As a favor to a friend of a friend, I have been asked to let interested readers know about a a questionnaire on file-sharing put together by someone carrying out research into the ways people use the internet. It takes about 15 minutes to get through, so if you are so inclined go here.
Month: January 2007
On Hillary
Imagine if Hillary Clinton wins the 2008 US presidential elections. Statistically speaking, she is likely to be re-elected in 2012 (most presidents have been) and therefore remain president until 2016. This will mean that between 1988 and 2016 two families will have shared the presidency — 28 years of Bushes and Clintons. You could even add another eight years if you consider that George H. W. Bush was a relatively powerful VP under Reagan because of his intelligence and foreign policy background and was even acting president for eight hours on 13 July 1985 when Reagan underwent surgery.
If this happens, a generation — my generation — will have spent the time between its teenage years and its middle age ruled by two feuding families. That will be oddly familiar for those of us with Arab origins, a situation reminiscent of Kuwait’s succession system or the much-gossiped rivalries of Saudi princes. So it seems that Arabs don’t only have political lessons to learn from America, but that they can export some of their cherished political values too. But for some reason, I don’t take much comfort in that.
New Torture Cases
From the Shebab Kifaya mailing list. Haven’t verified the information or obtained the victim’s full and informed consent to publish the details here, so names and details redacted for the moment:
Citizen […], known by […] was subject to severe beating and use of electricity on sensitive parts of his body at the state security intelligence headquarters in the city of […] by the hands of officer […]. […] had been arrested in the early hours of the […] from his house in the district of […] in the city of […], Gharbeyya governorate in the Delta of Egypt.
[…] woke up at about 2 a.m. upon a heavy knocking at his door. As soon as he opened the door the police was all over the house. […] asked for the prosecutor’s permit to search the house, upon which the state security officer reached into his pocket, got out a small piece of paper, which […] did not read, returned it back into his pocket again and said: “This is the permit. And even if there is no permit, I shall detain you as I wish”. The police then took […] down into the police car, then went up again in arms to search his house causing panic to his wife and children. The police took school books and botebooks of the children, a praying carpet, a computer which was searched by the officer himself at the state security office in violation of the law which states that examination of a computer should be carried out by the technical office upon an order of the prosecution.
As soon as […] arrived in the state security office in […] he was beaten, slapped and kicked all over his body by officer […] and […]. Then […] stripped […] of all his clothes, forced him to the floor on his back with his hands tied and eyes blindfolded. He then put a chair between his legs and used a baton to pressure sensitive parts of his body. While […] was screaming of pain, officer […] was laughing and saying: “I shall make you lose your manhood totally. You will sleep with your wife with no difference between the two of you!!”
After 20 hours of torture, […] was referred to the prosecution charged of membership of the Muslim Brotherhood. His file was registered as administrative case no. […].
[…]’s lawyer has filed a complaint to the public prosecutor’s officer and the National Council for Human Rights.
Perhaps the formal complaint with the prosecutor’s office makes this fair game for public distribution, but absent confirmation, and given Imad al-Kabir‘s momentary retraction of his story in the face of intimidation after the details of his case were publicized, I’m erring on the side of caution.
It’s rare for members of the Muslim Brotherhood to face torture these days. Those who do tend to be young, rank-and-file members from the governorates, like this unfortunate man from Gharbeyya. More senior members, and members from Cairo, now generally say they are not physicaly abused in custody.
Update: Hossam reports on another Kifaya anti-torture initiative here.
Chinese lessons
From a WaPo piece on Rice’s recent Middle East tour:
At one point, Rice said that the difficult circumstances in the Middle East could represent opportunity. “I don’t read Chinese but I am told that the Chinese character for crisis is wei-ji, which means both danger and opportunity,” she said in Riyadh. “And I think that states it very well. We’ll try to maximize the opportunity.”
But Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, has written on the Web site http://pinyin.info, a guide to the Chinese language, that “a whole industry of pundits and therapists has grown up around this one grossly inaccurate formulation.” He said the character “ji” actually means “incipient moment” or a “crucial point.” Thus, he said, a wei-ji “is indeed a genuine crisis, a dangerous moment, a time when things start to go awry.”
