Author: issandr

HRW on Gaza and Morocco

Two important reports have been issued recently by Human Rights Watch. One is quite timely in light of yesterday’s vote in the Israeli Knesset to pull out of Gaza is about Mass Home Demolitions in the Gaza Strip:

Over the past four years, the Israeli military has demolished over 2,500 Palestinian houses in the occupied Gaza Strip. Nearly two-thirds of these homes were in Rafah, a densely populated refugee camp and city at the southern end of the Gaza Strip on the border with Egypt. Sixteen thousand people — more than ten percent of Rafah’s population — have lost their homes, most of them refugees, many of whom were dispossessed for a second or third time.

As satellite images in this report show, most of the destruction in Rafah occurred along the Israeli-controlled border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt.  During regular nighttime raids and with little or no warning, Israeli forces used armored Caterpillar D9 bulldozers to raze blocks of homes at the edge of the camp, incrementally expanding a “buffer zone” that is currently up to three hundred meters wide.  The pattern of destruction strongly suggests that Israeli forces demolished homes wholesale, regardless of whether they posed a specific threat, in violation of international law.  In most of the cases Human Rights Watch found the destruction was carried out in the absence of military necessity.

HRW reports on Israel/Palestine are always extremely well researched because of the political sensitivity of the issues they address. This one includes some very revealing satellite imagery of Gaza that shows the extent of destruction that took place. What’s important about the report is that it highlights that

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to “disengage” from the Gaza Strip holds little hope of relief to the residents of Rafah.  Under the plan, the IDF will maintain its fortifications and patrols on the Rafah border indefinitely.  The plan explicitly envisions the possibility of further demolitions to widen the buffer zone on the basis of vague “security considerations” that, as this report demonstrates, should not require a buffer zone of the kind that currently exists, let alone further mass demolitions.

The second report is about the crackdown on suspected Islamists that followed the May 16 2003 Casablanca bombings, which were a setback for due process and human rights in a country that was just beginning extensive reforms under the new king. But the report also notes some positive developments for Morocco, notably in the form of an “Equity and Reconciliation Commission” that is the first in the Arab world to be set up to look at past abuses. Still, the commission’s power is limited.

Dirty Islamists

This story about Algeria’s Harkat Al-Islah Islamist party brought a smile…

Algerian Islamists Rattled by Sexual Scandals, Resignation of Leaders

Scandals surrounding the party broke out earlier this week when a member of the leadership, who must remain anonymous for legal reasons, filed a lawsuit claiming that his wife had been “sexually assaulted” by Sadiq Sulayemah, another party leader.

The plaintiff has accused the party’s leadership of trying to cover up the incident along with other instances of “illegitimate sexual activity” at the highest levels.

Sulayemah, a well-known poet, and a life-long friend of Jaballah, has denied the charge, explaining his presence in the plaintiff’s house as an accident.

Party sources said yesterday that the poet had met Jaballah and “confessed to his sins” and asked for pardon. Jaballah is reported to have asked the poet to keep the incident a secret so as not to harm the party.

“It is hard to know what happened at the house,” says Abdul-Ghafour Saadi, the party’s deputy leader. “There were no witnesses to see what our comrade and the lady did.”

Sulayemah has published an ode lampooning unnamed party leaders for their obsessions with adultery and sexual deviation. The scandals come as a blow to a party that has built its platform on the claim that the Algerian society has become corrupted by Western influence.

Last year the party presented a bill to make Algeria alcohol-free by banning the sale of drinks in public places. The bill failed to get enough support for inclusion in the parliamentary agenda. The party has also campaigned to make polygamy legal again, and opposed reforms presented by President Bouteflika to improve the condition of women.

Nothing reassures me more than corrupt (morally or otherwise) Islamist politicians. It’s the holier-than-thou ones I’m afraid of.

