Cordova

Why the Gulf States Need Labor Unions

2005-07-12T09:51:00.000-04:00

When it comes to the oil-rich sheikdoms of the Arabian Gulf, media and governments in the West have been largely united in their praise. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently dubbed the emirate of Dubai "an amazing city-state on the Gulf that is becoming the Singapore of the Arab East," and told NPR's Terry Gross that the Palestinians should emulate it. (He left it up to listeners to imagine how one could emulate Dubai without billions of dollars in oil reserves.) Christopher Hitchens wrote last week in Slate about his recent visit to Qatar, which he described as "a sort of cross between Switzerland and Hong Kong." He hailed the little country, among other things, for its treatment of immigrant workers, who receive "a much better deal than their semi-indentured fellows in Riyadh and Jeddah." The Bush administration apparently agrees. The White House has signed a bilateral free-trade agreement with Bahrain and is pushing for agreements with the United Arab Emirates and Oman. Since 2001, the White House has been calling for a Middle East Free Trade Area (MEFTA) similar to NAFTA, which it hopes will transform Arab politics by liberalizing Arab economies. This idea is a guiding principle for newly appointed Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, who formerly served Bush as U.S. Trade Representative. He has invoked the "spirit of the Levant," the region's history as "the world's preeminent bazaar," and even the Koran to argue for free-trade agreements with Middle Eastern countries.

These sentiments sound nice. But they are increasingly out of touch with reality. While news coverage of the region has lately focused on elections in Baghdad and Ramallah, and protests in Cairo and Beirut, there is growing political unrest in Gulf capitals, too. Some of it takes the form of Al Qaeda-style violence, once exclusive to Saudi Arabia but now common in Kuwait and cropping up in Qatar as well. But there's another form of discontent that's ubiquitous in the Arabian desert--even amid the shimmering skyscrapers of Friedman's "amazing city-state on the Gulf": The appalling treatment of workers in these countries has spawned gutsy labor movements, which are agitating for basic freedoms of association and collective bargaining. In two Gulf capitals they have already gained some ground. Yet the United States, apparently intoxicated by the promise of free trade with Gulf states, has not done enough to support them. This is too bad--not only because the groups are fighting for American values such as freedom and social justice, but also because many of the Gulf's labor leaders happen to be pro-Western and anti-Islamist.

Think of Poland's Solidarity movement in the 1980s, and you have an inspiring example of the liberating power of trade unions in the face of centralized authoritarian rule. Now lose that analogy for a moment and enter the alternate universe of the Gulf. Unlike other regions of the world, many Gulf states are populated primarily by foreign migrant workers. A small elite stratum of the Gulf's foreign population is composed of educated Indians, Pakistanis, Arabs, and Westerners who teach at schools and manage companies and stores. The rest are primarily underclass--migrants from the Indian subcontinent, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, and poorer Arab countries. When Gulf states experienced construction booms from the '70s through the early '90s, a larger proportion of migrant workers were male. Now the trend favors women, many of whom work as domestic servants.

To document the harsh conditions these workers face, an International Labor Organization survey published in 2004 compared domestic-worker conditions in Lebanon, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the UAE with domestic-worker conditions in Costa Rica. How many days do you have off per month? the survey asked. In Costa Rica, the average was four to six; in the UAE (whose commercial capital is Dubai), the average was zero. Are you physically, verbally, or sexually abused? In Costa Rica, 14 percent said yes; in the UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain, roughly 50 percent said yes. Is your freedom of movement controlled? In Costa Rica, the answer was generally no; in the three Gulf states, it was overwhelmingly yes. The U.S. State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor has likened Kuwait's worker conditions to "indentured servitude."

All these data reflect those sheikdoms where workers are thought to be treated the best. In Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Qatar, by contrast, just to ask such survey questions would be illegal. Workers' passports in Gulf states are usually confiscated by their masters, and there is little or no recourse to complain of maltreatment. When a migrant worker wants to leave the Gulf, it's not always easy to regain one's passport or afford a plane ticket. Consider the following from the March 27 Gulf Daily News in Bahrain:

Workers of a top garment factory went on a rampage last night following the death of a colleague. More than 500 Asians working for the MRS Fashions, which makes trousers for J C Penny, started damaging the factory's East Riffa premises after their colleague, who was kept in isolation for 15 days due to chicken pox, committed suicide. ... The workers--mainly from India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh--claimed two other workers had committed suicide in the past, another died of a heart attack and five others became insane as a result of harsh working conditions that require them to work for more than 12 hours daily. They blamed the manager of the factory for their ordeal. The workers also alleged physical abuse by floor managers and said they were not getting proper food and medical care.

If ever there was a place deserving of labor unions with teeth, the Gulf is it.

Many countries, unfortunately, are missing the key ingredient for the formation of workers' rights movements: a critical mass of disenfranchised locals who understand the region well enough to get a movement off the ground. It's not surprising, therefore, that the countries where labor has begun to seriously organize are Bahrain and Kuwait--the two Gulf states with a sizable Shia underclass. In Bahrain, Shias are the majority of the local population, though the ruling family is Sunni. Unemployment among Bahrain's Shias is high: Despite the large number of migrant workers, the country's unemployment rate is between 13 and 16 percent--and is believed to be much higher among Shias. In Kuwait, where Shias are only about a third of the population, the labor movement is weaker than Bahrain's, but well ahead of its near-dormant counterparts in Sunni Qatar, Oman, or the UAE.

Who are the union leaders, and what are they saying to their constituents? An American labor activist who recently visited the Gulf has shared with me a collection of Arabic-language newsletters from several nascent unions. Beyond critiquing working conditions and government restrictions on organized labor, they take pains to express an ideology that is radical for the Gulf--a notion of solidarity and social equality that spurns ethnicity or the heated language of religion. Here's an excerpt from a piece by the president of the Bahrain Airport Services union, Abdullah Hussein, from the March 2005 issue of that union's eight-page newsletter:

[T]here is one single truth ... embodied by the capability of labor unions to exact more rights for workers, increase wages, prevent the tyrannical isolation of individuals and groups, improve the conditions and circumstances of labor, and enter into serious negotiations with the administrations of companies. The ability of unions to realize their demands would not be feasible without a workers' conscience--by the members of the union--of the importance of workers' unity, cohesion, mutual assistance, and standing without hesitation behind their unions. Unity and solidarity on the part of workers are the most powerful weapons workers have, by which they will be able to realize their demands and exact their justice and legitimate rights.

Having lived in the Gulf emirate of Dubai for the better part of an academic year in 1999, and traveled around a bit, I can attest: You don't often see these sort of ideas in print. I did see missives on migrant workers--but from the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, which explained strategies for converting those workers to Islam.

Though Gulf unionists' writings show their passion for collective action, it's hard to imagine their efforts amounting to much without a serious nudge from a superpower. Bahrain's labor movement operated semi-underground, without legal protection, during the '80s and '90s, and has won some official status thanks to a forward-looking young king over the past three years. The country is on track to join the WTO and signed a free-trade agreement with the United States--the only one in the Gulf so far--last September. Yet according to the U.S. State Department, Bahrain's labor movement has just 11,300 members, stretched over 40 private-sector and 6 public-sector unions, out of a national workforce in the hundreds of thousands.

Those numbers aren't bad for non-Islamist political groups in a Gulf state, but they're still no great shakes. In Kuwait, where the government is now in FTA talks with the United States., de facto unions have the status of government-sanctioned "committees," and their membership is smaller. Whatever pressure the U.S. may be exerting on these governments to create a legal space for unions to flourish, the governments haven't yielded all that much.

Meanwhile, American labor has raised concerns about White House haste to establish FTAs with the more egregious violators of workers' rights--like Oman and the UAE--in the coming months. The AFL-CIO's Thea Lee told Congress last year, "To grant the UAE an FTA in the present circumstances would mark a significant reversal of previous policy, and a huge step backwards in the cause of workers' rights in the Gulf region."

On March 26, the UAE announced a ban on the use of underage children as camel jockeys in its many races. They were mostly one-and-a-half and two-year-olds from the Indian subcontinent, Yemen, and Sudan--numbering around 2,700, according to the UAE government. This symbolic concession has the effect of eliminating an historic eyesore--the pain those children suffered was manifest to crowds of thousands--but is little more than a token gesture in the grand scheme of UAE labor rights.

In light of the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers on September 11 were Saudis, it's hard to fathom why the United States would even consider ignoring a secular movement in the Gulf with reasonable goals and thousands of members. The American labor official who recently visited the region observed that 4 of the 46 Bahraini unions have woman chiefs--and the umbrella group that unites them has already reached out to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions in Brussels for membership. Compare that with Egypt, where the millions-strong labor movement has been around for decades but still has no official relationship with Brussels.

Professional unions in many Arab countries have been largely ineffectual by international standards--aside from their proclivity for banning "normalization" between their members and worker counterparts in Israel. (Even the Nablus-based Palestinian confederation has been excluded from the rickety Arab labor establishment in Damascus, as punishment for its ties to the Israeli union Histadrut.) The Gulf unions, by contrast, according to the American labor official, desire logistical support and training from the United States--a sentiment you don't hear very often from the traditional Arab labor headquarters in Damascus. To be sure, the Bahraini unions are--and the Kuwaiti unions are about to become--members of the Damascus-based establishment. All the same, their eagerness for American partnership is an opportunity to plant the seeds of meaningful political change.

What can the United States do for these unions in practical terms? In countries where there are no unions, the U.S. government should demand to know why--well before a free trade agreement is signed. Laws restricting public assembly--which exist in many Gulf states--ought to be eased in any country wishing to sign a free-trade agreement with the United States. But the right to assemble is only the first step in a long road that should lead to the rights to strike and collectively bargain--which either don't exist or are severely constrained in all Gulf states.

And it's not just the U.S. government that has a role to play. In countries where unions are already active and feisty, like Bahrain and Kuwait, American labor unions should lend support to their counterparts by offering advice and tactical training.

It would be a shame to see America's ability to push this agenda hindered by domestic politics. Though President Bush recently acknowledged the importance of labor unions in the building of healthy democracies, it's no secret that pro-business conservatives are far from sympathetic to unions in general. At the same time, one hopes that American labor will not be held back by the suspicions of its own left flank, some of whom view any global outreach--especially to the Arab world--as part of a neo-imperialist project. The Bush administration and American labor might seem like odd allies. But if "the world's preeminent bazaar" is to ever become a tolerable place to work, Gulf unions are going to need the help of both.

Joseph Braude is the author of The New Iraq: Rebuilding the Country for Its People, the Middle East, and the World.

Smoke Signals: What Big Tobacco Can Teach About Democratization

2005-06-20T08:16:00.000-04:00

Far too often, America's best-laid plans to promote democracy in friendly Arab countries have gone up in smoke. Consider the State Department's woebegone Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), launched in December 2002 with great fanfare by the Bush administration. Its purpose was to fight the underpinnings of extremism in the Arab world by directly funding Arab activists who want to push for women's rights and political and economic reform. But according to a study by the Brookings Institution, almost two-thirds of the first $103 million MEPI spent ended up benefiting Arab government agencies instead--"subsidizing Arab governments' attempts to build a kinder, gentler autocracy." As for the money that was actually doled out to democracy activists, some recipients have faced retribution from their government. Last Monday's Wall Street Journal reported that the MEPI-funded Egyptian Association for Supporting Democracy had barely gotten off the ground before a pro-government weekly in Cairo accused it of being, in the Journal's words, "pro-Zionist, anti-Egyptian, and anti-Arab." Clerics at two prominent mosques tarred the group's staff as American stooges. The Egyptian parliament opened an investigation into possible wrongdoing by its members. Some lawmakers are trying to prevent more foreign dollars from pouring in. All this over a $150,000 MEPI grant--which had been earmarked for nothing more than a training seminar on how to run for parliament and an in-house film series of Egyptian movies.

