Month: November 2005

Bush “magic” evaporating

At the end of the day, nearly all politics in Washington comes down to budgets. And this year, Bush is running into unexpectedly big trouble on the one he’s proposing.
I’m on the road a bit these days. Yesterday I drove from Charlottesville to Washington DC, where I had a delightful dinner and sleepover with some old friends… A fast and furious dinner discussion there– mainly global affairs, but with a little Washington politics thrown in. Today I’m in Philadelphia, where I’m attending a two-day workshop at a Quaker study center.
When I drive long distances is the main time I get to listen to a lot of radio. Here in the US all radio is broadcast locally, but many stations air content provided by either National Public Radio or the BBC (through PRI). Okay, not “many” as a proportion of the whole, since the airwaves are generally dominated by either evangelical-Christian stations or bland music stations controlled by the rightwing company “Clear Channel Communications”. But “many” as in, if you’re driving anywhere near a large city, you can usually find an NPR-based station somewhere down near the bottom end of the FM dial.
Yesterday afternoon I was listening to Congressman John Murtha (Dem., Pennsylvania) who waxed eloquent and angry about the plight of the US military as a result of the Bushies’ decision to invade Iraq.

    The war in Iraq is not going as advertised. It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion….Our military is suffering. The future of our country is at risk. We cannot continue on the present course. It is evident that continued military action in Iraq is not in the best interest of the United States of America, the Iraqi people or the Persian Gulf Region

Murtha– who had supported the original war-permitting resolution in october 2002– called for a rapid pullout of US troops. In addition, as a decorated ex-serviceman, he forcefully defended himself against the accusations from Cheney etc that now was “not the time” to criticize administration policy, and that criticism would be harmful to the US troops currently deployed in Iraq. He was particularly scathing about Cheney– who, as he reminded us, had enjoyed no fewer than five deferments of his draft obligation in the Vietnam era, and managed thereby completely to evade military service, at a time that Murtha was in combat in Vietnam.
Murtha and other Democrats are now unabashedly starting to come out and use some version of the “we were actively misled– by you guys” argument that I’ve been suggesting for a while now would be the best way to counter arguments from the Bushies that, okay, all those Dems who’re now against the war, well, most of ’em voted FOR it back in 2002.
Excellent!
(This is, of course, exactly why the whole current series of investigations into how exactly the intel/information about WMD was manipulated by the administration in the run-up to the war has such great current political significance. It is NOT merely a matter for the historical record.)
Anyway, back to the evaporation of Bush’s mojo…. No, I don’t think this process has gone anywhere near far enough yet. Obviously, it has a long, long way further to go before, for example, we can see such concrete advances as a withdrawal of all US troops of Iraq…. a re-structuring of US relations with the UN… the constructive re-ordering of US relations with the whole of the rest of the world… solid commitments to restoring a social safety net at home… etc., etc.
But still, it is definitely starting.
That NYT article I linked to at the top had this lead:

    President Bush suffered a series of setbacks and rebukes on Capitol Hill on Thursday and early today as the Republican leadership was unable to push through some of his most cherished policy goals for his second term.
    As the House and Senate struggled with spending and tax measures, two of Mr. Bush’s main objectives – oil-drilling in Alaska’s National Wildlife Refuge and an extension of the deep cuts to taxes on capital gains and dividends – were shelved by opposition from Democrats and some moderate Republicans.
    The defeats for the White House on the oil-drilling and tax-cut proposals came as Senate Democrats threatened to mount a filibuster against extension of the USA Patriot Act, which was enacted just after the Sept. 11 attacks and is a centerpiece of Mr. Bush’s antiterrorism policies. Democrats have been joined by several Republicans, some of them conservative, in contending that some parts of the act intrude too much on personal privacy in the name of national security.

Well, the erosion of Bushite power is way, way too late. But thank God it has started to happen.
As a footnote… When listening to both him and Cheney talking on the radio yesterday, they both sounded defensive– and very peevish. What a pair of babies.

