Universal longing in "The search for "Sugar Man"'

A few words can sometimes capture the feelings of a whole nation.  “Blood, sweat, and tears…” – words that enshrined the thoughts of many people in Britain at terrifying moment.  But when those words were thrown out into the public arena they enabled a whole people to join in a unity of feeling, a collective sense of who they were and what they faced together.  A few words transformed the disparate feelings of many individuals into the conviction of a nation:  as a people they must, and they would, stand together despite the obvious cost.  

The process by which private sensibilities are brought together into a common conviction is a kind of imaginative miracle.  It is worth asking how it works.  Inner depths of feeling are evoked by a particular poignant phrase – this a wonder worth examining closely.   

But the phrase that works powerfully in one setting may not work in another.   To understand the difference requires explication:  the history of all the fears and resentments and outrages that have piled up through the years becomes a reservoir of buried sentiments that can be awakened by a single event, a single utterance, a song.     

Tonight Rita and I went to see a film about a simple musician, a gifted balladeer, whose brilliance was missed in his own country but discovered by a whole nation elsewhere.  The simple ballads of loneliness, grief, despair produced by an unknown individual galvanized the strong feelings of  thousands of young people elsewhere.  His aching outrage at a broken world gave expression to feelings that they shared and enabled them to experience together their common  frustration, for their world also was grievous.  Carefully chosen chords and phrases objectified the feelings of thousands -- but in a different world.  

Anyone who wants to see how an objective form – music – can be made to stand for the feelings of a whole nation must see “The search for ‘Sugar Man’”.  

Will the new systems established after the Arab Spring avoid the oppressive systems they have overturned?

The dilemmas of what should happen next in the Arab world have been stated one way by an Iranian opponent of the Iranian government, Ibrahim Yazdi, and another way in an article by the Arab social critic Mahan Abedin [“Arab Spring confounds Iran's opposition,” Asian Times, Nov 10, 2011].  According to Yazdi a danger exists that the successful movements against repressive regimes in the Arab world could now be replaced by equally repressive systems.  He seems to blame the unfamiliarity of Muslims with all that is entailed in democracy.   Yazdi says: 

"Despite struggling for fundamental rights, freedom and self-determination, we Muslims from any nationality lack sufficient experience with democracy. We struggle and overthrow dictators but we don't remove tyranny as a mode of governance and a way of life."  

Yazdi of course has seen it happen, for he had been part of the Iranian uprising against the Shah in 1978-1979, and he experienced the takeover by Ruhullah Khomeini and those with him who, once in power, set about to remove [essentially to exterminate] those who could not share their Islamist vision for the country.  Yazdi survived but has been alienated for years, the position from which he now warns the Tunisians:  Their movement could end up being different from what they had originally been calling for.  He has good reason, then, to fear that these successful movements in Tunisia [and also Egypt] could be replaced by a  system as repressive as the old; a similar warning was once made by Foucault about revolutionary movements generally.  


Abedin is unimpressed by Yazdi's warning, seeing in it a Iranian condescending attitude.  But Abedin seems even to push Yazdi's point further, for he thinks that Islam and the democracy that the Arab Spring movements have demanded may be intrinsically incompatible.  Of the newly elected Tunisian Islamist party, al-Nahda (Renaissance), he says that  

"... these movements have yet to successfully grapple with their ideological dilemma. The essence of their ideology commits them to the creation of a pan-Islamic state, if not a fully-fledged caliphate. It also commits them to introducing the Islamic sharia as the basis of legislation and the general ordering of state and society.  While these goals are not necessarily inimical to democracy, they are not harmonious with it either. The Muslim Brotherhood and its many offshoots can legitimately claim to be democratic in spirit once they have resolved this ideological contradiction.

This is an old question.  Most Muslims I know see no reason why Islam cannot be built into a constituted democracy; that was the project Pakistan set out to accomplish in 1947.  We continue to watch and hope that the new regimes being established in Tunisia and Egypt will indeed establish the kind of democracy that they will cherish and be eager to protect from all forms of social oppression, a necessary feature of democracy if it is to be successfully practiced.

[Click on the title for a link to the original article by Abedin.]

Portrait of a hedonist; the fruit of Ghaddafi's profligacy

Nick Meo’s portrait of Mutassim Gaddafi [in today's Telegraph], the son of the dictator in Libya, is sobering. Here is a personality whose life of privilege has deprived him of the ability to appreciate the how much he has enjoyed all his life, to the point where he has scarce respect for the humanity around him, especially for those who serve him. The sense of a person who lives in a bubble of privilege pervades this whole article. As he entertained his guest he displayed a pathetic ignorance of what was actually happening in the world barely outside his door, a popular movement of rebels who hated him and his father and were bent on overwhelming the regime. The article for some of us is a revelation: Could this be the way the upper 1% is able to live these days?: glamorous guests, dinner parties with eminent social figures (Princesses), annual excursions to the Caribbean via a private Boeing jet, hundreds of guests completely provided for in the most expensive hotels, the finest Italian hairdressers flown in for an affair, etc. And in order to remove him, to bring him into the real world, to experience what life is like for the people whom he seems to despise, how many will have to die?

Mutassim Gaddafi's girlfriend tells of the final days of Libyan regime: Mutassim Gaddafi's former girlfriend, Dutch glamour model Talitha van Zon, talks to Nick Meo about the dying days of the Gaddafi regime.

By Nick Meo, Tripoli6:00AM BST 28 Aug 2011
Filipino servants wearing spotless white jackets mixed his favourite Jack Daniels whisky and coke, and then Mutassim Gaddafi raised his glass and toasted the victory that he was sure was close.
Relaxing in one of his Tripoli homes just over a week ago, during a break from commanding at the front, the fifth son of Libya's ruler was in a defiant mood. Soon, he boasted to the blonde foreigner sitting with him, he would lead his father's regime to a victory over the "rats".
The woman at his side was Mutassim's ex-girlfriend Talitha van Zon, a Dutch glamour model who still regularly visited him in the Libyan capital.
Her most recent trip, however, proved to be a far cry from the luxury break she was used to - as the Libyan regime crumbled last week and her male companion took flight, she endured several days of utter terror as battles raged around her five star hotel.
On Wednesday, The Sunday Telegraph found her alone and frightened in a Tripoli hospital ward, where she was being treated for injuries after leaping from a hotel balcony - apparently fearful that a group of rebels were about to burn her alive.

Before she was evacuated from the city by a humanitarian ship to Malta on Friday, though, she gave an extraordinary account of the final days of the Gaddafi regime - an insight into a family who will fight to the death and destroy their country before they give up power.

"I was shocked when I met Mutassim. He had changed," said Miss van Zon. "It was the first time I had seen him since just before the February uprising. He had a beard, he was sitting on a couch strewn with automatic weapons, and he was guarded by unsmiling 16-year-old boys with sub-machine guns." On the wall behind was a huge portrait of his father, Muammar Gaddafi.

... A former Playboy centrefold, Miss van Zon met Mutassim in an Italian nightclub in 2004, kindling a three-month relationship that ended when she learned that she "was not the only woman in his life". ... she was drawn into a fabulous private world of luxury, showered with gifts and invited to some of the world's most exclusive destinations. In Monaco she was taken to the Grand Prix and a dinner party attended by Princess Caroline. At Christmas, there was Mutassim's annual excursion to the Caribbean island of Saint Barts, with his entourage flown there in his private Boeing. When Mutassim was in Paris or London he would book several floors of the most expensive hotels, filling them with his friends, and the finest Italian hairdressers would be flown in from Italy, at a cost of 5,000 euros per time. "I asked him once how much he spent, and he took a minute to add it up in his head," Miss van Zon recalled. "He said 'about $2 million'. I said 'you mean a year?' He said 'no – a month'."

... "Of course I knew that it was not right to spend so much money like that," she said. "I asked him many times about the welfare of the Libyan people, and he said the schools and hospitals were free, that rice and flour were cheap. It was hard for me to judge life in Libya for ordinary people – I was always staying in a gilded cage when I visited. They looked happy enough."

She did, though, see occasional flashes of temper, in particular on one occasion where a servant had brought in a meal that was cold.

"He shouted at the guy and threw plates on the floor. He put that guy like a dog in a corner and then he demanded that he eat the whole lot, there in front of us. It was humiliating. I never saw the servant again, and I don't know what happened to him.
...

The hedonist son also had ambitions for power, inspired by his father's example. "He worshipped his father," Miss Van Zon said. "He talked a lot about Hitler, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez. He liked leaders who had a lot of power. He always said 'I want to do better than my father'."

[Click on the title above for a link to the original article.]

The moral imagination on display in riots and demonstrations: from London to Daraa

One of the qualities that makes human behavior so complex, so difficult to analyze, is the richness of meanings embedded in it. The riots in London are a good example. Ysmine Ryan has written an article comparing the many nuances in the intentions of the Britain rioters with those of the rioters and demonstrators in Tunisia and Egypt.

Fredrik Barth [in book carefully snubbed by southeast Asiaianists, Balinese Worlds] has pointed out that folks act with intentions that are informed by their own fund of cultural resources whereas the observers of their behavior must “read” their intentions on the basis of their own cultural resources, which means that the possibilities for misreading of each other can be large, and especially so when the actor’s intentions are nuanced with deeply felt personal sentiments. Actors in fact can seek to convey a whole range of meanings in what they do – rage, fear, frustration, a desire for attention, despair, revenge, greed. Sometimes folks do what they do because to them it feels like the most effective way to express their complex feelings – feelings too complex and deeply felt for words. We’ve all been there: In times of exhaustion and frustration we have all been tempted to lash out.

But from the vantage-point of the observer unpacking the meanings embedded in the behavior of others turns out to be a huge challenge. Critical for the observer is the need to appreciate the meanings embedded in the context. The attempt to understand social explosions like those in London or Tunis or Cairo or Yemen or Daraa demands care and empathy – for all the actors on all sides – if one is ever to appreciate what animates the behavior of collectivities in such social movements. We must be ready to appreciate the contradictory and even self-destructive intentions – some of them base, some of them noble -- that animate the behavior of folks in times of stress. If ever there was a complex object of study it is the human imagination.

This article [from Al Jazeera] is rich with the complexities of meaning that inform human behavior. Note, for instance, the statue erected to commemorate one thing, destroyed to commemorate something quite different, and then used by a contemporary artist to convey yet another message, which was, again, destroyed, apparently for reasons considered significant to the state. Meanings upon meanings upon meanings -- an illustration of the the multiple and confused meanings that must be read empatheticly if they are to be understood. Anthropology seeks empathy even when we cannot agree.

From the Arab Spring to Liverpool? : The UK riots have unique roots, but British youths' alienation is similar to the disenfranchisement behind Arab revolts.
Yasmine Ryan: 11 Aug 2011 14:47

In the heart of Toxteth, Liverpool, a mysterious statue appeared in the early hours of July 30.

