The Arab spring is at a crossroads; if Assad falls and the country avoids civil war, the revolution may move eastwards

Editorial
guardian.co.uk
23 December 2011

It is an unseasonably gloomy thought, but nevertheless a true one: all the aspirations, the sacrifice and the triumphs of a momentous year of revolution and upheaval in the Arab world hinge ultimately on events taking place in Syria. The Arab spring is at a crossroads. If Bashar al-Assad’s blood-stained regime falls, and the country stays in one piece and avoids a sectarian civil war, there is nothing to stop the revolution moving onwards and eastwards. The next stop could well be Iran, but none of the monarchies of the Gulf states are secure either. But if Syria disintegrates, it would quickly become a regional battlefield, fed by the rival interests of its neighbours – not unlike Iraq was in 2006 or Lebanon was during its civil war. And then the Arab spring would well and truly have come to a halt.

On Friday a blood-strewn week reached its apogee with a twin bombing of security and intelligence buildings in Damascus, killing at least 40 and wounding 100. The regime pointed the finger at al-Qaida and the state news agency quoted analysts who included US, Israel and Europe in the list of the bomber’s puppet-masters.

The Free Syria Army denied involvement and voiced scepticism. Read the rest of this entry »

BBC
25 May 2011

Clashes between the Hashid tribe and government forces have continued since Monday

Street battles between Yemeni security forces and the country’s most powerful tribal federation are continuing for a third day in the capital, Sanaa.

At least 44 people have died in the clashes, which began after forces loyal to President Ali Abdullah Saleh moved against a tribal leader’s compound.

The tribal leader, Sheikh Sadeq al-Ahmar, has joined an uprising against President Saleh’s rule.

On Sunday, the president refused to sign a deal to stand down. Read the rest of this entry »

By Heba Saleh in Cairo
Financial Times
May 24 2011

Egypt’s state prosecutor has charged Hosni Mubarak, the former president, and his two sons, Alaa and Gamal, over the killing demonstrators during the protests that toppled him and abuse of authority for personal gain.

The decision, which should lead to a criminal court trial, confounds predictions by some analysts and diplomats that the ruling supreme military council would try to shield the ousted president from public humiliation.

Assuming the trial goes ahead, Mr Mubarak will be the first Arab leader to have been deposed by his people in a popular uprising and held to account for abuse during his rule. Read the rest of this entry »

Reuters
By Yara Bayoumy
BOQAYA, Lebanon | Sat May 21, 2011

(Reuters) – Syrians who fled for their lives from a security crackdown in the border town of Tel Kelakh say violence has hardened attitudes toward President Bashar al-Assad and unrest will not end until he steps down.

Assad had lost credibility and it was too late to implement reforms since security forces laid siege to the town, raiding homes and arresting and killing dozens, they said.

“The first words my year-old son will learn to say are: ‘We don’t want Bashar’,” said Ahmed, who fled from Tel Kelakh, where security forces, the army and irregular Assad loyalists known as shabbiha had cracked down on earlier this week.

“Are these his reforms? To oppress people? Until when will we be downtrodden?” he said. Like other refugees interviewed by Reuters in the Lebanese border village of Boqaya, he asked that his surname not be used to protect his family still in Syria. Read the rest of this entry »

Joseph Massad 18 May 2011
AlJazeera

The US, with its allies, has already begun plans to subvert the Arab Spring to save its own regional hegemony.

A specter is haunting the Arab world – the specter of democratic revolution. All the powers of the old Arab world have entered into a holy alliance with each other and the United States to exorcise this specter: king and sultan, emir and president, neoliberals and zionists.

While Marx and Engels used similar words in 1848 in reference to European regimes and the impending communist revolutions that were defeated in the Europe of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there is much hope in the Arab world that these words would apply more successfully to the ongoing democratic Arab uprisings. Read the rest of this entry »

Bloomberg
By Mohammed Hatem
May 15, 2011

May 15 (Bloomberg) — Yemen’s Joint Meetings Party, a coalition of six opposition groups, says a plan to end the country’s political crisis is dead following a visit by the chief envoy of Arab Gulf states seeking to broker a deal.

While the coalition is willing to meet Abdel Latif al- Zayyani, the secretary-general of the Gulf Cooperation Council, again to explore new options, the current proposal was considered “dead,” Mohammed Qahtan, spokesman for the opposition, said in a telephone interview today.

Thousands of protesters returned to the streets in Sana’a, the capital, today calling for an end to the 32-year rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Several people marched through the streets carrying a makeshift coffin with the words “GCC Initiative” written on the side.