SCIRI Central Cttee man talks with Muslim Brothers

This, from Gilbert Achcar:
AN EXCHANGE BETWEEN SUNNI MUSLIMS AND A SCIRI LEADER
On the occasion of the Iraqi conference to be held in Cairo under the auspices of the League of Arab states, IslamOnline—a website related to the pan-Islamic (Sunni) Muslim Brotherhood—invited Dr. Ali al-Adad, a prominent member of the Central Council of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), to a live exchange with its readers in one of the online discussions that the website organizes regularly on very diverse issues. The exchange took place on November 17, and is posted in Arabic on IslamOnline.net.
It is an interesting document since it is rare to find the record of such a frank and direct exchange. It gives a view (rare in the Western media) of the discourse addressed by the SCIRI, the most prominent Iraqi Shiite organization closely linked to Iran, to Muslim audiences, including its own Iraqi constituency. It is, of course, quite different from the discourse held by those SCIRI members who are appointed to the task of dealing with the US, like Iraqi Vice-President Adel Abdul-Mahdi who visited Washington recently.
I have excerpted and translated what follows.
Gilbert Achcar
….
Q: It is said that the [Cairo] conference is backed by the US in order to control the situation in Iraq and overcome the valiant Iraqi resistance in the name of opposing terrorism. How do you assess this view? Is the national entente [between Iraqis] going to allow the resistance to act against the occupiers only, or will it contribute to make the situation in Iraq comfortable for the Americans and exclude the prospect of a timetable for the withdrawal [of occupation troops]?
A: It is true that the Americans need the Arab governments to take a positive stand toward the situation in Iraq, but the Iraqis and the Iraqi government and patriotic Iraqi forces need to be integrated in the Arab League and in the Arab nation and Arab people so that they join the Iraqi people and support it in building Iraqi unity.
There is no disagreement on the stance toward American soldiers. All Iraqi forces, Shiite, Sunni and Kurds, want a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops. There is no disagreement on this issue, but there are major reservations on the military operations of the so-called armed resistance since they are not only targeting the Americans, but have undertaken operations of mass murder and ugly crimes against women and children under criminal sectarian slogans, while declaring the overwhelming majority of the Iraqi people to be miscreants [takfeer].
This is why we cannot accept this insane criminal resistance to participate in the talks. We want these criminal forces to be definitively isolated by the unity of Arabs, Shiites and Sunnis, and Kurds, and all other minorities, in building a democratic Iraq that refuses sectarianism and rejects the attribution of posts on a sectarian basis instead of attributing them on a positive basis of competence for the building of a unified Iraq for all.
…
Q: Mr. Ali al-Adad, do you have a timetable for the withdrawal of occupation forces from Iraq? What is your position on the Iraqi resistance? Do you put it in the category of terrorism?
A: The political forces that will participate in the forthcoming [December 15 parliamentary] election, and in particular the [United Iraqi] Alliance’s slate that includes 17 movements and parties, the majority of whom are Shiites, agreed that the first demand on their political program is getting foreign troops out of Iraq, by setting a timetable for the evacuation of these troops. The second demand on their political program is the rapid and strong building of interior security forces so that they assume the defense of the country and take hold of all the territory including the borders, so that there remains no justification for the presence of foreign troops.
[The reply to the second part of the above question reiterates what was said already.]
…
Q: As-Salam aleikum, the head of the previous regime was a “Sunni,” and the Sunnis, and I am one of them, used to like the Shiites, and I have never felt that there was a discrimination against them or acceptance of an injustice that hurts them whether from the head of the regime or from his ministers.
Today the head of the ruling regime is very much Shiite, a Jaafari [the last name of the Iraqi Prime Minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, is also the name of the majority doctrine of Shiism]. Now that a little part has been uncovered of the hidden savage repressive practices denounced for long by the Sunni representatives and freely practiced by the Ministry of Interior, which is headed by a member of your [Supreme] Council, and by the apparatuses of the [SCIRI’s] Badr militia against the Sunnis:
1-Do you believe that an entente is possible without a clear position and sanction on this?
2-Will the actions undertaken by the resistance against the apparatuses and members of the Ministry [of Interior] continue to be characterized as terrorist—as all Iraqi Shiites like to call them today, and they even call the resistance against the occupation terrorism—especially that the little uncovered of what is hidden has been uncovered by your American ally itself? Please reply without beating around the bush.

Continue reading “SCIRI Central Cttee man talks with Muslim Brothers”

Salam/Pax on the torture houses, contd.

Some more sordid details from Salam/Pax about the Baghdad charnel/torture houses.
Including stuff about chain saws, razors, etc. Also this:

    It is said that the investigations will reveal that there are about 10 or 12 such centres in and around Baghdad. One of them in al-Ameryiah district was being used as a sort of a site for graves for those who die in detention.