When it comes to fomenting non-violent change in the Arab world, where is America's legendary ingenuity and know-how? You're not going to like the answer. The Americans who have been most effective at promoting their agenda in Middle Eastern societies, by any objective measure of success, are neither Washington wonks nor overseas diplomats. They are the owners of big tobacco companies.

Compare MEPI's pitiful record with the following statistics: Between 1990 and 1997, according to the American Cancer Society, while tobacco consumption dropped in South America and the Caribbean by 16.5 percent, North America by 7.6 percent, Western Europe by 5.9 percent, and Eastern Europe by 5 percent, the Middle East saw the opposite trend--a spike in consumption by a staggering 24.3 percent. In 1990, Egypt imported 90 million cigarettes; in 1997, it imported 500 million. Between 1995-96 and 1999-2000, expenditures on tobacco as a percentage of total urban household expenditures in Egypt went down by more than 50 percent; but during the same period, cigarette expenditures as a percentage of total urban household expenditures actually went up by about 5 percent. So at the same time as more traditional forms of tobacco consumption--such as water pipes and snuff--were declining, cigarettes were on the rise.

Of course, smoking is nothing new in the Arab world. But Western companies saw the popularity of their products grow significantly during the 1990s. And they managed to achieve this growth despite a rising stigma against American products in the Arab world--and despite anti-tobacco campaigns waged by Arab governments, Muslim clerics, and the media. American tobacco, pitted against authoritarian regimes and Islamists in a war of words and ideas, fought hard in the Middle East and won. And the question that Washington's befuddled policymakers ought to be asking is how. How--in the very same countries where U.S. government agencies are struggling to promote a noble ideal--have cigarette giants managed to sell millions of death sticks?

Thanks to anti-smoking activists, it's now possible to answer this question. Reams of internal documents subpoenaed from R.J. Reynolds, Philip Morris, and other companies through lawsuits are now available to the public and searchable online. The World Health Organization (WHO) has combed through them and published studies on the firms' operations--including their activities in the Middle East. The documents, which mostly date from the '80s and '90s, tell a story of Byzantine intrigue married to American-style tenacity: Where rubber-stamp Arab parliaments sought to ban smoking in public places and curb cigarette advertising, American companies managed to defeat some of these bills and knock the teeth out of others. Where Muslim clerics spoke out against the dangers of nicotine and issued religious edicts (fatwas) against smoking, Big Tobacco funded Islamic seminaries--and used its leverage to exact alternative fatwas in favor of smoking. Where Arab newspapers, mostly government-controlled, sought to warn their readers of cigarettes' health hazards, the companies manufactured one rebuttal after another--and pressured editors to print them.
They did all this, remarkably, on the cheap. With an annual budget of just a few hundred thousand dollars, big tobacco firms came together in the mid-1980s to set up their own equivalent of MEPI. The Middle East Tobacco Association (META), as it came to be known, had a mandate of "promoting and defending" the companies' agenda in the region. To be sure, where MEPI stands for democracy and freedom, META stood for nicotine and corporate greed. But nothing succeeds like success. So rather than ignore an organization like META because its end goals were reprehensible, Washington policymakers would do well to examine its methods. That is, of course, unless somebody has another bright idea about how to promote an agenda--any agenda--in a region of autocrats, without the use of force.

You might say that META operated in Arab countries much the way lobbying groups and political parties function in the United States--but with fewer restrictions from the legal system. WHO alleges that the group's very formation by rival tobacco firms amounted to a form of collusion. Leaving this possibility aside, however, META does not appear to have otherwise violated the law. It served its members as a private intelligence agency, a p.r. unit, and a springboard for outreach to influential Arabs. All these tasks were centralized under the stewardship of one "secretary"--a fact that made for the smoothest possible pooling of intelligence, ideas, and influence.

At times, the appointed secretary was an Arab national, although one of the most effective META chiefs happens to have been a Westerner, former journalist Robin Allen. According to an internal document from 1990, Allen was chosen for his "good contacts in the region" and put in charge of lobbying "opinion formers and decision-makers in the GCC"--i.e., the Gulf states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE--and "win[ning] goodwill on behalf of the industry." Hired hands like Allen were also instructed to monitor "threats" to the tobacco industry. In 1982, Philip Morris requested intelligence on "anti-smoking activity" in the Arab Gulf Health Ministers' Conference. Five years later, the firm called for a "consultant who can help us monitor and influence the Alexandria-based WHO office [in Egypt] which help [sic] prepare GCC health plans."

From these documents, two big ideas emerge: First, there's an implicit self-awareness that META's activities run counter to the interest of Arab regimes--at least, inasmuch as any regime should be concerned for the health of its citizens. Second, there's a dogged determination to view each autocracy not as a monolith but as a mosaic of individuals with conflicting interests of their own, some of whom are identified as "friends" of the tobacco industry and others as "threats" or "opponents." In this respect, META's behavior in Cairo, for example, has been similar to that of some of the more relentless lobbying groups in Washington today.

Thus in the early '80s, when Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's wife Jihan campaigned for anti-tobacco legislation in parliament, the cigarette companies fought back--inside the parliament itself. Philip Morris won an assurance from legislator Hassan Soleib, who vice-chaired the Committee for Industrial Development, "that no draft law related to industry or trade could pass Parliament without the advice of his committee." No sooner had Egypt's first lady circumvented Soleib, presumably by lobbying her husband, than Philip Morris and another company, Rothmans, teamed up to take the battle to Egypt's health ministry. They sought "technical discussion regarding the implementation ... thereby also achieving a delay." META and its constituent firms fought tooth and nail for ten years to water down any legislation curbing cigarette advertising or smoking in public spaces. A Philip Morris memo in 1993 lays out one component of this strategy: "Seek to defeat the proposed [advertising] ban ... [or] as a fall back, ensure that advertising freedoms ceded are kept to a minimum."

In a sense, META's lobbying efforts mirror those of many multinational corporations in the developing world: Big companies can often find influential locals willing to work on their behalf. But the group's relentlessness is unusual, in that it stood up for years to some of the most powerful people in Egypt--and for a cause that much of the government was dead-set against. In this respect, META's success is an example that would-be American democratizers can learn from: It demonstrates that smart politics can often thwart the intentions of authoritarian regimes--from within.

Beyond the challenge posed to Big Tobacco by the healthier instincts of Arab leaders, another problem the industry faced was the relationship between smoking and Islam. In 1984, an intelligence report from Brown & Williamson in Saudi Arabia advised that "the pressure upon smoking is continuous, with Friday sermons being delivered in the mosques stating that smoking is haram (outlawed by Islam)." In 1987, Philip Morris suggested a new policy objective: "Work to develop a system by which Philip Morris can measure trends on the issue of smoking and Islam. Identify Islamic religious leaders who oppose interpretations of the Koran which would ban the use of tobacco and encourage support for these leaders." The company appears to have done just that, by making a charitable donation to an Islamic seminary in the Gulf. A Philip Morris memo from 1989 proclaims that the company had won "extensive coverage in GCC media for Philip Morris' corporate contribution to the House of Koran, an Islamic cultural institution in Bahrain."

Why Bahrain, of all places? While the document doesn't say for sure, a different source offers some idea of the company's thinking. META secretary Abdullah Borek wrote, "While Bahrain in itself is not such an important market, its function as a forerunner in the Gulf must not be under-estimated." This insight is rather profound. Had a Western tobacco executive sought to influence the teachings of a puritanical seminary in Saudi Arabia, he probably would have been chased out of town. But where Saudi Arabia sets the standard for rigid doctrinal sensibilities, Bahrain occupies an important cultural space of its own: It's a liberal desert island where many Saudis and other Gulf Arabs go to escape for a weekend of pleasure--a middle ground of waywardness that's socially to the left of Saudi Arabia but well to the right of Europe and the United States. Subverting Islamic ideas about smoking in Bahrain was a feasible way to affect popular sentiments all over the region--including in Saudi Arabia--through the back door.
By the early '90s, the companies appear to have been emboldened to push the envelope even further. A 1991 memo from Philip Morris to the secretary of META states that the company "would prefer to maintain the right to hold special promotions during Ramadan." In 1995, Brown & Williamson went so far as to propose a special ad campaign to promote light cigarettes during the fast month, with the slogan, "Now is the time to switch to Lights." According to a company memo:

The Holy Month of Ramadan is a time of fasting, in order to practice self restraint and cleanse the body.

It is therefore a time when Muslims try to live a healthier life and it is believed that many people may try to give up smoking.Smoking during daylight hours is banned until the Iftaar [break-fast] cannon goes off around 6:30 pm. Therefore smokers will not have had a cigarette for around 14 hours.

This being the case it is reasonable to assume that after such a period of abstinence the tar/nicotine levels of a Lights/U.L.T. brand may be more acceptable to consumers than at normal times. This coupled with a desire to lead a healthier life may provide an opportunity to get smokers to switch.

Tobacco executives, who make their living by understanding and manipulating cultural sensibilities, showed an intuitive understanding of the Islamic milieu that some American policymakers still do not grasp. Rather than accept any particular notion of Islam as preached from a pulpit, they viewed the range of Muslim attitudes as part of a living cultural continuum--susceptible to nudges from within and without. It's tragic that this understanding on the part of some Americans has been applied to such unwholesome ends--while not, it seems, to the cause of political reform.

Finally, there is the matter of Big Tobacco and public relations. U.S.-backed reformers aren't the only ones who suffer from negative perceptions in the Middle East. After all, while the region's pundits widely believe that America wants to harm Muslims, they know that cigarettes cause cancer in Muslims. Yet inexplicably, only the latter of these two p.r. nightmares has managed to inspire a dogged counter-campaign.

"I strongly believe," wrote Abdullah Borek at the end of a lengthy META memo, "that any attacks from the other side should be countered in this way"--by sending letters to the editor--"and while we will not be able to change general trends and considerations, I am fairly certain that we can give the other side to understand that they do not own the floor." The group hired a local communications firm to monitor local and regional newspapers for any and all coverage of tobacco. META then began to respond to negative press by submitting letters to the editor and op-ed pieces under assumed names--seeing to it, according to one document, that "no excess duplication appears ... [to] avoid the appearance of a concerted campaign." Articles rebutted the charge that smoking is hazardous to one's health and advocated "smokers' rights," along with the merits of allowing tobacco companies to advertise their product. By the early '90s, the group became more aggressive, calling for "more placements, less caution." META scored dozens of hits in the region's leading papers, noting in one report that "key anti-industry publications had been breached in Saudi Arabia, pan Arab and UAE." Building on this momentum, the group launched a new campaign called "Voice of Reason," which sought to persuade well-known Arab journalists "to develop pro-industry articles," arguing that "it was doubly essential to approach only those well-known writers who had an open mind, and see that he was a) willing and b) well-briefed." In this way, tobacco companies built relationships with editors and publishers, enlisting their support to oppose advertising bans--and occasionally threatening to withhold advertising dollars from publications that opposed the tobacco agenda.

What lessons should be drawn from the story of Big Tobacco in the Middle East? That depends on your perspective. Take the view that META's tactics were inherently anti-democratic--based as they were on complicity with powerful elites and the use of money to buy off public voices--and you have an argument for the U.S. government to reject these methods completely when promoting Arab democracy. The trouble is, while the State Department's MEPI behaves like a troop of Cub Scouts in the Arab world--promising transparency in its strategies and a commitment to "partnership" with Arab governments--its grantees are getting crushed, because their competitors have far fewer scruples. The clerical endowments of Saudi Arabia and Iran finance their own political agendas in much of the region, but they promise neither transparency nor partnership.

