International affairs

Editorial : Israeli political and military tests in Gaza
The blockaded Gaza Strip is being subjected to an ongoing military operation carried out by the Israeli army. This operation is claiming more lives among the population by the hour, at a time when the Israeli leaders are threatening to launch a comprehensive war against the Strip despite the clear announcement of intentions issued by the leaders of the Palestinian factions, regarding the preservation of the truce equation which existed prior to the Israeli escalation.
In the context of the military operations, the Israelis talked about a field test for the efficiency of the Iron Dome System used to deter short and middle range missiles, considering that the results are pointing to a limited efficiency despite the wide scale campaign with which the Israeli military command wanted to lift the morale of its people and affect those of its rivals in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria.
The Palestinian resistance with all its factions is facing a difficult test in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and the Palestinian territories occupied in 1948, and is now facing the challenge of proving the ability of the Palestinian people, whether inside the occupied territories or abroad, to confront the new attack. For their part, the leaders of the resistance bloc in the region, will have to draft a political response to the Israeli open depletion process which is heading toward a new extermination war in the blocked Gaza Strip, at a time when the measures of the Egyptian authorities which succeeded to Mubarak remained below the level of freeing Gaza from the restraints imposed by the American-Israeli alliance two years ago.

The tribal division and the fires of foreign interference
New facts emerged at the level of the incidents witnessed in Libya ever since the beginning of NATO’s military interference. According to these facts, the war is evolving in the context of a dangerous stalemate, whose price will be paid by Libya out of its wealth, the stability of its people and maybe even the unity of its soil.
The back and forth witnessed on the battlefield is actually pointing to the vertical divisions which became publically clear ever since the Benghazi uprising. Experts and historians believe that the tribal division historically seen in Libya — since the days of the Ottoman empire and the Italian occupation — is still a decisive factor in the Libyan domestic fabric, as the latter experts believe that what happened in Libya was an uprising staged by a social base in Kaddafi’s regime, which rebelled against him and could no longer remain under his authority. As for the military and political command in Benghazi, it attracted — through the transitory council it proclaimed following its uprising — a mixture of oppositions abroad, including the Muslim brotherhood organization in Libya and other groups that feature oppositionists who have been enjoying close ties with Western intelligence apparatuses for many years now.
The tribal balance in Libya does not give the impression that the situation will be settled in favor of any of the sides considering that even if military balance were to shift, the problem will continue to exist and raise questions regarding the real goal which the Americans are trying to achieve: do they aim at solving the problem or at exploiting it? This was the main question which emerged in Iraq and Afghanistan, although it is being responded to by the bills of the American companies and the daily lists of dead locals, and especially those said to have been killed by mistake by the American leaders and their partners in NATO, as it was recently seen near Ajdabia.

The Arab file

Syria
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad appointed Adel Safar, the minister of agriculture in the resigned government to form the new Cabinet. And in the context of the reforms which were launched by President Al-Assad the latter issued several decrees, mainly featuring the appointment of Mohammed Khalid al-Hanous as the governor of Daraa, the ousting of the governor of Homs and granting the Syrian nationality to the foreigners in Al-Hassaka, in addition to several other decrees aiming at meeting the needs of the citizens. Al-Assad had met with leaders in the areas inhabited by a Kurdish majority to listen to their demands. For their part, these Kurdish leaders welcomed the president’s decree and considered it was a “historical” one which will enhance Syrian national unity.
In the meantime, the special committees looking into the state of emergency and the investigations in the Daraa and Latakia incidents proceeded with their work.
On Friday, some Syrian cities witnessed gatherings demanding the hastening of reforms and the enhancement of the climate of freedom. However, a number of armed elements randomly opened fire on the security forces and the citizens, which resulted in the fall of a number of dead and wounded.
The Syrian Interior Ministry assured in a statement there was no room for any leniency in maintaining the security of the country and the citizens, adding: “We will not allow the intentional mixing between peaceful demonstrations, sabotage and the attempts to generate strife.”
It is worth mentioning, that the official Syrian television was able to air footage showing armed men shooting at the demonstrators in Douma, Homs and Daraa, which clearly pointed to the presence of foreign fingers attempting to tamper with Syrian security. On the other hand, total calm prevailed over the two largest cities in Syria, i.e. Aleppo and Damascus, which proved that the majority of the Syrian population was not concerned about the ongoing incidents.

Yemen
Several cities in Yemen witnessed the fall of many dead and wounded in the ranks of the demonstrators protesting against the regime. For his part, President Ali Abdullah Saleh called on the opposition to withdraw from the streets before reaching an agreement over the transition of power, while the opposition called on Saleh to step down, surrender his powers to his deputy and work on reaching an agreement with them over the transitory phase in the country.
The European Union asked Saleh to start transferring power without any delay.
In the meantime, dissident Brigadier General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar accused the Yemeni president of attempting to kill him through an ambush which resulted in a number of injuries.
It is worth mentioning, that the Gulf foreign ministers’ meeting saw the proposal of an initiative which was presented by Qatar to establish dialogue between Saleh and his opponents. However, Qatar’s assurance that this dialogue will eventually cause President Saleh to step down, raised the Yemeni president’s discontent, prompted him to reject the initiative altogether and to accuse Qatar of interfering in Yemeni internal affairs.