Protests have persisted since the government and the Joint Meetings Parties failed to sign a GCC-brokered plan last month. Under the terms of the plan, Saleh would have ceded power within a month of signing the deal and would be granted immunity from prosecution. Al-Zayyani visited Sana’a yesterday to revive the group’s stalled peace initiative, the official Saba news service said. Read the rest of this entry »

Jack Shenker in Cairo
guardian.co.uk
13 May 2011

Largest rally in recent weeks comes on day ousted president’s wife detained on suspicion of illegally acquiring wealth

Tens of thousands of Egyptians returned to Tahrir Square in Cairo on Friday in a show of national unity against sectarian tension, and to demonstrate their solidarity with the Palestinian people.

The largest rally to be held in the Egyptian capital in recent weeks took place as Suzanne Mubarak, wife of ousted president Hosni Mubarak, was detained by investigators for 15 days on suspicion of illegally acquiring wealth.

Cheers erupted in the square as news broke of Mrs Mubarak’s incarceration. The 70-year-old former first lady now joins her husband, two sons and more than 20 other ministers and business figures from the Mubarak regime on the list of those being investigated for crimes against the state.

Last week former interior minister Habib Al-Adly was sentenced to 12 years in prison for financial fraud. He also stands accused of having ordered the killing of peaceful protesters, a charge that can carry the death penalty.

In a sign of how vibrant and fragmented Egypt’s political landscape has become since the toppling of Mubarak in February, protesters came together on Friday to support a multitude of causes from local anti-corruption campaigns to unity with Arab uprisings elsewhere in the region.

Following a week of sectarian violence in Cairo in which at least 15 people were killed in clashes at a church in the poor neighbourhood of Imbaba, many demonstrators held aloft placards depicting the Christian cross and Muslim crescent, and chanted: “We are all Egyptians.” Read the rest of this entry »

Al Jazeera
14 May 2011

More than 8,000 people attend funeral of protester who was killed by security forces in restive city of Homs.

More than 8,000 people are attending the funeral in Homs of one of three protesters killed by Syrian security forces in the restive city, an eyewitness told Al Jazeera.

Mourners for Fouad al-Rajoub, who was killed on Friday, gathered near Bab al-Dreib and began making their way through the city chanting for an end to the siege on Homs, Baniyas and Deraa, the major flashpoints in the uprising.

The eyewitness said that due to the size of the procession the military had removed and relocated some of the checkpoints it had established throughout the city since mass anti-regime protests erupted there last month.

“Everything is peaceful now but we will be passing government buildings and I fear the snipers will open fire on us,” he said. Read the rest of this entry »

BY MADAWI AL-RASHEED | FEBRUARY 28, 2011
Foreign Policy.com

In the age of Arab revolutions, will Saudis dare to honor Facebook calls for anti-government demonstrations on March 11? Will they protest at one of Jeddah’s main roundabouts? Or will they start in Qatif, the eastern region where a substantial Shiite majority has had more experience in real protest? Will Riyadh remain cocooned in its cloak of pomp and power, hidden from public gaze in its mighty sand castles?

Saudi Arabia is ripe for change. Despite its image as a fabulously wealthy realm with a quiescent, apolitical population, it has similar economic, demographic, social, and political conditions as those prevailing in its neighboring Arab countries. There is no reason to believe Saudis are immune to the protest fever sweeping the region.

Saudi Arabia is indeed wealthy, but most of its young population cannot find jobs in either the public or private sector. The expansion of its $430 billion economy has benefited a substantial section of the entrepreneurial elite — particularly those well connected with the ruling family — but has failed to produce jobs for thousands of college graduates every year. This same elite has resisted employing expensive Saudis and contributed to the rise in local unemployment by hiring foreign labor. Rising oil prices since 2003 and the expansion of state investment in education, infrastructure, and welfare, meanwhile, have produced an explosive economy of desires. Read the rest of this entry »

The revolutions sweeping the Arab world indicate a tectonic shift in the global balance of people power

by Mark LeVine
Aljazeera
26 Feb 2011

For decades, even centuries, the peoples of the Arab world have been told by Europeans and, later, Americans that their societies were stagnant and backward. According to Lord Cromer, author of the 1908 pseudo-history Modern Egypt, their progress was “arrested” by the very fact of their being Muslim, by virtue of which their minds were as “strange” to that of a modern Western man “as would be the mind of an inhabitant of Saturn”.

The only hope of reshaping their minds towards a more earthly disposition was to accept Western tutelage, supervision, and even rule “until such time as they [we]re able to stand alone,” in the words of the League of Nations’ Mandate. Whether it was Napoleon claiming fraternité with Egyptians in fin-de-18e-siècle Cairo or George W. Bush claiming similar amity with Iraqis two centuries later, the message, and the means of delivering it, have been consistent.