His conclusion– an astute reference to Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses— is particularly worth reading.

New book on start of Rwanda genocide

Hirondelle is a very sober, Swiss-funded news service that does a lot of coverage of justice affairs in Rwanda. So I sat up sharply when I read this piece on one of their recent newsfeeds. It is a short review of a book newly published in France by Lieutenant Abdul Ruzibiza, who states that as a member of a trusted commando group under the control of the country’s present president, Paul Kagame, he was a member of the unit that shot down the plane of former president Juvenal Habyarimana in April 1994.
That attack– which killed both Habyarimana and the president of neighboring Burundi– led in very short order to the unleashing of the maelstrom of genocidal violence that engulfed Rwanda for 100 days, leaving an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and 200,000 Hutus dead there.
The Hirondelle reporter writes that Ruzibiza is categorical that it was Kagame who gave the order to shoot down the plane. The reporter adds about Ruzibiza:

    His book published by editions Panama in Paris is a war diary that retraces “the October war day by day” and the ensuing atrocities committed by different factions especially members of the RPF.
    The armed conflict which took place in Rwanda between October 1990 and July 1994 was christened the “October War”. [It was in the last 13 weeks of that period– after the shooting-down of Habyarimana’s plane– that the genocide occurred. ~HC]

    Nearly all books on the Rwandan genocide gave a wide coverage to human rights violations committed by the government side [that was then in power, i.e., before the RPF takeover] but very little has been documented in the zone controlled by the RPF.
    As an “insider”, Ruzibiza was on many fronts and had first hand information on what went on in the “liberated” zones where the population was huddled together and killed en masse.
    Ruzibiza does not hesitate to use the term “genocide of Hutus” and according to him, the rebel [i.e. RPF] high command “had given orders to commanders of different units and intelligence officers to kill as many Hutus as possible especially if they were found grouped together”.
    The author considers April 1994 “the worst month in the history of Rwanda”. Apart from the massive genocide of Tutsis, “a large number of Hutu citizens were massacred because of a crime not all of them committed; that of having exterminated Tutsis”.
    Ruzibiza is quick to warn those who might be tempted to misinterpret his book to forward the “double genocide” theory. “It should not be understood that way. The Genocide of Hutus should neither be blamed on Tutsis nor that of Tutsis on Hutus. The gravity of these crimes surpasses ethnic dimensions. Those who committed these crimes are savages who should individually answer for them”…

Well, there’sa huge food for thought there. Most accounts of the shooting down of the plane say, in effect, that the identity of the shooters is shrouded in mystery. There have been some accusations from French officials that that Kagame and his RPF were responsible– but they seemed fairly easy to discount, given the strong antipathy between the French and the RPF.
The publication of this book– and the fact that the Hirondelle team, whose members are very familiar with the politics of Rwanda (many of them also being, in fact, Rwandan), gives such serious attention to it– means that some of these key but until now murky facts about Rwanda’s history may be becoming a little clearer.
No, of course it is false to say that if the RPF shot down the plane, then that in any way “excuses” the anti-Tutsi genocide. Nothing does that. But still, it does mean that Kagame’s role in the events is not quite the shining “saint” role that many in the west have attributed to him.
Okay, here’s why I’m writing about this here. Yes, partly in case any of you wants to join a discussion on this issue. But also to make a request that perhaps some kind JWN reader living in France might be able to get hold of a copy of the book and send it to me.
Anyone?
I shall of course be happy to reimburse all the costs involved.
And, um, just so I don’t get a truckload of copies landing on my doorstep, if you think you might be able to do this, could you drop me a line? Thanks!

Congratulations, Massachusetts!

Huge kudos to the Massachusetts House of Representatives which on Tuesday voted down a bill introduced by Governor Mitt Romney that sought to re-introduce the death penalty into the state.
The vote was 99 to 53.
Romney claimed that the bill he introduced had mandated so many safeguards that it would, “[take] out the risk of executing someone who is innocent, and it does put in place the ultimate penalty for those who carry out the most horrible crimes in society.” A majority of legislators disagreed.
State Representative Eugene L. O’Flaherty, Democrat of Boston, was quoted as saying, “No system that relies on scientific evidence can truly be developed that flawlessly and with no doubt separates the guilty from the innocent.” Other death-penalty opponents noted that the death penalty,

    was unfairly applied to the poor and to members of racial minorities, that it was too expensive and that it ran counter to the trend in which increasing numbers of countries have abolished capital punishment.