Personally, I find it remarkable that many Americans who would agree to the use of force to promote democracy would at the same time eschew the more subtle tactics of a tobacco company to achieve the same ends. In any case, let's not delude ourselves: There is no hope of achieving reform in the Middle East through "partnership" with authoritarian regimes. When done right, democratization is addictive, and hazardous to a dictator's health. When done wrong, it isn't worth doing at all.

Joseph Braude is the author of The New Iraq: Rebuilding the Country for Its People, the Middle East, and the World. This essay first appeared in The New Republic Online on April 18, 2004.

On John Paul II's Record in the Middle East

2005-06-06T19:54:00.000-04:00

Muslim leaders are widely reported to be mourning the death of the Pope. Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, the ranking cleric at Egypt's preeminent Al Azhar Islamic seminary, said his death was "a great loss not only to the Catholic church but to the Islamic world." Senior Muslim Brotherhood preacher Yusuf al Qardawi wrote, "He was a man of peace who stood firmly against the Iraq war and the Israeli separation wall." The leadership of Hamas conveyed its condolences to the press and urged the Vatican "to maintain its position in support of our people and our cause, and focus its efforts on steering its followers to defend the rights of our Palestinian people to confront the continuous Zionist aggression, which targets Muslims and Christians..." Sympathies poured in from Syrian president Bashar Assad, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, and Arab League chief Amr Moussa, among others. Former Malaysian premier Mahathir Muhammad recalled that Pope John Paul II had "supported the Palestinians and condemned their victimization. He also ... opposed the occupation of Iraq." Arabic-language satellite networks, according to the Associated Press, "have launched a media blitz for the death of Pope John Paul II, giving Mideast viewers hours of live broadcasts from the Vatican and programs on the pontiff's life--coverage rarely given even to the region's leaders."

In the midst of all these tributes, however, one thing has been lost: When it came to the Middle East, Pope John Paul II largely failed to promote social justice and religious freedom. His political strategy in the region was in many ways the very opposite of his political strategy in Eastern Europe. The Pope took a hard line against communist governments, but in the Middle East, his strategy was too often one of appeasement--not only toward authoritarian regimes but also toward powerful religious-political movements that preach intolerance toward minorities. Partly as a result, the percentage of Christians in the population of many Middle Eastern countries continued its precipitous decline over the past three decades. Ironically, the Muslim Middle East grew more religiously homogenous and less tolerant at the same time as the Christian West was growing more religiously diverse.

It's impossible to know for sure why so many Islamist leaders and Arab heads of state were so generous in their praise of John Paul this week. But here's one theory: They liked him because he didn't hold them to the same standards to which he held Poland's Wojciech Jaruzelski and the USSR's Mikhail Gorbachev. They liked him because whereas he successfully fought for religious freedom, equality, and social justice in Eastern Europe, in the Middle East he did not.

Why did John Paul come to adopt a stance of appeasement toward Middle Eastern leaders? He may have concluded early in his papacy that critical engagement with the Muslim world doesn't pay. Consider the results of the Pope's correspondence with Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini in the early 1980s. I first saw the letters on a visit to the Iranian city of Isfahan in 1998. A lot of people saw them, because they were on display in glass casing at the Khomeini Museum. According to a paper by Yusuf Progler, professor of social sciences at the Zayed University campus in Dubai, the Pope had initiated the correspondence, noting the "increase of tension" between the Carter administration and Iran. He urged the Ayatollah to consider reestablishing relations with the United States government. Khomeini refused. "Our militant, noble nation took such cutting-off of relations as a good omen and celebrated it with rejoicing," he wrote. Khomeini asked the Pope to tell Carter to "treat the nations that want absolute independence--and which do not want to be aligned with any power in the world--according to humane criteria." A few months later, the Pope wrote back with a second request: He asked the Supreme Leader for an assurance that Iran's ancient Christian communities would not be harmed, and would be permitted to worship and study their faith as before. Khomeini's reply was disheartening. He alleged that Christian schools in Iran had been used as a base for Western espionage, and asked:

How can I tell my nation that Christian clergy are [not] in the service of the superpowers? Why did the Pope make no comment when our young people were killed on the streets? ... Does Christ act well toward the rich and badly toward the oppressed? Do you know what they did to our country? ... How can I reply to the oppressed people when they ask us why we defend these clergymen who don't say a word against the superpowers and oppression, even of the American people?

Perhaps the Pope drew a lesson from his interactions with Khomeini: Christian leaders who intercede with Muslim politicians on behalf of the West are liable to gain little and lose much. Twenty years later, Iran's once-strong Chaldean Christian community, which falls under the hierarchy of the Vatican, has dwindled to 8,000 people. The population is smaller even than the country's beleaguered Jewish community, which numbers about 11,000, according to the U.S. State Department. What's more, the strained relations between the Vatican and Iran have also become a problem for the embattled Christians of Iraq--thanks in part to Iran's growing influence there. Some newly empowered Shia politicians who enjoy the Iranian government's support have begun to call for the application of Islamic law in Iraq, which could officially make Christians second-class citizens. Moreover, Christians themselves have become prime targets for kidnappers; in January, a Catholic bishop was abducted.

Following the Pope's early failures with Khomeini, the Vatican during the past 20 years has largely taken a soft approach to the Middle East, eschewing stern moral language in its dealings with Islamists and instead trying to engage them in dialogue. The problem has been that the Vatican's ostensible partners in this exchange had different ideas about what dialogue meant.

John Paul II's years as Pope coincided with an unprecedented proliferation of hardline Islamist teachings of both the Shia and Sunni variety. Revolutionary Iran's oil-rich clerical endowments subsidized books and mosques that molded millions of minds in Pakistan, Lebanon, the Gulf states, and beyond, while the Saudi Muslim World League and its many subsidiaries bankrolled Wahhabi firebrands and their teachings across the Sunni Muslim world. The latter project enjoyed Western acquiescence, particularly during the Reagan years, because it helped recruit fighters for the Jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan. I have seen many of these books, in Persian and Arabic, in markets across the Middle East. They conjure a world of shadowy international conspiracies--Western leaders and Jews using Catholic churches, Masonic lodges, and multinational corporations as their agents to plunder Palestine and enslave Muslims. Once you have been through a few of these volumes, as many Muslims have, you won't easily view your Christian neighbor the same way again--let alone the odd Jewish neighbor. Nor will you be able to see much good in the Pope's visit to a synagogue in 1986, or his establishment of full diplomatic ties to Israel in 1994, or his apologies to world Jewry for the Holocaust at various times in the '90s. On the contrary, you will find, in all these developments, a validation of the very conspiracies you were taught. Here is how Amir Said, a commentator at the website Islamway.com, summarized the Pope's career this week:

This Pope's life or death does not concern me much, because the Jews have already established themselves in the Vatican. The arrow from the Zionist bow has struck, and the matter is no longer confined to one man alone. Rather, a base of Jewish hegemony has anchored itself on the Catholic religion. ... The Pope, in truth, is a distinguished product of joint Catholic-Jewish manufacture. His production passed through a number of stages and religious and intelligence plots of the highest precision. Some of these plots are wrapped in the strictest secrecy, while others have today come to be revealed to researchers.

Now try and imagine how such a mindset would process the Vatican's overtures for dialogue with Muslims. In 1997, Ahmad Sakr, director of the Foundation for Islamic Knowledge in southern California, joined a delegation of Muslim leaders on a visit to Rome for several weeks of discussion with Catholic counterparts. The coordinating body was the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue (PCID). The Council's statement, which cites an encyclical letter of Pope John Paul II, explains: "Dialogue is a two-way communication. It implies speaking and listening, giving and receiving ... It includes witness to one's own faith as well as an openness to that of the other. It is not a betrayal of the mission of the Church, nor is it a new method of conversion to Christianity."

Sakr returned to California and published a four-part essay on his experiences in Rome in the Arabic-language Chicago-based newspaper Al Zaitounah. Under a photograph of Sakr shaking hands with the Pope, he wrote the following:

I said to myself that if the prophet Abraham, peace be upon him, came to visit the Vatican, the first thing he would have done would have been to break all of these idols and destroy them from existence entirely. ... The Vatican has founded three active university institutions to teach Islam from within--its sole goal being to figure out how to instill doubt among the Muslims in their belief and in their faith. ... They should sincerely repent to God, and they should not take Jesus as the son of God.

The Vatican had reached out to a firebrand; and the results were clearly nothing to brag about. Moreover, among the long list of guests whom the Pontifical Council invited to meet with the Pope over the years, there was nothing unique about Sakr's political profile. As recently as January 2004, the ninth annual PCID conference brought the Pope together with Abdullah Nasif, head of the Saudi Muslim World League--an endowment that has helped disseminate anti-Christian books. Of course, it's always your ideological opponents with whom dialogue and bridge-building are most important. But where was the tangible improvement for Arab Christians--or for the Middle East as a whole--that such meetings brought about?

Dialogue, not the moral stridency with which he so frequently spoke about other issues, was the Pope's modus operandi when it came to the Middle East. And so rather than take Arab and Islamist leaders to task for their shared role in creating a climate that was hostile to Arab Christians, the Church too often placed the lion's share of the blame on Israel. Why have Arab Christians left Palestinian territories? According to the Catholic Near East Welfare Association ("a papal agency for humanitarian and pastoral support"), "The principal reason for the dramatic rise in Christian emigration has been the continuing Israeli military occupation and the denial of the sovereignty of a Palestinian state wherein Christian Arabs could feel at home economically, politically, culturally, and spiritually." And why have Arab Christians left Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon? Under the section heading, "Christian Emigration from Jordan," the group writes that "Students of migratory phenomena have pinpointed a series of factors, which have triggered or accelerated" the trend of Christians leaving Jordan and other Arab countries. The first item: The "Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has continued unabated since 1948." What you won't find in any of these reports is the frankness of Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, who retired in late 2003 after serving the Pope as Foreign Minister for 13 years. He told Reuters, "There are too many majority Muslim countries where non-Muslims are second-class citizens"; and he singled out "the extreme case of Saudi Arabia, where freedom of religion is violated absolutely--no Christian churches and a ban on celebrating Mass, even in a private home. Just like Muslims can build their houses of prayer anywhere in the world, the faithful of other religions should be able to do so as well."

The disconnect between these studies and Tauran stems from a painful reality: The former reflect the input of bishops from local Arab dioceses, where political and social pressures tend to influence what they can write. Contrast the Catholic Near East Welfare Association report with the following straight talk from Iraq, post-Saddam Hussein, where bishops now enjoy a measure of freedom, at least from government supervision: Chaldean bishop Rabban Al Qas explains, of Islamists: "In the time of Saddam Hussein they acted secretly; they would send anonymous threatening messages, urging even bishops and priests to convert to Islam. ... Under Saddam Hussein there was a veiled persecution." With this in mind, the Vatican's blaming of Zionism for the emigration of Christians from Arab countries surely should be taken with a grain of salt.

Perhaps the best-known example of the Pope's appeasement strategy in the Middle East came in 2001, when he met with Syrian president Bashar Assad and top Muslim clerics in Syria. At the time, an Arab journalist reported on the speech Assad gave in the Pope's presence:
Assad pointed to the atrocities that the Israelis in Palestine are perpetrating and the perpetual aggression that they are carrying out on the Islamic and Christian holy places in an attempt to kill all the principles of the divine religions, with the same mentality by which [they perpetrated] the treachery against Christ, and his torture, and similarly did they attempt to double-cross the prophet Muhammad, peace and blessing be upon him.

The Pope turned the other cheek at Assad's nod to old-fashioned "Christ-killer" rhetoric, and was subsequently treated to another lecture on the Palestinian cause from Syrian Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro during his visit to the Umayyad mosque in Damascus. The fact that the Pope was made to listen to the central message of Arab-Islamist populism was Syria's way of saying, We are in the driver's seat today--not the Pope. When it came to relations between the Catholic Church and Arab and Islamist leaders during the last 25 years, that too often seemed to be the case.