It would be comforting to know that top policy-makers do not get their strategic thinking from pop psychology books. But then again we are dealing with a president that got excited about democratization because he read Nathan Sharansky’s book and a few years later apparently got bored with the whole idea.
Update: I forgot to include these choice quotes from Neil King’s article in the WSJ:
While traveling this week through the Middle East and Europe, Ms. Rice engaged in several long historical tutorials with reporters in tow. Her point in referring back to the Cold War, she said, isn’t to argue that history repeats itself or that the analogy is exact.
“The reason that I cite some of these other times, like Europe, is that it is so clear in everybody’s mind that the United States and its allies came out victorious at the end of the Cold War,” she said in Kuwait. “But if you…look at the events that ultimately lead to that, you would have thought that this was failing every single day between 1945-1946 and probably 1987 or 1988.”
Her contention is while things may look bad now in Iraq and elsewhere in the region, history is on the administration’s side. She pushed a similar argument to reporters last month. The Middle East is “moving toward something that I am quite certain will not have a full resolution and that you will not be able to fully judge for decades,” she said.
Critics dismiss Ms. Rice’s references to the Cold War as both convenient and a sign of her limited frame of reference. The challenges facing Europe in 1946, they say, bear little similarity to those of the Middle East in the 21st century.
“The administration’s reservoir of historical analogies seems limited to the 1914-1991 period. And it’s all about Europe,” said Adam Garfinkle, a former Rice speechwriter who edits the foreign-policy journal The American Interest. “No one in a senior position in this administration seems to have even the vaguest notion of modern Middle Eastern history.”
When asked this week about what moments in Arab history inform her thinking, Ms. Rice said she had read about “the British experience” in Mesopotamia in the 1920s, which led to the founding of modern Iraq and the withdrawal of British forces. “I know a number of things that went right, and I know the things that went wrong,” she said.
What also comes out in the article is the idea that Rice’s main strategic objective is securing a new regional arrangement that favors Israel:
On this trip, which wrapped up in London, Ms. Rice has portrayed her main mission as firming up what she calls “a new alignment” of moderate states allied with the U.S. to push back against Iran. Ms. Rice also has shown a new interest in trying to promote an Arab peace deal with Israel after years of inactivity.
Four years ago, the administration theorized that the U.S. invasion would spawn a democratic Iraq, on good terms with Israel, that would break the regional mold and compel erstwhile enemies to end hostility toward the Israelis. Now, Ms. Rice says it is the Iranian ascent wrought by the war that makes Arab states more open to negotiations.
Yet, the leading initiative for Arab-Israeli peace is an Arab one and was announced in March 2002 in Beirut — and been ignored by successive Israeli administrations, as well as the Bush administration. So it’s not so much peace that they are interested in, but have their cake and eating to. Understandable from an Israeli right-wing perspective, but should American politicians be towing the same line?
[Thanks, X]
King PS2 goes nuclear
So it appears from this Haaretz interview of King Abdullah “PS2” (like most people he can’t find a PS3) that Jordan is joining the fast-growing gang of Arab countries with civilian nuclear programs and an ambiguous attitude as where there is going to be anything more than just civilian. The boy-king says Jordan has to even though it probably can’t afford to, because of those nasty Iranians and their Shia crescent. Which is probably a lot of bull — if Jordan gets a nuclear power station, it’s because men with little black briefcases will have toured Arab capitals trying to sell multi-billion dollar plants with the backing of their governments. If Jordan goes though with, you can bet its power station will be mostly funded by the US taxpayer thanks to the Bush administration pandering to the nuclear energy lobby. That is not to say that other strategic considerations aren’t important, most notably Jordan’s long-term energy security. But this is not Iran’s nuclear program for sure — unless the Jordanians mean that they want to have a nuclear bomb too, but that’s not want he’s saying:
“But, the rules have changed on the nuclear subject throughout the whole region. Where I think Jordan was saying, ‘we’d like to have a nuclear-free zone in the area,’ after this summer, everybody’s going for nuclear programs.