Hizb Al Ghad granted license

Hizb Al Ghad (the Party of Tomorrow), was approved a few hours ago by the Higher Political Parties Committee (HPPC) of the Egyptian Shura Council, the upper house of parliament. The HPPC has, for the past two decades, routinely denied new parties licenses on the spurious grounds that they did not bring anything new to the political scene, one of the requirements for founding a party in Egypt. The Hizb Al Ghad people are of course ecstatic, and we are waiting to see if more parties were granted licenses. Remember yesterday I posted that there were rumors this was going to happen. Well, for one party at least it did.

I don’t want to go into the details of the case right now, but it is likely that the decision came a) from high up, i.e. Mubarak, and b) to avoid the embarrassment of having the administrative court rule in favor of Hizb Al Ghad and overturning the HPPC’s decision. Note that the key decision-maker at that level is Safwat Al Sherif, the former Minister of Information and current head of the Shura Council and secretary-general of the ruling National Democratic Party. As you might guess, he’s no fan of new parties.

The bottom line: a good first step, but one that probably would have come anyway through the judicial system. Will be more excited if Karamah and Al Wasat, for instance, get through and if currently frozen parties (such as the rather nasty left-Islamist Labor party and the ridiculous Ahrar party) are unfrozen.

Bits and pieces

A few things that I picked up around the web but I have nothing special to say about:

  • A fun story from the October 1854 issue of Harper’s called The Oriental Merchant. Rummage around the site and there are some great 19th century orientalist stories.
  • Mona Baker’s site, which leads with an important appeal to defend Columbia University Assistant Professor Joseph Massad, who is coming under attack by the usual suspects for having opinions of his own.
  • Shebab Misr (the youth of Egypt, in Arabic) is a subversive but relatively apolitical online magazine that prints what’s usually not available in the print publications. A worthy project.
  • We’ve mentioned Al Hurra a few times here in the past few weeks, but Abu Aardvark has a bit more with rumors of impending shake-ups. Also check out his links covering protests over human rights activist Abd al Hadi al Khawaja’s arrest, which we’ve covered before. Update:

    • He’s also right that Chan’ad Bahraini is a must-read on Bahrain and this affair in particular.

    Petition against Mubarak

    Egypt’s pro-democracy movement is gathering some steam:

    More than 650 people – Islamists, Communists and 30 lawmakers – signed a petition in the name of The Popular Campaign for Reforms, to try to amend Egypt’s constitution to limit a president to two terms.

    The petition, a copy of which was faxed to The Associated Press, called the system of one-man rule in Egypt “an obstacle to all opportunities for reform and progress.”

    The left and the Islamists have taken some time to get together and find common ground, but at least they finally have. The group that’s still missing, though, is precisely the one Western powers would most like to see succeed the military regime: the “liberal” businessmen who have been nurtured for years as a rising force in Egyptian politics and are now — to a certain extent — represented by Gamal Mubarak and his cronies.

    Update: Abu Aardvark offers his own analysis, and a conversation I had with one of the activists who signed the petition suggest that the Islamists are not really on board: although they sent a representative to sign the petition, yesterday the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood denied any knowledge of the petition, effectively dissociating himself but maintaining a certain level of ambiguity.

    At the end of the day, the petition itself is not that significant if there isn’t a follow-up to make it a more general opposition to a another Mubarak term. The petitioners gathered under the banner “Enough” when they held their gathering, that feeling now has to be communicated to others who have also had enough.

    New parties rumor

    There has been a rumor going around Cairo that President Mubarak has decided to grant the Hizb Al Ghad (Party of Tomorrow) and Karamah (Dignity) party licenses, and that this will be carried out within a couple of days. Now, I don’t take too much stock in rumors, especially as, at least in the case of Hizb Al Ghad, there is a case pending in the administrative court. (Read Ursula’s post from last month for more info.)