It was a monument to Mohamed Bouazizi, the young Tunisian man who, after being humiliated by police, had set himself alight in an act of protest that was to inflame the simmering rage of hundreds of thousands of people.

Last Thursday, in the London borough of Tottenham, the British police shot and killed a 29-year-old black man named Mark Duggan. The following day, the monument in Toxteth - a district that had been the site of racially-fuelled social unrest in the 1980s - disappeared, the monument's artist told Al Jazeera.

The Liverpool city council was unable to comment on whether it was responsible for having the monument removed, as they were swamped trying to deal with the riots, which spread to Liverpool over the weekend.

Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation, and the uprising that followed, happened in a very different context to the British riots.

When Tunisia's peaceful protesters in the underprivileged centre of the country were slain by the police's use of lethal force, the country’s middle class poured into the streets to show their outrage, and solidarity.

In Britain, by contrast, people across socio-economic groups are calling on the police to protect them from the seemingly uncontrollable mobs of youths, who, according to the dominate media narrative, seem intent on wreaking havoc for the simple reason that they can.

Yet the artist who created the monument to the young Tunisian street vendor, who wishes to remain anonymous in the commodity-free spirit of his work, told Al Jazeera that his work celebrated universal aspirations of emancipation and social justice.

His unsanctioned "people's monument" referenced other recent uprisings in the Arab world, including Egypt and Libya.

Commonalities with Arab Spring?

Closer to home, it also referred to the Toxteth riots of 1981. The statue was mounted on a plinth where a statue of William Huskisson had stood until it was mistaken for a tribute to a slave-trader and torn down in the protests against racism and police brutality of 1981 (the unfortunate Huskisson had, in fact, been the world’s first railway victim in 1830).

The myth that has arisen around Bouazizi is relevant to the UK, the artist explained, where the conservative government's cutbacks have taken their toll on people's daily life.

"[Bouazizi] represented everyday struggle, his gesture was not politically motivated but about the right to exist, to provide for one's family," he said. "I like that fruit and vegetables were the cornerstone of the revolution – not political ideology or other beliefs."

In any event, such overt political messages or symbols have been largely absent during the riots in the UK, which have been left many commentators stunned by the apparent lack of any political agenda.

Will Davies, a spokesperson for Avaaz, an international organisation that works for social justice and has rallied in support of the Arab Spring, told Al Jazeera that those rioting in the UK were, in stark contrast, not politically minded and were causing "anarchy for anarchy's sake".

"Juxtapose that with the situation in Syria, where they've finally got the courage to stand up to a brutal regime and they've done that entirely peacefully."

"They should take a long hard look at what is going on in places like Yemen and Syria," Davies said, noting the state violence and forced disappearances endured by protesters elsewhere in the world simply for exercising the right to peaceful protest or for speaking to the media.

There have, nonetheless, been some attempts to link the UK riots with the string of uprisings in North Africa and Middle East.

For some, emphasising such a link is a way of eliminating any need to discuss the local and national roots to the violence.

The neighbourhood of Toxteth in Liverpool saw some of worst riots over police brutality in 1980s [REUTERS]
Stuart Bell, a British Labour Party MP, told Europe 1, a television station, that "these riots have nothing to do with unemployment, or with government cutbacks. It has its origins in Tunisia".

Others, meanwhile, have taken a more nuanced approached.

Expressing his frustration with the way the media were covering the unrest, Darcus Howe, a 68-year-old West Indian writer, broadcaster and resident of South London, told the BBC that turmoil was very much a consequence of the British police's shooting of Mark Duggan, and of routine police bullying.

Parallel to this very local root cause, the writer argued that the social dissent should also be viewed as part of a global movement.

"I don't call it rioting - I call it an insurrection of the masses of the people. It is happening in Syria, it is happening in Clapham, it's happening in Liverpool, it's happening in Port-au-Spain, Trinidad, and that is the nature of the historical moment," he told the BBC host.

'Only then do the media listen to you'

While most other commentators agree it would be a stretch to argue that the Arab Spring in helped to ferment social unrest in the UK, North African activists who had participated in protests against their own governments told Al Jazeera that they felt solidarity with the British youths who have taken to the streets.

. . . [much is excised here]

[For more, click on the title above for a link to the source]
. . .

As a consequence of issues highlighted by those riots, there was social change which benefited the Liverpool community as a whole, he said.

"The dynamic of this riot is very difficult. This riot is not being led by black people, it is being led by youth," he said. "There's no colour bar, no gender bar."

While the rioters have no clear agenda and their behaviour should not be excused, the poet said, the existence of so many restless young people was directly linked to David Cameron’s conservative government cutbacks to community and social services.

"It should be said that the last civil unrest we've had in this country was under [former prime minister] Margaret Thatcher, during a similar time of austerity," he said.

There had been "disproportionate investment" in the upper and middle classes, notably in the war effort in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the bank bailouts, while millions of children have received little from their government.

"These are children who now appear to have no purpose. Society does not seem to see them as a significant enough group to invest in."

The story of Bouazizi captured so much attention because of the sheer desperation embodied by the act of self-immolation. Britain’s youth may be speaking a different language and their violence turned outwards, rather than inwards, but they have no less legitimacy than their counterparts in the Arab world.

Follow Yasmine Ryan on twitter: @YasmineRyan

Source: Al Jazeera

Attacks against the Shia in Pakistan: From The Friday Times

The following is an article from The Friday Times [Lahore, Pakistan] that reveals some of the ugly features of Pakistan's internal politics. This source used to be only available for a small fee but it is now free. Take advantage of it.
Consider what it means to live as a minority person in a place like this. But also consider what is entailed in being a journalist in this place. It takes courage to put your name on an article that calls a spade a spade in a place where there is little assurance that a journalist will be protected. Altogether 39 Pakistani journalists have been killed since the 1990s, the most recent being Salim Shahzad, who reported on the hypocrisy of the Pakistani government. RLC

Balochistan crisis: Sectarian groups continue to target the Persian-speaking Shia community, which is not sure if the state wants to protect it
By Zia Ur Rehman

Lashkar-e-Jhangvi behind Hazara killings in Quetta


Eleven people, including a woman, were killed on July 30 when gunmen opened fire on a passenger vehicle near Pishin bus stop in Quetta. All the victims were Hazaras. The incident sparked violent protests and Quetta was completely shut down on July 31.

Over 200 Shia Hazaras have been killed in Balochistan in the last three years; they include businessmen, political leaders, government employees, clerics, police cadets, vegetable vendors, and daily-wage workers.

This is not the first such attack on members of the Shia Persian-speaking Hazara community. On July 10, two Hazara policemen were shot and killed on Qambrani Road. On June 22, two people were killed and 11 others injured in Hazar Ganji area when armed men ambushed a bus carrying pilgrims to Iran.

Syed Abrar Hussain Shah, a former Olympian, deputy director of Pakistan Sports Board, and recipient of the prestigious presidential Pride of Performance and Sitara-e-Imtiaz medals, was gunned down on June 16 near Nawab Nauroz Khan Stadium in Quetta. Shah, who belonged to the Hazara community, has represented Pakistan in the Olympics thrice and won a gold medal at the 1990 Asian Games in Beijing.

In another sectarian attack near Mirgahi Khan Chowk on May 18, unidentified men shot dead seven members of the Hazara community, including a baby, and injured five others. Most of the killed were vegetable vendors.

Seven Hazara men were killed and several injured in a rocket and gun attack in Hazara Town on May 6. There were Frontier Constabulary and Police checkposts nearby, but the attackers fled.

Over 200 Shia Hazaras have been killed in Balochistan in the last three years, according to elders of Hazara tribe and media sources. They include businessmen, political leaders, government employees, clerics, police cadets, vegetable vendors, and daily-wage workers. Hazaras are identifiable because of their Mongoloid features.

A large number of Hazaras have also been killed in attacks on religious processions. Last year, over 80 Shias, most of them Hazaras, were killed in a bombing on a Shia procession on September 3.

"Members of our community have been targeted persistently for the last 10 years by sectarian outfits, especially the banned militant organisations Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) and Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP)," said Abdul Khaliq, chairman of Hazara Democratic Party.

LeJ has accepted responsibility of most of these attacks. A spokesman for the LeJ in Balochistan, who ironically identifies himself as Ali Sher Haidri, said his group would avenge the killing of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden by targeting not only government officials and security forces, but also Hazara Shias.

Handbills distributed in Quetta recently have warned the Hazaras of a "jihad" similar to the one carried out against the Hazaras of Afghanistan by the Taliban.

Handbills distributed in Quetta recently have warned the Hazaras of a "jihad" similar to the one carried out against the Hazaras of Afghanistan by the Taliban; the Taliban regime had killed 12,000 Hazaras in central Afghanistan.

The 3.5 million Hazaras in Balochistan are said to have migrated to Quetta from Afghanistan a century ago. In the 1990s, the Taliban massacred the community - the third largest in the country - killing thousands in Bamyan, Ghazni and parts of Uruzgan that later became the Daykundi province. They had accused the Hazaras of collaborating with the Afghan Northern Alliance (ANA) fighting the Taliban regime in Kabul. According to an Amnesty International report, about 12,000 Hazaras were killed in central Afghanistan by the Taliban.

"Hundreds of Pakistani young men from militant organisations including the SSP, Jaish-e-Muhammad, Jundullah and Harkatul Mujahideen fought with the Taliban against the ANA," said an expert on militancy who teaches at Balochistan University. "The same men are now killing the Hazaras in Balochistan." He said the Al Qaeda and Taliban-linked groups accuse the community of colluding with the Americans and causing the downfall of the Taliban. Quetta is reportedly the new hub of the defeated Taliban factions, and has become a major site of expression of the hatred
towards the Hazaras.

The LeJ network in Quetta is being run by Usman Saifullah Kurd, Dawood Badini and Shafiqur Rind, a senior police official said. Kurd, who heads the LeJ in Balochistan, has trained a new group of killers who are carrying out attacks on the Hazaras, he said. Rind was arrested in 2003 from Mastung area of Balochistan while Kurd was arrested by the Criminal Investigation Unit in Karachi on June 22, 2006. Both fled from the Anti-Terrorist Force jail in Quetta on January 18, 2008. Rind was rearrested, but Kurd is still at large.

A source in the SSP said Kurd had recently met Malik Ishaq, a founding member of the LeJ, in Rahim Yar Khan and invited him to visit Quetta to address the banned SSP's public meetings.

Ishaq, accused of having masterminded the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in 2009 from behind the bars, was recently released by the Supreme Court after 14 years in prison.

The Hazara community had expressed concerns over his release. "The courts are releasing top leaders of banned organisations, and that shows these groups are getting stronger once again," said a Hazara religious scholar.