Libya
The battles continued between the forces of Colonel Kaddafi and the armed rebels next to the city of Ajdabia, after they were able to restore Brega where the fighting revolved around the oil wells.
On Monday, the United States pulled out it warplanes and its Tomahawk missiles from the battlefield, after NATO assumed the responsibility of the military operations in the country. From now on, the American army will only be providing fuel supply planes and undertake jamming and surveillance missions.
The White House asked Libyan leader Kaddafi to carry out actions and not to settle for words, after it received a letter from him following Washington’s pullout from the military campaign on Libya.
The military commander of the rebels, Abdul Fattah Youness, said that NATO “disappointed us because it left the people of Missratah to die and is not interfering to strike Kaddafi’s forces which have been blocked for over a month.” It is worth mentioning that during the last couple of weeks, NATO inadvertently bombed positions for the rebels and claimed the lives of dozens among them, a thing which raised the discontent of the revolutionaries especially in light of NATO’s refusal to apologize.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that Turkey was trying to draft a roadmap to put an end to the war in Libya, featuring a ceasefire and the pull out of Kaddafi’s forces from some cities. For that purpose, Turkey conducted talks with envoys representing the Libyan government and the opposition during the past week.

Egypt
In light of the protests which erupted on the Egyptian arena to demand the trying in court of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a great rift emerged between the protesters and the military council after the Egyptian troops attempted to disperse Friday’s demonstration by force, leading to the death of two protesters and the wounding of many others. Following these incidents, the youth of the revolution issued calls for the staging of new massive protests in the capital Cairo and other provinces.

Palestine
The Israeli occupation forces had escalated their attacks on the Palestinian people this week, thus arresting dozens of citizens, besieging the village of Ourta and arresting dozens of women in it. Moreover, since Thursday, the occupation forces and aircrafts have been launching an ongoing attack on the Gaza Strip. This attack has so far resulted in the martyrdom of a number of resistance fighters and the fall of many wounded in the ranks of the citizens. This happened at a time when Israeli War Minister Ehud Barak ratified the structural plans of four settlements in the West Bank.
Israel also launched an air raid on a car in Port Sudan in the eastern part of Sudan on Tuesday, thus causing the fall of two martyrs.
Head of the UN-affiliated Human Rights Committee South African Judge Richard Goldstone recanted the biggest part of the report in which he assured that the Israeli occupation forces committed war crimes during their attack on the Gaza Strip on the end of 2008. In this context, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on the United Nations to immediately annul the Goldstone report, as the South African judge assured that the claims made by Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai in regard to the Israeli attack on Gaza were false and unfounded.

The Israeli file

Judge Goldstone’s recanting of the biggest part of his report regarding the operation on the Gaza Strip constituted the main headline of the Israeli papers issued last week, as Haaretz indicated that Netanyahu assigned a team to exploit this development in favor of Israel.

At the level of Palestinian affairs, the papers talked about the possible launching of a wide scale military operation on Gaza against the backdrop of the daily launching of rockets on Israel, pointing to Netanyahu’s escalatory statements at this level. Haaretz focused on Israel’s preparations to counter the international convoy which includes twenty ships and is heading toward the Strip, as well as on the attempts of the Foreign Ministry to convince the governments of the concerned states to prevent this convoy from starting its journey at the end of May.

Moreover, the press focused on the Wikileaks documents which are exclusively being published by Haaretz, and the most prominent of which being the one in which the Mossad assured that Hezbollah was planning on launching six thousand rockets on Tel Aviv in the next war, and the dupery exerted by Israel vis-à-vis the United States in regard to the discontinuation of the constructions in the settlements.

Aircrafts arrive from the Red Sea and bomb wanted men in Africa
Yediot Aharonot quoted foreign sources as saying that an Israeli aircraft carried out the attack on a car in south Sudan – which led to the death of two people- and that the aircraft entered the Sudanese airspace at around ten. Writer Yossi Yehoshua from Yediot Aharonot, said that the Israeli aircrafts arrived from the Red Sea and returned as soon as they completed their mission.
As for Amit Cohen from Maariv, he assured that the attack on Sudan aimed at killing the man responsible for armament within the Hamas organization, i.e. Abdul Latif al-Ashkar who replaced Mahmud al-Mabhouh and is likely to have been killed in the attack.

Lebanese affairs

Editorial: Al-Hariri’s task to trigger strife
The forces of the new majority are busy arranging the files of their government and establishing the possible allocation of the portfolios and the names. They are in fact postponing the necessary debate over the policy and choices of the government in regard to several thorny issues. In the meantime, leader of the future movement Saad al-Hariri is placing obstacles before the new government through political and field harassments that will force the next cabinet -following its proclamation- and its president to deal with complications and problems affecting Lebanon’s relations with the outside world and the ways to deal with several domestic files.
Through his pressures on Mikati, Hariri wants to delay the birth of the government as long as possible, and while this effort is doomed to fail after the majority forces expressed their determination to settle this matter, what is required through the pressures is to place Mikati in a state of continuous political blackmail that would render him the defense line of Al-Hariri’s positions and policies within the state from inside the Cabinet. Al-Hariri was assigned to carry out provocations in order to induce a debate that would revive the confessional sensitivities in Lebanon and the region through three axes:
 1. Interfering in Syria and providing support to the forces of sabotage and sectarian instigation, while offering logistic facilitations allowed by geographic proximity and the Future Movement’s presence and influence in the Bekaa and the North.
 2. Leading a campaign to topple the arms in Lebanon in order to deplete the reputation and credit of the resistance, and prepare the popular climate and political reality for a state of erosion that with provide Israel with the best conditions for when it decides to launch its promised war.
 3. Provoking an attack on Iran in order to fuel sectarian mobilization and induce reactions going in that same direction.
It seems that Al-Hariri is trying to generate tensions on all levels in order to pave the way for the Israeli war in a few months, before the set date for the American troops’ pullout from Iraq in August.