Quite right.
My home state of Virginia, meanwhile, remains one of the killingest states in the Union. I think we have two executions coming up: one for Robin Lovitt on November 30, and one for Daryl Atkins on December 2.
Massachusetts last executed someone in 1947.
The chart on this web-page from the Death Penalty Information Center seems to show that the death penalty is very much “a southern thang”… The sixteen named “southern” states there– yes, that includes Virginia– have accounted for roughly 80% of all the country’s executions since 1993.
As you can learn here, twleve states and the District of Columbia do not have the death penalty in their penal codes; 38 states plus the federal government do have it.
This disparity allows for some interesting comparisons. For example, regarding the alleged “deterrent” capacity of the death penalty. If you go to the table around 2/3 way down this web-page from the DPIC, on the left, you can see that:

    in 2003, the murder-rate in DP states was 44% higher than in non-DP states;*
    in 2002, the murder-rate in DP states was 36% higher than in non-DP states;
    in 2001, the murder-rate in DP states was 37% higher than in non-DP states; etc…

So why, oh why, do we do it? This truly feels like a medieval country sometimes.
—-
*In an earlier version of this post I wrote these facts exactly the wrong way around. Oops, sorry about that. ~HC

Iran, the PA, and Israel

Israel’s veteran strategic-affairs commentator Ze’ev Schiff had an intriguing piece in Ha’Aretz today. In it, he wrote quite movingly about a recently retired PA intelligence colonel whom he called Abed Alun, who was killed in one of the recent hotel blasts in Jordan.
Firstly, it was very decent of Ze’ev to write about Alun. Even more decent that, as he wrote, he made the trip to the north-Jerusalem suburb of Beit Hanina to convey his personal condolence’s to the man’s family. (Most Jewish Israelis really hate going into the Palestinian-peopled parts of Jerusalem. That may be partly fear of the unknown. It may also be because to visit families living in such places brings vividly home the deeply apartheidized nature of the holy city despite its alleged “unification” under Israeli rule.)
Anyway, what really struck me about Ze’ev’s piece was this:

    As part of his work for Palestinian intelligence, he met about 18 months ago – as part of a small group to which I also belonged – with a very senior official in the Iranian government. The man described how he saw a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: First Israel must accept the majority of Palestinian refugees, then there will be general elections and Tehran will recognize the new government formed in Israel. Abed, who was sitting beside him, immediately responded that that was not the solution the PA wanted. We support the two-state solution and the Iranian proposal replaces it. The Iranian attacked him and accused the Palestinians of treachery.

All parts of that description ring true to me. But interesting to hear it from that particular source…

Modestly good news on Gaza

Late Monday night, Condi Rice managed to wrest the Sharon government’s agreement to an arrangement whereby the Palestinians get to control one tiny portion of Gaza’s physical interface with the outside world. This is one aspect of the land border between Palestinian Gaza and Egypt. (You’ll note that Israel is not contiguous to that border.)
Israel still gets to control the passage of all goods transiting between Gaza and Egypt. They will be diverted to a special point where the lands of the three territories all come together, where their passage will be controlled by Israel. Regarding people, however, under the new agreement they will pass through the Rafah crossing point on the Egypt-Gaza border where on the Palestinian side they will be processed by Palestinian border-control officers, but under monitoring from an EU presence.
Will Palestinians from all around the world flock to Gaza in the weeks ahead? Will Gazans stream outside to visit places they could not until recently dream of visiting?
One first thing to understand is that every single family in Gaza has many family members living elsewhere. Conditions in Gaza under 38 years of Israeli occupation have been so harsh that many young people have had to emigrate to make any kind of a living at all. They went to Egypt (sometimes), to Gulf countries (much more in the 1970s and 1980s than recently), to Jordan, Europe, the Americas… all around the world. The new prospects for families to hold reunion gatherings must be heady indeed.
Israel still, apparently, wants to maintain a blacklist of Palestinians whom it wants banned from Gaza. We’ll have to see how that works out. I am sure that there are still extensive Israeli intel networks operating, even if only clandestinely, throughout the Strip.
Condi Rice’s “spin-meisters” have tried to present her winning of Israel’s agreement on the Rafah crossing as a big and significant political achievement. It’s no such thing. It’s one single tiny item on the enormous list of tasks that remain in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking… And it has come ways too late to win much “goodwill” for the Israelis from the Palestinians. Israel withdrew from Gaza, remember, more than two months ago, and has been hanging on and hanging on with its demands over the Rafah crossing and the other crossings.
Meanwhile, there are now just two months left till the Palestinian elections. Pres. Mahmoud Abbas has sadly little time between now and then to show his people that his administration is dedicated to meeting their basic needs… For all the past two months he has been left hanging in the air by the Israelis and made to look impotent and useless.