    Karamah, an older party founded by ex-Nasserist MP Hamdeen Sabahi — one of the most honest men in Egyptian politics and a respected younger leftist leader — has quite a different background that Hizb Al Ghad. It has ties with the revolutionary socialists, the underground leftist movement that has been one of the main forces behind street protests against the Iraq war and the occupation of Palestine, as well as with Egypt’s growing anti-globalization movement. Karamah is motivated by ideas of social justice, while Hizb Al Ghad’s central issue is constitutional reform. The first has grassroots support among intellectuals and left-wing activists, as well as some poor areas, while the second’s main strength is the personality of its leaders, maverick MP Ayman Nour and former MP Mona Makram Ebeid.

    Many of the regime’s fiercest critics nevertheless take pride in the independence of the judiciary (I am more pessimistic on this myself), and if Mubarak can decide overnight to make the court decide in Hizb Al Ghad’s favor (it seems they have a solid case anyhow), while it will be good for that party it won’t say much for the judiciary. But it’ll be interesting to see what happens, and I guess we’ll know by the end of the week if the rumors are true.

    Update: Just to clarify things, the Hizb Al Ghad ruling by the administrative court which could grant it party status is scheduled to come tomorrow. This is what probably started the rumors. Regarding Karamah, it has already been denied several times by the Higher Political Parties committee, as has Al Wasat, a centrist party mostly led by former Muslim Brothers.

    American legitimacy

    Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson take Robert Kagan and others to task in The Sources of American Legitimacy, an article why the Iraq war and the Bush doctrine of ignoring international law, the international community and the United Nations has imperiled the US. They take aim, notably, at Kagan’s argument that

    “Contrary to much mythologizing on both sides of the Atlantic these days, the foundations of U.S. legitimacy during the Cold War had little to do with the fact that the United States helped create the UN or faithfully abided by the precepts of international law laid out in the organization’s charter.”

    Kagan’s recent book, Of Paradise and Power, which argued that Americans were from Mars and Europeans from Venus and would never agree on foreign policy in general and military intervention in particular. It was the most articulate argument against what Donald Rumsfeld called “Old Europe” by one of the brightest neo-con thinkers. Tucker and Hendrickson’s answer to it is timely and well-argued, without all the wishy-washiness of terms such as “soft power.” They are particulary good when making the argument that the pre-emptive wars envisaged under the Bush doctrine are not only illegal, but dangerous and unrealistic:

    Such illegal uses of force are in fact unnecessary for U.S. security and actually imperil it. The Iraq war clearly illustrates both points: not only did containment and deterrence offer a perfectly workable method of dealing with Saddam’s Iraq, but the consequences of the U.S. occupation have also made Americans much more insecure. Those consequences include daily attacks on American soldiers, the inflammation of opinion in the Muslim world (encouraging new recruits for al Qaeda), and the possibility of further wars arising from the potential disintegration of the Iraqi state.

    The baleful results of the Iraq war are also relevant to the dangers posed by the acquisition of nuclear weapons by North Korea or Iran, two instances in which preventive war is often urged. As with Iraq, “preventive” attacks would be remedies worse than the disease and could mean catastrophic war in both regions. U.S. threats of “regime change” also undermine the more reasonable policy of dissuading either state from acquiring such weapons through measures short of war-that is, through a mixture of negative sanctions and positive inducements. The prospects of a grand bargain with either Pyongyang or Tehran would be enhanced were Washington to abandon its not-so-secret wish to bring about the downfall of these regimes.

    Good reading if you follow these policy debates.

    TV agit-prop

    The Washington Times on Al Manar and Znet on Al Hurra: they could be talking about the same thing.

    There has been a spate of stories on Al Hurra recently, none of them particularly enlightening. A few weeks ago I met one of their reporters who was coming through Cairo. That person told me that the atmosphere at Al Hurra was unbearable: most of the staff are Lebanese Maronites who come from the MBC channel in Lebanon, which was closed by the authorities for being critical of Syria. Many of them come from Aounist backgrounds, after General Michel Aoun who was one of the main and bloodiest warlords during the Lebanese civil war.