According to the Hazara Democratic Party chairman, Kurd's escape from jail was proof that these groups have inside support. He said the government claims to have arrested the attackers in all the cases, but they are never brought before the court or the public.

"The government has failed to tackle sectarian violence and protect the Hazara community," Khailq said, whose predecessor Hussain Ali Yousafi was also killed for being a Hazara in 2009.

Hazara elders believe intelligence agencies know about the activities of banned outfits and the whereabouts of their leaders, who simply operate under new names. They believe the state is either indifferent or supporting them.

The writer is a journalist and a researcher who works on militancy and human rights.
He can be contacted at zia_red@hotmail.com

Sober reflections on the contraries that led to Bastille Day

[slightly revised 7/15/11 @3:11}
Sometimes a situation becomes so complicated, disputes become so irresolvable, and adversaries so irreconcilable, that a great deal comes to bear on what happens in a single moment. The outcome of a high-stakes situation can be revolutionary change, when the system in place gets upended. I keep hoping that the disputes in our Congress have not reached such a state. But as today is Bastille Day it might be worth noting some circumstances that led up to the French Revolution, in case you notice parallels.

The whole story is too complicated to try to tell here, but I quote William Sewell, Jr’s summary of the issues that set the clash of interests in motion, to create a huge societal convolution in France. I quote from Chapter 8 of his book “The Logics Of History”. I arrange his statement in stages, in order to emphasize how as the situation developed the problems became all the more dire and irresolvable so that the underlying premises that held the French Crown in power were being undermined before it was completely overturned.

> “In 1786 the comptroller general informed the king that the state was nearly bankrupt.

> By the summer of 1789, the crisis of the state’s funding had become a crisis of the system of social stratification (because fiscal reform would mean stripping the clergy and nobility of one of their major privileges, their immunity from taxation);

> it had become a crisis of the privileged corporate institutions that were the integument of the social order of old regime France (because their privileges were linked to particular fiscal arrangements);

> it had become a deep constitutional crisis (because it was unclear which governmental body had the authority to change the system of taxation)

> and it had also become a crisis of the very principles of the social and political order (because proponents of natural rights, national sovereignty, and civic equality had managed to dominate political discourse and gain a sizeable foothold among the deputies to the Estates General.)"

That is to say, the fundamental assumptions that held the King in place were now crumbling at just the time when a contrary and irreconcilable concept of authority was being widely discussed, namely, that sovereignty should belong to the nation and the populace should have a voice in determinations of how (and possibly by whom) they should be governed. The events that took place in a cascade of miscommunications and conflicting agendas as the problems became more acute could never have been predicted, but in retrospect it is possible to notice that the ambiguities and contraraties of the situation were destabilizing the system in place, that is, the monarchy. Nothing required that the events that took place should take place that way, but much in the way of a collapse was potential in the situation. And as events took place a series of errors of understanding and communication added to the possibilities that the old order might be swept away. A spark was all that was needed.

It’s hard to think about the irreconcilable contraries in France in late eighteenth century without wondering if our own country, and perhaps even the capitalistic world as we know it, might be careering toward a point when powerful contrary interests could become, as in the French Revolution, an uncontrollable societal convolution.

Converging layers of hypocrisy in Bahrain's abuse of its own citizenry

In an op-ed piece in Al Jazeera ["The role of the Islamic Republic in Bahrain," 27 May 2011] Hamid Dabashi points out the many layers of hypocrisy that have converged in the treatment of demonstrators in Bahrain. His primary focus is Iran, but in the process of explaining Iran's perfidy he mentions that of several other countries that happen to be hostile to Iran.

"The Sunni royal family in Saudi Arabia," according to Britain's Daily Telegraph, "fears the growing influence of Shiite Iran in the Middle East, and is helping Bahrain's Sunni rulers retain power."

Also,

"the [UK] Ministry of Defence has now admitted that members of the Saudi Arabian National Guard sent into Bahrain may have received military training from the British Armed Forces in Saudi Arabia".

In the mean time Bahrain is the home of the US Fifth-Fleet,

"which makes "the great advocate of democracy" turn a blind eye to the murderous regime in Bahrain. . . "

Even though Iran's Shiite clerical regime might seem to support the Shiite demonstrations in Bahrain it is fully aware of the resemblance of those demonstrations to those of its own Shiite citizens it has repeatedly suppressed. The last thing the Iranians want is for those demonstrations to succeed.

The influence of the Islamic Republic in Bahrain is on the ruling regime: teaching it, by example, how viciously to quell a democratic revolt.

Saudi Arabia, Britain, the United States, Iran -- these countries for various and contrary reasons are supporting the Bahrain regime's abuses of its own people:

"The repression," Patrick Cockburn reports, "is across the board. Sometimes the masked security men who raid Shia villages at night also bulldoze Shia mosques and religious meeting places. At least 27 of these have so far been wrecked or destroyed, while anti-Shia and pro-government graffiti is often sprayed on any walls that survive." He further reports, "Nurses and doctors in a health system largely run by Shias have been beaten and arrested for treating protesters. Teachers and students are being detained. Some 1,000 professional people have been sacked and have lost their pensions. The one opposition newspaper has been closed. Bahraini students who joined protests abroad have had their funding withdrawn."

The Bahrain regime has even set about to silence all authentic reporting on what's going on inside the country.

"Bahraini authorities have begun an assault on local journalists working for international news agencies - with arrests, beatings and, apparently in one instance, electric shock."

States, whatever their claims, can be heartless when it comes to protecting their own interests. Even the U.S.; even Britain.

Dabashi's point is that the Bahraini regime is no better than that of Iran, as both repress their citizens with impunity.

[T]he Islamic Republic and Bahrain are in fact identical - not just in the majority of their population being Shia but in being ruled by two identically brutal and intolerant dictatorships. The Islamic Republic is frightened out of its wits by the Arab Spring, especially on its own back door, in Bahrain: for the more this Spring blooms and flowers the more it exposes the criminal atrocities of the Islamic Republic over the past thirty years, including, most recently, its own homegrown Green Movement - which one might in fact consider an early blooming of the Arab Spring.

[Click on the title above for a link to the whole piece.]

Syria's betrayal of its own claims to legitimacy

What the regime in Syria has lost in legitimacy is unrecoverable. The reality of that loss can hardly be said more eloquently than in this Al Jazeera report by Hugh Macleod and an unnamed correspondent [probably in Syria]. RLC [Click on the title for a link to the source.]

Secret police are raiding hospitals to round up people who were injured during anti-government protests.
by Hugh Macleod and a special correspondent 24 May 2011

Fawaz al-Haraki had only minutes to live.

As the shots rang out, Abu Haidar and the other protesters ran for cover, grimly familiar with what to do when the mukhabberat (secret police) attacked.

But Fawaz fell, the blood soaking his trousers where the bullet from a Syrian secret policeman had torn into his leg.

It was Friday April 22 in the industrial city of Homs, famous for being the nation's main producer of jokes and cement.

Few are laughing for Homs or its dirty factory these days. Last Friday, 11-year-old Aiham al-Ahmad became the latest among dozens of people killed in Homs since the city rose up in some of the largest numbers yet seen to call for freedom and an end to the Assad family's 41-year-old dictatorship.

As the bullets sparked off the street around them, Abu Haidar and two other protesters hauled 42-year-old Fawaz into a car, desperate to get him to a doctor before his time ran out.

But Fawaz, growing pale under a blanket in the backseat of Abu Haider's car, was already a dead man: Killed not only by a bullet, but by the regime's decision – appearing, increasingly, to be systematic – to prevent injured protestors from receiving medical care.

From the moment he was shot until the moment he was buried in the ground, Fawaz's fate was not in the hands of the doctors, friends and family who wished to save him, but in the hands of secret policemen whose actions ensured that he died, and that as few people knew about it as possible.

Nowhere to go

"They have checkpoints everywhere and we knew they could stop the car at any moment, even if we were acting normally," said Abu Haidar, who has been a consistently reliable source for Al Jazeera's reporting from Homs since the uprising began.

He had good reason to be worried.

On that same Friday, three other cars ferrying wounded protestors from Homs disappeared after approaching a security checkpoint. One of the drivers, Raed Mehran, had been on the phone with Wissam Tarif, director of Insan, a Syrian human rights organisation, hanging up saying he was approaching a checkpoint.

Several weeks later, Tarif received news that four of the men in the cars had died while the others had been imprisoned.

"It is beyond arbitrary detention. It is people being kidnapped. In many cases injured people are being kidnapped and we do not know if any medical attention is provided or not," said Tarif.

In Jabla, on Syria's Mediterranean coast, the injured from an attack on April 24 couldn't even be bundled into a car, pinned down inside the Hamwi Mosque by snipers shooting anyone who moved outside.

"We can't even get to the pharmacy to get medicine because of the snipers on the roofs," said Dr Zakariya al-Akkad. "All I can do is try and stop the bleeding." He couldn't, and 17-year-old Ali Halabi, along with several others, died.

Abu Haidar and his team had managed to avoid the checkpoints, but didn't spot the plain clothes security men pulling up to them in the car behind. The security men opened fire.

. . . "We were driving really fast and trying to keep our heads down. There were bullets all around. We were risking our lives but also the life of Fawaz because when you are injured like that every moment is important," he said.

The car swerved down a back alley to escape the mukhabberat.

"It was complete chaos but we know the neighbourhood much better than the security so we managed to escape with our lives," said Abu Haidar.

Not so for the man they were trying to help: "Because we were forced to make that long journey, Fawaz bled to death."

Al Jazeera has also reported that security forces, including snipers on rooftops, prevented residents from assisting the dead and dying during the siege of Deraa.

Human Rights Watch documented cases of security forces preventing casualties reaching hospital and firing on protesters seeking to help the wounded in Harasta, a town 12km north-east of Damascus, and also in Deraa.

'They entered the hospital'

Even without the secret police attacking their car, Abu Haidar said his options for getting Fawaz to a doctor had already been drastically limited: "We were not willing to take him to the national hospital in Homs because we thought he would be arrested and kidnapped there."

In cases repeated in several different Syrian cities, Al Jazeera has been able to document raids on hospitals by members of the secret police who have snatched injured protestors from their beds and forced them, some on stretchers, into police vehicles where they are driven to what are suspected to be military hospitals.

On April 22, the same day Fawaz died, a young nurse was on duty in the emergency ward of a hospital in Duma, a town 15 km north-east of Damascus, where tens of thousands had been protesting against the regime.

It was her fifth consecutive Friday on call. Before the protests began, the emergency department would receive three or four people per day, usually from car accidents, she said. This Friday, as before, the hospital would admit 30 to 40 emergency cases, almost all of them gunshot wounds to the upper body.

"I was in the hospital between eight and nine in the evening when about 20 security men with Kalashnikovs entered the hospital and asked reception to give them the names of all patients submitted that day," the nurse told Al Jazeera, speaking on the condition that her identity and the name of the hospital not be revealed.

