Month: March 2009

Bitter black coffee

The LA Times’ “Babylon and Beyond” blog writes about the Egyptian play قهوة سادة (“Coffee, no Sugar”–I would have translated it as “Black Coffee”), which was already a smash-hit in Cairo last summer. 

The play begins with scores of weeping men and women, all in black, walking in a funeral procession, laying photographs of Egypt’s prominent deceased economists, actresses and actors,  and political leaders on a sandy grave symbolizing the Egyptian past.

The play mocks a plethora of flaws, including bread queues, the chasm between rich and poor, corruption, unemployment and the failure of state institutions. By mocking businessmen, the play hit a sensitive nerve with large segments in Egyptian society that believe the rich survive on tight networks of corruption that drain national resources to serve the vested interests of the few at the expense of the many. 

“Coffee, No Sugar” offers a ruthless depiction of the sweeping social chasm. On one hand, it depicts a businessman who prayed to God to inspire him with a solution to his dilemma of whether to build a square or rouund swimming pool at his villa. On the other hand, the play shocks spectators with a scene of a bunch of young men who threw themselves into a deadly fight over few loaves of bread.

The show has been greeted with extreme enthusiasm. Seeing the play seems to be almost cathartic, like attending an uproarious funeral for the country. In Al Masri Al Youm, Sulayman Gouda writes that “the show sheds tears over our situation, and invites us to shed tears, and no play in 2008 has attracted people’s attention as forcefully as ‘Black Coffee’…. When you look around, searching for something to staunch your pain, temporarily, from the sorrows you see, in every corner […] you won’t find anything but this play to cling to! As if it were a life preserver, that maybe expresses what troubles you on the inside, your grief, regret, suffering and pain. (This is my own, approximate translation).  

Yet as my friend Sumita (who sent me the link, thanks!) points out, it is a little facile to throw all the blame on “businessmen” and the pernicious influences of the Gulf –it’s a typical left-wing analysis that allows one to feel indignant and superior without taking too many risks (by criticizing the government in detail) or responsibilities. Being nostalgic about Egypt’s “better days” also ignores the way the roots of many of today’s problems–authoritarianism, corruption, incompetence–were laid long ago. But what the success of the show says to me most clearly is how widely acknowledged it is today in Egypt that the whole country is at a low, low point. 

Anyway, I haven’t see the show and I’d love hear from those who have. I hear it’s the collaborative work of several young screen-writers, and is basically a collection of skits. This is what I’ve gleaned, because I wasn’t able to see it. As “Babylon and Beyond” notes, “In recent months, finding a ticket was a hopeless endeavor.”

Last summer it wasn’t easy either. A friend and I were kept standing in line for an hour, watching helplessly as several ladies–some associated with the government theater where the play was being shown–cut in line in front of us. By the time we got to the window, there were no tickets. The young functionary in charge of organizing the line, when asked why he hadn’t stopped the cutting, shrugged his shoulders and  then angrily said that it wasn’t his responsibility. It was all pretty ironically appropriate for a show about the ills of Egyptian society.

Saatchi discovers Middle East art

I’ve been meaning to write about the new exhibition of Middle Eastern artists at the extremely fashionable London Saatchi gallery for some time..

Saatchi is an advertising mogul turned art collector and he’s famous for discovering and promoting the artists featured in his very influential Young British Artists shows in the 90s. More recently, Saatchi has turned his attention to foreign art. I visited the gallery’s exhibition of Chinese art in December and was very impressed. 

But reviews of Saatchi’s Middle Eastern show–which is about 50% Iranian, with some Iraqi and Syrian, and several artists who now live in the West–have been mixed. Here’s a review or two. I can’t help being a little surprised by the British coverage, in which reviewers often talks about this show as the “first” time they’ve experienced modern Middle Eastern art, and make free use of stereotypes. 

But there has been some criticism of the show’s curatorial shallowness. In the Review at the National Kaelen Wilson-Goldie writes that: 

Geography makes for a miserable curatorial conceit. All of these exhibitions start from maps rather than artworks. They propose to introduce regions rather than explore the nuances of an individual artist’s practice. They shoehorn artists into a format that is set in advance (pick the region first, the talent second) rather than letting their works give rise to ideas that could, if given the time and consideration they deserve, structure exhibitions from the inside out. Inevitably, regional shows end up playing at representation, with the artists put in the position not of expressing themselves but of interpreting, packaging and reducing for easy consumption their culture or their country. This elevates biographical over critical interpretations. It flattens complexities and panders to those in search of the exotic, the foreign and the monolithic other. It’s all rather patronising, as if the artists from a given region aren’t good enough, interesting enough, accomplished enough or successful enough to stand on their own. And when it comes to the Middle East, a part of the world that houses so many countries, languages, dialects, religions, sects, socioeconomic classes, educational systems, social customs, traditions, cultures, histories and contemporary political situations, it simply makes no sense. 