The Lebanese file

The Roumieh prison witnessed protests during which the prisoners burned their blankets and detained elements from the security forces to demand the improvement of their conditions and general pardon. For their part, the families of the prisoners blocked the roads and protested in front of the prison, which led to clashes with the security forces and resulted in the fall of dead and wounded in the ranks of the prisoners. Minister of Interior Ziad Baroud assured that the chronic neglect of the prisons file rendered the latter a time bomb and placed a number of prisoners in the position of victims, regardless of their judicial files. He thus called for the hastening of the investigations, the trials, the implementation of the law regarding the reduction of the sentences and the implementation of article 108.

Hundreds among the relatives of the Lebanese living in Abidjan and the Ivory Coast protested in front of the Foreign Ministry to condemn the state’s shortcomings toward 100 thousand Lebanese citizens.

And following the opening of the Abidjan airport, the Middle East Airlines company decided to dispatch urgent flights in parallel to charter planes which will be rented to help transfer the Lebanese outside the capital or to nearby ones.

Politically, Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri said during the inauguration of the Lebanese-Saudi Economic Forum that no one was entitled to export anarchy to the Lebanese territories and the Arab countries, adding: “The biggest challenge facing the Arab world is the Iranian infiltration into the Arab fabric. The Iranian command misinterpreted the positive Arab behavior toward it, thus going to the farthest extent by infiltrating the Arab communities.”

Hezbollah responded by describing Al-Hariri’s “instigation” against Iran as being a translation of “the recent positions issued by American Secretary of War Robert Gates from Riyadh, regarding the Iranian role in the region. This is an exposed attempt to cover up the American interference in the affairs of the region, and confiscate the will of its people to achieve freedom and get rid of American hegemony. It also shifted the attention away from the enemy’s escalating practices against the Palestinian people.”

For his part, Hezbollah’s Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah defended Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri in regard to what was attributed to him in the Wikileaks documents, assuring there existed a relation of cooperation and total complementarity with him and the Amal movement. He then attacked the statements of Prime Minister of the caretaker government Saad al-Hariri against Iran, as well as the intentions of the Kingdom of Bahrain to deport some Lebanese from Manama. Nasrallah said: “When a state which stood alongside Lebanon on all levels is harmed, we cannot remain silent. And when someone says that Iran is an enemy and the reason behind the crisis in Lebanon, not Israel and America, this is a great mistake especially coming from a prime minister.”

Prime Minister Designate Najib Miktai called for calm at the level of the political rhetoric to avoid slipping toward what could increase the tensions. He also rejected “the attempt to exploit political slogans that neither serve Lebanon nor its people, regardless of the party or movement to which they belong. In addition, these slogans are harming the Lebanese because they are implicating them in disputes with friendly states that stood alongside Lebanon and helped the Lebanese during the very difficult conditions endured by their country.”

News analysis

The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria: The role and choices
The events witnessed in Syria are pointing to a very active role played by the Muslim Brotherhood group, i.e. the strongest, most organized and widest spread among the opposition groups. It seems – from the size of the calls for protest and the harsh tone of the statements issued last week – that the slogan related to the hastening of the reforms was a mere maneuver to instigate against the Syrian command. The size of the MB’s role could clearly be seen based on the poor Syrian response to the calls to stage wide demonstrations in front of the Baath party’s branches on Thursday, knowing that the partisan elements who were celebrating the founding of the Baath party on April 7 were not disturbed by any actions.
At this point, we should point to the political choice expressed by the MB organization in Syria. It participated in the alliance led by Khaddam in the context of the American-Israeli attack on the country in 2005 and practically adopted an agenda of security and political sabotage to annex Syria to American hegemony. This forces us to say that the MB never acted against the regime except during the days of the official Western attack on the country, and while this was true in 2005, it is also true today.
Through its sectarian project, the MB poses a threat on national unity in Syria and the interests of this unity in the ongoing conflict with the Israeli enemy. And since the Syrian fabric features several sects and confessions, fears always surround the inclinations of the MB which never conducted any political reviewing of its choices and connections, while it is clear that its relations with the Palestinian Hamas and the Turkish Justice and Development Party constitute a burden on both Khalid Mishaal and Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Despite the willingness of the Syrian command to engage in the dialogue called for by all the oppositionists on the basis of national principles, the facts on the field show that the Muslim Brotherhood, along with some extremists groups, the Al-Qaeda of Bandar Ben Sultan and others – is standing behind the bloody escalation in Syria and especially in the locations that witnessed the fall of many dead and wounded.

The American file

The American papers issued last week focused on the ongoing attempts to mend the American-Saudi relations, as well as on the Yemeni file and the United States’ recanting of its support to Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has been facing protests demanding his departure from power since the month of January.

The papers also took interest in the Libyan incidents, assuring that at least two among Libyan leader Muammar al-Kaddafi’s sons were proposing the transition toward a constitutional democracy, the departure of their father from power, and the handling of the transitory phase by one of them. They indicated there was no concord whatsoever between the United States’ military goals and policies in Libya.