"We were afraid of them. They asked us to bring them all the wounded, not those who were just normally ill."

The doctors and nurses were made to escort all 30 injured protesters, some of them carried on stretchers, from their beds to the police vehicles.

"I remember a teenager who was injured in his arm. He was exhausted, but they put him in a car anyway and he was crying from the pain. But I couldn't do anything for him," said the nurse. "They told us they were taking them to the military and police hospitals to treat them under their observation."

On the same day, also in Duma, residents formed a human shield around the gates of the private-run Hamdan Hospital, trying to prevent secret police arresting the 25 injured protesters receiving treatment inside.

"This is the last way we have to protect our wounded from being kidnapped by the secret police," said a man who took part in the human shield, which he said broke up after security forces fired on it and then arrested several injured patients.

In two other suburbs of Damascus, Berze and Maadamiyeh, Al Jazeera spoke to local doctors who said they had resorted to treating injured protestors in private homes or make-shift field clinics after relatives reported loved ones going missing from hospitals.

Also on April 22, a 13-year-old boy from Maadamiyeh died from a gunshot wound, said a local doctor, after secret police beat his father as he tried to get his son to hospital in neighbouring Daraya.

On April 23, an eyewitness in Deraa described to Al Jazeera how he saw military and plain-clothes security officers kill five people around the state hospital before breaking in and carrying out the wounded on stretchers.

In Homs itself, a week after Fawaz died, members of a local tribe stood watch around the Al-Barr private hospital to try and protect wounded protestors from police raids.

On May 5, Homs residents again formed a human shield, this time around the main hospital in Bab al-Sebah, while last Friday three people were killed when security forces opened fire on locals trying to protect a hospital in Homs' Al-Waar neighbourhood.

"They prevent patients from being taken to hospital," said a doctor directly involved in treating patients under the custody of the secret police. "It is something horrible. We feel hate towards this security regime."

Treated or tortured?

Injured protestors in the custody of security forces also stand less chance of receiving adequate medical care, according to testimony from doctors speaking to Al Jazeera and human rights researchers.

"When we were treating patients from the protests the mukhaberrat said to us, 'You don't have to take care for these people, you have to care for the injured security men,'" the doctor who treated patients in police custody told Al Jazeera.

"As doctors we have our priorities, but the mukhaberrat don't accept our priorities. It's not like they say, 'We will kill you if you care for the patients,' but the doctors cannot say no to them. They are very afraid."

As Al Jazeera first reported last month, Syrian doctors have come under direct pressure not to treat injured protesters.

Insan, a leading Syrian human rights organisation, documented the case of Hussein Moutaz Issa, 23, who died in police custody after being arrested with a gunshot wound left untreated.

Issa was shot in his right shoulder by security forces while trying to escape door-to-door raids on homes in Madaya, 40 km northwest of Damascus, on April 28. He made it to a neighbour's house where several eyewitnesses, one of them with a medical background, told Insan they managed to stop the bleeding and the wound appeared non-fatal.

But later that night Issa was arrest and died in police custody, his body left at the main regional hospital in Zabadani. According to a doctor from the hospital who spoke to Insan, Issa had bled to death after receiving no medical attention.

"He was left without medical attention and bled to death," said the doctor. "This is homicide. I saw the body myself. This young man was not offered any medical attention."

Even more disturbingly, the body showed marks of torture.

"He was not even left to die in peace," said the doctor. "It seems that after he was captured he was severely beaten."

Issa's death prompted a massive funeral march carrying his body from Zabadani back to Madaya, with thousands of people chanting for the downfall of the regime.
In a graphic and disturbing video from May 19, residents of Deraa display the body of a man said to be 75-year-old Mohammed Hassan Zubi, who was shot in the neck but whose body also bore the scars of severe beating and other torture.

Laid to rest, not in peace

Shot when protesting for freedom, Fawaz Haraki bled to death, like many others, because the actions of Syrian security forces prevented him from receiving the medical attention he needed.

Yet even after his death, the secret police continued to impose their restrictions and repression.

According to Abu Haidar, who delivered the body to them, Fawaz's family were visited by secret police and forced to sign papers stating they would not bury Fawaz in the central Al Kateeb cemetery – now renamed Martyrs' cemetery – but instead on the outskirts of the city, in the Tal Al Nasser cemetery, where the authorities hoped few would gather.

It was a scheme the mukhaberrat was using elsewhere. Just hours after residents of Homs gathered to bury Fawaz, to the south, in the Damascus suburb of Berze, a small group of mourners gathered in the dead of night to bury seven-year-oldIsraa Younes, shot by security forces the day before.

Having snatched bodies from the streets of Berze, the secret police forced families of those shot to sign papers stating their loved ones had been killed by "armed gangs" before they would release the bodies for burial.

Families had also to agree to hold the funeral at night. The same practise took place in Duma, only there the protestors, according to the regime's paperwork, had been killed by "terrorists".
But Fawaz's funeral had the power of numbers. Born aloft by a procession of some 6,000 mourners, Fawaz's body was carried not to the outskirts of the city, but straight to the Martyrs' cemetery in central Homs, an act of defiance at the last, an assertion of rights in death which the regime had so systematically removed from his life, even in its last minutes.

The Arab Contagion in Iran

Anymore it is no surprise to hear that the Iranian government has brutalized its own people; it's only where it has taken place this time that surprises -- or rather among whom. The Arabs of Khuzestan, a minority with historically little influence on public affairs, have been demonstrating for more rights. The contagion has spread even to this group of Arabs. And again Shirin Ebadi is risking her well being by revealing, again, how brutal the Ahmadinejad regime can be.

Here is what Radio Free Europe says:

April 19, 2011
Iran's Nobel Laureate Ebadi Warns Of Unrest Among Ethnic Arabs In Iran
Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi has warned the United Nations of the possible spread of unrest in Iran's Khuzestan Province, home to most of the country's ethnic Arab minority.

Ebadi sent a letter to UN Human Rights Chief Navi Pillay in which she describes a deadly crackdown by Iranian security forces last week on a peaceful protest in Khuzestan's capital, Ahvaz.

The April 15 protest, which some dubbed "Ahvaz Day of Rage," was aimed at protesting what participants say is discrimination and injustice against ethnic Arabs, who make up about 3 percent of Iran's population.

The event was reportedly planned with the help of social media sites, including Facebook, by political groups and young people both inside and outside the country who are said to have been inspired by popular uprisings in Arab countries.

Iranian officials have praised street demonstrations across the Arab world as an "Islamic awakening" but themselves have used force against Iranian protesters who have taken to the streets to demonstrate for democracy and human rights.

Deaths, Injuries, And Arrests

Force was also Iranian authorities' response to the April 15 protest in Ahvaz.

In her letter, Ebadi says that at least 12 people were killed in the clashes, 20 others were injured, and dozens were arrested.

Human rights activists told RFE/RL they have received reports that there were more than 150 arrests, including a number of intellectuals, artists, and women's rights activists. They said the province has been turned into "a military base" by security forces who have warned activists not to speak to the media.

[For the rest, click on the title above.]
===========
To the above Sami wrote the following:
I was impressed with how Shirin Ebadi has, at great risk to her own
person, recently spoken out on the Iranian government's oppression
toward ethnic minorities. Prior to this, I had been under the mistaken
assumption that Ebadi was inclined to avoid adopting any position on
especially sensitive topics such as this, which the Iranian government
probably characterizes as falling under the rubric of ‘national
security’. Maybe even she, as courageous and outspoken as she is, had
to be extremely careful about the statements she made on certain
issues. I developed this opinion after attending an event in April 2007
at Saint Louis University, where Ms. Ebadi was invited to speak. In her
(translated) speech, she was very critical of the Iranian government’s
restrictive domestic policies towards women, but at the same time she
was also defensive of her country's foreign policy, particularly its
ambitions to develop an independent nuclear energy capacity and
maintain its role as a major power within the region.

While denouncing U.S. foreign policy vis-a-vis Iran, she questioned why
her country was considered a state-sponsor of terrorism when it was
U.S.-backed states like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan which had supported
the Taliban while Iran had fiercely opposed them in the 1990s. The
convenience of this overly simplistic argument made me wonder whether
she was trying to balance her criticism of the Iranian government’s
internal policies by defending its international positions or if she
really did have a different interpretation than most of us have of
Iran's support for militant proxies like Hamas in Palestine, Hizbullah
in Lebanon, and the Mahdi Army in Iraq. This seemed a bit odd (to me,
anyway).

When it was time for the audience to submit written questions, I'd
hoped to ask a fairly simple question about her stance on the
persecution of religious and ethnic minorities in Iran (apart from
women's rights in general). From the enthusiasm of the audience in
attendance (many members of the local Iranian community, along with
professors and students from SLU and other local colleges), I could
tell there were probably more questions than she could possibly answer
that day but I was also somewhat disappointed by the quality of the
questions that were asked. The focus seemed to be on the person and not
so much on the issues that she had come to talk about. Could it be that
the more serious questions had been deliberately avoided? Or maybe this
particular audience was not interested in the 'boring' stuff I wanted
to hear.

Anyway, I'm glad to learn that I was wrong to have based my assessment
of Ebadi on what I didn't hear that afternoon. As in the past, she's
now acting as the moral conscience of the Iranian nation to make
Iranians and others around the world aware of how minorities are being
repressed in Khuzestan. The issue of women's rights is not a slight
one, and it needs to be forcefully addressed from within by able and
articulate Iranians like Ebadi. However, the perpetration of state
violence against ethnic and religious minorities (Arabs, Kurds,
Baluchis, Sunni Muslims and non-Muslims among others) constitute a more
immediate violation of fundamental human rights that demands to be
condemned by all. It's truly inspiring to see Shirin Ebadi use her
international prominence to take a stand for the rights of all
Iranians. I must say it is also quite reassuring to have a question
(finally) answered in this way.

Moderate comments for this blog:
http://www.blogger.com/comment-pending.g?blogID=8473844

Posted by Sami to Vital Concerns for the World at 7:56 PM
====

The Documentary film *Bhutto*, and Why Benazir Failed.

Recently we were able to preview the forthcoming PBS documentary, Bhutto, about the life and career of Benazir Bhutto. It was well done, but much that is described in the film cannot be understood without more information on her enemies. The film refers several times to “enemies” without identifying them. That she had them is clear enough, as there were several attempts on her life, the last one of course being successful.

Benazir and indeed all of the Bhutto family had one powerful enemy: the Pakistani army. You can’t appreciate what was at stake in the Bhutto story without knowing how powerful the army is and how pervasive its influence is in Pakistani society.