“The Egyptians are looking for a nuclear program. The GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] are looking at one, and we are actually looking at nuclear power for peaceful and energy purposes. We’ve been discussing it with the West.
“I personally believe that any country that has a nuclear program should conform to international regulations and should have international regulatory bodies that check to make sure that any nuclear program moves in the right direction.”
I was actually more interested in other parts of the interview that were highly telling of King PS2’s personality.
1. He thinks of himself as a representative of the US government:
I can say that on behalf of the U.S. president and the secretary of state, and I’ve talked to both, that they’re very serious and very committed to moving the peace process forward, because they realize the dynamics of the region at the moment.
2. He’s unhappy about Israel losing to Hizbullah last summer and doesn’t bother to mention the irresponsibility of Israel’s actions:
The frequency of conflict in this region is extremely alarming, and the perception, I believe, among Arabs, and partly among Israelis, is that in the summer Israel lost this round… And that creates a very difficult and a very dangerous precedence for radical thinking in the area. The stakes are getting higher and higher.
But now I suppose I have to reluctantly recognize other bits of the interview were interesting, and I suppose no head of state can give very revealing interviews anyway. Still, his unwillingness to be a tougher critic of Israel, the main “saboteur” of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, is regrettable.
A petition
My friend Sandmonkey and I disagree on most things (because he’s wrong!), but a few days ago he spotted reports of an Egyptian blogger attending a conference in Israel who said things that have raised the Egyptian blogosphere’s collective eyebrows. Among other things, he alleged that we are all opposition journalists, there are only 100 of us and he knows us all, and we spend vast fortunes at internet cafés where we hold conspiratorial meetings. In fact there are well over 6,000 Egypt-based bloggers, the vast majority of which are not political, and even the political ones are generally not linked with the opposition, although they might support Kifaya or other movements.
To read more about it, see the petition a bunch of us have signed to alert the Israeli organizers that they have been duped — the so-called “blogger” appears to be a US-based Egyptian academic who puts up his scholarly articles online. It’s one thing to want to speak about blogging in general terms as an academic, but another to paint a vibrant and diverse group of bloggers as a cabal of spoilt rich kids with political agendas. And kudos to Sandmonkey — the very proof that the Egyptian blogosphere is not what you might expect it to be — for putting it all together.
cheap dig
Ok ok. My apologies to the fine boys who come out to make sure that law and order are maintained during these demos. Sometimes you just can’t resist though.
Today’s Kefaya demo at Sayeda Zeinab mosque, marking the thirty-year anniversary of the Bread Riots, was more energetic than usual, and the crowd seemed more diverse. At the same time security seemed more at ease, though the tactics followed routine practise: squish the protestors into the smallest possible space and keep a troupe of beltagaya posted around the corner just in case.
I’ve posted a couple of other shots of the proceedings on my flickr site.
Also see Hossam Hamalway’s report here or check out a contemporary account of the events by Henry E. Mattox, economic reporting officer at the US Embassy at the time. He seems to have observed the events from the vantage point of his office, but he did offer this:
The root cause of the recent unpleasantness was what we in the economics racket call in technical terms an effort to extract blood from the corpus of a turnip.
And then he went on to describe how the government has “painted itself into an uncomfortable corner” with “this subsidy lashup.”
Worth noting that Sadat’s government got itself out of the corner not by easing off subsidies while doing something about the repressive and corrupt mode of economic “management” that they enabled, but by a cheap sleight of hand: keeping the price of bread the same while reducing the size of the loaves (oh yeah, and bashing a lot of heads). So the working class today finds itself in the same position as 1977: dependent for their daily bread on a regime that acts like a violent dead-beat dad, at once stifling the ability of those without the capital to buy up state assets at knock-down prices to support themselves, and unable to provide an alternative.
Mattox’s conclusion also says much about the nature of US-Egyptian state-level relations, though perhaps unintentionally. After bemoaning the billions of dollars that the subsidies are costing the Egyptian government, referring to cutting out the subsidies as “bringing sanity” and hiding under his well-polished desk for several days, Maddox reports that “the natives are quiet again.”