The British file

The developments of the Libyan crisis and the tense relations between the NATO forces and the Libyan rebels were among the most prominent topics tackled by the British papers issued last week.

The papers also focused on the local, European, and international news which they perceived as being the most heated, namely the issue of the Ivory Coast which is suffering from an important international neglect and the gangs of pillaging that are roaming the streets.

The developments in Yemen came in second position in the British papers following the Libyan developments, in light of the continuation of the protests demanding the departure of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s regime. They also pointed to the Gulf interest in finding a political exit to the political crisis in Yemen.

Posted by Voltaire at http://www.voltairenet.org/article169432.html

France on Monday became the world’s first country to ban the veils anywhere in public, from outdoor marketplaces to the sidewalks and boutiques of the Champs-Elysees. (See a TIME video on a voice behind the veil: Planning to defy a French law.)

French President Nicolas Sarkozy set the wheels in motion for the ban nearly two years ago, saying the veils imprison women and contradict this secular nation’s values of dignity and equality. The ban enjoyed wide public support when it was approved by parliament last year.

Though only a very small minority of France’s at least 5 million Muslims wear the veil, many Muslims see the ban as a stigma against the country’s No. 2 religion.

About a dozen people, including three women wearing niqab veils with just a slit for the eyes, staged a protest in front of Notre Dame on Monday, saying the ban is an affront to their freedom of expression and religion.

Much larger crowds of police, journalists and tourists filled the square.

One of the veiled women was seen taken away in a police van. A police officer on the site told The Associated Press that she was detained because the protest was not authorized and the woman refused to disperse when police asked her to. The officer was not authorized to be publicly named.

The Paris police administration said another woman was also detained for taking part in the unauthorized demonstration.

It was unclear whether the women were fined for wearing a veil. The law says veiled women risk a €150 ($215) fine or special citizenship classes, though not jail.

People who force women to don a veil are subject to up to a year in prison and a euro30,000 fine ($43,000), and possibly twice that if the veiled person is a minor.

Authorities estimate at most 2,000 women in France wear the outlawed veils. France’s Muslims number at least 5 million, the largest such population in western Europe.

The ban affects women who wear the niqab, which has just a slit for the eyes, and the burqa, which has a mesh screen over the eyes.

Kenza Drider, who lives in Avignon and wears a niqab, calls the ban racist. She was planning to attend Monday’s protest.

Right before the ban came into effect, she said she would continue to go “shopping, to the post office and to city hall if necessary. I will under no circumstance stop wearing my veil.”

“If I am warned verbally and must appear before the local prosecutor…. I will appeal to the European Court of Human Rights,” she told AP Television News.

The veil, for her, “is a submission to God,” Drider said.

The ban had strong support from France’s leading parties on left and right in a country that separated church and state with a 1905 law but has struggled in recent years to integrate a growing Muslim population.

Police on Saturday arrested 61 people — including 19 women — for attempting to hold an outlawed Paris protest against France’s pending ban on face-covering Islamic veils.

Many Muslims have also felt stigmatized by a 2004 law that banned Islamic headscarves in classrooms.

Angela Charlton in Paris contributed to this report.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (photo) shut down pages on his social network that were calling for an uprising in Palestine to begin on May 15, the date marked by Palestinians as the Nakba.

As I write these final notes from the Egyptian revolution on my way back to Germany, I once again curse my amazingly bad timing regarding key events of the revolution. I arrived in Egypt on my first visit three days after the Friday of Anger, was dramatic key moment that made the old system lose its balance. I left five days before Hosni Mubarak resigned. I arrived on my second visit one day after the Essam Sharaf’s caretaker government took over. And I am leaving in the early morning hours of the constitutional referendum that will determine which way Egypt will be going in the coming months.

This decisive moment is just one of the many that Egypt has seen and will continue to see during this year. But as it is the moment when I leave Egypt, I seize it to offer some preliminary conclusions about the Egyptian revolution and the social and emotional dynamics it has released. I make no pretensions to neutrality. My account of the Egyptian revolution is an extremely partisan one, and I would consider it a failure if it weren’t so. There are times to look at things from a neutral distance, and there are times to take a stance. But while taking a stance, I have tried to be fair towards those whose views and actions I do not agree with. It has been difficult.

In November 2010 I spoke with the Egyptian journalist Abdalla Hassan who told me that there will be a revolution in Egypt soon. I replied him that there is no way there will be a revolution in Egypt, and in any case, I find a revolution a bad idea because in revolutions things get broken, people get killed, and in the end the wrong people seize the power. I was obviously wrong about the point as to whether there will be a revolution in Egypt or not. However, at the moment it looks like that all my three reasons to be opposed to a revolution are turning out to be true. And yet I continue to think that the revolution was a good thing, one of the best things that have happened to Egypt since a long time.