The army controls huge sectors of the Pakistani economy. It owns an estimated twelve million acres, 12% of the total state-owned land and its lands are parceled out to retired officers. Also, it owns two powerful investment companies, the Fouji Foundation and the Army Welfare Trust, which together control a third of the entire heavy manufacturing in the country. They own hotels, shopping malls, insurance companies, banks, farms, factories for corn flakes, bread, cement, textiles, sugar. Altogether the Pakistan military-industrial complex was worth about 20 billion dollars in 2007. Someone has said that while other countries have armies, in Pakistan the army has a country.

The army is however not a popular institution. And of course it need not be: It exists as the institution that should be protecting the interests of the country; the problem is that it is also the country’s landlord.

In contrast, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and later his daughter Benazir Bhutto were hugely popular. Their base of influence lay in their broad popularity among the Pakistani people. This is why the army had a problem with the Bhuttos: they were too popular. Whatever failings the Bhuttos had, and I presume they had a good many like most of us, their popularity was a threat to military wealth and power.

This was why, when Benazir ran for Parliament, essentially to be Prime Minister, the army put together a new party to run against her which called itself the Islamic Democratic Alliance. And this was why when Benazir was elected in 1989 the army did what it could to keep her from serving. In fact only after Washington intervened did the army relent, and even then only after forcing Benazir to agree to allow the army to run foreign policy and the nuclear program, and not to reduce the military’s budget, or even to question the military’s budget for the nuclear program, its backing of the Kashmir insurgency, or the Afghan Mujahedin. In June, 1989, it was the Americans who told her about the army’s project to enrich uranium.

In that year she had grand ideas of resolving the problems with India. She and the Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi proposed to develop a new era of peace and cooperation but their plans were upset by an insurgency in Indian Kashmir, possibly instigated by the Pakistani military. And then Gandhi was assassinated on May 21, 2991.

Benazir’s term as Prime Minister ended in August 6, 1990 – hardly a year after she was elected.

She was elected Prime Minister again in 1994 but by 1996 she was again deposed. The reasons for her deposal both times were the same: her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, as well as Benazir herself, was accused of corruption. President Ghulam Ishaq Khan was backed by the army and had the power to dismiss her and did so twice on the basis of those claims. Both Benazir and Zardari served time in prison for corruption. It is impossible to evaluate the merits of the accusations of corruption – significantly, the PBS film presents Zardari as unfairly judged [but then the film entailed getting approvals from his administration]. What can be said with some confidence is the army had from early on opposed Benazir and were inclined to want to smear Benazir.

Rash an accusation as this is, it is not without basis. We have noted already that the army had in 1989 resisted her serving as Prime Minister and even then seriously truncated her powers. This they did again in 1994 when she was elected for a second time. And after she was deposed a second time they tried to push through amendments to the constitution that would have banned her for life from becoming Prime Minister again.

Even when she returned to Pakistan in 2007 the former general, then President Pervez Musharraf, who by then had lost all legitimacy required that she make a deal in order to run for office. Even then the promises he made in two face-to-face negotiations with her and the Americans he failed to carry out. Under American pressure he finally dropped all charges of corruption against Bhutto, which made it possible for her to return to Pakistan and run for office. When she returned on October 18, 2007, welcomed by tens of thousands, the Pakistani army provided only desultory protection even though they had been forewarned of a plot against her; indeed it is hard not to wonder if somehow someone in an official capacity was involved in what took place as her motorcade traveled from the airport to her home: suddenly the street lights went out and then two huge bombs exploded, killing 179 people and injuring more than 600. It was the “the single largest terrorist attack in Pakistan’s history.”

After her arrival Musharraf behaved as if her popularity were a threat to his powers. On November 3, 2007, he declared a state of emergency, suspended the constitution, sacked Supreme Court judges, arrested thousands of activists, took all private TV news channels off the air, forced all serving judges to take a new oath of office that would validate whatever he did. And a few weeks later, in December, he placed Bhutto under house arrest. When thousands protested on the streets he jailed up to 10,000, finally lifting the state of emergency on December 15, allowing Bhutto to campaign for office.

By this time she had become convinced that the ISI was planning to rig the election against her, and she had prepared a dossier of evidence to present to Senator Arlen Specter and Congressman Patrick J. Kennedy. Also, on the morning of December 27, in a meeting with the Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai she told him about the ISI plan. And she had prepared a note indicating that if she was killed it would have been the work of Musharraf. She was indeed killed that afternoon. Even if Musharraf himself was behind the assassination, he made no pretenses of grieving over her loss. He and the army never did like her, he said, and anyway it was actually her own fault that she died.

The army’s control of public affairs continues. No elected government in Pakistan has ever completed its tenure, for in every instance the army stepped in to take over a government that it claimed was in disarray. The army’s complaint against Benazir was corruption. No one will ever know how fair the charge was or whether this charge was trumped up in order to suit the army’s agendas – a way of delegitimizing a politician whose popularity was so great as to be a threat to its control of the country.[Source: A. Rashid, Descent Into Chaos.]

Some articles on the recent demostrations in the Arab world

For what it's worth this is a list of some interesting recent reports on the many public demonstrations in the Arab world demanding more rights and more accountability in government. These publications may not be especially the best, but they have been helpful to me. I would welcome suggestions of other helpful articles about what is going on. RLC


‘Volcano of Rage’ by Max Rodenbeck. New York Review March 24, 2011. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/24/volcano-rage/

Frontline: Revolution in Cairo. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/revolution-in-cairo/?utm_campaign=viewpage&utm_medium=toparea&utm_source=toparea

Uprisings: From Tunis to Cairo, by William Pfaff. NewYorkReview Feb 24, 2011.

Anonymous and Tunisia: A New Cyber Warfare? by Amar Toor [AOL], January 29, 2011. http://www.switched.com/2011/01/29/anonymous-and-tunisia-a-new-cyber-warfare/?a_dgi=aolshare_email

The Internet: For Better or for Worse, Steve Coll, New York Review of Books April 7, 2011. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/apr/07/internet-better-or-worse/?pagination=false

A New Arab Generation Finds Its Voice. New York Times Magazine Mar 20, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/03/20/world/middleeast/middle-east-voices.html#0

Iran’s State of Fear, by Haleh Esfandiari New York Review of Books. Mar 3, 2011. http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/mar/03/irans-state-fear/

How China Fears the Middle East Revolutions by Perry Link. NYRBooks Mar 24, 2011.

ADDENDA

Is the Arab Spring losing its spring? by Ian Bremmer
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/04/2011479616652196.html

MORE ADDENDA [5/14/11]

'Arab Spring' Has Yet to Alter Region's Strategic
Balance (op-ed, Los Angeles Times, May 9)

The Arab Spring
(Economist, April 27, 2011)

Syria: Economic Hardship Feeds Social
Unrest (op-ed, Los Angeles Times, March 31)

The Shifting Zeitgeist of the Arab Spring by Mark Levine.
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/04/20114118540870935.html#

===========
Syrian troops refuse to fire
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2011/0425/Syria-s-military-shows-signs-of-division-amid-crackdown?cmpid=ema:nws:Daily%20Auto%2004252011&cmpid=ema:nws:NTI5OTY2MTg3MwS2

===============

CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF ISLAM AND DEMOCRACY: Tunisia's and Egypt's Revolutions and Transitions to Democracy: What is the impact on the Arab World? What Lessons can we learn?
https://www.csidonline.org/annual-conference/12-annual-conference

==============

Another look at the movement in Bahrain -- as it looked five years ago

Merely for what it reveals of the past as well as the present I here reproduce an article I posted on this site in 2005. The relevance of this unremarked protest more than five years ago to what is going on now in Bahrain is too obvious to belabor. For what it's worth:

THE FRAUD OF US DEMOCRACY CRUSADE: AMERICAN MEDIA SILENT OVER MASS PROTEST IN BAHRAIN By Bill Van Auken
> 29 March 2005
> http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/mar2005/bahr-m29.shtml

The hypocrisy of Washington’s self-proclaimed crusade for democracy in the Middle East found damning expression this week in the nearly total silence of the US government and the American media over a demonstration that brought tens of thousands of protesters into the streets of Bahrain last Friday demanding democratic reforms.
>
> The contrast between the reaction to this popular upsurge against a dictatorial monarch in the Persian Gulf and the attention lavished on the so-called “Cedar Revolution” in Lebanon could not have been starker.
>
> The New York Times was among the few to print anything at all, limiting its coverage to a 13-line Reuters dispatch placed at the bottom of page 6 in its international briefs column. The Washington Post, the other paper of record of the US ruling elite, published nothing at all, and the major broadcast media remained completely silent.
>
Apparently, the US corporate media’s only interest in Bahrain is the preparations for a Grand Prix motor race to be held there on April 3. The aspirations and the oppression of the country’s population are a matter of indifference.
>
> Friday’s peaceful march saw an estimated 80,000 people—roughly 12 percent of the Gulf state’s total population—demanding constitutional reforms. They called for greater power for the elected lower house of parliament, which currently is subordinated to a handpicked upper chamber, the consultative council — an arrangement that leaves all real legislative power in the hands of King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa. They also demanded a constitution ratified by elected representatives, rather than the current charter, which was imposed by royal decree in 2002.
>
> This action signaled the refusal of the Al-Khalifa dynasty to relinquish the absolute power it has exercised since declaring its independence from Britain in 1971. As a consequence, the opposition parties boycotted an election held that year.
>
> The monarchy denied organizers of the march—principally the main Shia opposition movement, the Islamic National Accord Association (INAA)—a legal permit for the protest, citing “tension and regional threats.” Also participating in the march were the left-wing National Democratic Action Association, the National Democratic Rally—a pan-Arabist group—and the Islamic Action Association, another Shia opposition movement. Political parties remain banned in Bahrain.
>
> On Saturday, the daily newspaper Al-Ayyam quoted a senior minister in the Bahrain regime declaring that the INAA “will face legal measures after it organized an unlawful demonstration yesterday.”
>
> Opposition leaders are threatened with arrest. The regime has increasingly cracked down on dissent. In the past month alone, it jailed three young men for running an online discussion forum—Bahrainonline.org—that posted comments critical of the regime. It accused them of “defamation...inciting hatred against the regime and spreading rumors and lies that could cause disorder.”
>
> Also arrested March 9 were three members of a recently formed Committee of the Unemployed for distributing leaflets urging participation in a picket on behalf of the jobless. It is estimated that as much as 25 percent of the country’s population are unemployed. An opposition group reported that the three were subjected to physical abuse and harsh interrogations.
>
> Last September, Abd al-Hadi al-Khawaja, vice-president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, was arrested for violating royal decrees restricting freedom of speech and association. The rights group was also proscribed.
>
> Al-Khawaja earned the monarchy’s wrath by speaking at a public forum on poverty and social inequality in Bahrain, blaming the policies of Prime Minister Shaikh Khalifa bin Salman al-Khalifa—the king’s uncle. The regime is a family affair, with al-Khalifas occupying 10 of the 21 ministries, including all those most important to the exercise of state power.
>
> While the Shia community represents an estimated 70 percent of the country’s population, there are only five Shia ministers in the government, all of them occupying relatively unimportant posts. In the last elections, the ruling family shamelessly gerrymandered electoral districts to dilute the Shia vote.
>
> Given the Bush administration’s incessant proclamations of its dedication to the struggle for democracy and against tyranny, one might anticipate the administration embracing the demonstration in Bahrain as an indication of a democratic wave sweeping the Middle East.
>
> After all, here were tens of thousands openly defying a regime that suppresses freedom of speech and assembly, discriminates against the majority of the population and routinely locks up those who criticize it.
>
> But George Bush did not take to the airwaves proclaiming his desire for the liberation of the people of the Bahrain—as he has done in relation to Iran
and Lebanon—nor did he suggest sanctions against the tyrannical monarchy, as he has implemented against the Syrian regime.
>
> Rather, there was an embarrassed silence, both in Washington and the media. The events in Bahrain cannot be reported because they expose US policy as a lie.