Skin peeled off

The latest revelations about torture in the “New Iraq” are really horrific. Reuters has a good (by which I mean very disturbing) account of it… Including this:

    “There were 161 detainees in all and they were being treated in an inappropriate way … they were being abused,” Hussein Kamal, a deputy interior minister, told Reuters.
    “I’ve never seen such a situation like this during the past two years in Baghdad, this is the worst,” he told CNN.
    “I saw signs of physical abuse by brutal beating, one or two detainees were paralyzed and some had their skin peeled off various parts of their bodies.”

The BBC’s report is much fuller. It says:

    Sunday’s discovery is hard evidence and officials believe it may be the tip of the iceberg.
    There are suspicions the building may also have been used as a base for a militia called the Badr Brigade, and that such militias may have infiltrated Iraq’s security services, our correspondent adds.

“May have infiltrated” is an amazing euphemism, since what has happened in large parts of Iraq is that the US/UK occupation forces have handed off public security to various militias–including both the Badr Brigade and the Kurdish Pesh Merga– quite knowingly. (And they complain about the Lebanese government allowing a militia to operate there!)
The victims of the latest barbarity were reportedly all Sunnis.
The BBC account notes that extreme mistreatment of detainees by Iraqi security forces and their allied militias is not a new issue:

    Anne Clwyd MP, the UK government’s human rights envoy in Iraq, said she had raised such allegations with Iraqi authorities back in May.
    “It is shocking what has happened,” she told Newsnight.
    She said the UK had been trying to help bring about a cultural change by providing human rights training to Iraq security forces.
    “After 35 years of abuse, it takes a long time for people’s mindsets to change,” she said.

Also, this:

    The security forces have faced repeated allegations of systematic abuse and torture of detainees, and of extra-judicial killings.
    A report by pressure group Human Rights Watch earlier this year said methods used by Iraqi police included beating detainees with cables, hanging them from their wrists for long periods and giving electric shocks to sensitive parts of the body.

That would be this report, from January.
The 161– or, in some accounts, “more than 170”– mistreated detainees were apparently discovered by US troops, who for some reason had been searching for a missing 15-year-old youth. (People get “disappeared” in Iraq all the time. This kid must have had some powerful relatives.)
The BBC report said:

    A US soldier who carried out the raid said: “It’s not what we expected at all, we were looking for a 15-year-old boy.”

The generally well-informed Salam Pax recounts some additional gruesome details:

    It is said that there were a number of dead bodies as well in the shelter and what the report doesn’t mention is signs of power tools used on the detainees. Apparently the officer in charge of this operation has something for drills; there were holes on feet and legs. Heading this operation there is an Iraqi officer and [he] is under the direct supervision of the current minister of interior affairs (security) who us a member of SCIRI. And I don’t really [buy] the spokesman’s line that the minister of Interior Affairs had no idea of what was going on, what I heard was that the officer in charge was under direct supervision from the Minister.

The tragedy of all that’s been happening seems almost overwhelming. Large numbers of Iraqi Sunnis have been receiving barbaric treatment for many months now– at the hands of both the US forces and the Iraqi-government/Badr forces.
By the way, the BBC today quoted Pentagon spokesman Lt.Col. Barry Venable as confirming that US troops used White Phosphorus bombs in last November’s attack against Fallujah:

    “When you have enemy forces that are in covered positions that your high explosive artillery rounds are not having an impact on and you wish to get them out of those positions, one technique is to fire a white phosphorus round or rounds into the position because the combined effects of the fire and smoke – and in some case the terror brought about by the explosion on the ground – will drive them out of the holes so that you can kill them with high explosives,” he said.

