oil, bigger than anything," said Abdulrahman Al-Iryani, Yemen's former water minister and founder of 'qat uprooting', a charity which supports farmers in replacing qat shrubs with coffee plants.
  • qat is entwined in all of Yemen's problems
  • the cultivation of qat - the least taxed, most subsidized and fastest-growing cash crop in Yemen - consumes 40 percent of irrigated farming land
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  • One "daily bag" that can be consumed by one person in one day requires hundreds of litres of waters to produce
  • In 1972, then-Prime Minister Mohsin Al-Aini forbade qat-chewing by public servants during working hours and banned its cultivation on lands run by state-controlled religious trusts. He received death threats from tribesmen and qat farm owners around Sanaa. Many Yemenis suspect his eventual dismissal from office three months later was in large part due to his push.
  • "As water prices go up, the competition drives more and more people toward farming qat which in turn uses up even more water. If the spread of qat farms continues like this soon all our arable land will be used to grow qat."
  • everyone chews
Ed Webb

Can Essebsi's 'Call for Tunisia' Movement Unite the Opposition? - By Erik Churchill | T... - 0 views

  • The Call for Tunisia features a broad spectrum of former regime officials together with secular liberals. The former regime officials, or RCDists (from the Constitutional Democratic Rally), were excluded from running in the last elections and see in the new initiative a chance to revive their political prospects. (There was no such cleansing of the actual government administrations -- only positions in the Constituent Assembly). These officials and their supporters oftentimes criticize the current government as incompetent and unable to manage the complexity of government. They try to deflect criticisms of the rampant corruption and stasi-like police state of the past, by pointing to the (very real) progress achieved under Bourguiba and Ben Ali. They cite statistics on women's rights, improvements in education, and infrastructure development, and they compare Tunisia with its neighbors in the Maghreb and throughout Africa. Their motives are clear -- keep the good and throw out the bad of the former regime.
  • challenge will be to integrate their liberal values into what is at heart a conservative party
  • While Ennahda supporters talk about the extremism of Bourguiba/Ben Ali regarding Islamic practices (including banning the veil and a very liberal interpretation of Ramadan -- not to mention the systematic torture and imprisonment of Islamists themselves), many Tunisians felt comfortable being Muslim under the former regime. It is fair to say that many (though certainly not all) Tunisians did not feel that their religion was under assault under the previous secular regime
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  • Essebsi's movement has scared both liberal secularists and Ennahda supporters alike.  A return of the crooked, corrupt, and cruel former regime is everything that they fought against -- not just in the past 2 years, but in the last 30 years. While Ennahda will point to the abuses against Islam, and secular liberals will point to the harassment of human rights activists and infringements on freedom of expression, both will point to the ultimate failure of the Bourguiba/Ben Ali experiment to bring real progress to many parts of Tunisia. While visitors to Tunisia's coastal areas can see the development and progress of the last 50 years, it takes only a few minutes to get to villages that remain poor, backwards, and lacking in any opportunities to progress. They will point to the promises of Ben Ali to provide education and work, even while the educational system declined and job opportunities dried up. They will point to the fact that closer relations with the west only brought tighter visa restrictions and low-wage jobs.
  • Some have pointed to Mustapha Nabli, who has links to the former regime, but spent the last 12 years at the World Bank prior to coming back after the revolution to lead the Tunisian Central Bank. He is well respected in international circles and has already engaged in fierce debate with the coalition government over the central bank's independence, and as a result has received open calls for his sacking by President Marzouki himself. Others have cited Taieb Baccouche, a former labor and human rights leader, who most recently served with Essebsi as Minister of Education in the transition government. He has been making the rounds in Tunisian media on behalf of the Call.
  • the CPR and Ennahda have proposed legislation that would limit RCD participation in any future government. While political activists in Tunisia have long regretted the relative immunity granted to the former regime officials, many Tunisians continue to place the blame firmly on Ben Ali and his family. Essebsi has capitalized on this sentiment by stating that these proposals are anti-democratic and would only further polarize a society that needs unity. Nevertheless, with control over the government and the assembly, the coalition could tighten the rules to make it difficult for the Call to field candidates
  • The work for Essebsi's movement will be able to convince Tunisians that they can keep the gains of Tunisia's independence leaders while upholding the values of the revolution. For Tunisia's secular left, the Call represents an opportunity to join a party that may have real traction with ordinary Tunisians, but also signifies a capitulation for what many have worked so hard to change. Like in Egypt, the rise of two conservative parties (the Islamists and the Call) is a disappointment to those who fought for human rights and civil liberties. At the same time, in this conservative society it is hardly surprising that the debate is characterized by what kind of conservatism Tunisians will choose between
Ed Webb

The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer: Egyptian battle lines harden as ultras learn... - 0 views