To be sure, the challenge of promoting religious freedom and social justice in the Middle East is in many ways more complex than fighting communism. In communist countries, freedom and liberty were stifled by an identifiable leadership. In the Middle East, by contrast, social justice is hindered in large part by authoritarian regimes, while the principle of religious equality is undermined by transnational religious-political movements that are unaccountable to a single government. There are other differences as well. The Pope's Polish background made it natural for him to fight communism in his native Eastern Europe; any efforts by the Catholic Church to fight for religious freedom in the Muslim world would invariably be tinged by the history of the Crusades; and the situation of Christians in the Middle East (where they are a religious minority oppressed by a Muslim majority) is quite different from the situation in the Soviet bloc (where Christians were a large majority oppressed by an atheist minority). And to his credit, the Pope did not always opt for appeasement in the Middle East. He traveled to Sudan, where Christians faced genocide and slavery, in 1993; he also beatified Sister Josephine Bakhita, a Sudanese slave, acknowledging the dignity of her long-oppressed community.

Moreover perhaps in a very narrow sense, the Pope's approach served Middle Eastern Christians well. His support for Palestinians and opposition to both U.S. wars in Iraq helped to carve out a political space for Arab Christians to feel a bit more secure in their home countries. Syrian Cardinal Ignace Moussa Daoud put it well in May 2003: "There was a big danger that Christians would be considered allies of the Americans, but thanks be to God all this was avoided because of the positions taken by the Pope and the Vatican." Palestine and Iraq were on the lips of nearly every Muslim cleric and Arab head of state who praised the Pope's memory this week. It is difficult to imagine a similar outpouring of Arab and Muslim sympathy for the departed leader had his position on those two issues been different.

But in the long run, the Pope's soft stance toward dictators and Islamists hasn't served anyone well--not Christians, not Jews, not Muslims. In Latin America, the Pope spoke clearly for social justice; in Eastern Europe, he spoke clearly for religious freedom; but in the Middle East he allowed himself to be lectured by Bashar Assad about how the Jews killed Christ, and bad-mouthed by some of the very Islamists whom he had welcomed into the Vatican. His successor must be shrewd and demanding in the Middle East--and willing to be loved a little bit less by the region's self-appointed leaders.

Joseph Braude is the author of The New Iraq: Rebuilding the Country for Its People, the Middle East, and the World.

Compare and Contrast: Why Farid Ghadry Is Not the Ahmad Chalabi of Syria

2005-05-16T22:17:00.000-04:00

Pity the Arab exile who dares to preach democracy in Ahmed Chalabi's wake. Syrian-born businessman Farid Ghadry has formed a political movement that aims to topple the regime of Bashar Assad--and he is taking flak from journalists and pundits across the political spectrum. In Slate, Elisabeth Eaves wrote flippantly of Ghadry: "Remember that name: He could soon be cashing millions in U.S. government checks. ... The road to Damascus may be closed for now, but if Ghadry can just sit tight--and save a few million for PR--collective amnesia ought to have us ready for another Middle East invasion by the early 2010s." A Washington Post story on Ghadry's high-level meeting at the State Department last week noted that his Syria Reform Party is "often compared to the Iraqi National Congress led by former exile Ahmed Chalabi." Lest the meaning of that comparison be misunderstood, the article quoted a professor at Georgetown observing: "Its membership is extremely thin and is not taken seriously. It's almost unheard-of in Syria." (Missing from the Post story, incidentally, was the disclosure that the Georgetown professor, Murhaf Jouejati, isn't exactly a disinterested party. His father served as Syrian Ambassador to the United States under Hafez al Assad. As to the veracity of his claim that Syria doesn't take Ghadry seriously, it's worth noting that Ghadry was taken seriously enough to merit an attack in the official Syrian daily Tishreen two days earlier.) TNR, too, has cast doubt on Ghadry: Two years ago Eli Lake quoted a former American ambassador to Syria saying that it would be "ridiculous" to expect Syrian liberals to generate "any meaningful political opposition."

What explains this widespread antipathy? We all agree (or should) that the world would be better off without the Syrian regime--after all, it once mowed down 25,000 men, women, and children over a long weekend--which makes the knee-jerk hostility of pundits toward Ghadry a bit of a mystery. Having surveyed coverage of Ghadry, listened to the Reform Party of Syria's Arabic-language broadcasts, read the group's literature, watched Ghadry debate on Al Jazeera, and reached him by phone in Paris, this is my best-guess explanation for why pundits are so skeptical: America's questionable experiences with Chalabi have left many commentators with an allergy to liberal Arab exiles. And that's too bad, because Syria is not Iraq. And Farid Ghadry is not Ahmed Chalabi.

The major difference between the two men is the circumstances under which they have sought change in their respective countries. Chalabi spent much of the 1990s trying to provoke the international community into action against Saddam. In many ways, he had no choice, because much of the international community would have been happy to forget about Saddam altogether. The same cannot be said of Syria today. U.N. Security Council resolution 1559, which calls on "foreign forces" (meaning Syria) to withdraw troops and spooks from Lebanon, enjoys the staunch backing of the United States and France--not to mention the backing of hundreds of thousands of Lebanese protestors. The assassination of former Lebanese President Rafik Hariri, allegedly on instructions from Damascus, has only served to galvanize that movement and further isolate Syria in its region. President Assad was rebuffed by both Saudi Arabia and Egypt over the past month when he appealed to those governments for help.

According to The Washington Post, Jacques Chirac believes that the Syrian government probably wouldn't survive a withdrawal from Lebanon. He may be right: A withdrawal would badly hurt Syria's economy. Remittances from Syrians working in Lebanon are an economic lifeline to thousands of Syrian families, and Damascus's private sector has profited from its ability to put the squeeze to merchants in Beirut. Unlike Saddam's Iraq, Syria lacks oil wealth with which to tempt foreign powers in exchange for political support. Should Syrian Kurds stage an uprising in the country's northeast, or a few hundred protestors lie down in traffic in Damascus, they will find a world of solidarity--and the regime will have to face that solidarity virtually alone. Assad doesn't have Washington lobbyists, think tanks, or Islamist groups to rally to his cause as the Saudis do. Nor does he have the support of Israel's backers in the West, as the Egyptian and Jordanian regimes sometimes do.

But Assad still has a few chips left: the support of Vladimir Putin and Iran's mullahs, some vestiges of pan-Arab solidarity in Middle Eastern societies, and the stage fright of Syrian opposition activists. It's these last two chips that Farid Ghadry and the Reform Party are trying to take away.

On the matter of pan-Arab solidarity, the difference between Chalabi and Ghadry is plain to any Arabic-speaking couch potato. Chalabi had a legendary distaste for pan-Arab media. He rarely appeared on satellite networks prior to the Iraq invasion, and when he did, he often spoke English. This was indicative of his belief in Iraqi exceptionalism--that his country's suffering was unique and incomparable to that of its neighbors, who didn't truly care for the Iraqi people and therefore did not deserve to hear from him. Most Iraqis weren't watching, because Saddam had clamped down on satellite technology; the punishment for owning a dish was five years in prison. And so Chalabi focused on reaching Americans and Brits, in order to persuade them that Saddam posed an imminent threat. Nor was he particularly charming on Arabic TV when he occasionally did appear. I'd venture to say his popularity in Arab countries other than Iraq descended with his public appearances.

Ghadry, by contrast, appears on Al Jazeera and other networks fairly frequently. He can't claim Syrian exceptionalism, because he calls for democratic change in a Sunni majority country--and Sunni majorities in other countries are watching. So he emphasizes not the differences but rather the commonality of suffering between Syrians under Assad and Arabs elsewhere. His arguments advocate democracy and reform while repudiating the anti-American tropes that Arab police states typically use to stay in power. Witness the following exchange from Al Jazeera this past Tuesday between Ghadry and George J. Hajjar, a gray-haired supporter of the Syrian regime, senior lecturer at Notre Dame University-Lebanon, and author of a book called America in the Era of the Fourth Reich. The subject of the debate was whether "the American invasion of Iraq had been necessary to push the Arab world toward reform and change." Hajjar had this to say:

Though Bush is calling for democracy, America now is in the era of a Fourth Reich--a new Nazism. ... America, in light of the American political and economic system, is a kleptocratic state--a state of thieves and killers--and the proof of this is that those who rule it are WorldCom, Enron, Martin Lockheed [sic], and others of this sort. ... The last person who can talk about democracy is George Bush. ... He and his Zionists form a grave danger to all humanity, and to civilization, not to mention America itself. I say with all pride, I hope that hundreds of thousands of Arabs would go to Iraq and fight this invading imperialism--and that would not be a fault, but rather an honor for us--to defend Iraq and fight the occupation in Iraq. It's not a crime...

Nothing unusual about Hajjar's rhetoric; these tropes are repeated every day in much of the region. The difference is, there's usually no rebuttal. Enter Ghadry:

First of all there is a violent attack on America by Professor George. ... I had thought that this program was to talk about freedom and democracy and the impact of Iraq on these freedoms and democracy. ... I want to ask Professor George, is he for these freedoms and democracies or against them? This is a question that he must answer, because it is the crux of this discussion. ... I am certain that there are many people who hate America, but as someone who has lived in America 30 years, I know that country well, and never did a moment come that I felt that America was racist toward me, and I'm a Sunni Muslim. But let's leave that aside. We consider and believe that the freedom and democracy that came by way of the Iraq war is what is helping the Arab peoples toward freedom and democracy today, and we have seen proofs in Lebanon, and the pressures and demonstrations that happened in Egypt, and we have seen it in Saudi Arabia, and we will see it in other countries and in Syria soon.

In response, Hajjar lost his cool. He became, remarkably, more irate. He hurled personal invective at Ghadry and accused America of assassinating Lebanon's Hariri. Ghadry hit back, demanding he furnish proof of this accusation. At which point Hajjar took to flailing his arms and yelling at the top of his lungs. The clip-on mike eventually fell off Hajjar's lapel--affording Ghadry an opportunity to riff a while longer without interruption. The debate was stunning television. It lay bare the authoritarian mindset and the vexation that a mindset experiences when challenged. Based on the running poll of Al Jazeera viewers, moreover, Ghadry appears to have influenced Arab audiences. Before the debate began, only 13 percent of viewers polled agreed "that the American invasion of Iraq had been necessary to push the Arab world toward reform and change." By the program's midpoint, with over a thousand more votes emailed in, the proportion had swelled nearly three-fold, to 34.9 percent.

Ghadry, who denies receiving funds from any government, makes a more effective case in Arabic for replacing pan-Arabism with democracy than any American diplomat I've ever watched. So if the "millions in U.S. government checks" the Slate writer joked about are being spent on somebody else, they're being wasted.

The other chip Assad holds--the stage fright of his domestic opponents--stems from a classic authoritarian move he made when first he took the helm after his father's death in 2000. The young president announced his intention to introduce sweeping reforms in Syria--encouraging some intellectuals to openly criticize government corruption, the pervasive security apparatus, and the country's enduring "emergency laws." This period of openness, known as the "Damascus spring," ended with a sweeping crackdown on the dissidents who had reared their heads; several hundred of them remain in prison today. Still, that brief period of liberalization can be taken as evidence that debate and dissent exist in Syria, even though it is now confined to people's homes owing to a climate of fear. Recent developments since the Iraq war suggest that opponents of the regime are at last regaining some of that old gumption--and might be profoundly emboldened by the belief that a new Syrian opposition party enjoys the support of the United States. Witness the March 2004 riots in the Syrian Kurdish towns of Qamishli and Hasake, in which 14 Kurds died, or the thousands of signatures on an online petition calling for a lifting of the emergency laws collected by a new group called Restoration of Civil Society in Syria. These cracks in the wall of Assad's regime have no analogue in the late years of Saddam's Iraq.