> Washington is not condemning this tyrant, because he is a pliant and valued instrument of US imperialist policy in the region. The small gulf emirate he rules serves as the headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet. Some 4,500 US military personnel are deployed there, occupying a 79-acre base. The Navy and Marine components of the US Central Command are also based there, and the royal family allowed the use of its territory for carrying out military attacks on Iraq.
>
> Economically, the autocratic regime has likewise subordinated itself to Washington, signing a free trade pact last year that effectively abrogated an existing customs union joining it with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. US firms dominate the oil sector.
>
> With a population and landmass that are both approximately equivalent to
those of Indianapolis, Indiana, Bahrain has been designated as a “major non-NATO
ally.”
>
> Last November, when King Hamad flew to the US, the White House celebrated him as “the first Arab leader to meet President George W. Bush since his re-election as US president.”
>
> During the visit, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell lauded the King for sharing the US commitment to “help the Iraqis have their election.” That the election staged in his own country was so blatantly rigged that political
organizations representing the majority of the population boycotted them went
unmentioned.
>
> King Hamad’s regime in Bahrain, the Saudi royal family, Egypt’s Mubarak,
General Musharraf of Pakistan and ex-Stalinist dictators like Karimov of
Uzbekistan—these are the regimes that Washington props up and depends upon in the Middle East and Central Asia. They are the real face of the supposedly democratic goals of US imperialism in the region.
>
> The reaction to the Bahrain protests serves to expose the obvious. In its pretense of a worldwide crusade for democracy and against tyranny, US imperialism designates who is a democrat and who is a tyrant based entirely upon its own strategic interests. Thus, protests in Lebanon that are seen as a means of strengthening both US and Israeli dominance in the region are celebrated by the US government and given massive coverage in the media, while a demonstration in Bahrain that threatens to undermine a US-backed regime is censored from the news.
> --

The demonstrations we ignored until the big ones happened

So much has been happening in the Middle East that I have tried to collect a list of the several demonstrations that led up to the recent major demonstrations that have had such an effect. Most of them -- all of them -- sought popular sovereignty and in any case indicated a growing sense of frustration across the Middle East. Virtually none the demonstrations that led up to these recent massive movements were animated by Islamic agendas. Some of them were pointedly aimed against the Islamist regimes currently in power, notably in Iran. In a few instances, the leaders of these demonstrations specifically denied that their agendas are Islamic. For instance, when President Admadenijad in Iran claimed the Egyptian demonstrations were Islamist a leader of the Muslim Brethren denied it.

So here is my working list, in chronological order of demonstrations in the Middle East that were mostly ignored. Much of this information comes from Asef Bayat, 2010, *Life as Politics: How ordinary people change the Middle East,* Palo Alto, CA, Stanford University. Further information is available at various sites on the internet. Also, for a recent statement on Iran see Haleh Esfandiari. 2011. "Iran: the State of Fear", NYReview Ap 7, 2011.

1987-93. First Palestinian Intifada, triggered by a fatal accident caused by an Israeli truck driver. Eventually thousands of Palestinians participated.

1995. Iran. In January a hundred thousand spectators at a soccer match in Tehran, in response to a bad call, tear up the stadium, begin chanting “Death of this barbaric regime”, and “Death to the Pasdaran” [paramilitary troops]. [Bayat 2010: 126.]

1998. Iran. In June “hordes of young boys and girls [disgorged into] the streets in every major city to cheer, dance, and sound their car horns” because of a victory of the Iranian soccer team in Paris -- and in defiance of government regulations. In Karadj they taunt the Basij who are supposed to maintain order chanting “Basij must dance!” [Bayat 2010: 126]

2001 Iran. The loss of Iran’s soccer team in Bahrain provides another excuse for hundreds of thousands of young people to display deeply felt anger against their government. “In fifty-four different areas of Tehran, young people marched, shouted political slogans, threw rocks and handmade explosives at police, vandalized police cars, broke traffic lights, and lit candles in a sign of mourning for defeat.” Contrary to government regulations young people shot off fireworks to celebrate Nowroz, “turned urban neighborhoods into explosive battle zones, scorning the official ban on the ritual and the collective joy that went with it. … symbolizing “outrage against officialdom …” [Marc 21, 2001; Bayat 2010: 126]

2004. Iran. In Tehran and Tabriz there are open fights against the Basiji paramilitaries who were trying to contain “improper behavior.” [Bayat 2010: 126].
2005. Feb 14. Lebanon. Cedar Revolution developed after the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. More than a million people gather in downtown Beirut and demand the end of Syrian troop occupation, blaming the Syrians for the assassination.

2005 March. Bahrain. Thousands march in the streets demanding a more open society and democracy. [See this blog, 3/23/11.]

2005-2006. Egypt. Nascent democracy movement appears. Kifaya [Enough is enough] movement brings together thousands of middle class professionals, students, teachers, judges, journalists who call for political prisoners to be released and the end to emergency law, torture – even call for the end of Hosni Mubarak’s presidency. It is secular, nonsectarian, appeal for democracy. [Bayat 2010: 6, 38, 168]

2006, 2007. Egypt. There are several mass workers’ strikes, especially among textile workers of Mahalla al-Kubra, “the most effective organized activism in the nation’s history since World War II, with almost no Islamist influence.” [Bayat 2010:9]

2007. In Iran, owing to the protests, during this year thousands of activists are arrested and given court summons or/and dismissed from their jobs; dozens of dailies and weeklies are shut down; hundreds of NGOs are closed down. In Egypt police treat with violence peaceful protestors calling for political reform; hundreds of Muslim Brethren are arrested; thousands are in detention without trial. [Bayat 2010: 10]

2008, April 6-7. Egypt. “April 7 Youth movement.” By linking up through Facebook 70,000 people come out in support of a textile workers strike, and to protest Israeli attacks against Gaza. Largely made up of young people, educated, well-to-do. It was implicitly a reaction against political repression, economic stagnation, nepotism in government. Bayat [2010: 23, 135] provides a description of police brutality on July 23, 2008. The protests appear in the outskirts of Cairo. [Bayat 2010: 168]

2008. Nov 5. Barak Obama is elected President of the United States.

2009. June 4. Obama speaks to the Muslim world from Cairo.

2009. June 12. After the Iranian election for President the government declares within hours that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is re-elected. Within a day there is a growing sense of outrage among the Iranian public claiming that the election was stolen. Demonstrations in favor of Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the major challenger, appeared the next day indicating their identity by using the color green as participation and support for him. Police and basij [paramilitaries] suppressed the movement brutally. On June 20 Neda Agha-Soltan was shot to death. Her death was captured on film and passed all over the world and became a defining icon of the whole affair. It stood for the popular movement against the regime, for the brutality of the regime, for the collective outrage among many Iranians, for the abuses suffered by young men and women in Iran, for aspirations of “freedom” – that is, for a system by which their government could be made more accountable. Even her name became iconic: “nedaa” means “voice” or “divine message” and so came to stand for “the voice of Iran”. The government not only spared no violent means but also used torture against those who were captured and incarcerated. [Afsaneh Moqadam. 2010. Death to the Dictator. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.]

2010. Dec 17. Mohamed Bouazizi in the town of Sidi Bouzid set himself on fire in outrage at the way he had been treated by local officials, especially a police woman who slapped him in the face and insulting his father when he tried to pay a 10-dinar fine. Riots erupted the next day in Sidi Bouzid and the violent response of the police was shared on Facebook. On Dec 22 Lahseen Naji, a protestor, in response to “hunger and joblessness” climbed onto an electricity pylon and electrocuted himself. Another person, Ramzi Al-Abboudi, who was in financial difficulty, also killed himself. On Dec 24 a demonstrator was shot to death by police in Bouziane, another on December 30. Protests reached the capital, Tujnis on December 27 in the form of a rally of 1,000 people calling for jobs. Soon the Tunisian Federation of Labour Unions demonstrated; 300 lawyers held a rally near the palace. There were demonstrations on December 29, 30, 31; there were reports that lawyers were “savagely beaten”. And there were more demonstrations on January 3, 2011. On the 6th 95% of the country’s lawyers went on strike, and the next day teachers joined the strike. On the 11th rioters were ransacking buildings, burning tires, burning cars and buses police used riot gear; the military began to deploy. The Islamist organization Hizb ut-Tahrir organized protests for January 14 and called for re-establishment of the caliphate. The next day they went to the prison to free political prisoners. On January 14 a journalist was hit by a tear gas canister and died. And on that day President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali flew out to Saudi Arabia. On January 17 a new cabinet was announced in order to quiet the rebellion. The next day, nevertheless, there were street protests against the new cabinet, insisting that no one connected with President Ben Ali should hold office. By the 23rd the police were joining the protests. Changes in the personnel in the Center committee did not satisfy the demonstrators and on 28 hundreds were demonstrating against the Prime Minister Mohammaed Ghannouchi, seeing themselves as representatives of ten million people. By February 19 demonstrators were demanding a new interim government that was completely free of any connection to the old regime.

2011. January 25. Egypt. Feb 15 Wael Ghonim placed on Facebook a web page “We are all Khaled Said”. In the next 21 hours there were hundreds of comments on the site. Walter Armbrust, when he looked at it on the 16th, saw 5,500 comments on the site. The Egyptian revolution had begun.

A fluid situation in Egypt allows for simmering tensions to catch fire

A report by Al Jazeera – “Copts, Muslims clash in Cairo: At least 11 people killed in sectarian clashes after Coptic protest against the torching of a church” -- reveals how conflicted Egyptian society is after the successful uprising against Hosni Mubarak. On the one hand we have heard that Muslims protected Copts and Copts protected Muslims at different times during the uproarious demonstrations. On the other hand, in the last few days, local clashes among people indicate that the old practices of discrimination have continued. [Click on the title above to see Al Jazeera on the latest affair.]