  • In a statement on their Facebook page that has some 255,000 followers, Ultras Ahlawy said last week that it would defy the spectator ban in the match against Ismaily  to deliver a message to “all remnants of the ousted regime” that they would not obey their “manipulated regime.” In their statement, the ultras said: “The issue is bigger than football. We want to settle the score with remnants of the former regime, under the leadership of Samir Zaher, and their oppression of Egyptian youth.” UWK issued a similar statement saying that “we suffered a lot from injustice and repression in the past, but we stood up to that with pride. We fought with all our might to maintain our principles and freedom. We thought justice and freedom would come after our revolution. We will continue in our defense of freedom even with our blood. Our war with the EFA will continue until we win and see the corrupt people in prison.”
  • As the frontline in the ‘Battle of the Dakhliya (interior ministry)’ or alternatively dubbed the Battle of Mohammed Mahmoud – the epicenter of the confrontation just off Tahrir Square -- moved at times closer to and then further away from the ministry, Chinese-made motorcycles carried the wounded to safety. Shamarikh, the controversial, colored fireworks employed by the ultras during soccer matches lit up the sky at night replacing street lights that had been turned off. Theirs was as much a battle for karama or dignity as it was part of the fight to hold the military to its pledge to lead the country to democracy. Their dignity is vested in their ability to stand up to the dakhliya, the knowledge that they no longer can be abused by security forces without recourse and the fact that they no longer have to pay off each and every policemen to stay out of trouble.
Ed Webb

Women keep wary eye on Tunisian revolt - 0 views

  • It's a fear backed by little substance so far -- except for some talk on chat shows and warnings on Tunisian Facebook pages
  • The worry is mainly over any changes to the Personal Status Code -- a law first approved after independence from France in 1956 which bans polygamy and gives equal rights to husbands and wives in a family. It also says divorced women and their children should receive alimony. Women's rights groups are unconvinced by the assurances of the new government, notably with some commentators in recent days using the new freedom of expression on Tunisian television to advocate conservative values.
  • An incident in the streets of Tunis illustrated such concerns this weekend when a group of youths shouted crude insults at a female AFP reporter, jeering and mocking her. "Women's rights are over after the revolution!" one shouted
Ed Webb

Tunisia cabinet to lift party bans - Africa - Al Jazeera English - 0 views

  • "I am with you. We are not going to shoot you. What matters is that the rally is peaceful," an army captain promised the crowd, who reacted with applause.
  • "As the people of Tunisia chart a different future, political and social stability are essential ingredients for credible elections," Philip Crowley, the state department spokesman, said on the microblogging site Twitter.
Ed Webb

Youth, Waithood, and Protest Movements in Africa - By Alcinda Honwana - African Arguments - 0 views