Unlike Chalabi, who would have had difficulty using mass media to communicate with his followers inside Iraq, Ghadry can reach Syrians--and does. Satellite penetration in Syria is relatively high, so there is reason to believe that some of Ghadry's countrymen saw his appearance on Al Jazeera this week--some may even have been among the voters backing him in the Internet poll. (The Georgetown professor's claim that Ghadry is "almost unheard-of in Syria" did not seem to take his TV ubiquity into account.) In addition, the Reform Party's radio broadcasts parse news for the Syrian interior in ways designed to encourage dissent. One 60-minute segment, archived on the Radio Free Syria website, is a panel discussion on the Qamishli riot called, "Uprising or Fracas?" The host tries to engage Syrian callers in a debate on the political significance of the violence--and whether a bigger uprising might lie in the future. Another program features the voice of Syrian poet Marwan Uthman, who was arrested and deported by Bashar in 2003 for sticking it to the regime in verse. Reached by phone on a visit to Paris this week, Ghadry explained to me how he views the purpose of these broadcasts, and media outreach to Syria in general:

We're trying to pull the rug from under the Baathists. They have a strong identity, so we want to dissolve that identity so that we can psychologically hurt them. ... The Iraqi National Congress, there was no consultation with the inside. But you have to remember that for the INC, there were limited tools--Internet was just starting to happen, in '98, '99, Al Jazeera was still young. We're looking and saying, okay, we can take advantage of that.

The fact that Chalabi's audience was primarily Western and Ghadry's is primarily Arab goes to the heart of their respective strategies. While Chalabi sought to foment a foreign invasion of Iraq, Ghadry seems to believe that, with the help of strong diplomatic pressure from overseas, he can actually bring about change from within Syria.

Dream on, you may say. Ghadry, 50, a father of four who likes to drive his kids to soccer practice in Bethesda, Maryland, is hardly the picture of a revolutionary. Yet this soccer dad may well be undermining Assad's regime among Arabs more successfully than Chalabi ever undermined Saddam's. American pundits may sneer. But then again, American pundits aren't the people Farid Ghadry needs to win over.

Joseph Braude is the author of The New Iraq: Rebuilding the Country for Its People, the Middle East, and the World. This essay first appeared in The New Republic Online on April 1, 2005.

Playing From Memory: The Sound of a Culture Flash Frozen in Time and Thawed a Generation Later

2005-05-03T18:39:00.000-04:00

Israeli-born composer and performer Yair Dalal has never been to Baghdad, home to his parents until they fled in the early 1950s together with 125,000 other Jews. But it's that city's musical heritage, as it sounded when his family departed half a century ago, that comes alive in Dalal's technique and improvisational style today. His music is the sound of a culture flash-frozen in time and thawed a generation later.

Learning the music of your parents' generation doesn't seem unusual. But as far as the Iraqi Jewish diaspora is concerned, the icy excesses of nationalism in the Middle East have created cultural barriers that make Dalal's achievement, sadly, unique. Among the many who were forced to flee Baghdad, tarred as Zionist traitors, were some great musicians--including more than half the players in the legendary Iraqi National Orchestra. Their weekly radio concert in Baghdad had aired live across the region for years. They formed a new ensemble in Israel, struggling to reach the same Arab listeners via short wave, but it's hard to connect with an audience you can no longer actually meet. And it proved too difficult to build up a critical mass of fans inside the Jewish state; Arabic music was taboo among Israelis during the early decades of conflict. So by the time Dalal went out looking for an Iraqi music teacher in the late '70s, he found some of the all-time greats selling parsley and scallions in a Tel Aviv market. They probably thought he'd be better off working for a credit-card company, but they taught him their licks anyway.

A classically trained violinist, Dalal learned to play the oud--a 13-stringed precursor to the European lute. Shaped like a giant pear sliced down the middle, you tune it much like a violin but strum it, mandolin-style, with a feather pick. Its deep, hollow body resonates with every nuance of finger pressure on the neck or friction between pick and string--an audio readout of the performer's temperament and skill almost as visceral as the sound of his own voice. The range of melody, moreover, is vast--meaning not the distance from lower to upper registers but the wide open space in between each note. Intervals are negotiable because the oud, unlike a mandolin or guitar, has no frets. Melodies do cartwheels around the rigid semitones of modern Western music; they stretch back in time to medieval and ancient scales that mixed quarter- and three-quarter-tone intervals among the wholes and halves. These are the sounds that some historians of Western music used to claim had been lost for all time, after the Roman church clamped down on ancient Greek chants. In fact, the ancient scales lived on in Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, and the eastern Mediterranean coastline and were codified by musical philosophers in ninth-century Baghdad. (Click here to listen to a few of these scales, known in Arabic as maqamat, played on the oud in streaming audio.) Chains of teachers and students passed them on for generations in Iraq and bequeathed them to players in the twentieth century--in spite of efforts, ancient and modern, to suppress them.

Plato's Republic had outlawed a few scales, arguing that certain musical intervals were dangerous because they incited violent acts or aroused sexual urges. Khomeini, during his years as a Muslim jurist in southern Iraq, issued a similar edict; his ban holds among some religious Muslims even now. But it's not easy to eradicate intervals as tiny as the space between two fingers. Only the prevalence of the electronic synthesizer, in bands across the Middle East today, threatens at last to snuff them out. The irony of Yair Dalal's musical journey backward on the oud to the sound of his Iraqi roots is that trends in Arab, Israeli, Turkish, and Greek dance music have meanwhile converged. Up-tempo and harmonically streamlined, they all sound equally distant from his retro playing style.

Listening to one of Dalal's first albums, Al Ol (Najema, 1995), you can hear the past meet Dalal's other influences to tell a modern story. The first track, "Solo Arak," opens with the breathy sound of the Nay, an Arab shepherd's flute, riffing on a couple of old-time scales. The initial flute phrase is modest--a slow flirtation with three or four notes of the melancholy Nahawand scale--pausing and starting, pausing again then starting up more deliberately. Then, a tiny transformation: The same narrow melodic space is reexplored through the more angular and suspenseful Hijaz scale. The riff uneasily resolves on a low note, which is held at length before an extra gust of breath effects a sudden octave-high jump. From this peak the notes climb down again, returning to Nahawand, and at last greet the strumming sound of Dalal's oud. The two instruments state the theme in unison, which is then sung--surprise--not in Arabic but in modern Hebrew, and in the somber guttural accent of an Iraqi immigrant. Heavy traditional Iraqi percussion drives the tune forward. The words are by Iraqi-Israeli poet Ronny Someck:

Black ants crawl over nicotine-stained fingertips
dipping a mint leaf into the glass.
The alcohol dismantles Abd al Wahhab's "Cleopatra."
Now all is clear
solo violin
solo flute
solo oud
we're solo arak

These words evoke an image that the children of Jewish immigrants from Iraq (myself included) know well: An old-timer from Baghdad, living below the poverty line in Israel among ants, listens to a broadcast of the beloved Egyptian composer Muhammad Abd al Wahhab on the radio. He nurses a glass of arak--clear hard liquor made from anise, which turns cloudy with a cube of ice and which Iraqis like to drink with fresh mint. The song manages to fuse a timeless Mesopotamian sound with the very modern nostalgia that's felt today in the Iraqi diaspora for a not-so-distant past.

Other tracks on the album combine the same modern reality and ancient memory in more subtle ways. Dalal's most traditional performances are his unaccompanied Oud improvisations, known in Arabic as taqsim, which build in intensity and usually end in an old Baghdadi Jewish folk song--like "Taqsim Eliyahu," the second track. Arabic music fans who listen can tell that Dalal's solos are a marked departure from the flashy style of Egyptian virtuoso Farid al Atrash, whose famous oud riffs from the '50s and '60s are imitated all over the Arab world today. Dalal's taqsim is more brooding--almost meditative in its rhythmless contemplation of the scales--perhaps evoking a time in the Middle East when the pace of life was slower.

The album's title track, "Al Ol," is an ensemble work that explores the borders of modern Israel--literally. "Ol" is the word that Bedouin in the Jordan Valley use for a swirling desert wind, common in Israel's eastern and southern fringes, that emits a wailing sound. Sometimes an Ol can actually be seen, because it whips thousands of specks of sand, in mid-air, into the vague shape of a cone. There's a legend that each Ol is the ghost of someone who has earned God's wrath (the word is also the origin of the English word, "ghoul"). An insistent three-beat rhythm played on the daf--a hand-held frame-drum--captures the swirling pattern in sound, while Dalal's oud, the voice of a singer, and a clarinet embody the Ol's tormented soul. It's hard not to hear a hint of klezmer music--eastern European Jewish soul--in the angst-filled blasts of the clarinet. But the ambience is much darker here than in a klezmer ensemble. In its fusion of musical styles, metaphors, and even disparate ethnic motifs, "Al Ol" is at once Iraqi, Ashkenazi, and quintessentially Israeli.

I meet Yair Dalal for coffee whenever I visit Tel Aviv and he's in town. We both travel a lot, but Dalal--like his elder Iraqi music teachers--is prevented by his Israeli citizenship from visiting the places his heart craves most to see. Baghdad has always topped the list, but there are other dream destinations. "I want to go to Saudi Arabia," he once told me in Hebrew.

"Saudi?" I asked. "Mega-malls, gaudy houses, chandeliers in every room, crystal dolphins on the coffee table?"

"Desert," he replied. "Friendships for life. Wide open spaces."

He has formed memories, through his music, of places he has never seen. These memories are all beautiful and loving.

Joseph Braude is the author of The New Iraq: Rebuilding the Country for Its People, the Middle East, and the World. This essay first appeared in The New Republic Online, March 30, 2005.

The League of Extraordinary Autocrats

2005-04-27T09:44:00.000-04:00

Here's the good news from the Middle East this week: In an Al Jazeera poll of 17,955 viewers just before the Arab League's two-day summit in Algiers, thousands of people voted for "democracy and political reform" as their number one priority--so many, in fact, that they almost equaled the number that voted for "supporting the Palestinians" (26 percent for the former, 27.6 percent for the latter, with a 3 percent margin of error). Furthermore, "independence for Iraq" came in near the bottom at sixth place--trounced by such causes as "improving the status of human rights" and "fighting poverty and unemployment." All these results together suggest that Arab societies are beginning to assign greater importance to development and liberty than to the hot-button issues of Palestine and Iraq. That's a historic and exciting shift.

Now here's the bad news: As far as the region's most powerful decision-makers are concerned, Arab public opinion still doesn't matter. The thirteen-nation Arab League summit did little more this week than stymie the latest initiatives for peace and democratization: Jordan's proposal to improve Arab relations with Israel was nixed; the West's pressure on Syria was denounced as "foreign intervention"; and political reform was mentioned "only in passing," according to The New York Times.

Sadly, the big winners this week were neither Arab societies nor even their unelected leaders. That trophy belongs to Hamas, which has been working for many years to discredit any discussion of Israeli-Arab normalization. Hamas played no small part this week in helping to torpedo Jordan's peace plan. Also, honorable mention goes to an obscure Western consulting firm that is reported to have begun its own dialogue with terrorist groups in Lebanon; more on that in a moment. The trouble with both these mini-victories is that they are a blow to mainstream Arab aspirations.