The burning of the Shahedain church reveals that some Muslims in the city of Sol still have disdain for the Copts of their community. The source of the problem was a love affair: A Copt man wants to marry a Muslim girl. If it had been a Muslim man wanting to marry a Christian girl, that would have been less unusual and less offensive to most Muslims, because the common practice is for the woman to “become” whatever the husband is. These are social categories, not indexes of authentic worship. And viable social categories are enforced and reinforced, reiterated many times in many contexts by the way people relate to each other – by what they don’t do as well as what they do. This love affair is offensive to some folks, as it cuts across conventions firmly established by generations of social practice.

Such are these times. They are momentous because so many fundamental conventions of practice are now at stake as new opportunities are taking form and former options being foreclosed or made less feasible or unproductive. This Muslim-Copt clash is but one of what Al Jazeera calls “a string of violent protests over a variety of topics as simmering unrest continues nearly a month after [the] mass protests.” We all hope the Egyptians can constitute a viable social order in the absence of a dictator. That would indeed be something new, hugely creative in a country that has never enjoyed a ruling institution that existed by popular suffrage.

But in this story there are some encouraging details worth watching because they hint of something else that is new in the picture: the official organizations involved have seemed to take the side of the more vulnerable and to seek redress. Al Jazeera tells us that "The military intervened to prevent further clashes” and “Egypt's ruling military council vowed to have the church rebuilt and prosecute those behind the arson attack.” If the military council follows through it will be significant.

Our own country knows how difficult it is to change social conventions. The rights of Afro-Americans were not seriously protected until the state insisted on it – which pitted the federal government against some state leaders. And even then there were marches on Selma, imprisonment, continued physical abuse, interpersonal clashes that ramified into a series of interpersonal and institutional crises.

We can only hope that the process will take place with minimal pain to the Egyptian people. What we do know, however, is that the fundamental animus of the movement ofr change is not “Islamist”. This is not an “Islamist” movement. All that the radical Islamists had hoped for and risked their lives for never had this kind of penetrating impact on the fundamental structures of Egyptian society.

Armbrust on the Middle Eastern cry against neoliberalism

This article, by a former anthropology major at Washington University in St Louis, Ph D from the University of Michigan, now a fellow at Oxford's Middle East Center, captures well the revolutionary implications of the new public demonstrations in the Middle East. We are seeing revolutionary movements in the true sense of a cry for a new social order. Walter Armbrust sees clearly some of the social conditions these demonstrations cry out against. Will they yield the paradigm change that they want? This as it appeared in Al Jazeera. RLC[Click on the title for a direct link to the source.]

A revolution against neoliberalism?
If rebellion results in a retrenchment of neoliberalism, millions will feel cheated.
Walter Armbrust 24 Feb 2011 20:27 GMT

On February 16th I read a comment was posted on the wall of the Kullina Khalid Saed ("We are all Khaled Said") Facebook page administered by the now very famous Wael Ghonim. By that time it had been there for about 21 hours. The comment referred to a news item reporting that European governments were under pressure to freeze bank accounts of recently deposed members of the Mubarak regime. The comment said: "Excellent news … we do not want to take revenge on anyone … it is the right of all of us to hold to account any person who has wronged this nation. By law we want the nation’s money that has been stolen … because this is the money of Egyptians, 40% of whom live below the poverty line."

By the time I unpacked this thread of conversation, 5,999 people had clicked the "like" button, and about 5,500 had left comments. I have not attempted the herculean task of reading all five thousand odd comments (and no doubt more are being added as I write), but a fairly lengthy survey left no doubt that most of the comments were made by people who clicked the "like" icon on the Facebook page. There were also a few by regime supporters, and others by people who dislike the personality cult that has emerged around Mr. Ghoneim.

This Facebook thread is symptomatic of the moment. Now that the Mubarak regime has fallen, an urge to account for its crimes and to identify its accomplices has come to the fore. The chants, songs, and poetry performed in Midan al-Tahrir always contained an element of anger against haramiyya (thieves) who benefited from regime corruption. Now lists of regime supporters are circulating in the press and blogosphere. Mubarak and his closest relatives (sons Gamal and 'Ala’) are always at the head of these lists. Articles on their personal wealth give figures as low as $3 billion to as high as $70 billion (the higher number was repeated on many protesters’ signs). Ahmad Ezz, the General Secretary of the deposed National Democratic Party and the largest steel magnate in the Middle East, is supposed to be worth $18 billion; Zohayr Garana, former Minister of Tourism, $13 billion; Ahmad al-Maghrabi, former Minister of Housing, $11 billion; former Minister of Interior Habib Adli, much hated for his supervision of an incredibly abusive police state, also managed to amass $8 billion — not bad for a lifetime civil servant.

Such figures may prove to be inaccurate. They may be too low, or maybe too high, and we may never know precisely because much of the money is outside of Egypt, and foreign governments will only investigate the financial dealings of Mubarak regime members if the Egyptian government makes a formal request for them to do so. Whatever the true numbers, the corruption of the Mubarak regime is not in doubt. The lowest figure quoted for Mubarak’s personal wealth, of "only" $3 billion, is damning enough for a man who entered the air force in 1950 at the age of twenty two, embarking on a sixty-year career in "public service."

A systemic problem

The hunt for regime cronies’ billions may be a natural inclination of the post-Mubarak era, but it could also lead astray efforts to reconstitute the political system. The generals who now rule Egypt are obviously happy to let the politicians take the heat. Their names were not included in the lists of the most egregiously corrupt individuals of the Mubarak era, though in fact the upper echelons of the military have long been beneficiaries of a system similar to (and sometimes overlapping with) the one that that enriched civilian figures much more prominent in the public eye such as Ahmad Ezz and Habib al-Adly.
Despite macroeconomic gains, tens of millions of Egyptians still live in poverty [EPA]

To describe blatant exploitation of the political system for personal gain as corruption misses the forest for the trees. Such exploitation is surely an outrage against Egyptian citizens, but calling it corruption suggests that the problem is aberrations from a system that would otherwise function smoothly. If this were the case then the crimes of the Mubarak regime could be attributed simply to bad character: change the people and the problems go away. But the real problem with the regime was not necessarily that high-ranking members of the government were thieves in an ordinary sense. They did not necessarily steal directly from the treasury. Rather they were enriched through a conflation of politics and business under the guise of privatization. This was less a violation of the system than business as usual. Mubarak’s Egypt, in a nutshell, was a quintessential neoliberal state.

What is neoliberalism? In his Brief History of Neoliberalism, the eminent social geographer David Harvey outlined "a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade." Neoliberal states guarantee, by force if necessary, the "proper functioning" of markets; where markets do not exist (for example, in the use of land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution), then the state should create them.

Guaranteeing the sanctity of markets is supposed to be the limit of legitimate state functions, and state interventions should always be subordinate to markets. All human behavior, and not just the production of goods and services, can be reduced to market transactions.

And the application of utopian neoliberalism in the real world leads to deformed societies as surely as the application of utopian communism did.

Rhetoric vs. reality

Two observations about Egypt’s history as a neoliberal state are in order. First, Mubarak’s Egypt was considered to be at the forefront of instituting neoliberal policies in the Middle East (not un-coincidentally, so was Ben Ali’s Tunisia). Secondly, the reality of Egypt’s political economy during the Mubarak era was very different than the rhetoric, as was the case in every other neoliberal state from Chile to Indonesia. Political scientist Timothy Mitchell published a revealing essay about Egypt’s brand of neoliberalism in his book Rule of Experts (the chapter titled "Dreamland" — named after a housing development built by Ahmad Bahgat, one of the Mubarak cronies now discredited by the fall of the regime). The gist of Mitchell’s portrait of Egyptian neoliberalism was that while Egypt was lauded by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund as a beacon of free-market success, the standard tools for measuring economies gave a grossly inadequate picture of the Egyptian economy. In reality the unfettering of markets and agenda of privatization were applied unevenly at best.

The only people for whom Egyptian neoliberalism worked "by the book" were the most vulnerable members of society, and their experience with neoliberalism was not a pretty picture. Organised labor was fiercely suppressed. The public education and the health care systems were gutted by a combination of neglect and privatization. Much of the population suffered stagnant or falling wages relative to inflation. Official unemployment was estimated at approximately 9.4% last year (and much higher for the youth who spearheaded the January 25th Revolution), and about 20% of the population is said to live below a poverty line defined as $2 per day per person.

For the wealthy, the rules were very different. Egypt did not so much shrink its public sector, as neoliberal doctrine would have it, as it reallocated public resources for the benefit of a small and already affluent elite. Privatization provided windfalls for politically well-connected individuals who could purchase state-owned assets for much less than their market value, or monopolise rents from such diverse sources as tourism and foreign aid. Huge proportions of the profits made by companies that supplied basic construction materials like steel and cement came from government contracts, a proportion of which in turn were related to aid from foreign governments.

Most importantly, the very limited function for the state recommended by neoliberal doctrine in the abstract was turned on its head in reality. In Mubarak’s Egypt business and government were so tightly intertwined that it was often difficult for an outside observer to tease them apart. Since political connections were the surest route to astronomical profits, businessmen had powerful incentives to buy political office in the phony elections run by the ruling National Democratic Party. Whatever competition there was for seats in the Peoples’ Assembly and Consultative Council took place mainly within the NDP. Non-NDP representation in parliament by opposition parties was strictly a matter of the political calculations made for a given elections: let in a few independent candidates known to be affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood in 2005 (and set off tremors of fear in Washington); dictate total NDP domination in 2010 (and clear the path for an expected new round of distributing public assets to "private" investors).

Parallels with America

The political economy of the Mubarak regime was shaped by many currents in Egypt’s own history, but its broad outlines were by no means unique. Similar stories can be told throughout the rest of the Middle East, Latin America, Asia, Europe and Africa. Everywhere neoliberalism has been tried, the results are similar: living up to the utopian ideal is impossible; formal measures of economic activity mask huge disparities in the fortunes of the rich and poor; elites become "masters of the universe," using force to defend their prerogatives, and manipulating the economy to their advantage, but never living in anything resembling the heavily marketised worlds that are imposed on the poor.
Unemployment was a major grievance for millions of Egyptian protesters [EPA]

The story should sound familiar to Americans as well. For example, the vast fortunes of Bush era cabinet members Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, through their involvement with companies like Halliburton and Gilead Sciences, are the product of a political system that allows them — more or less legally — to have one foot planted in "business" and another in "government" to the point that the distinction between them becomes blurred. Politicians move from the office to the boardroom to the lobbying organization and back again.