To start with, things don’t look too good to be honest. There is strong mobilisation for a “No” vote for the sake of a new democratic constitution to finish the job of the revolution. The activists of the “No” vote who for too long a while were focussed on demonstrations, the press and the Internet, have finally taken to debating and spreading leaflets in the streets. But they are facing a much stronger mobilisation by an unholy alliance of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Salafis, for a “Yes” vote, with tacit support of the army. A “Yes” vote will mean a consolidation of what remains of the old system, and it will mean early elections that are likely to be dominated by an alliance of the old system and Islamists. In Cairo the “Yes” and “No” campaigns appear to have approximately equal strength, but in Alexandria, where the Salafis are especially strong, they have been not only speaking out loudly for their point of view, they also quite reject the possibility of there being a different point of view. According to newspaper reports, they have been aggressively trying to prevent the “No” campaign from spreading its message in Alexandria. Despite the widely publicised measures to guarantee a transparent election, there are already reports of vote-rigging on the countryside and in Upper Egypt. The odds are at the moment that the “Yes” vote will prevail due to a mixture of trustful expectation of a quick return to normality among a very large part of Egyptians, the organising power of Islamist movements, the tacit “Yes”-campaign by the state media, and some fraud. But the outcome is not certain, and that in itself is a major progress in Egypt. (For more details on the arguments for and consequences involved in a “Yes” or “No” vote, see my previous post)

Scenarios for the future

I spent yesterday, my last day in Egypt, from the morning until the evening meeting my friends in Cairo. They represent a very particular selection of Egyptians. They are all going to vote “No”, and they all think that Egypt needs more social and gender equality, more freedom, and a civil state ruled by a democratic government, without the Muslim Brothers if possible. But their assessment of the situation is different, each coming up with a different scenario of Egypt’s future.

My friend from southern Cairo is the most pessimistic one. She sees that the Muslim Brothers and the Salafis are about to take over, be it directly or indirectly, and that there is a grave danger that the promises of democracy and freedom will be betrayed by a conservative religious turn that will put an end to the little bit of freedom there was for different ways of life in Egypt under Mubarak. In her view, the nationalists and leftist were very naive to join the Muslim Brotherhood in the temporary alliance to overthrow Mubarak because the Muslim Brothers are the ones who will profit now due to their superior organisation. She argues that since the system was so weak that it fell after less than three weeks of demonstrations, it would have been very well possible indeed to gradually reform it. A gradual reform of the old system, she argues, would have been better because it would not have given the Islamists the chance to dominate which they are offered now. Maybe, I say, but now things are as they are. So what to do now? She does not have a plan, but she points out that whatever its political consequences, the revolution has released a longing for freedom and unsettled the logic of gender relations. This shift can substantially change Egyptian society in the coming years, but it needs to get the chance to evolve.

F.E., a long-standing socialist activist, is much more optimistic. “Whatever the outcome of the referendum, we have already gained a lot.” Many socialist and communist movements that were previously working in illegality are now working publicly. Some of them are well connected with the new free trade unions in Egypt’s industrial centres. Left wing parties and organisations are mushrooming. The crucial issue, in F.E.’s view, is to create a functioning network to facilitate their work to compete with the Muslim Brotherhood and the NDP. In F.E.’s view it is in a way good that the Muslim Brotherhood decided to join the “Yes” campaign because by doing so “they have proven to everybody what we already knew: that they are a part of the system”. In F.E.’s view, there is a likelihood that the Muslim Brotherhood comes to power in alliance of parts of the old system. But it won’t be a disaster since it will only be making official what has been unofficially going on since the 1970′s. With the gradual withdrawal of the state from its role as a service provider in the course of economical liberalisation, the Islamist movements and religious actors in general were given the role of non-governmental service providers in the new neoliberal system of governance. Due to this deal, F.E. says, the Muslim Brothers have a societal advantage which the socialists and the labour movement now have to catch up with by entering the streets and the popular neighbourhoods and defeating the Islamists in their home ground. A part of the plan is to raise lawsuits against Muslim Brotherhood-dominated charities which often link their services with ideological conditions, which is against the law on charitable institutions (F.E. is lawyer by training, he knows). But the crucial point is to be there for the people, to offer services and to be socially active: “The poor people cannot afford to be ideological. If you go to them and offer them assistance, they take it. It doesn’t take much ideology to tell the difference between one loaf of bread, and two loafs.” In F.E.’s view, right now is the finest hour of the Muslim Brotherhood, but their days are counted because in the end they are a part of the corrupt old system, and will not be able to solve the problem of social inequality – the issue that took the people to the streets.

W., also a long-standing socialist and since years a cultural activist, is a little less enthusiastic about the networking capacities of the leftist movement. He, too, has been intensively involved in the revolution, and as I meet him in the evening, he is exhausted. Not only has he been participating in a number of cultural activities and a leaflet campaign on the eve of the referendum, he is also a member of the citizen’s checkpoint in the area of the cultural centre where he works. Yesterday he attended the founding meeting of yet another socialist party. He is not so worried about the splintering of leftist parties, however. What troubles him is that trade unions are at the moment so busy presenting their demands to the ministries that they have no concentration for the wider political situation. These demands, which typically involve improved pay and a change in management structures, are known in Egypt currently as “the demands of professional groups” (matalib fi’awiya), which has become something of a curse word. For activists like W, they are an ambivalent business, partly a crucial part of political action, partly detrimental to coordinating the pursuit of more general objectives.