There is one serious error in that report. It states that a prof at Bradford University said that WP could count as a chemical weapon “if deliberately aimed at civilians”– but the actual quote they have there from the professor doesn’t say “civilians”, it says “people”… And the worldwide Chemical Weapons ban is a ban on using CW against anyone, whether combatants or noncombatants; it doesn’t specify “civilians” at all…
But anyway, in western Iraq, and in many parts of Baghdad, Sunnis have been targeted for ourageous mistreatment. Then, on the other side, we saw the terrible tragedy of the recent, Iraqi-Sunni-perpetrated bombings in Jordan.
Violence begets violence.
Yes, there was violence inside Iraq before the US invasion of March 2003. (But actually, in the three years immediately preceding the war, not very much of it at all.)
But in March 2003, President Bush and his advisors opted for a massive escalation of violence in and against the country— and after having unleashed the “shock and awe” cataclysm of the invasion, they proceeded to dismantle the Iraqi state, thus unleashing all the demons of inter-sectarian strife.
And now this, in the “new order” they created there: Skin peeled off..
Bring the troops home. Resign. Apologise. There are no further excuses. It is not just the skin of those men screaming in pain that has been peeled off. It is also the skin of all the Bush administration’s lies about this war.

Resources on the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood

I wanted to put in a link to Anthony Shadid’s informative recent interview with Syrian MB head Ali Sadreddine al-Bayanouni (also here).
Shadid wrote:

    “Syrian society today is destroyed,” [Bayanouni] said. “The primary aim right now is to transform society into a new era where political and democratic life will be rebuilt.”

About the MB’s political plans, Shadid wrote:

    “The organization is not going to be an alternative to this regime,” [Bayanouni] said. “The alternative will be a broad-based national government to which the Muslim Brotherhood will contribute, as does any other political force.”
    Among the various Syrian political factions — Islamic activists, Arab nationalists, Syrian nationalists, communists and other leftists — nearly every party has abandoned the revolutionary, generation-old notion that it alone can serve as the agent of change. The Baath Party has not; the constitution still declares it “the leading party of both the society and the state.” In Bayanouni’s words, and in a spate of declarations, the Brotherhood has forsworn that role, mirroring reforms of the group in other countries including Egypt and Jordan.
    In 2002, Bayanouni published a national charter that called for a democratic state and rejected violence. In 2004, the Brotherhood disavowed the idea that “we consider ourselves to be the movement that represents all Muslims.” In the same document, it endorsed women’s rights and said it would seek only the gradual introduction of Islamic law, leaving the actual legislation to elected representatives. (Requiring women to wear the veil, segregating education or banning alcohol “are not a priority at this point,” Bayanouni said in the interview.) A year later, in a National Call for Salvation, the Brotherhood disavowed revenge for past crimes and called for political parties and free elections.
    Last month, it joined secular and minority opposition groups in endorsing what was called the Damascus Declaration, a four-page manifesto hailed by a still-feeble Syrian opposition as a blueprint for an alternative to Assad’s government and a first for cooperation between secular and religious activists.
    “The Muslim Brotherhood,” Bayanouni said, “is ready to accept others and to deal with them. We believe that Syria is for all its people, regardless of sect, ethnicity or religion. No one has the right to exclude anyone else.”
    …
    At his home in London, Bayanouni talks about returning to the alleys of Jubaila, the quarter of Old Aleppo where he grew up. His father died while in prison in 1975, his mother after he went into exile in 1979. But, he said smiling, he will visit the rest of his family. “There are relatives I don’t even know,” he said.
    For some Islamic activists, years in the West radicalize them, reinforcing their alienation in a culture that’s not their own. Not Bayanouni. He said his time in exile helped him reconsider his beliefs.
    “One of the things I learned,” he said, “was to accept the other.”
    And in that is perhaps one of the greatest ironies of Arab politics today. To a remarkable degree, albeit with different inflections and still untested, some secular and religious activists are speaking a common language of citizenship and individual rights in the face of authoritarian governments. Bayanouni … said he wanted to see “a civil state based on democratic institutions.”
    “The religion of the majority is Islam, and the ethnicity of the majority is Arab,” he said. “Those are facts on the ground, but citizenship is the base on which people should interact. Whatever is the result of the democratic process should be accepted.”

Here is the Wikipedia’s entry on the MB in Syria.
Here is a very informative mid-August interview with Bayanouni, on the Jamestown Foundation website. Nearly all the articles linked to at the top of that page are also informative.