As neoliberal dogma disallows any legitimate role for government other than guarding the sanctity of free markets, recent American history has been marked by the steady privatization of services and resources formerly supplied or controlled by the government. But it is inevitably those with closest access to the government who are best positioned to profit from government campaigns to sell off the functions it formerly performed. It is not just Republicans who are implicated in this systemic corruption. Clinton-era Secretary of Treasury Robert Rubin’s involvement with Citigroup does not bear close scrutiny. Lawrence Summers gave crucial support for the deregulation of financial derivatives contracts while Secretary of Treasury under Clinton, and profited handsomely from companies involved in the same practices while working for Obama (and of course deregulated derivatives were a key element in the financial crisis that led to a massive Federal bailout of the entire banking industry).

So in Egyptian terms, when General Secretary of the NDP Ahmad Ezz cornered the market on steel and was given contracts to build public-private construction projects, or when former Minister of Parliament Talaat Mustafa purchased vast tracts of land for the upscale Madinaty housing development without having to engage in a competitive bidding process (but with the benefit of state-provided road and utility infrastructure), they may have been practicing corruption logically and morally. But what they were doing was also as American as apple pie, at least within the scope of the past two decades.

However, in the current climate the most important thing is not the depredations of deposed Mubarak regime cronies. It is rather the role of the military in the political system. It is the army that now rules the country, albeit as a transitional power, or so most Egyptians hope. No representatives of the upper echelons of the Egyptian military appear on the various lists of old-regime allies who need to be called to account. For example, the headline of the February 17th edition of Ahrar, the press organ of the Liberal party, was emblazoned with the headline "Financial Reserves of the Corrupt Total 700 Billion Pounds [about $118 billion] in 18 Countries."

A vast economic powerhouse

But the article did not say a single word about the place of the military in this epic theft. The military were nonetheless part of the crony capitalism of the Mubarak era. After relatively short careers in the military high-ranking officers are rewarded with such perks as highly remunerative positions on the management boards of housing projects and shopping malls. Some of these are essentially public-sector companies transferred to the military sector when IMF-mandated structural adjustment programs required reductions in the civilian public sector.

But the generals also receive plums from the private sector. Military spending itself was also lucrative because it included both a state budget and contracts with American companies that provided hardware and technical expertise. The United States provided much of the financing for this spending under rules that required a great deal of the money to be recycled to American corporations, but all such deals required middlemen. Who better to act as an intermediary for American foreign aid contracts than men from the very same military designated as the recipient of the services paid for by this aid? In this respect the Egyptian military-industrial complex was again stealing a page from the American playbook; indeed, to the extent that the Egyptian military benefited from American foreign aid, Egypt was part of the American military-industrial complex, which is famous for its revolving-door system of recycling retired military men as lobbyists and employees of defense contractors.

Consequently it is almost unthinkable that the generals of the Supreme Military Council will willingly allow more than cosmetic changes in the political economy of Egypt. But they could be compelled to do so unwillingly. The army is a blunt force, not well suited for controlling crowds of demonstrators. The latest statement of the Supreme Military Council reiterated both the legitimacy of the pro-democracy movements demands, and the requirement that demonstrations cease so that the country can get back to work. If demonstrations continue to the point that the Supreme Military Council feels it can no longer tolerate them, then the soldiers who will be ordered to put them down (indeed, in some accounts were already ordered to put them down early in the revolution and refused to do so) with deadly force, are not the generals who were part of the Mubarak-era corruption, but conscripts.

Pro-democracy demonstrators and their sympathisers often repeated the slogans "the army and the people are one hand," and "the army is from us." They had the conscripts in mind, and many were unaware of how stark differences were between the interests of the soldiers and the generals. Between the conscripts and the generals is a middle-level professional officer corps whose loyalties have been the subject of much speculation. The generals, for their part, want to maintain their privileges, but not to rule directly. Protracted direct rule leaves the officers of the Supreme Military Council vulnerable to challenges from other officers who were left on the outside. Also, direct rule would make it impossible to hide that the elite officers are not in fact part of the "single hand" composed of the people and the (conscript) army. They are instead logically in the same camp as Ahmad Ezz, Safwat al-Sharif, Gamal Mubarak, and Habib al-Adly — precisely the names on those lists making the rounds of regime members and cronies who should face judgment.

Ultimately the intense speculation about how much money the Mubarak regime stole, and how much the people can expect to pump back into the nation, is a red herring. If the figure turns out to be $50 billion or $500 billion, it will not matter, if Egypt remains a neoliberal state dedicated (nominally) to free-market fundamentalism for the poor, while creating new privatised assets that can be recycled to political insiders for the rich. If one seeks clues to how deeply the January 25th Revolution will restructure Egypt, it would be better to look at such issues as what sort of advice the interim government of generals solicits in fulfilling its mandate to re-make Egyptian government. The period of military government probably will be as short as advertised, followed, one hopes, by an interim civilian government for some specified period (at least two years) during which political parties are allowed to organise on the ground in preparation for free elections. But interim governments have a way of becoming permanent.

Technocrats or ideologues?

One sometimes hears calls to set up a government of "technocrats" that would assume the practical matters of governance. "Technocrat" sounds neutral — a technical expert who would make decisions on "scientific" principle. The term was often applied to Yusuf Butros Ghali, for example, the former Minister of the Treasury, who was one of the Gamal Mubarak boys brought into the cabinet in 2006 ostensibly to smooth the way for the President’s son to assume power. Ghali is now accused of having appropriated LE 450 million for the use of Ahmad Ezz.

I once sat next to Ghali at a dinner during one of his trips abroad, and had the opportunity to ask him when the Egyptian government would be ready to have free elections. His response was to trot out the now discredited regime line that elections were impossible because actual democracy would result in the Muslim Brotherhood taking power. Conceivably Ghali will beat the charge of specifically funneling the state’s money to Ahmad Ezz. But as a key architect of Egypt’s privatization programs he cannot possibly have been unaware that he was facilitating a system that enabled the Ezz steel empire while simultaneously destroying Egypt’s educational and health care systems.
The Egyptian army controls a range of businesses, ranging from factories to hotels [EPA]

The last time I encountered the word "technocrat" was in Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine — a searing indictment of neoliberalism which argues that the free-market fundamentalism promoted by economist Milton Friedman (and immensely influential in the United States) is predicated on restructuring economies in the wake of catastrophic disruptions because normally functioning societies and political systems would never vote for it. Disruptions can be natural or man-made, such as … revolutions.

The chapters in The Shock Doctrine on Poland, Russia, and South Africa make interesting reading in the context of Egypt’s revolution. In each case when governments (communist or apartheid) collapsed, "technocrats" were brought in to help run countries that were suddenly without functional governments, and create the institutional infrastructure for their successors. The technocrats always seemed to have dispensed a form of what Klein calls "shock therapy" — the imposition of sweeping privatization programs before dazed populations could consider their options and potentially vote for less ideologically pure options that are in their own interests.

The last great wave of revolutions occurred in 1989. The governments that were collapsing then were communist, and the replacement in that "shock moment" of one extreme economic system with its opposite seemed predictable and to many even natural.

One of the things that make the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions potentially important on a global scale is that they took place in states that were already neoliberalised. The complete failure of neoliberalsm to deliver "human well-being" to a large majority of Egyptians was one of the prime causes of the revolution, at least in the sense of helping to prime millions of people who were not connected to social media to enter the streets on the side of the pro-democracy activists.

But the January 25th Revolution is still a "shock moment." We hear calls to bring in the technocrats in order to revive a dazed economy; and we are told every day that the situation is fluid, and that there is a power vacuum in the wake of not just the disgraced NDP, but also the largely discredited legal opposition parties, which played no role whatsoever in the January 25th Revolution. In this context the generals are probably happy with all the talk about reclaiming the money stolen by the regime, because the flip side of that coin is a related current of worry about the state of the economy. The notion that the economy is in ruins — tourists staying away, investor confidence shattered, employment in the construction sector at a standstill, many industries and businesses operating at far less than full capacity — could well be the single most dangerous rationale for imposing cosmetic reforms that leave the incestuous relation between governance and business intact.

Or worse, if the pro-democracy movement lets itself be stampeded by the "economic ruin" narrative, structures could be put in place by "technocrats" under the aegis of the military transitional government that would tie the eventual civilian government into actually quickening the pace of privatization. Ideologues, including those of the neoliberal stripe, are prone to a witchcraft mode of thinking: if the spell does not work, it is not the fault of the magic, but rather the fault of the shaman who performed the spell. In other words, the logic could be that it was not neoliberalism that ruined Mubarak’s Egypt, but the faulty application of neoliberalism.

Trial balloons for this witchcraft narrative are already being floated outside of Egypt. The New York Times ran an article on February 17th casting the military as a regressive force opposed to privatization and seeking a return to Nasserist statism. The article pits the ostensibly "good side" of the Mubarak regime (privatization programs) against bad old Arab socialism, completely ignoring the fact that while the system of military privilege may preserve some public-sector resources transferred from the civilian economy under pressure of IMF structural adjustment programs, the empire of the generals is hardly limited to a ring-fenced quasi-underground public sector.

Officers were also rewarded with private-sector perks; civilian political/business empires mixed public and private roles to the point that what was government and what was private were indistinguishable; both the military and civilians raked in rents from foreign aid. The generals may well prefer a new round of neoliberal witchcraft. More privatization will simply free up assets and rents that only the politically connected (including the generals) can acquire. Fixing a failed neoliberal state by more stringent applications of neoliberalism could be the surest way for them to preserve their privileges.

A neoliberal fix would, however, be a tragedy for the pro-democracy movement. The demands of the protesters were clear and largely political: remove the regime; end the emergency law; stop state torture; hold free and fair elections. But implicit in these demands from the beginning (and decisive by the end) was an expectation of greater social and economic justice. Social media may have helped organise the kernel of a movement that eventually overthrew Mubarak, but a large element of what got enough people into the streets to finally overwhelm the state security forces was economic grievances that are intrinsic to neoliberalism. These grievances cannot be reduced to grinding poverty, for revolutions are never carried out by the poorest of the poor. It was rather the erosion of a sense that some human spheres should be outside the logic of markets. Mubarak’s Egypt degraded schools and hospitals, and guaranteed grossly inadequate wages, particularly in the ever-expanding private sector. This was what turned hundreds of dedicated activists into millions of determined protestors.

If the January 25th revolution results in no more than a retrenchment of neoliberalism, or even its intensification, those millions will have been cheated. The rest of the world could be cheated as well. Egypt and Tunisia are the first nations to carry out successful revolutions against neoliberal regimes. Americans could learn from Egypt. Indeed, there are signs that they already are doing so. Wisconsin teachers protesting against their governor’s attempts to remove the right to collective bargaining have carried signs equating Mubarak with their governor. Egyptians might well say to America 'uqbalak (may you be the next).

Dr. Walter Armbrust is Hourani Fellow and University Lecturer in Modern Middle East Studies at Oxford University. He is the author of Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

This article first appeared on Jadaliyya.