Dr. A., a psychologist concerned with the spiritual aspect of religion as a way to help people find agency in their lives, says that he is neither a pessimist or an optimist: Pessimism and optimism, he argues, are attitudes of the time before the revolution, now is a time to work. He says that when people discuss the referendum with him, he doesn’t say what he will vote, but only encourages them to vote and take the decision in their own hands. He will vote “No”, he says, but what is more important for him is the level of political consciousness and spontaneous activity by young people who never had that experience before. “When I was at the Friday prayer today, after the prayer there were people spreading ‘Yes’ leaflets and others spreading ‘No’ leaflets, people whom I had never before seen being socially active. I went to the guy with the “No” leaflets and thanked him for just that.” We discuss what will happen to this drive of activity if the majority vote will be a “Yes”. I’m concerned that a victory of the “Yes” vote, which would be the first major setback for the revolutionaries (excepting, of course, the Muslim Brothers who go for “Yes”), will cause a major wave of frustration and make many people give up again. The question, Dr. A. replies, is about turning the spirit of revolution into experience. The revolution is an emotional state, and as such it is transient even if it leaves a strong trace on one. But it also comes with a practical experience, and that practical experience is changing a significant part of Egypt in these very days.

Revolution is a sledgehammer: Contradictory changes and social dynamics

That change will be a contradictory one. A revolution is a sledgehammer, good for breaking the walls of oppression and frustration. It is a way of changing things that causes a lot of damage, it is risky, and there is no way to tell how things will eventually turn out. One can draw so many comparisons to the Iranian revolution 0f 1979, to the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, to the revolutions of the Eastern Block in 1968 and 1989, and the youth revolution in western Europe and Northern America in 1968 – but the only thing that one learns is that revolutions are fundamentally unpredictable. Afterwards, we will be able to name the actors, the groups, the dynamics, and the decisions that determined the course of events. But beforehand, nobody knows.

What I do know is this: Egypt’s revolution of 25 January built on a number of social dynamics that were present in Egypt already years before, and which have now been partly magnified, and partly transformed.

Number one is the reintroduction of capitalism since the 1970′s after a period of Arab socialism, and the enormous social impact of neoliberal governance that gave enormous wealth to a political-economical elite, some wealth to a new middle class, and an enormous gap of promises and reality to the biggest part of the population. Egypt in the age of Mubarak was a liberal dictatorship, with vast opportunities for investment, beautiful new malls and resorts, space for different lifestyles on the condition of sufficient funds, an extremely stratified class society, and a brutal and arrogant security apparatus that treated citizens like criminals and had criminals on its paycheck. As Walter Armbrust has argued in an early and very fitting analysis, the revolution of 25 January 2011 was directed first and foremost against this conglomerate of big money, class and family privileges, and everyday oppression, and whether and to what degree this conglomerate will change in favour of ordinary Egyptians, will be the primary measure-stick on which the people who undertook the revolution will measure its success.

Number two is the wave of a very particular kind of religious conservatism that Egypt has been experiencing since thirty years. In the past decade this religious conservatism took a markedly unpolitical, primarily socially engaged shape, but it now turns out that this was very much due to the constraints of the Mubarak system that worked systematically to depoliticise social movements. Now religious conservatism has become an openly political (and so have left wing cultural projects, by the way) again, thus also creating new kinds of divisions. Some of my colleagues have argued that the revolutionary protest has offered a new language of dissent, a new logic to think about the relationship of state, society, religion, and the individual which is “asecular” in the words of Hussein Agrama, because it stands outside the contrast of the secular and the religious. This could indeed be the impression if one focusses on the utopian moment of revolutionary protest. But that the utopian moment of a revolutionary protest and now we are in entering the period of transition. The shared spirit of protest has become impossible to hold once the common goal was reached, although it is likely to have some positive effects on Egypt’s politics in the next years. The political developments of the transitional period are providing for a spectacular comeback of that contrast in new forms, most disturbingly in the shape of the Salafis with their rejection of the very idea of democracy as un-Islamic, but also in a less destructive way in the way leftist and nationalist political actors are now rearranging their ranks to face the alliance of the old system and the Muslim brotherhood. Turning Agrama’s analysis around, the re-politicisation of religious conservatism is providing not so much specific norms – after all, Egypt is for the biggest part a conservative and religious society anyway – than specific questions that it obliges Egyptians to ask and answer (I am thinking for example, about the discussion about the Islamic state between R. and Y. in my note from 15 March).

But more important than who will run the country in the next four or eight years is the peculiar nature of this religious conservatism as an integral part of the neoliberal system of governance as F.E the socialist pointed out. The power of Islamist ideals of politics and society over Egypt is interlinked with the experience of an increasingly amoral society moving away from a conservative communal experience towards a competitive, fragmented social experience where morals are learned from the book. The power of the Islamist promise of good life rises and falls with the neoliberal capitalist utopia/dystopia. While I am not much of a socialist myself, I therefore think that socialists and the labour movement may have more to say in future than may seem right now.

