‘Democracy’ takes battering, Iraq

I don’t for one moment enjoy being a Cassandra-like bearer of bad news when it comes to the democratization project in Iraq. I would love to have had my earlier forebodings about the project proved wrong. (Indeed, throughout 2004 I wrote a lot about how credible progress in just such a project could help to de-escalate tensions in Iraq while also disentangling the occupying army from its continued presence there…)
But no. There they were again today, the 275 elected members of the National Assembly– meeting, but once again quite unable to reach agreement on forming a government.
AP’s Mariam Fam was writing there, at 1 p.m. EST, about,

    the interim prime minister and president storming out of the chaotic session that exposed deep divides among the National Assembly’s Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish members.
    The short session

‘Red+white’ movement, Bahrain

A great post on the Bahraini blog Chan’ad Bahraini about the big demonstration there last Saturday in favor of “Constitutional Reform First!”
50,000 or so people from a national population of 400,000 is no mean feat. (Plus, in all these proportion-of-population assessments you have to remember that–in societies where many people are still young children– very few of those youngsters get hauled along to participate… Except in the Israeli-settler demonstrations.)
“Chan’ad” (it’s the name of a local fish) describes himself as an Asian born in Bahrain. He evidently speaks and writes Arabic, and seems well-clued-in.
Saturday’s demonstration was organized by the Shiite-Islamist group, Al-Wefaq (the agreement). In that post I linked to above you can see some great pictures of it, apparently taken by Chan’ad.
In this post from last Wednesday, Chan’ad writes very interestingly about Wefaq and about the relative political quiescence of all the other supposedly “oppositionist” organizations in Bahraini society:

    Not only is Al Wefaq the most popular political society on the island, but these days it is also the most active one. If you have been following recent activities you may have noted that Wefaq has provided support (logistic or moral) to the causes of the BahrainOnline detainees, State Security torture victims, the BCHR discrimination report, constitutional reform, and even for the protection of the Tubli Bay mangroves.
    I commend Al Wefaq for supporting these important causes, and I also credit the Wefaq high order for recognizing the political value that this gives them. However I can’t give my full support to the party because Al Wefaq is an Islamist group, and I disagree with them in principle. But it leads to the question… where is everyone else??!! Are there no other political players to compete with Al Wefaq? In particular, I’m thinking about the National Democratic Action Society (NDA), since it is the largest political society without a religion driven agenda. Their presence in supporting all the grassroots human rights and social causes is miniscule compared to that of Wefaq.
    Yes, they usually issue a statement in support of something… and sometimes they even hold a seminar… but their physical presence is rarely seen on the street. Whenever there is a protest for something you can be sure to see Wefaq leaders Ali Salman or Dr Abduljalil Sengase (of recent controversy) on the scene. But the only time I have ever seen another group make their presence known at one of these events was during the Victims of Torture demonstration last June, in which a small troupe of NDA supporters wore yellow headbands and held a banner with the party name at the bottom. But since then, nothing.
    I’d like to see more political societies take an interest in these events, sponsor/co-sponsor them or encourage their supporters to show up, and to make their presence known when they get there. Not only is it morally right to support some of these causes, but it is also in the interests of the party. And come 2006, this will provide more choice for a voter concerned about human rights and social issues…

Chan’ad also gives serious attention to another key aspect of rights-abuse situation in all Gulf emirates and many other Middle eastern societies as well: the issue of immigrant workers. See this from Sunday, and this from Monday.
Btw, chapeau to Head Heeb Jonathan for sending me to Chan’ad.