(You can read the rest of that review here.)

 And really, couldn’t they think of any better title than the trite “Unveiled”? 

Links March 3rd to March 4th

Links from my del.icio.us account for March 3rd through March 4th:

Gamal in DC: are think tanks complicit?

While Gamal Mubarak did not “quietly slip” into Washington as the FP blog The Cable suggests (the visit was widely reported in the Egyptian press) he is keeping a low profile. Odd that this leader of the National Democratic Party who holds no executive position (officially!) should be hosted in several closed-session meetings with major think tanks, including some close to the Obama administration, with an apparent black-out on what’s being discussed.

A rhetorical question – I am torn about this myself: should the same think tanks that regularly call out for democratization in Egypt host a man who appears to want to undemocratically replace his father and tailored Egypt’s constitution for that purpose? Should they collaborate in furthering the opacity that has characterized Egyptian-US relations for decades? I understand their desire to be seen as “players” and the usefulness of “Chatham House rules” meetings, but in this case I find it rather galling. The future of Gamal Mubarak and his role as a representative of Egypt is a pretty important issue, and one where lack of clear information has contributed to the general malaise about the post-Hosni Mubarak future.

As mentioned before, if anyone would care to leak, we’ll happily publish.

Update II: A reader who attended one of the meetings says:

There was a 90-minute discussion that covered economics, politics, civil-military relations and the bilateral relationship. For the most part, the questions were what one would expect people to ask the head of the policy secretariat of the party (rather than a president-in-waiting). He was comfortable (and relatively bullish) on the economic front, arguing that Egypt was less exposed to the global slowdown than many countries and would benefit from having cleaned up the banking sector several years ago. He also suggested that the aid relationship cannot be the centerpiece of the bilateral relationship. On Civ-Mil issues, he said that the military and intelligence services are subordinate to the president regardless of whether the president comes from a civilian or military background.

Glad some of this came out!

On reform of the banking sector protecting Egypt’s economy, this is generally understood to be the case and was recently highlighted by the World Bank. Egypt has already had its liquidity crisis and does benefit from a very competent Central Banker in Farouq al-Ogda, and has mostly cleaned up the bad banks. That being said, the financial crisis is bound to have a socio-economic component that, combined with the sour public mood, could generate some kind of unrest or political difficulties. Especially that the Nazif government has driven little political benefit from the real economic improvements of the last few years, unfairly I think, and faced pretty hostile media coverage.

Interesting quote on aid not being the central part of the relationship. Unfortunately, for Congress, it is. It’s all about how much money the US spends on Egypt (without much thought about how, in many ways, Washington gets its money’s worth). So this sounds like presenting Egypt’s point of view, which is that aid should not even be up for discussion.

On civilian-military relations, again the classic constitutionalist view. One would think he’s hoping this will be the way things unfold. But, let’s imagine Gamal Mubarak is the next president: he will have to deal with several massively powerful institutions (some might call them states within the state): the military, the intelligence services and the interior ministry. Will he be able to address one of the key issues that makes cleaner, and eventually more democratic, politics possible – namely the separation of the state from the NDP – especially when he will have been brought in by that very collaboration?

If anyone has any more thoughts on this, let us know in the comments.

Update: In the meantime, American-Egyptian associations have released a statement to President Mubarak and raising the issue of whether he should be welcomed in the US again when civic, religious and political rights have stagnated or degraded in recent years. Full text after the jump.

Continue reading Gamal in DC: are think tanks complicit?

Links March 2nd to March 3rd

Links from my del.icio.us account for March 2nd through March 3rd:

Al Koni on translation

A little item at the Literary Saloon recently about Lybian author Ibrahim Al Koni caught my eye. Al Koni was talking about translation at the Dubai literature festival recently. This reminded me that his novel “Nazeef Al Hajar” (“The Bleeding of the Stone”) was one of the great discoveries and pleasures of a language-cum-literature class I took last year with Professor Hussein Hamouda, of Cairo University. A number of his other novels–mostly set among tribes in the Lybian desert–have also been translated. I can’t describe how powerful and original his work is.

For Obama, Helping Gaza Is Harder Than It Looks

For Obama, Helping Gaza Is Harder Than It Looks:

“Ignoring those contradictions might be acceptable in furtherance either of the simple moral goal of helping thousands of people in need or, more cynically, in pursuit of the public relations win that might come from being seen to do so. But much of the money pledged in Sharm el-Sheikh may never actually go to helping Palestinians in Gaza at all. At a Paris conference in late 2007, the international community started a pledge drive that eventually totaled $7.7 billion in proposed aid to the Palestinians. By September 2008, only $1.4 billion had gone through to the Palestinian Authority according to French diplomat Pierre Duquesne, thanks to the difficulty of distributing the aid and a failure of donors to actually deliver the promised money.