Number three is the strained relationship of ordinary people with the state, which for a long time has been marked by seeking the patronage of the state/business authorities, and cursing the humiliation which one experienced while doing so. Burning the police stations on 28 January was a radical, impulsive reaction against this experience, and it has released highly contradictory dynamics. Until today, there is very little police on the streets of Egypt’s cities, although technically the police should have been able to return weeks ago. Partly it has made things better, as people have to suffer a lot less insults and derision than they used to. Partly it has made things more colourful, with street vendors who used to play cat and mouse with the police now working freely in Cairo’s shopping streets. But for a big part, it is a serious problem in face of the increase in crime – and in fear of crime – that followed the revolution, further aggravated by the large number of police firearms that got into private hands on 28 January. The fear of crime and violence is the strongest argument in the hands of those who want things to get back to as they were. Those who want to push for the sake of continuing revolution tend to place the blame on the police itself, seeing in the delayed return of the police to the street a continued campaign of intimidation. But I think that more is at stake. A main reason appears to be that the police officers are very hesitant to take their new role as servants of the people. There is very strong resistance against criminal investigations against police officers. In the beginning of this week, police forces in Alexandria marched out of the courts they were supposed to protect in protest against court cases against three police officers accused of killing protesters. This spirit was most arrogantly marked by the video circulating on the Internet in early March, showing a police chief telling the policemen that “we are the masters of the country.” The burning of the police stations has been a traumatic event for the police force, and an ambiguous one for the citizens who note the new politeness of the few police officers in the streets with great satisfaction, but also suffer from the new insecurity of violent crime. The relation of the citizens and the police will remain an open question for a while, and while there seems to be no return to times past, it is unclear whether a new sound base for policing will be found. The relationship will remain strained. And the weapons that moved to private hands will stay that way, and violent crime is likely to become a more permanent menace in Egyptians’ daily life.

Number four is the crisis of patriarchal authority so dramatically marked in the Oedipal father murder which the revolutionaries committed on Mubarak, the clientelistic father-godfather of the nation. I wrote more about this point back in February, at the moment I want to point out that this was a move by no means a shared undertaking by all Egyptians. A lot of people did not believe that Mubarak would go until the last minute, and did not dare or care to go out to the streets. These people, too, are now claiming the revolution as theirs, but for them it has a different emotional significance. And those who did believe that Mubarak would go and who put their faith into a revolution without visible leaders, had quite different ideas of what would replace the figure of the respected and feared collective father. Things are in the movement, and some are searching for new reliable sources of authority while others are claiming the freedom to speak out what is in one’s heart and yet others are experimenting with non-hierarchical organisation and pluralistic debate. This shift in authority and in the entitlement to a voice will be the biggest and bitterest struggle that Egypt will face in the next decades.

Revolution and emotions

This is why I think the Egyptian revolution is a good thing although things have been broken, people have been killed, and the wrong people are likely to get into power. Egypt of the past decade was marked by an enormous contrast of great promises and high expectations on the one hand, and a sense of humiliation, depression and frustration. The 25 January revolution opened up a different way to feel about the world, and things got into movement. Some things will get back to the way they were, some will get better, a lot of things will get worse. But they are not just happening to people. One can do something about one’s share in the world. So many people in Egypt felt that nothing can be done, and many of them now feel that something can be done after all. They will do that something now, for better or worse.

Revolution is indeed an emotional state, and it is an intense, nervous and stressful one. One cannot go on that way for very long. The turn from the state of revolution to a state of transition is also a time of exhaustion and bad nerves. R., an artist, is sick with a “post-revolutionary flue” as she calls it. Like many others whom I have met, she is emotionally exhausted, and says that the past month and a half has been the most stressful time in her life. Although I myself have spent only three weeks in Egypt since the revolution began, my nerves are wrecked, too. I have started smoking again, and I sleep very badly. And yet unlike many others, I haven’t been through any really bad experiences. But there is a constant anxiety, and it is of the same kind of the anxiety of M. who found it quite wearing to find this country one’s own. Like so many Egyptians who share this feeling, I am anxious because I care. Having lived so long in a country that seemed so stalled, so doomed to face just more and more of the same, it is not a bad thing to be anxious in this way.

Greetings from Egypt in transition!

Samuli Schielke is a research fellow at Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin. His research focusses on everyday religiosity and morality, aspiration and frustration in contemporary Egypt. In 2006 he defended his PhD Snacks and Saints: Mawlid Festivals and the Politics of Festivity, Piety and Modernity in Contemporary Egypt at the University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences. During his stay in Cairo at the time of the protests at Tahrir Square he maintained a diary. The text here is part of that diary which you can read in full at his blog. He also wrote “Now, it’s gonna be a long one” – Some first conclusion on the Egyptian Revolution

Taken from Martijn de Koning site (C L O S E R) at http://religionresearch.org/martijn/2011/03/19/egypt-after-the-revolution/ and can be accessed through the author’s blog at http://samuliegypt.blogspot.com/

By Abigail Hauslohner

To listen to Kamal Habib extol the democratic ideal is to slip into a parallel universe where down is up and black is white. This is, after all, the co-founder of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, who was jailed for years — some of them alongside his classmate from university Ayman al-Zawahiri, now al-Qaeda’s No. 2 — for allegedly helping organize the assassination of President Anwar Sadat. His democratic credentials are, at best, slim. And yet here’s Habib, on the fourth floor of Cairo’s Journalists’ Union, along with a few dozen men sporting long beards and Islamic garb, to discuss plans for a political party. “Most of these men are jihadists who were detained and tortured,” he says. Habib himself was released 20 years ago, and he has renounced the armed struggle. Now they all want to get into politics.

Habib, 53, and his followers are Salafists, adherents of a particularly fundamentalist strain of Islam, and until recently they regarded democracy as un-Islamic. That changed, he says, when the Tahrir Square demonstrations brought down President Hosni Mubarak: “What we’d been trying to achieve for 40 years by force, the people managed to do in 18 days without the use of force.” (See pictures of the drama on Tahrir Square.)