    Apparently they have decided to take revenge and now devote a considerable portion of their time to attacking Syria, while other areas of the Arab world — North Africa for instance — are ignored. They also have a tendency to promote Arab and Arab-American reporters who have a history in Arab Christian activist movements, not only Maronite but Coptic too. More than one presenter of talk shows has also reportedly shown a slight obsession with minority-related issues: for instance a 90-minute interview with

    If all this is true — and it has been confirmed elsewhere so I think it is — no wonder no one has confidence in this channel.

    Two quick TV stories

    As anyone who has lived in the Arab world during Ramadan knows, this is the time of the year when new TV series come out and families crowd around their TV set from sunset to the late evening, watching the latest on offer from Egypt, the Gulf and elsewhere. In Egypt, for instance, the big hit show so far is Abbas Al Abiad fil Youm Al Aswad (literally, Abbas the White in Dark Days), a story of mistaken identities in the context of the Gulf War (the 1991 one), which is quite good from what I’ve seen so far.

    But the big TV event came before Ramadan, on the eve of the Taba bombings, when Egyptian TV viewers found their 10 national channels bereft of news about the bombings and continuing normal programming even as Al Jazeera provided continuous coverage of events. Tarek Atia — who, as well as writing for Al Ahram Weekly, runs one of the first blog-like Egyptian sites, cairolive.com — reported on what happened on the small screen:

    “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” said Hossam El- Garahi, a stock exchange analyst. Having learned of the incident from the satellite channel, Al-Arabiya, El-Garahi kept flipping back to Egyptian TV, determined to find out more about what was going on in Taba. “All the channels had the regular stuff going on — a play here, a video clip there — it was like this thing wasn’t happening in Egypt.”

    Millions of other people couldn’t believe their eyes as they watched their TV screens late Thursday night. It wasn’t just the horrific images emerging from Taba that astounded them, but the seeming oblivion to those events being demonstrated by their local channels.

    On channel 1, a play continued without interruption. On channel 2, a video clip. Channel 3 was airing an interview, as was channel 4, and so on.

    Finally, said a flustered and angry El-Garahi, a news ticker appeared that indicated that an explosion, which might have been caused by a gas leak, had occurred in Taba. “That useless ticker remained unchanged for the next several hours,” he said.

    Viewers hungry for information relied more on channels like Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya (or CNN, as in El-Garahi’s case) that were basically blanketing their coverage with news from Taba, albeit with an annoying lack of new details. In fact, most of that first coverage was basically a continuous reel of an Israeli ambulance leaving the scene, and a wounded blond woman on a stretcher.

    The other interesting story about TV comes from Jordan, with state TV there pulling a new serial about Afghanistan after threats from Islamists that they would take revenge if it showed the Taliban in a bad light. The same show has also apparently been pulled from Qatar, where it was produced.

    Hostages in Iraq

    AP did a tally of foreigners taken hostage in Iraq. Sobering.

    A Look at Foreigners Taken Hostage in Iraq

    By The Associated Press

    Insurgents in Iraq have kidnapped more than 150 foreigners:

    HELD HOSTAGE:

    _Margaret Hassan, director of CARE international in Iraq and a citizen of Britain, Ireland and Iraq. Abducted Oct. 19. A videotape issued Oct. 22 shows her pleading for Britain to withdraw troops from Iraq.

    _Two Lebanese electrical workers, Marwan Ibrahim Kassar and Mohammed Jawdat Hussein. A video broadcast Sept. 30 shows masked men holding them at gunpoint. Islamic Army in Iraq claims responsibility.

    _Christian Chesnot, 37, and George Malbrunot, 41, French journalists. Disappeared Aug. 20. Islamic Army in Iraq claims responsibility.

    _Aban Elias, 41, Iraqi-American. Seized May 3 by Islamic Rage Brigade.

    Continue reading Hostages in Iraq