Ever since Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, the great Egyptian chronicler of the French invasion of Egypt, brilliantly dissected Napoleon’s epistle to Egyptians, the peoples of the Middle East have seen through the Western protestations of benevolence and altruism to the naked self-interest that has always laid at the heart of great power politics. But the hypocrisy behind Western policies never stopped millions of people across the region from admiring and fighting for the ideals of freedom, progress and democracy they promised.

Even with the rise of a swaggeringly belligerent American foreign policy after September 11 on the one hand, and of China as a viable economic alternative to US global dominance on the other, the US’ melting pot democracy and seemingly endless potential for renewal and growth offered a model for the future. Read the rest of this entry »

By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 27, 2011

UNITED NATIONS – The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Saturday night to impose military and financial sanctions against Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi and his inner circle and to refer his regime’s crackdown on protesters to a war crimes tribunal for an investigation of possible crimes against humanity.

The move came as President Obama for the first time called on Gaddafi to step down, deepening the Libyan leader’s international isolation as he struggles to contain a revolt that threatens his 41-year rule. It also marked the first U.S. vote in support of a Security Council referral to the International Criminal Court, which the United States has not joined.

Speaking by phone with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Obama said that “when a leader’s only means of staying in power is to use mass violence against his own people, he has lost the legitimacy to rule and needs to do what is right for his country by leaving now,” according to a White House account of the conversation. The statement brings U.S. policy in line with the position that European leaders adopted several days ago.

Obama had taken a more cautious approach, in part because he feared that hundreds of Americans in Tripoli could be in danger if he called for regime change. Those diplomats and other citizens have now been evacuated.

In a statement Saturday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the U.S. would work with others to provide humanitarian assistance to Libyans in need. “We will continue to look at the full range of options to hold the Libyan government accountable and support the Libyan people,” she said. “Moammar Gaddafi has lost the confidence of his people and he should go without further bloodshed and violence.” Read the rest of this entry »

After alienating powerful tribes, Qaddafi’s regime seems to be falling, but it is unclear who could fill vacuum.

George Joffe
24 Feb 2011
Aljazeera

Many believed that Colonel Qaddafi’s regime in Libya would withstand the gale of change sweeping the Arab world because of its reputation for brutality which had fragmented the six million-strong population over the past forty-two years.

Its likely disappearance now, after a few days of protest by unarmed demonstrators is all-the-more surprising because it has systematically destroyed even the slightest pretence of dissidence and has atomised Libyan society to ensure that no organisation – formal or spontaneous – could ever consolidate sufficiently to oppose it.

Political Islam, whether radical or moderate, has been the principle victim, especially after an Islamist rebellion in Cyrenaica, the country’s eastern region, in the latter 1990s. Other political currents have been exiled since 1973, when “direct popular democracy” was declared and the jamahiriyah, the “state of the masses”, came into existence.

Even the Libyan army was treated with suspicion, with its officer corps controlled and monitored for potential disloyalty. No wonder that major units now seems to have broken away from the regime and made the liberation of Eastern Libya possible. Read the rest of this entry »

Gaddafi reaps what he has sown during his four-decade rule: terror, nepotism, tribal politics and abuse of power.

by Larbi Sadiki: 21 Feb 2011
Al Jazeera

Libya cannot escape the infection of democratic revolutionary wind blowing through the Middle East and North Africa. If longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi falls, it will be a sweet victory for the heirs of Omar al-Mokhtar, the legendary anti-fascist and anti-colonial hero. But a lot of blood will spill before the Libyan colonel abandons ship.

After Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Tunisia’s Ben Ali, Gaddafi is the worst of the Arabs’ surviving illegitimate rulers. He is now reaping what he has sown: terror, nepotism, tribal politics, and abuse of power.

In Gaddafi’s Libya, the so-called People’s Congress, universities and other regime-affiliated organisations have had to toe the official line: worship of the “brother leader”, read his Green Book, and the brand of Pan-Africanism that no Libyan except Gaddafi and his henchmen believed in.

While visiting the country with a group of students from Exeter University, the hollow slogans of Gaddafi’s “Great Revolution” covered all public space. “Partners not salaried” one says. Another declares “People’s rule” (sultat al-sha’ab). Nothing could be further from the truth.

Gaddafi has ruled the country with the delusion of grandeur of a man who rose to power in a 1969 coup with fairly acceptable political ideals that got corrupted and abandoned. Gaddafi’s much vaunted socialism turned into distribution in favour of the Colonel’s clansmen. Read the rest of this entry »