It’s tempting to view Habib’s embrace of peaceful, participatory politics as a triumph of democracy. On balance, it’s a good thing that he’s part of the process rather than outside it. For a relative newbie in politics, he’s already quite good in the art of the sound bite, and he has a catchy label for himself: “a modernist Salafist.”

But the values he preaches sound anything but modern. He envisions an Egyptian society governed by a strict Islamic code, in which women stay at home, only a Muslim can be President and punishments are meted out in accordance with Islamic law. The gathering at the Journalists’ Union is “sort of a relaunch or revival of the Islamic Jihad movement,” Habib says. “From a closed ideological movement to a political force.” (See pictures of Mubarak: The Man Who Stayed Too Long.)

That kind of language sends shivers down the spine of many a Tahrir Square revolutionary. Egyptians know too well the brute intolerance preached in Salafist schools across the Islamic world. There have already been reports of Salafist-inspired violence since Mubarak’s exit: women have been harassed in the street; shrines deemed heretical have been burned; extremists in rural central Egypt severed the ear of a Christian teacher they accused of renting an apartment to prostitutes. The Salafists, says Hisham Kassem, a prominent opposition newspaper publisher in the Mubarak era, “are being obnoxious in every way.”

Better get used to it. In the political carnival that is post-Mubarak Egypt, the Salafists are just one of several groups with questionable backgrounds and murky ambitions that aspire to shape Egypt’s future. Their chances of making that happen are not great: with general elections expected in September, to be followed by a presidential contest in November, most of these parties simply don’t have enough time to create a grass-roots organization and win the seats necessary to change anything. But extremist groups have already demonstrated that joining the political process doesn’t mean they will curb their violent and disruptive behavior; how they will respond to failure at the ballot box is anybody’s guess. (See TIME’s graphic of Rage Across the Region.)

Other, more formidable groups are maneuvering ahead of the elections. The Islamists who make up the Muslim Brotherhood, moderate in comparison with the Salafists, are already in full campaign mode and are widely expected to be the largest group in parliament. Many believe that Egypt’s military, running the country until the election, will not cede all its power and privileges afterward.

And all this in a society with little exposure to multiparty democracy and much given to rumors and conspiracy theories. That means the high hopes raised by Mubarak’s ouster are accompanied by high anxiety: the gnawing feeling that something — or someone — will take back all the freedoms won in Tahrir Square. “We want to feel that we’re going into democracy,” says Shadi al-Ghazali Harb, a member of a youth coalition formed since the revolution. “And until now, we don’t have this feeling.”

The Brotherhood Wins One
Nothing worries Egyptian liberals — the young Facebook revolutionaries as well as some of the older, secular figures — like the Muslim Brotherhood. The Islamists, repressed for decades under the Mubarak regime, trod cautiously at the start of the protests in late January, joining only when the dictator began to wobble. Since his fall, however, the Brotherhood has put its disciplined political organization into high gear. It is holding large meetings and conferences out in the open for the first time and will soon move its Cairo headquarters to a more spacious venue. Mohamed Morsy, a Brotherhood spokesman, says the Islamists are energized and optimistic. “It’s a new era, a new climate. It’s freedom,” he says. “We are taking a deep breath … getting more oxygen.” (See TIME’s exclusive photos of the uprising in Cairo.)

Unable to muster comparable organizing skills, many liberals have taken to complaining that the Islamists are hijacking their revolution. Al-Ghazali Harb subscribes to a widely believed conspiracy theory that the Brotherhood is in cahoots with the military administration and that “in the end, this will probably result in a parliament with a majority of Islamists.”

The first political test of wits between the Brotherhood and the liberals was over a March 19 referendum in which a military-appointed constitutional committee asked Egyptians to vote yes or no on a collection of 10 amendments, including presidential term limits, rules making it harder for future leaders to declare a state of emergency and fewer barriers for independents to run for office. Many parties believed a yes vote would allow general elections to be held soon, whereas a no vote would send the constitutional committee back to the drawing board and postpone the elections. The Brotherhood, confident that it could quickly mount an election campaign, backed a yes vote; a number of liberal parties, needing more time to get their operations going, backed the no vote. (Watch Egyptians celebrating Mubarak’s ouster.)

The Brotherhood, just as many had feared, played the religion card: a yes vote, it told supporters, would be a yes for Islam. The referendum passed in a landslide, with a record turnout of 41% of eligible voters.

The liberals’ cause was not helped by their lack of unity before the referendum. Some of the young leaders of the Tahrir Square demonstrations would have preferred the military administration to introduce comprehensive, rather than piecemeal, constitutional reform. They’d also have preferred the military to focus on purging regime loyalists from administrative positions and bringing many of them — possibly Mubarak himself — to a speedy trial. Others, like publisher Kassem, felt that delaying the election would carry the attendant risk of a temporary military leadership’s growing more entrenched.

This interview is a follow-up to the article “ Afghanistan: Opium, the CIA and the Karzai Administration“, by Peter Dale Scott, Voltaire Network, 13 December 2010.

Kangen 2011

Ya..apalah arti layang-layang tanpa angin. Dia hanya akan teronggoh di tanah, gudang atau dapur kita. Layang-layang tempatnya di udara, karena itu namanya diambil dari kata ‘melayang.’ ya benar..namanya layang-layang, ya harus terbang. kalo ngga, silahkan cari nama sendiri, ciptakan kata dan buatlah bahasa!

Di sela-sela menulis ‘fiqh al-aqaliyyat’ di PSI!