USAID says it committed $600 million after the Paris donor’s conference, including $300 million in budget support to the Palestinian Authority and $184.7 million in refugee assistance. Other countries, especially the Arab donors, did not follow through on their own pledges. With $6 billion in undelivered pledges, the Sharm el-Sheikh summit may simply repurpose the same money pledged a year ago in Paris. And it seems perfectly possible, barring dramatic changes in the Middle East political equation, that a year from now another summit will propose more humanitarian goals, boldly repurposing unused Paris-Sharm el Sheikh money.”

These are important points – a lot of money has already been pledged to Palestinians, but not disbursed. The conference has been held under the same basic premise – isolation of Hamas in favor of Fatah – that the whole “West Bank first” policy is based on. Yet, the Egyptian initiative and Palestinian reconciliation talks aimed at creating some kind of National Unity Government would suggest a move away from that scenario. The visits of John Kerry, Javier Solana and Tony Blair to Gaza also suggest a change of attitude towards Hamas – unless they are mere PR.

So what will it be? Full backing for Palestinian reconciliation, with the understanding that this means dealing with at least parts of a Hamas-staffed NUG? Or pretending to want Palestinian reconciliation but acting as if it has no prospects and continuing a failed policy? Does the EU, do the Arabs have to wait for Obama to make up his mind about this? They should make his job easier and change policies unilaterally, Obama is saddled with an AIPAC-controlled Congress and probably can’t change the policy even if he wanted to. But others can make it clear that they will no longer slavishly follow the American lead here – America is an obstacle, not a leader, in Israeli-Arab peace.

This does not mean engaging Hamas directly. But at the very least it means clearly, unequivocally, supporting Palestinian reconciliation as the most urgent priority in the next few months and providing some guarantees that the international community would not abandon a NUG because Ismail Haniyeh or some other Hamas leader is a member. You can figure out the money later, for now, will the Quartet continue to back isolating Hamas over Palestinian reconciliation?

Also see: March Lynch is disappointed at Hillary Clinton for behaving like West Bank First is still the plan.

Update: Lynch posts a guest comment by Tamara Wittes, saying there is a big difference about what the US can do with its funding – which ultimately is controlled by Congress – and what it can do diplomatically. I agree, and this is what is referred to above, but I don’t get a real sense of clarity from what Hillary Clinton said at Sharm al-Sheikh. Maybe if Clinton wanted to support reconciliation, she should have said so more forthrightly. Nathan Brown also chimed in on the same point.

Links for March 2nd

Links from my del.icio.us account for March 2nd:

  • Steven J. Rosen Joins MEF as Visiting Fellow – Middle East Forum – MEF gets new fellow, absolutely no mention of the fact that he is on trial for espionage on behalf of Israel.

  • All Roads Lead to Damascus – WSJ.com – Michael Oren, the famous IDF information officer, writes a bizarre article on Syria's history (worthy of extensive fact-checking, like his implication that all Syrian Baathists are Alawis or wrong assertion that Syria is "resisting inter-Arab efforts to formulate united platforms on regional issues" – why did it sign on to the Beirut initiative, then?). In his spare time Oren teaches history at Georgetown, which is rather distressing when you think of the number of Foreign Service Officers that school produces.

  • The despicable smear campaign against Charles Freeman | Stephen M. Walt – Walt points out how the usual suspects are witch-hunting against Chas Freeman.

  • Almasry Alyoum – The Press Industry Between Al-Ahram’s Prestige And Al-Masry Al-Youm’s Dream – Al-Masri al-Youm gets its own printing press, becoming the first major independent newspaper to be printed outside of the government-owned al-Ahram printer. Now we'll see about independent distribution networks…

  • The Oxonian Review » Traffic in Tel Aviv – A photo gallery on human traffic in Israel: "Neve Sha’anan neighbourhood – In recent years, thousands of foreign women have been smuggled into Israel and sold into sexual slavery. The women work shifts as long as 18 hours under conditions of virtual slavery. They are sold at auctions for $8,000 to $10,000 and say they are forced to have sex with up to 30 men per day. The women say they receive, on average, $5 for every $80 to $120 paid to pimps for their services." Many of these women are smuggled across the Egypt-Israel border.

  • Alive In Baghdad – Iraq Video – Site providing weekly video reports by Iraqi journalists. This week, an interesting interview with a publisher.

  • FT.com / Iran – US urged to take tough Iran sanctions – That the FT puts so much importance in a WINEP report but does not tell you that's it's from WINEP until paragraph eight, or indicate WINEP's well-known Israeli bias is pretty bullshit. But at least it's a reminder that the three authors of the report – Dennis Ross, Gary Samore and Robert Einhorn – all got jobs in the Obama administration either working on the Persian Gulf (Ross) or nuclear proliferation (the others).