Syrian crackdown, conference canceled

I got a sad email this morning, from a staff assistant at a reform-oriented organization in Damascus called the Tharwa Project. Just ten days ago, Dr. Samer al-Ladkany, the assistant director of Tharwa, had invited me to participate in a big conference Tharwa was organizing in Damascus under the title “”Recognizing the Multicultural Society for Successful Democratic Transitions.” Ladkany was inviting me to speak about some aspects of South Africa’s historic transition from minority-based rule to full democracy, and naturally I was pretty excited at the prospect of doing so. After all, in Syria power has for many decades now been quite disproportionately concentrated in the hands of the Alawite community that makes up roughly 11% of the national population– and it desperately needs to find a peaceful way to transition to a fully inclusive, accountable, and rights-respecting form of national rule…
In today’s email, the staff assistant wrote:

    I must ask you to put everything on hold for right now. I am very sorry, but we are having some problems here in Damascus. I am not completely sure what is going on, but I went to work today, just to find out that we have been closed down…permanently. The worst part is, I have not been able to contact the director here in Damascus.

I guess that would be Ladkany. The “big boss” at Tharwa– the organization’s founder, Ammar Abdel-Hamid– left Syria for the US around a month ago, after being warned by the security services that he should do so.
I am still hoping that ways can be found to urge Bashar al-Asad’s regime to– as I put it in this JWN post a couple of weeks ago–

    “do a Frederik De Klerk” — that is, to find ways to repair the broken fabric within his own country by opening up serious political negotiations with his political opponents from the country’s majority population.

Obviously, right now, the prospects for that happening look significantly bleaker.
The latest move against the Tharwa Project in Damascus was, sadly, fairly predictable. Last Thursday, Pres. Asad made a strongly nationalist speech in which he came out swinging against Washington, and against the Washington-pushed activities of UN investigator detlev Mehlis. Al-Hayat’s Ibrahim Hamidi interpreted what was happening as Asad “preparing Syria for the probable imposition of international sanctions.” (As reported here.)
Then on Saturday, the mukhabarat (security services) arrested Kamal Labwani, a Syrian democracy activist who had just returned to his country from the US. While in the US, Labwani met in the White House with with U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor J. D. Crouch. He also did an interview for the (US government-operated) al-Hurra TV and other media outlets.
So it definitely looks as if the regime is in a defiant, hunkering-down mode. I think that’s a great pity. The well-connected and Damascus-based Syria expert Josh Landis has written on his blog, “Syrians will put up with sanctions lite if the government moves ahead purposefully with internal reform designed to free the economy.” I largely agree with that assessment. I also think that– like the international isolation that South Africa’s apartheid regime faced in the late 1980s– Syria’s growing international isolation today might well act to help persuade people at the heart of the regime that wide-ranging internal political reform is not only a good tactic, but also, a necessary policy if the interests of their nation and their sub-national community are to be preserved.
Josh does add, it is true, “Of course, it is hard to do this when being isolated.” I would add to that, that it would be extremely hard for the Syrian regime to open up the political space that is needed for reform when it is not only the subject of very hostile intent from the USA, but also in an actual and unresolved state of war with Israel.
Well, I have a lot of other thoughts about this whole subject. I should also, probably, take the opportunity of either writing something here on JWN, or writing something new in al-Hayat, to set down some of the things I would have said at the conference in damascus, if it were held.
Yes, there is much that is parallel between the experiences of the voteless majority in South Africa under apartheid and the powerless majority in Syria under the Asads. But there are also several signal differences. One is the seeming absence of any inclusive and highly disciplined opposition party on the model of the ANC. Actually, I’m not sure if the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood might reach some of the necessary criteria (though a problem there regarding “inclusivity”.) As for the secular-liberalizing opposition networks, they all seem to me to be dominated by prima donnas and individualists. In the latter category, I’m afraid I would probably have to include the Syrian liberalizer who’s best known in Washington DC– Ammar Abdel-Hamid, the founder of the Tharwa Project…. In his blog, Abdel-Hamid has called for the opposition to build “networks, networks, networks”. (Calling for the creation of single, disciplined party or front organization would, I think, be more effective.) But even regarding “networks” he doesn’t actually seem to be very respectful of the other people who might be in such a network. In this recent post he summarily dismissed “the Syrian opposition” as being “weak and idiotic.”
Altogether, a story that is tragic at many, many levels.
Most important, now, though: What can we do to try to ensure the safety of Samer Ladkany?