Settlements and settlers bulldozing two-state project

Two phenomena– both intimately linked to the settlement-implantation project that was Ariel Sharon’s most serious commitment throughout most of the years since 1967– are now combining to undermine any chance that a viable two-state outcome might somehow be plucked from the dense demographic intermingling now existing in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
The first of these phenomena is the Israeli government’s determination to go ahead with constructing 3,500 new housing units in the crucial “E-1” area between East Jerusalem and the (already illegal) Israeli mega-settlement of Ma’ale Adumim– a decision that Ha’Aretz describes as a “provocation”.
The second is the growing prospect that militants among the angry settlers in both the West Bank and Gaza might now escalate their violence in protest against the government’s planned Gaza withdrawal to the level of something approaching an inter-Jewish civil war.
These two developments are connected– in a number of ways. One is that you can realistically assume that the Israeli government’s announcement at this time of its intention to proceed with the E-1 construction– plans for which have existed for several years already, but not hitherto been implemented– was designed in part to “reassure” the great bulk of Israeli settlers who live in the West Bank that the big plan to continue settlement-building there will continue, even after the withdrawal from Gaza.
Over 400,000 settlers live in the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem, while only around 8,500 live in Gaza.
Another way in which the developments are connected is through the Israeli government’s long-sustained policy not just of driving and implementing the settlement-implantation policy on its own account (or, more precisely, that of US taxpayers)– but more than that, on numerous occasions in the past, Ariel Sharon and many other government members and government leaders have winked at, or even actively encouraged, the “excesses” committed by militants among the settlers thus implanted.
When settlers have set up illegal “outposts” outside the boundaries of existing settlements, those outposts rapidly gained access to government services and (most of them) became entirely regularized. Settlers have nearly always been allowed to carry their guns wherever they go: when they have used their weapons and their “ubermensch” status under Israeli law to attack, humiliate, harrass, and on occasion murder people from the area’s indigenous Palestinian population, the most they have generally received has been a slap on the wrist. In short, the settler militants have been indulged, subsidized, and generally treated like spoiled children in Israel’s otherwise much more law-abiding society– and this, apparently, as part of a sustained government policy.
Is it any surprise that now, when the government tries to say “No!” to these always-pampered adolescents, the adolescents should turn round in confusion and with some violence in their hearts?
(If settler violence does escalate, I fear for the security of Palestinians in geographically isolated places who are as likely as–or perhaps, even more likely than–the Israeli government forces to be the target of enraged settler mobs… In general, when social order breaks down, it is the weakest and most vulnerable people who end up getting hurt the most.)
I want to return, quickly, to the question of why the E-1 construction is so important. E-1 lies between East Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim. MA is a settlement of (now) some 40,000 people that spreads eastward down the rocky hills toward the Jordan Valley. If E-1 is built, it will connect MA demographically to the great solid walls of Jewish-settler population that successive Israeli governments have already built around most of occupied East Jerusalem.
Given the present Israeli government’s clearly stated intention of continuing to hold on to all the large, Jewish-settled parts of the West Bank in any future peace settlement (an intention that received virtually total support from President Bush last April), proceeding with settlement construction on E-1 has two consequences:

    (1) The portion of the West Bank left for the Palestinians becomes clearly cut into two by the E-1-MA axis, and
    (2) The 150,000 or so Palestinians who have been able to cling to their families’ ancestral homes in East Jerusalem will be even more solidly cut off than at present from their family members and compatriots in both the northen West Bank and the southern West Bank.

At that point, all hopes that the Palestinians could win true national sovereignty over a land base that would have both the territorial and the political prerequisites of a viable national state would be dashed. All they could hope for at that point (and has it perhaps arrived already?) is a resource-poor, heavily politically constrained little “statelet”…
As we all know, the word for such an entity is “Bantustan”.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it here again: any viable two-state solution requires the establishment of two viable states. A situation that leads to the creation of one heavily armed, land-grabbing behemoth and one (or more) Bantustans is not viable and not stable.
Perhaps a delegation from the Verligte (enlightened) branch of South Africa’s Afrikaaner community could travel to Israel and start explaining some of those facts of life to people in the Israeli public and government?
Yes, the Afrikaaners had their own extremist bitter-enders. But thank G-d that finally–after 40 years of ghastly internal repression and numerous very damaging military adventures outside their borders– the vast majority of Afrikaaners came to understand that a continued reliance on colonial domination of the neighbors is not, in the modern world, a good path to ensuring any community’s wellbeing.
So far, a large majority of Jewish Israelis still continue to express clear support both for the withdrawal/evacuation from Gaza and for the establishment of a decent two-state outcome… But these relatively “Verligte” Israelis haven’t become nearly as strongly mobilized as the settler militants.
Meron Benvenisti thinks they are are not about to become so.
So what are the prospects? I would say, pretty bad. It looks to me as though the settler militants might actually succeed in hoisting Sharon on the petard of his own decades-long dedication to the expansion of the settlement project. Don’t get me wrong: I do, strongly, hope that Sharon can succeed– first, in his plan to withdraw all Israelis from Gaza (and please, may he make that a total withdrawal); and then, after that, in rapidly negotiating a decent, workable final-status outcome with Abu Mazen.
But does Sharon actually seek a “decent, workable outcome” with the Palestinians? The decision he has made most recently on E-1 indicates strongly that he does not.
If the Bush administration wants to work seriously for the success of the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, it has to draw a quite unequivocal and unbreachable line in the sand over the E-1 construction plans. (It would also help a lot if Bush and his people started spelling out their own clear vision of what a viable and hope-filled two-state outcome would look like, and expressing their firm commitment to concluding the final-status talks that embody this vision by the end of 2005.)
But if the administration doesn’t establish the E-1 issue as a clear Red Line for US policy, then anything else it might do is just (pardon the phrase) pissing in the wind.