Underlying the week's many political maneuvers is a familiar tag-team alignment: On one side, authoritarian Arab regimes like Syria and Egypt are clinging to power and Islamist movements like Hezbollah and Hamas are clinging to their weapons. On the other side, Israel and Jordan want to bolster prospects for regional change, for starters by making Islamist militias obsolete. That means encouraging Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to disarm Hamas and cutting off the umbilical cord that ties Hezbollah to Syria. It also means formally ending the Arab League's opposition to Israel. This week's Al Jazeera poll seems to indicate that many Arabs would like to see the latter team succeed. But of course, it's easier said than done. From the seaside splendor of Sharm al Sheikh back in February, Israeli foreign minister Silvan Shalom told journalists that as many as ten Arab governments "have a diplomatic representative in Israel," suggesting their willingness to sign a peace deal. The government of Jordan's King Abdullah II has worked toward that goal over the past few weeks. Jordanian Foreign Minister Hani Mulki argued to Arab leaders that Jordan's peace proposal would strengthen Ariel Sharon's hand to dismantle Jewish settlements (although he later backed off somewhat, clarifying that he was not advocating "normalization," a loaded term among Arab leaders fearful of backlash by groups like Hamas).

Unfortunately, that proposition had too many downsides for the tag team on the other side. The authoritarian Gulf states are struggling to beat down crops of homegrown Al Qaeda-style insurgents--so why should they cede a rhetorical chip by caving to Israel? Egypt's leadership has already paid its dues to Washington by brokering a temporary Hamas-Islamic Jihad truce and permitting select opposition parties to run for the presidency in May--so why take more heat in the region by siding against the Islamists now? Lebanon's hands are tied. And though they are supposedly being untied in excruciatingly slow motion by Syria, they may be retied again if Syria somehow deflects the international pressure it now faces. As for Hamas and other armed militias, blocking normalization with Israel is one of the reasons they wake up in the morning. And this time, it's also a matter of prestige: They want to claim victory in the Palestinian Intifada. Ten new peace deals (or even two or three) between Israel and Arab states would make it clear those groups had lost.

All these considerations have converged in light of America's pressure on Arab autocracies--strengthened by pressure from Arab societies--to reform. Historically, the best way to deflect such pressure has been to claim that it was inauthentic--nothing more than an imperialist imposition--and speak out against the Zionists for good measure. The need to do that again, and do so convincingly, is why Islamists and some Arab rulers are now, in effect, each other's allies of convenience.

Thus the message from the rostrum at the Arab League summit was familiar. Speakers repeated platitudes from the last big summit in 2002, as if Arab geopolitics had barely changed in the past three years. Having ruled out the Jordanian peace plan at the outset, they simply defrosted the hard-line Saudi plan of 2002, knowing full well that Israel has already rejected it and even secured a tenuous truce without it. As for the question of political reform, the tone was set by the following rousing statement from Algeria's President Abdelaziz Bouteflika:

We recognize that it has become imperative for all societies, particularly Arab societies, to [carry out] reforms. But it should also be recognized that we have already arrived at that [conclusion], for we have begun to carry out these reforms. Reforms shall not be imposed on us. I say, they shall not be imposed on us! They shall not be imposed on us!

Presumably the crowd loved it; the crowd, after all, was composed of Arab heads of state.

Meanwhile, in the streets of Arab capitals and via satellite television, Hamas and Hezbollah delivered rallies and sound bites that bolstered the League's retro stance. On the first day of the summit, protesters near the Jordanian University in Amman burned American, British, and Israeli flags, and called on Arab leaders "to form a unified position in support of the Palestinian people and to apply Islamic law," according to Al Jazeera.

Hezbollah chief Hasan Nasrallah assured journalists in Beirut that his movement "would bear responsibility for defending Lebanon and confronting Israeli aggressions." Translation: We won't disarm. And leading Hamas ideologue Mahmoud al Zahhar appeared on an Al Jazeera panel to offer his version of a "mission accomplished" speech, regarding the outcome of the Intifada: "On the issue of resistance and withdrawal," he said, "the goal of the resistance has been to banish the occupation, and now the occupation, its entire apparatus, will leave the Gaza Strip, God willing, this coming July or shortly thereafter." Translation: We won. It's the stick that works. So don't try and sell us a bunch of carrots.

Of course, which fighting force won the Palestinian Intifada depends on your definition of victory. But if ever there was a definition of defeat, it's the toll in physical and human infrastructure that the Intifada has taken on Palestinian society over the past four years. A failure to defang the resistance factions will only guarantee that gang-land culture rules in Palestine and south Lebanon for years to come--whatever political authority prevails there in name. For this reason by itself, it's too bad that the Arab League turned down a ten-state mega-treaty with Israel this week. The sweeping move might have helped to take the steam out of Zahhar's "mission accomplished" and further isolated Hezbollah. Then again, Silvan Shalom and Jordan's King Abdullah may have expected too much out of the rickety League to begin with. Now that the preeminent assembly of Arab leaders has spoken, hopes for transformative change turn once again to the societies they rule.

The role some Islamist movements played in bolstering the leaders' intransigence is manifest for all to see. And that's why, now of all times, it's discomfiting to observe some well-connected Americans and Brits touting their new unofficial dialogue with Hezbollah and Hamas. An Al Jazeera news segment Tuesday reported on an "unprecedented meeting" in Beirut between leaders of the two terrorist groups and a new U.K.-based consulting firm, Conflicts Forum. Participants were said to include "American persons close to American decision-makers." The Forum's co-founder and director, Beverley Milton-Edwards, speaking in English, had this to say to Al Jazeera:

I think the importance of this meeting, as the speaker from Hezbollah pointed out this afternoon, is that this isn't actually about enmity between the people from Islam and Muslims and those in the West. In fact, the idea here is to end this disconnection--for people to understand that there is a common platform between the peoples of Islam and the West. So this is a unique opportunity for opinion formers in North America and Europe to hear that enmity is not on the table.

There's a presumption implicit in this statement: that the militant factions participating in the meeting are somehow representative of the "peoples of Islam." In fact, many of the "peoples of Islam" now favor regional priorities that these factions are aligned against, like "democracy and political reform." You just wouldn't know it from listening to Beverly Milton-Edwards or the Arab League.

Joseph Braude is the author of The New Iraq: Rebuilding the Country for Its People, the Middle East, and the World. This essay first appeared in The New Republic Online on March 25, 2005.

Gender Gap: What President Bush, American Feminists, and American Muslims Haven't Done for the Women of the Middle East

2005-04-20T00:09:00.000-04:00

The Bush administration and its supporters are claiming credit for the advancement of women's rights in Muslim countries. Last Tuesday, at a White House ceremony to mark International Women's Day, First Lady Laura Bush told an audience of Arab and Muslim women that her husband had made their cause a "global policy priority" and cited an impressive list of achievements won by American military actions. She noted that the Taliban no longer oppresses women in Afghanistan and has been replaced by a government with three female ministers, along with a new constitution that is "one of the most progressive documents on women's rights in the Muslim world." She also cited high female voter turnout in the Afghani, Palestinian, and Iraqi elections, and the fact that a third of Iraq's elected parliament members are women. Both the First Lady and another speaker at the event, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, stressed the administration's desire to spread these gains across the region through the State Department's Middle East Partnership Initiative. Rice told the audience, "As you stand for your rights and for your liberty, America stands with you." Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger summed up the impact of White House policy on Middle Eastern women with this observation: "After the fall of Saddam and the election of January 30, it is harder than it was for authoritarian regimes to force their women into the shadows."

Perhaps it is harder to force women into the shadows; but it's still not actually hard. Women remain marginalized and oppressed by many of the Middle East's secular and Islamist governments alike--including both America's allies and its opponents--and it's not clear what exactly the White House intends to do about it. Even in the two countries where the U.S. exerts direct military authority, the cause of women is advancing in some ways but regressing in others. In Afghanistan, human rights organizations report that rape, sex trafficking, and extra-judicial "honor killings" remain prevalent in rural areas, in part because the central government is too weak to exert much control outside Kabul. In Iraq, the security situation has effectively barred many women from leaving their homes to go to school or work. Furthermore, some newly elected Iraqi Islamist parties are pressing to repeal the relatively liberal personal status law for women that has been on the books since 1959. They want to replace it with a version of Islamic law that would take away women's inheritance rights and skew divorce law to favor men. These setbacks are the downside of political destabilization brought about by American hard power. The trouble is, American soft power is weak and inconsistent on the issue of Middle Eastern women--at a time when soft power is precisely what is needed to mitigate the negative side-effects of an aggressive foreign policy.

The inconsistency begins at the top. President Bush has declared that "No society can advance with only half of its talent and energy--and that demands the full participation of women." But he also said, in his last State of the Union address, that he does not seek to impose Western culture on new and fledgling democracies: "Our aim is to build and preserve a community of free and independent nations, with governments that answer to their citizens, and reflect their own cultures." So what should the United States do when entrenched cultural forces call for the curtailment of women's rights?

During the year ending in June 2004 when the Coalition Provisional Authority ruled Iraq, Americans largely acquiesced to a strengthening of Islamist control over women and families. In one fateful decision, the army discontinued the pre-war system of food rations and begin distributing food to Iraqis through mosques. Zainab Salbi, an Iraqi feminist who is CEO of Women for Women International, was in Baghdad at the time. In a phone conversation, she described to me what happened next:

We were talking with women who were saying, During Saddam's time we would go to the store [for food]. ... Now we had to go to the mosque, had to cover from head to toe, and we had to fight with men for the food because we were forced to the back of the mosque. When I asked the general who was giving us the briefing, I asked him, 'Are you considering the impact you are having on women?' ... He did not understand the word gender.

While Islamists began to consolidate power and influence, some women's rights activists lobbied the U.S. government for a measure of affirmative action--initially, by asking CPA chief Paul Bremer to give women special consideration as he selected the Iraqi Governing Council. Though women are a majority of the country's population, only three were nominated by Bremer to serve on the 25-member Governing Council. Moreover, only one woman served among the country's 25 ministers, no women participated in the drafting of the Transitional Administrative Law, and out of hundreds of judges appointed by the CPA to serve in the country's court system, only 15 were women. When later confronted by women's groups with the suggestion that 40 percent of parliament seats be reserved for women--similar quotas have been established in 80 countries worldwide--Bremer initially refused ("out of a Republican ideology," Salbi alleges). A de facto parliamentary quota was eventually put in place by the CPA-appointed NGO tasked with setting the rules for Iraq's election: Each party had to list one woman for every two men among its candidates, thereby guaranteeing a one-third women's presence in any parliament. But the American role in this victory for women, now touted by Laura Bush, wasn't exactly enthusiastic from the start.

The Bush administration's apparent discomfort with the notion of affirmative action for Middle Eastern women is unfortunate in light of its stated commitment to advance their rights. There's a broad consensus among Arab feminists that quotas for women in the political arena are crucial in any attempt to offset the overwhelming cultural pressure against women's advancement. Consider the following percentages of women in the parliaments of Arab countries where the government is secular and America has some influence: Palestine, 7 percent; Jordan, 5.5 percent; Egypt, 2.9 percent; Oman, 2.4 percent; Lebanon, 2.3 percent; Yemen, 0.3 percent. Conspicuously missing from the list is Saudi Arabia, where the percentage is, of course, zero; recent municipal elections barred women from voting--let alone running for office.

Bush supporters have defended U.S. policies by noting that the most conservative voices in Iraq on women's issues include some female Islamist politicians, as documented by a front-page story in last week's Wall Street Journal. But a central explanation for this odd state of affairs is inconvenient for Bush backers: The fact that secular governments routinely disenfranchise women from power is often the reason that politically ambitious women resort to Islamist parties for a piece of the action.

American soft power, of course, is more than just the policies of the U.S. government. Grassroots movements play a vital role as well. Yet here too, Middle Eastern women have too often been let down. Some of the largest American feminist organizations opposed the Iraq war, which was their prerogative, but did so in part by whitewashing Saddam Hussein's record on women's issues. The fall 2003 edition of the National Organization for Women's NOW National Times, in a piece called Iraq: A Step Backwards for Women, had this to say about Saddam's rule: "Prior to the 2003 invasion, women comprised more than 20% of the Iraqi workforce, holding a wide range of technical, professional, and governmental positions, including a full fifth of the country's parliamentary seats."