What a relief.
WaPo: “Lost in the Middle East”
The Washington Post takes the time to point the obvious and gets in some good old fashioned Hozz-bashing:
The new strategy explains a series of reversals of U.S. policy that otherwise would be baffling. In addition to embracing the Middle East peacemaker role that it has shunned for six years, the administration has decided to seek $98 million in funding for Palestinian security forces — the same forces it rightly condemned in the past as hopelessly corrupt and compromised by involvement in terrorism. Those forces haven’t changed, but since they are nominally loyal to “mainstream” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and serve as a check on the power of the “extremist” Hamas, they are on the right side of Ms. Rice’s new divide.
So is Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a thuggish autocrat who was on the wrong side of Ms. Rice’s previous Mideast divide between pro-democracy forces and defenders of the illiberal status quo. In past visits to Cairo, Ms. Rice sparred with Mr. Mubarak’s foreign minister over the imprisonment of democratic opposition leaders such as Ayman Nour and the failure to fulfill promises of political reform. On Monday, she opened her Cairo news conference by declaring that “the relationship with Egypt is an important strategic relationship, one that we value greatly.” There was no mention of Mr. Nour or democracy.
They should also mention that this US egging on of a Sunni-Shia conflict is the most irresponsible thing since… well, since the invasion of Iraq. My feeling is that while some Arab governments are at least partly encouraging this worldview to justify their backing of US policy — see Sandmonkey’s reflections on anti-Shia diatribes in the Egyptian press lately — the main force behind this is the Bush administration, which against all common sense seems bent on escalating tensions with Iran. If some kind of regional conflict pitting Shia against Sunnis emerges, than the US will bear a great deal of the responsibility for having started it, and this will not be forgotten by the region’s inhabitants.
Over the last five years, major Arab states like Saudi Arabia and Egypt had made some overtures to Iran and both sides were keen to improve relations. Trade with Iran has also increased over the last few years. Now talks of reopening embassies are over.
This is not dismiss the problem posed by Iran’s nuclear program, but between Iran having nuclear weapons and a region-wide second fitna, I know what I’d choose.
NDP MP strips to protest amendments??!?
Intriguing story:
An Egyptian ruling party politician started to undress in parliament on Tuesday in protest at proposed constitutional amendments which perpetuate many of the Egyptian president’s vast powers.
In a debate on the amendments, details of which have not been released, member of parliament Mohamed Hussein objected to the article which gives the president the right to dissolve parliament.
“Enough of that, enough. Should I take my clothes off?” he added, using a sarcastic popular expression used in response to someone’s excessive expectations.
When Hussein unbuttoned the waistcoat of his suit, speaker Fathi Sorour threatened to have him thrown out of the chamber.
A month or so ago I remember hearing about a group of 60 NDP MPs who wrote a letter of protest asking for the amendment of Article 77 to limit presidential terms to two. I do know some in the NDP believe this should be done, as well as many establishment commentators in the state press. But Hozz has made it clear it’s not about to happen. Still, it’s an interesting development to see NDP MPS — the majority of which, remember, were elected as independents, defeating the leadership’s chosen candidates — getting some backbone.
By the way, does anyone know more about this individual MP or those who demanded that Article 77 be amended?
Israel, Syria dismiss peace talks
I’ve been looking at Israeli reactions to yesterday’s revelation that a secret negotiations between Tel Aviv and Damascus had been going on since 2004 — negotiations that yesterday Ehud Olmert rushed to dismiss, even insulting the mediators involved. This from Uzi Benzimann in Haaretz:
It is enough to observe the panicked responses in Jerusalem to the report by Akiva Eldar yesterday in Haaretz on the outlines of an agreement between Israel and Syria cobbled together in unofficial talks, to feel yet again that generations of governments of Israel, including the present one, are responsible in no small way for prolonging the Israeli-Arab conflict. Unlike the first 30 years of the state’s existence, when the Arab world refused to recognize Israel, its neighbors have gradually come to terms with the reality starting in 1977. And since then, the Arab world has also started to bear responsibility, at least partially, for fanning the embers of the conflict.