Political interactions vs. bombs in Lebanon

I think there was another bomb in (predominantly Christian) East Beirut today, though thank G-d it didn’t kill anyone. I’m sure it must be very disquieting to live there these days. Exactly 30 years ago, I was a young journo working in Beirut, and I remember Lebanon going through an eerily similar period of great unrest… In February, 1975, the eminent Sidon-based Sunni Muslim politician Maarouf Saad had been assassinated while leading a march in his hometown… There were isolated clashes, unexplained happenings, rumors of war…
Then on April 13, 1975, occurred the ambush (of a Palestinian bus, by followers of the Maronitist pol Camille Chamoun) that killed 27 people and ignited the entire, extremely lethal, 14-year civil war that followed.
This time round, most Lebanese seem keenly aware of the danger of going down that escalatory path again. There is one larger and one smaller piece of good news from Beirut today.
The smaller one is that Bahia Hariri, the parliamentarian and sister of the late, lamented Rafiq, announced that the Beirut Marathon Association will be holding hold a 5-kilometer “Unity Run” to mark the occasion of the start of the civil war.
I think it is excellent that that anniversary should be remembered and publicly marked, and marked in that “forward-looking” way, as well as other ways.
The larger piece of good news is that the Lebanese Druze (and political “opposition”) leader Walid Jumblatt late on Sunday night went to call on Hizbullah sec-general Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, in the latter’s heavily guarded HQ in the south-Beirut suburbs.
This is the first time the two have met since Hariri’s assassination. The Daily Star’s Leila Hatoum wrote:

    Lebanese opposition leader Walid Jumblatt insisted any UN-led international probe into the assassination of former Premier Rafik Hariri should not involve the deployment of foreign troops in Lebanon. Speaking after an unexpected late-night meeting with Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Jumblatt also insisted any international probe would be restricted to Hariri’s death and would not involve the issue of the resistance group’s arms.
    He said: “We will not accept that any international investigation will be allowed to expand outside the framework of Hariri’s assassination.”
    … Jumblatt also reiterated that he would not call for the resistance group [i.e. Hizbullah] to be disarmed.
    He said: “The arms issue is not proposed. It is not open to discussion at this stage,” adding: “When our ambitions are met, in agreement with the resistance, over Shebaa Farms, then we will talk about arms.”

In other words, he’s backing Hizbullah on the rationale it gives for keeping its militia in operation.
Hatoum noted, too, that Jumblatt’s comments on the proposed international investigation,

    follow those of Lebanese President Emile Lahoud, who insisted he would welcome an international probe into Hariri’s assassination.
    In a statement from the Presidential Palace in Baabda, Lahoud stressed his commitment “to do whatever it takes to reveal the circumstances surrounding Hariri’s murder, in cooperation with the United Nations by whatever method it adopts.”
    … Lahoud pledged full cooperation with the UN after meeting with Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Butros Sfeir.

Sfeir, by the way is another Middle Eastern religious leader who, along with Iraq’s Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, should certainly be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize, for his tireless and thus far successful efforts at keeping his co-religionists and the rest of his countrymen back from the brink of civil war.
Anyway, back to the Sayed Nasrallah-Jumblatt meeting. Hatoum has this intriguing additional little tidbit of information:

    The surprise meeting took place in the Hizbullah stronghold of southern Beirut. Jumblatt said: “Nasrallah has offered to visit me in my house in Clemenceau in Beirut, but I refused. At this time of security chaos, the safety of the Sayyed is the safety of the nation. We don’t want to suffer a second loss after Hariri’s death.”