Say what you will about the Iraq war and its aftermath, it's hard to deny that Saddam's departure in and of itself was good news for the country's women. In his final years, the dictator had ordered prostitutes to be beheaded. His security services had raped and tortured female relatives of Iraqi opposition activists and sent videotapes of the sex acts to their families. Thus it was unconscionable of NOW chief Kim Gandy to draw moral equivalence between Saddam Hussein and Bush in an antiwar protest called "Code Pink: Women's Pre-Emptive Strike for Peace." Gandy said: "The real terrorism is the Bush administration's disregard for international law and destruction of civil liberties at home. This has become an issue of one dictator versus another." Of course, there are feminists who take a more constructive position. Feminist Majority leader Eleanor Smeal (also a supporter of the Code Pink rally) was among the first American activists to identify Taliban atrocities against women in Afghanistan. In December 2001, she called upon Bush to "construct a foreign policy as if women mattered."

Yet somehow, voices like Smeal's were largely absent last fall when the State Department's Middle East Partnership Initiative tasked American NGOs with training Iraqi women for public life. Perhaps the Bush administration is to blame, or perhaps the feminist establishment decided to wash its hands of Iraq policy in an election year, or perhaps a little bit of both. In any case, a major recipient of a $10 million grant package for Iraqi women's programs was the Independent Women's Forum--a right-wing group originally formed to counter feminists who opposed Clarence Thomas's nomination to the Supreme Court. Among other campaigns, the Forum had lobbied in opposition to the Violence Against Women Act. How well the organization has been doing on the ground in Iraq is unclear. What is clear is that the talent and resources of the mainstream American feminist movement have, for the most part, not been put to constructive use on behalf of Iraqi women.

Nor have America's most prominent Muslim organizations been particularly vocal on the empowerment of women in the Middle East. Part of the reason may be the funding some of these groups are widely reported to receive from conservative clerical endowments in the Gulf states. Thus the Council on American Islamic Relations, allegedly a recipient of Saudi funding, has been aggressive in advocating the right of women to wear a headscarf in the American workplace and outspoken on Israel's occupation of Palestine--but, as far as I can tell, silent on the exclusion of women from elections in Saudi Arabia or the struggle for women's suffrage in Kuwait. The content of Al Zaitounah, a biweekly pro-Hamas newspaper from the Islamic Association for Palestine in Chicago, has been lacking in introspection on the challenges women face in Islamic societies. In an article last year, the newspaper quoted the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood movement as saying, "The woman has not been dignified in any civilization or any religion as she has been dignified in Islam."

Having invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States has arguably set in motion a wave of political change that stands to weaken authoritarian rule in numerous other countries. In this respect, setbacks for women in Afghanistan and Iraq that stem from weakened central authority, physical insecurity, and a rise of Islamist political influence may be a harbinger of things to come in many places. Which is why it's so important for American politicians and grassroots movements across the spectrum to shed their ideological baggage and formulate coherent stances on the use of soft power to advance Arab and Muslim women.

There are some encouraging signs that this process has already begun. The National Council of Women's Organizations weighed in with a statement on women's rights in Iraq on February 25. Other groups with a global reach, like Women for Women International, have been active and influential on the ground in Afghanistan, Iraq, and across Africa and Asia for years. This afternoon at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York City, in a move of symbolic importance, the Progressive Muslim Union will publicly break with a Muslim tradition of long standing that denies women the right to lead mixed-gender prayer services. The leader of the Friday prayer, who will also deliver the afternoon's sermon, is Amina Wadud, an African-American Muslim theologian from Virginia Commonwealth University. A New York mosque refused to host the event, claiming it would be incompatible with Islamic law. Wadud, who has already drawn coverage on the satellite network Al Arabiya, says she has received numerous death threats in the past few weeks. At a recent lecture in Toronto, she was accused by one Muslim man of being a "CIA agent." He apparently had no idea of the gap that often divides the U.S. government from American grassroots movements. This disconnect is intolerable at a time when American policy stands to affect millions of Muslim women--for better or for worse, and whether the U.S. manages to formulate a coherent strategy or not.

Joseph Braude is the author of The New Iraq: Rebuilding the Country for Its People, the Middle East, and the World. This essay first appeared in The New Republic Online on March 18, 2005.

Hyperspace: How the Internet Is Transforming Arab Politics

2005-04-14T22:15:00.000-04:00

Two years is a long time in the history of the Internet--especially in the Arab world. Consider the following statement made by Jonathan Alterman, director of the Center for Strategic & International Studies's Middle East Program, in April 2003:

There was a good deal of loose talk in the late 1990s about how the Internet would change everything in the developing world, democratizing information and empowering citizens. It didn't quite work out that way, and Internet penetration remains lower in the Middle East than perhaps any other region of the world. ... Rather than embracing "high-tech," Arab publics have embraced what I would call "mid-tech," basically 1970s technologies like satellite TV, photocopiers, fax machines, and videocassette recorders. These technologies share several things in common: they are relatively cheap to the end user, they have a remarkably easy interface, and they facilitate spreading compelling messages to broad populations.

At the time, I agreed with him. I wrote the following in my book, The New Iraq, which was published in March 2003: "As unruly as it is, the Internet remains merely a nuisance and not an existential challenge to the stability of Arab governments ... due in part to the medium's small audiences." As a then-consultant for Pyramid Research, I gave similar advice to state-owned Arab telecommunications companies as they pondered their Internet development plans.

Arab regimes seemed to buy this argument. Most governments fearlessly embraced the new technology, apparently believing they could promote computer literacy among their populations while filtering out subversive content and keeping tabs on cyber dissidents, all at the same time. So it was that in 2002, Egypt offered free dial-up Internet access in Cairo and promoted "Arab-financed" computer manufacturing; that the Saudi government, with the help of an American company called Secure Computing (which builds corporate firewalls) succeeded for the most part in filtering out Al Qaeda's online threats to the royal family as well as cyber porn; that the United Arab Emirates now boasts a remarkably advanced Internet infrastructure, but also one of the more subtle cyber-monitoring systems in the world.

Yet there is growing evidence of tension. Last week in Bahrain, protestors covered their mouths with tape and silently demonstrated in front of a prosecutor's office; they are demanding the release of a local webmaster accused of "inciting resentment against the government" via his site, Bahrain Online. Several weeks ago an Egyptian blogger announced what he claims is the region's first-ever threat to bloggers by the secret police. Other bloggers, like this one in Syria, write that they are worried of potential interrogations. Two years ago in Tunisia, a man was imprisoned for 18 months for running the site TUNeZINE, which was critical of the government. And recently in Saudi Arabia, a religious court flogged and imprisoned 15 people for trying to march against the government; the instructions to march had come from a Saudi webmaster in London who operates a digital radio station.

These incidents are symptoms of a larger trend: The Internet is now a destabilizing force to Arab governments, some of which are trying and failing to bottle it back up. Despite its relatively modest penetration in the region, the web is threatening the status quo--in societies as conservative as Saudi Arabia and police states as tightly run as Syria and Tunisia--in ways that previous technologies never could. That's in part because it is making obsolete the strategies that Arab governments had used for centuries--with almost perfect success--to quash dissent and cling to power. It may be trite to speak of the Internet's transformative power; but in the case of the Arab world in 2005, it appears increasingly to be real.

Authoritarianism is as old as government, and its oldest tactics have a way of surviving until they're proven thoroughly obsolete. One measure that Arab regimes throughout history have employed against dissidents has been to force them to flee to a distant land--making back-and-forth communication with a homegrown movement nearly impossible. For example, the ninth-century historian Tabari quotes a governor in the Umayyad Arab empire explaining why he banished an insurgent: "What I fear from him if he is banished is less than what I fear from him if he is living here, for a man who is exiled from his country becomes less powerful."

This wisdom persisted for over a thousand years. The advent of the telephone did not fundamentally change it, because Arab phone lines have been, for the most part, effectively monitored. Thus the exile of Egyptian dissident Karam Mutawwa from Cairo to Baghdad in the early 1970s was just as effective, from the perspective of an authoritarian government, as the exile of a medieval rebel to Cyprus in the year 700 would have been. The advent of the tape deck greatly facilitated exile politics, but not enough to shift the paradigm. When the Shah of Iran forced Khomeini to Paris before the 1979 revolution, the cleric had already built a formidable infrastructure and courier network back home; so he continued preaching via recorded sermons, which followers then smuggled into Iran by cassette and reproduced en masse in the country. But it's hard to conceive of his founding an Iranian political movement via cassette from some distant land. Even the advent of the satellite dish--used so effectively by Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, who continues to inspire his fighters inside the desert Kingdom via Al Jazeera--did not render the ninth-century approach obsolete. That's because bin Laden's speeches, delivered to the Kingdom via satellite broadcasting, remain a one-way form of communication only.

Only through the Internet is it feasible to run an Arab political organization by remote control. For instance, the Saudi dissident Movement of Islamic Reform in Arabia, managed out of London by Saad al Fagih, relies on the web to recruit and expand its base inside the Kingdom. Fagih recently managed to solicit oral oaths of loyalty in Real Audio format from 99 Arabian clans and post them to his website--a feat he achieved by proxy, ten years after having been exiled from the Kingdom. Much of his information on political developments in the Kingdom reaches him through email, which he discusses frequently on his radio broadcasts; and he often encourages listeners to email him directly. The anti-government demonstration he fomented on the ground back in December was relatively modest, but for chutzpah, the 15 protesters--including one woman--were off the charts. As a result of all this, Arab regimes may be rethinking their propensity for exiling dissidents; after all, those dissidents would be freer to wage Internet warfare if sent to a freer country. In Tunis last month, political prisoner Abdallah Zouari finished his eleven-year prison sentence only to be exiled not abroad but to the remote south of the country (near the red desert of Tataouine where portions of the movie Star Wars were filmed). According to Human Rights Watch, he is closely monitored--and prevented from using the Internet.

Of course maintaining tyranny isn't only about targeting specific dissidents; it's also about inhibiting the masses. Here, too, a paradigm has been smashed. For over a thousand years, governance in the Arab world has been marked by an uneasy truce between state and society--namely, the state policed the public sphere but cut society some slack in private. This bifurcation of space was brilliantly delineated by the seventh-century caliph Umar, who instructed his citizens, "Show us the best of your character, while God knows your secrets well." That bifurcation held in Saddam's Iraq as well. As Iraqis who lived through those bitter years will tell you, it was common to spend the day at work, at school, or outdoors feigning loyalty to Saddam whenever called upon to do so. On returning home, however, an oft-repeated phrase was Allah yantaqim minnak ya Saddam ("God wreak vengeance upon you, o Saddam"). In Saudi Arabian cities today, the ubiquitous guardians of public virtue--who whack women's ankles that are exposed in public and haul away teens for having alcohol on their breath--enjoy jurisdiction in public places but shy away from inspecting people's homes. As a result, even though it is illegal to own a satellite dish, Saudis are the biggest consumers of satellite television in the region. You can have your MTV; just close the door to your house.

The growing phenomenon of Arabic-language blogging makes this awkward truce between citizens and their governments untenable. Blogs, by their very nature, blur the line between private and public expression; bloggers are free to publish their most strident personal views anonymously for all to read--and from the privacy of their own homes. In some Arab countries, like Egypt, because of the dispersed way Internet connections are distributed, it is virtually impossible to curb the continued distribution of this content short of shutting down the country's fixed communications infrastructure altogether. And some of those countries' bloggers seem to know it. One blog went so far as to post a poem in Egyptian vernacular called "We'd like you dead, o President" alongside a photo of Hosni Mubarak on February 11. The first of thirteen posted comments reads, in formal Arabic: "We in the secret police have determined from which site this threat against the person of his Excellency the President originated. We will take the necessary measures to punish whoever carries this out. Wait for us." Rather than cow the bloggers concerned, who perhaps believed the note to be a fake, this seems only to have egged them on. The comment that follows, posted in English, reads, "Oh look, I'm shaking in my little space boots." The comment after that begins with the well-known cyber-acronym "lol" (short for "laughing out loud").

