Can Essebsi's 'Call for Tunisia' Movement Unite the Opposition? - By Erik Churchill | T... - 0 views
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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.
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challenge will be to integrate their liberal values into what is at heart a conservative party
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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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The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: Arab Bank for Counter-... - 0 views
Tunisia and Egypt are struggling with the process required to unfreeze assets in Swiss ... - 0 views
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The Swiss are sending advisors to help the countries formulate their requests.
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Concretely, Egypt and Tunisia must provide Switzerland with examples of abuses of power or the theft of public funds and subsequent deposits into Swiss accounts. Bank account numbers and credit card details should also be shared.
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“an impenetrable wall of bureaucracy” for these countries, according to Hasni Abidi, director of the Geneva-based Study and Research Center for the Arab and Mediterranean World.
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Special Report: In Egypt's military, a march for change | Reuters - 1 views
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As in the country, so in the barracks. Over the past six months, more than a dozen serving or recently retired mid- and lower-ranking officers have said they and their colleagues see Egypt's revolution as their own chance to win better treatment, salaries, and improved conditions and training. They are tired, they said, of a few very top officers becoming rich while the vast majority of officers and ordinary soldiers struggle.
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"Military ranks struggle like the rest of Egyptians because, like Egyptian society, the wealth of the military is concentrated at the top and does not trickle down. You have to reach a specific rank before wealth is unlocked," one major said.
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say they will hold off on pushing their demands further until the ruling military council hands over power to an elected civilian government
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With Yemen's Saleh gone, attention turns to problem of qat - 0 views
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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.
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qat is entwined in all of Yemen's problems
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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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Quick thoughts on the Tunisian revolution « Ibn Kafka's obiter dicta - divaga... - 0 views
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Tunisia basically has a choice ahead: whether to continue as the IMF’s, the World Bank’s and Europe’s alleged best pupil in the Arab classroom, with the mixed resultsthat are plain for everyone to see, or to decide for itself, according to its own interests and sovereign decisions, what path and what policies to adopt, whether it be in the foreign policy, domestic policy or economic policy fields. Tunisia can chose to be like Turkey, Brazil, India or Malaysia, or it can pursue in its post-colonial striving for acceptance and the occasional pat on the head by its Western partners, a path followed by Jordan or Morocco with limited success.
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For all practical purposes, this is the kind of government that Benali could have appointed himself had he had more brains – his last speech actually outlined exactly this sort of government, and he actually met with some opposition members before being deposed.
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The Tunisian people have ousted the dictator, but they haven’t yet got rid of his institutional and political legacy. This is just the beginning, if democracy is to take hold.
3quarksdaily - 0 views
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in a post-9/11 world, any non-state actor caught throwing a stone, be it the first stone or the thousandth, risks total warfare under the guise of counterinsurgency
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Mass, sustained civil disobedience at the corporate headquarters of insurance 'providers' and banks and petrol companies remains a long way off. Instead, Koch-funded campaigns continue to succeed at electing Republican governors who then refuse federal money to build high-speed rail networks . (See Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, and more to come. Special shoutout to New Jersey.) When Americans begin to thirst for health care, re-pedestrianised cities, and the return of usury laws with the same fervor that Egyptians have shown in clamouring for democracy and the rule of law, only then will we know the revolution is here.
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The coming constitutional showdown between human law and divine law in the revolutionary Arab states may turn on the question of gay rights and sexual freedom generally
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FT.com / Comment / Opinion - Too much aid will hobble Arab spring - 0 views
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Those calling for new support seem to forget that the deposed regimes already received plenty of international aid finance. Under the aegis of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, they presided over elaborate privatisation and reform programmes, which benefited those close to power but did little to help the wider population. In truth the regimes tended to use this support to strengthen their rule, building state security apparatuses and creating kleptocratic governments accountable only to their foreign bankrollers.
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Generous aid programmes mean leaders do not need to please their citizens, or gain their trust to secure power; they can instead use donor money to build a security state and buy off their opposition.
swissinfo - Time needed before Ben-Ali assets returned - 0 views
The Tunisia Heist | Newlines Magazine - 0 views
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