There’s some wonderfully delicate diplomacy at play there. In Lebanon, as in most cultures around the world, it is often an issue of significance “who has to go out of his way to visit whom.” (Leaders from around the world flock to Crawford, Texas to pay their homage…) Someone like Walid Jumblatt, who is the paramount chieftain of the entire world Druze community and a political successor to the Druze lords who ruled over Lebanon’s inter-sectarian system for three centuries, 1516-1832, would normally perhaps not have to go to pay a visit to the “home” of a poor village boy from an insignificant village in South Lebanon, which is what Nasrallah’s family lineage is.
But in terms of that decidedly modern phenomenon, political parties, Nasrallah’s wins hands down over Jumblatt’s rather sad “Progressive Socialist Party”. In fact, Hizbullah is described by many Lebanese analysts as the only– as well as by far the largest– truly “political” and clearly ideological (rather than quasi-feudal) party on the scene in Lebanon today.
(The Falangists once laid claim to that honor. But first, the party came close to becoming a familial fiefdom for the Gemayyel family; and then, under Karim Pakradouni, it sold its soul to the Syrians. Sic tempora, sic mores.)
So with Walid going to visit Sayed Hassan today, a number of things were happening. He certainly was paying a great deal of respect, if not exactly “homage”, to his host. (Though we can’t rule out the claimed “security” rationale, either. After all, Sayed Hassan has been on the Israelis’ hit list ever since he became party head in 1992; and Jumblatt’s place in Clemenceau is certainly far less secure for him than the Hizbullah-secured areas of the Dahiyeh.) But Jumblatt also noted that Sayed Hassan had “expressed his readiness” to make the trek up to Clemenceau instead. So everyone’s face got saved, and everyone ended up looking extremely gracious.
Those kinds of diplomatic skills– as shown by these two Lebanese patriots as well as by the “other Nasrallah”, i.e. the Maronite Patriarch– are exactly what Lebanon needs if it is to be steered safely through the shoals that currently beset it…
Meanwhile, a few final thoughts from me on the April 13 “Unity Run”:
(1) Yes, I’d love to go and run in it!
(2) I think the Daily Star’s reporter and editors might be wiser not to call it a “fun” run? Somehow, while the idea of the run is good, I don’t think “fun” strikes quite the right note for the war-remembrance occasion…
(3) Wouldn’t it be interesting if Hizbullah turn their people out in huge numbers to run it? (And that could be their women, as well as their men… Beirut’s observant-Muslim runners have already started displaying a very suitable and modest line of “Islamic women’s running gear”, as I blogged about when I was there last fall.)

Iraq: political stasis and state erosion

The steady passage of time has now eaten up 25.8% of the time allowed in Paul Bremer’s dysfunctional “TAL” regime for Iraq’s elected leaders and Assembly to come to agreement on a new permanent Constitution for the country… And yet, because of the restrictive, anti-democratic government-formation rules also included in the TAL, the elected lists have still not been able even to form a Transitional Government.
Delay, delay, delay… We have had so many promises already that government formation was “on the point” of being completed and announced! The latest one was this AFP report, March 25 from Baghdad, which warned that the coalition talks could drag on for a further week.
Meanwhile, the NYT’s Ed Wong is reporting that: “The delay in forming a new government in Iraq has stalled important projects at ministries and is sowing confusion among current government workers about their duties… ”
Surprise, surprise, surprise.
It really does seem as if what is happening now is a resumption of the policy Bremer pursued during his roughly one year in charge in Baghdad, of in effect destroying the internal structure of the Iraqi state.
Destroying the existing structures of governance and economic organization is a classic strategy of colonial powers throughout history. In recent times we saw the campaign of actual, phsyical destruction that Ariel Sharon waged in spring 2002 against the facilities of the still-fetal Palestinian Authority. Throughout most of 2003, Iraq was ruled by Bremer with the same philosophy, though using slightly different means.
And now, it has resumed…
Yesterday, btw, I had the good fortune to attend part of an excellent one-day conference at the University of Virginia on the past, present, and prospects for democratization in the Middle East. The panel I went to had as the main presenters the Turkish scholar Soli Ozel and Saad Eddim Ibrahim, a dear old friend who is a pioneer of the democratization movement in Egypt and indeed has announced his candidacy in Egypt’s presidential election, if there is to be one. The commenters on the panel were UVA profs Bill Quandt and David Waldner.
The whole discussion was excellent– there, and at the Al Dente restaurant afterwards. But what was particularly à propos for the present post was an excellent point that David made, namely that for democratization to work, the democratically elected leaders actually have to have at their command existing and empowered state institutions through which they can implement their decisions.
It seems like a self-evident point, doesn’t it? But it is not, it seems, at all evident to the Bush administration supporters who keep on crowing about the great success of the Iraqi elections some eight weeks ago (which more or less, I grant), while also claiming that those elections actually constituted some form of a successful “democratization” of Iraq….
I don’t think we should grant that yet, at all.