  • young Africans struggling with unemployment, the difficulty of finding sustainable livelihoods, and the absence of civil liberties
  • Political instability, bad governance, and failed neo-liberal social and economic policies have exacerbated longstanding societal problems and diminished young people’s ability to support themselves and their families
  • Many are unable to attain the prerequisites of full adulthood and take their place as fully-fledged members of society. The recent wave of youth protests can best be understood in the context of this generation’s struggles for economic, social, and political emancipation
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  • young Africans are living in waithood
  • a growing number of young men and women must improvise livelihoods and conduct their personal relations outside of dominant economic and familial frameworks
  • their sense of being “˜trapped’ in a prolonged state of youth
  • recent protest movements, led mainly by young people, stem directly from the economic and social pressures they suffer, and from their pervasive political marginalisation
  • Young activists appear to be struggling to translate the political grievances of the protest movement into a broader political agenda. Clearly, they seem to be more united in defining what they don’t want and fighting it, and much less so in articulating what they collectively want
  • interviews I conducted with young people in Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa, and Tunisia, between 2008 and 2012, which resulted in my two most recent books: The Time of Youth: Work Social Change and Politics in Africa (published in August 2012 by Kumarian Press in the USA), and Youth and Revolution in Tunisia (published in June 2013 by Zed Books in the UK)
  • there is scepticism among youth that growth alone, without equity, will bring the solution to their problems
  • In Dakar in June 2011, rallying around the movement Y’en a Marre! (Enough is enough!), Senegalese youth came out to the streets, clashed with police, and managed to stop the approval of constitutional amendments that would benefit former president Wade. Galvanized by this victory, and using the slogan “Ma Carte d’Electeur, Mon Arme“ (my voting card, my weapon), the young Senegalese helped to remove Abdoulaye Wade from office in February 2012.
  • Young Africans constitute a disenfranchised majority
  • Liggey, which means work in Wolof, the national language of Senegal, is celebrated as an important marker of adulthood. The ability to work and provide for themselves and others defines a person’s self-worth and position in the family and in the community. Yet, the majority of young people in Senegal and elsewhere in Africa are unable to attain the sense of dignity embedded in the notion of liggey.
  • African societies do not offer reliable pathways to adulthood; traditional ways of making this transition have broken down, and new ways of attaining adult status are yet to be developed
  • a liminal space in which they are neither dependent children nor autonomous adults
  • Waithood also evidences the multifaceted realities of young Africans’ difficult transition to adulthood, which goes beyond securing a job and extends to aspects of their social and political life
  • Ibrahim Abdullah (1998) and Abubakar Momoh (2000) have pointed to the use of the vernacular term youthman, in many West African countries, to describe those who are stuck in this liminal position
  • youth as a socially constructed category defined by societal expectations and responsibilities (Honwana and De Boeck 2005)
  • While Singerman’s usage of waithood suggests a sense of passivity, my research indicates that young people are not merely waiting, and hoping that their situation will change of its own accord. On the contrary, they are proactively engaged in serious efforts to create new forms of being and interacting with society. Waithood involves a long process of negotiating personal identity and financial independence; it represents the contradictions of a modernity, in which young people’s expectations are simultaneously raised by the new technologies of information and communication that connect them to global cultures, and constrained by the limited prospects and opportunities in their daily lives
  • Although women are becoming better educated and have always engaged in productive labour alongside household chores, marriage and motherhood are still the most important markers of adulthood. While giving birth may provide girls an entry into adulthood, their ability to attain full adult status often depends on men moving beyond waithood (Calví¨s et al. 2007)
  • Although growing numbers of young people are completing secondary school and even attending university, the mismatch between educational systems and the labour markets leaves many unemployed or underemployed; they are pushed into the oversaturated informal economy or become informal workers in the formal sector (Chen 2006
  • Young Senegalese and Tunisians employ the French term débrouillage, making do
  • in the realm of improvisation, or “making it up as you go along,” and entails a conscious effort to assess challenges and possibilities and plot scenarios conducive to the achievement of specific goals (Vigh 2009)
  • young women and men in waithood develop their own spaces where they subvert authority, bypass the encumbrances created by the state, and fashion new ways of functioning on their own. These youth spaces foster possibilities for creativity; and as Henrietta Moore puts it, for self-stylization, “an obstinate search for a style of existence, [and] a way of being” (Moore 2011: 2). The process of self-styling is made easier by cyber social networks such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
  • these new “˜youthscapes’ (Maira and Soep 2005) resemble Michel Maffesoli’s notion of “urban tribes,” understood as groupings that share common interests but whose association is largely informal and marked by greater “fluidity, occasional gatherings and dispersal” (1996: 98)
  • Waithood constitutes a twilight zone, or an interstitial space, where the boundaries between legal and illegal, proper and improper, and right and wrong are often blurred. It is precisely at this juncture that young people are forced to make choices. Their decisions help to define their relationships towards work, family, and intimacy, as well as the type of citizens they will become. Rather than being a short interruption in their transition to adulthood, waithood is gradually replacing conventional adulthood itself (Honwana 2012).
  • growth alone, without equity, will not guarantee social inclusion and better lives for the majority of the population. Indeed, young people rebel against the widening gap between the rich and the poor, and the rampant corruption that they observe as elites enrich themselves at others’ expense
  • Young Africans today are generally better educated and more closely connected with the rest of the world than their parents. The young people I interviewed did not seem like a “˜lost generation’ nor did they appear apathetic about what is happening in the societies surrounding them. They are acutely conscious of their marginal structural position, and no longer trust the state’s willingness and ability to find solutions to their problems. In their shared marginalisation, young people develop a sense of common identity and a critical consciousness that leads them to challenge the established order (Honwana 2012, 2013).
  • Asef Bayat calls these dispersed actions “˜non-movements,’ which he describes as “quiet and unassuming daily struggles” outside formal institutional channels in which everyday social activities blend with political activism (2010: 5)
  • Young activists find themselves more divided; the broad unity forged during street protests dissipates as they struggle to articulate a new common purpose and to define a new political role for themselves
  • In the aftermath of street protests, young people appear to be retreating back to the periphery of formal politics, into their “˜non-movements.’
  • Today, the divorce of power from politics is deepening because power is being seized by supranational finance and trade corporations and by transnational organised crime syndicates. Devoid of power, politics remains localised in the nation state and responds to the interests of supranational powers rather than to the will of the people. In this sense, “˜sovereignty is outsourced’ and democracy becomes a charade, as politics has no power but instead serves power.
  • Aditya Nigam points to the current crisis of the “˜political’ and suggests that in the wake of the North African revolutions, these societies are “living in an interregnum when the old forms of politics have become moribund and obsolete but new ones have not yet emerged … Something, clearly, is waiting to be articulated in this relentless refusal of the political” by the younger generation (2012: 175).
  • In Tunisia, young activists are enjoying the freedom of independent civic and political engagement following the revolution, as these were banned under the old regime. But at the same time, their disappointment with party politics makes some young people turn to politicized forms of Islam. For example, the famous rapper of the revolution, “˜El General,’ is today an advocate for the instauration of Sharia law, and the lyrics of his latest song, titled “I Wish,” call for Tunisia to become an Islamic state. Indeed, young Islamists who joined radical Salafist groups believe that Sharia will be the solution to their problems because, as some of them put it: “Sharia is not politics, but a whole way of life, with its laws and its science.”
  • In Senegal, the Y’en a Marre activists pride themselves on being non-partisan and vow to work towards making politicians accountable to those who elected them
  • a “˜New Type of Senegalese’ described as: one that is more socially and politically conscious, assumes her/his responsibilities as a citizen, and fights for the well-being of the Senegalese people
  • my young interlocutors seem to believe that it is possible to achieve fundamental change outside of dominant political structures, even if they have not yet fully articulated how to do so
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