Bush escalating against Syria

I was going to write a post here noting that the Bushies have taken a serious step toward escalating their battle against Bashar al-Asad’s regime in Syria.
That link there goes to a report by Robin Wright and Glenn Kessler of the WaPo, that on Thursday the State Dept’s new “democracy czar” Elizabeth Cheney hosted a meeting that included “senior administration officials from Vice President Cheney’s office, the National Security Council and the Pentagon and about a dozen prominent Syrian Americans, including political activists, community leaders, academics and an opposition group.”
The opposition group in question is the Syria Reform Party, which Kessler and Wright say is “often compared to the Iraqi National Congress led by former exile Ahmed Chalabi.” The SRP– or rather, as it calls itself, the RPS– is headed by Farid Ghadry, a 50-year-old Syrian-American who left his homeland when he was ten years old…
Well, I was going to post about that, but then I found this great post on Josh Landis’s blog.
Josh is a good, serious US scholar of Syrian affairs who knows Syria fairly well and is currently in Damascus on a Fulbright scholarship. (He speaks and reads good Arabic and is married to a Syrian, all of which attributes certainly strengthen the authority with which he writes.)
One key passage of what he writes there is this:

    Reformers here believe that Syria

Legacies of torture, South Africa

This week, I have been focusing mainly on reviewing/revising the three South Africa chapters of my book on Violence and its Legacies. I find much of this project (South Africa, Mozambique) really heartening to work on, because the broad-level changes in the situations in those two countries over the past 15 years have been so evidently for the better. Yes, I know horrendous problems of poverty, social inequality, the legacies of colonialism, the ravages of HIV, and non-trivial problems of governance remain in both those countries.
But still.
Given a choice between South Africa today and apartheid South Africa; given a choice between Mozambique today and civil-war-gripped Mozambique– well, it seems evident to me which is better.
Along the way, though, in the chapters I’ve been working on so far in the past four weeks or so (Rwanda, SA), I’ve had to deal with a lot of narratives of torture and atrocity.
Many, many of the narratives of tortures carried out by SA’s apartheid regime seem shockingly familiar today, if you read the many accounts now surfacing of how the CIA (in particular) but also other US government bodies have been treating suspects in the “Global War on Terror”. There is something sickening about these governments that claim to be so “democratic” and so “civilized”, and that portray themselves, indeed, as “bringing the benefits of civilization to the natives”– but in fact, often interacting with the actual people of the subordinated, marginalized populations in an extremely barbaric way.
I have this emerging theory that the way the US deals with the rest of the world is sort of a macrocosm for how the White South Africans dealt with their non-White compatriots… Except that the SA Whites were around 11-15% of the relevant population there, while US citizens constitute only 4% of the population of the world. So the sheer chutzpah of our “leaders” claiming to be able to act “in the name of” or “on behalf of” or “for the good of” the rest of the world is that much greater.
Anyway here is an excerpt from my Chapter 5, South Africa from conflict to peacebuilding that will give you an idea of some of the things I find so familiar looking at US government actions today:

Continue reading “Legacies of torture, South Africa”

Yes, some worthwhile respect here

I see that today Juan Cole did refer to my work warning about the dangers of delay in forming the Transitional Government in Iraq.
Nice that someone gives public attribution and acknowledgement to my work here, eh? But then, I’ve always thought Juan was a very decent person, even when I have disagreed with him.
(Incidentally, we worked together back in the mid-1980s when he was co-editor of a book on Shiites and Social Protest to which I was contributor.)
Juan’s blog post there was reporting that some sources– apparently Kurdish– are saying that Iraq may get its Transitional Government formed by Sunday…
Let’s wait and see… Both whether they can do that, and also what powers the occupying army will allow the “government” to have…
Anyway, it’s still ways early to take down our “Democracy Denied in Iraq” counters…