The big question, of course, is whether any of these shifting paradigms is actually capable of changing the present distribution of power in an Arab country--and if so, how and where. Maybe all this online noise is just so much noise, and the medium is still no more than an annoyance to the status quo. Or perhaps it has merely grown into a migraine for the status quo. You can live with a migraine. On the other hand, the pressure imposed on several Arab countries today by the United States stands to exacerbate all the internal tensions these regimes already face, making even a migraine no "lol" matter. The fact that Internet penetration of Arab populations remains low--the regional average is below 5 percent--means that the extent of the web's influence will depend on whether it can somehow nudge forward broader political trends.

Some human rights activists will tell you a first nudge has already taken place. Years before Arabic blogs were widespread, email from dissidents across the region made it easier to gather testimony and photographs documenting human-rights infractions. "Twenty years ago, the way we found information," says Neil Hicks, International Programs Director for Human Rights First, "we had to go to the country, in a very laborious process. Even making an international telephone call to Egypt--you'd wait for hours. Just the speed of information flow, there's no comparison." Human-rights groups have long faced a problem: It's easier to level accusations against open societies, where information can be more easily gathered. By making evidence from closed societies more readily available, the Internet may have already begun to correct this imbalance. Which may well lead to heightened global awareness of human-rights abuses in Arab states--and more political pressure on the authoritarian governments that run them.

Then there is the prospect of systemic change in an Arab country owing to a ruler's personal obsession with the Internet. Bashar al Assad, Syria's young president, spearheaded the introduction of web technology to the country himself and reportedly browses in his spare time. Users of the medium there are fewer than 2 percent of the population, and you won't find anything like the seditious sentiments of Egyptian bloggers because the state-run Syrian Computer Society controls the web with an iron fist. And yet there is robust activism of a sort, and the organs of state are acknowledging it. "Sometimes," writes an Aleppo-based journalist for Al Hayat, "it has seemed that the government has responded to some of the desires and suggestions of the electronic 'lobby.'" A group called Restoration of Civil Society in Syria has amassed thousands of signatures in an online petition calling on the government to lift its nearly-40-year state of emergency. The existence of such groups provides western powers--who increasingly seem to be interested in pressuring Assad--with an opportunity to build ties with dissidents and perhaps push the regime toward reform. (To be sure, Assad might also view such groups as a relatively harmless way to placate foreign governments by creating the appearance of free and open discourse.)

There is also the opportunity to draw attention to the abuses of authoritarian regimes that have escaped the ire of western governments because of their inoffensive foreign policies. For instance, this November, Tunisia (where crackdowns on political activity are frequent and severe) will be hosting the International Telecommunication Union's World Summit on the Information Society, a major world convention intended to promote openness through new media. Bloggers in the Arab world and beyond could demand the right to converge on the country and picket--or at the very least use their outlets to draw attention to the amazing hypocrisy of the Tunisian government in hosting such a conference.

Still, it seems likely that the web's most crucial impact on Arab politics won't be in alerting the west to human rights abuses or rallying support in the international community; it will be in allowing Arab dissidents to talk to one another and coordinate their activities. I recently read extensive Arabic blogging, dated from January and early February, on behalf of an anti-Mubarak group called the People's Peaceful Front for the Rescue of Egypt. A series of rambling entries began with an invitation to join an anti-government demonstration planned for Alexandria, "place and time to be announced shortly, God willing." Stay tuned, apparently.

Joseph Braude is the author of The New Iraq: Rebuilding the Country for Its People, the Middle East, and the World. This essay first appeared in The New Republic Online on March 7, 2005.

Language Barrier: The Problem with Using Arabic to Reach Arab Audiences

2005-04-04T00:10:00.000-04:00

Since September 11, the U.S. government's bid to promote democracy and improve America's image in the Arab world has consisted largely of countering anti-American pan-Arab media with pro-American pan-Arab media. In 2003, the State Department launched a glossy magazine called Hi, which it distributed in 13 Arab countries. The U.S.-backed Al Hurra television network--which recently celebrated its first anniversary--offers programs resembling those of Al Jazeera in nearly every local market reached by its rival. The former chairman of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, Harold Pachios, has written, "Now more than ever, the United States needs it own voice in the Arabic language." And these efforts go beyond government programs. Witness the Global Americana Institute, which seeks "to engage in translation, publication, and distribution of books on the United States in Arabic. The initial volume will be the key works of Thomas Jefferson."

But there's a problem with these initiatives. Just as you won't win over a crowd of Mexican villagers by speaking Latin, the United States can't sell democracy and reform to Arab populations by speaking to them in modern standard Arabic--and ignoring the Middle East's more widely understood vernacular languages.

The challenge of winning hearts and minds among populations with high illiteracy rates is doubly complex in the case of the Arab world. Not only are 70 million Arabs unable to read or write; a much larger number of the region's 280 million people do not fully speak or understand the standardized Arabic language (known as "Fus'ha") that is used in broadcast news as well as official discourse and the academy. Fus'ha was introduced in schools across the region beginning about 90 years ago as a component of pan-Arab nationalism. It is a formal construct, gleaned from classical Arabic grammar and wholly consistent with Koranic syntax, designed to unite the 20-odd Arab countries culturally and politically. But nine decades later it unites, in effect, only the region's elites.

Most everybody else prefers to speak a version of their country's vernacular. Ninety percent of Moroccans, for example, can only understand their unique brand of Arabic, which is heavily infused with Berber phonics and French vocabulary--testimony to the country's multiethnic and colonial history. The Moroccan language, in turn, is barely comprehensible to, say, Iraqis, whose unique idioms and usages reflect more ancient Mesopotamian tongues as well as the country's proximity to Turkey, Iran, and the Kurdish mountains. These vernaculars, derided by pan-Arab ideologues as "dialects," are in fact the region's major living languages. They are the contemporary Middle Eastern equivalent of Romance languages, which, of course, were all derived from Latin and were also once known as dialects--but now are known as Spanish, Italian, and French.

The Arab world today stands at a crossroads--between an old-fashioned allegiance to the contrived political agenda of a single Arab nation (or a single Islamic nation) and a new twenty-first-century emphasis on distinct, democratic national polities that focus on their own social and political challenges. But the latter will not be possible if a country's majority does not understand the language of government. Thus where countries have grassroots movements calling for mother-tongue media and education--the list includes Egypt, Lebanon, and Morocco--the United States should support their efforts. The renowned Beirut linguist Sa'id A'il plans to publish the first ever "dictionary of Lebanese" this summer for a small group of scholars, but there is no program in place to develop his life's work into a curriculum. An independent newspaper began publishing in "Moroccan" in May 2003 and has won a large following among the working class but requires investment in order to expand.

Might the Middle East Partnership Initiative--founded with great fanfare by the Bush administration in January 2003 to promote discourse and civil society in the Arab world--consider supporting projects like these? One of the Initiative's existing projects, which subsidizes the translation and publication of children's books by Scholastic, predictably does so in Fus'ha--a one-size-fits-all approach for every Arab country. Not an encouraging sign. On the other hand, the U.S.-backed Radio Sawa, which broadcasts locally on FM dials across the region, has begun to include some local vernacular content in five separate Arab markets. More work along these lines is needed.

Meanwhile the natural evolution of new media in Arab countries is bolstering the use of local vernacular all by itself. The proliferation of Arabic-language blogs means thousands of webpages are updated daily in the versions of Arabic spoken in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Tunis, and so on. Rather than fall behind this curve, the United States should adjust and adapt its strategy for reaching Arab audiences. We stand to gain considerably from speaking to the Middle East in languages that Arab majorities, not just elites, can understand.

Joseph Braude is the author of The New Iraq: Rebuilding the Country for Its People, the Middle East, and the World. This essay originally appeared in The New Republic Online on February 22, 2005.

5 More Years: Why Hosni Mubarak Should Be Allowed to Re-Elect Himself One Last Time

2005-04-01T15:48:00.000-05:00

Two senior Egyptian officials are visiting Washington this week amid heightened American pressure on their boss, Hosni Mubarak, to permit free elections--which he would probably lose. Mubarak has ruled Egypt under emergency laws and nixed political activity for nearly 24 years. His recent arrest of a liberal contender for the presidency on trumped up charges is symptomatic of his abysmal human rights record. His excesses have embittered many Egyptians, while his establishment press routinely parrots anti-American and anti-Jewish canards. Yet the U.S. government has maintained its support for Mubarak, paying out tens of billions of dollars in aid to his regime over the last few decades. The Bush White House has also made use of the regime's "special talents," outsourcing the interrogation of terror suspects to Cairo.

Now the word in Egypt is that Mubarak wants to run without serious opposition for a sixth consecutive term in the upcoming spring elections--and perhaps groom his son Gamal to succeed him. So what's a freedom-loving country like ours to do about it? Not for the first time, President Bush called upon Egypt in his recent State of the Union address to "show the way toward democracy in the Middle East," and pundits want to hold the administration to its word. A Washington Post editorial in January hailed a group of anti-Mubarak protesters in Cairo and slammed Bush for giving "no indication that he objects to another of the fraudulent referendums with which Mr. Mubarak has ratified his rule." Max Boot, writing in the Los Angeles Times, has asserted that there is "little evidence that Islamists are popular enough to win a free election in Egypt" and urged Washington to cut or squeeze the umbilical cord of aid to the regime "unless there's real economic and political progress." Throw the bum out, some argue, and let the chips fall where they will.

The desired ends of the Post editorial writers and Boot--liberal democracy in Egypt--are noble, and I share them. But the means they apparently envision--regime change through free elections this spring--would be self-defeating. The Post seems unaware, for example, that the organizer of the very protests in Cairo that they praised, Nasserist party stalwart Abd Al Halim Qandil, penned the following words in Arabic in his opposition newspaper just a few days after September 11, 2001: "Yes, we have the right to celebrate [the September 11 attacks]. This was the first step in a thousand-mile journey toward defeating America in a knockout blow." Nor is Boot's dismissal of Islamists' prospects in free elections--casually stated in the piece without any evidence to back it up--borne out by reality: As most scholars of modern Egypt acknowledge, the Muslim Brotherhood, though banned from official political activity, dominates Egypt's influential professional associations and maintains the strongest grassroots organization in the country besides the ruling party. Both Boot and The Washington Post neglect to address the obvious fact that the political arena in Egypt today is lopsided: Liberals are exceedingly weak and radical nationalists and Islamists are strong. This is a mess of Mubarak's making. But ironically, for reasons unique to Egyptian politics, Mubarak may also be the person best suited to clean up this mess, paving the way for liberal democracy in Cairo. And strange though it may seem, the longtime foe of liberal reform could soon have every incentive to do just that.

The stakes in Egypt are higher than some might realize. The apparent success of the Iraqi elections--despite sweeping gains by Shia Islamists--might incline some Americans to believe that Islamist victories are an acceptable price to pay for the arrival of democracy in Muslim countries. And in some places, they'd be right. Egypt, however, is different. By contrast to some Shia Islamist parties, which began making conciliatory gestures toward the United States months before the invasion of Iraq, the Muslim Brotherhood--a Sunni, Egyptian-dominated international movement--has been ratcheting up its anti-American rhetoric. Just a few days ago on Al Jazeera, I watched Abd Al Mun'im Abu 'l-Fattuh, a Cairo-born leader of the organization, affirm his support for the Iraqi insurgency, restate his opposition to the Camp David accords between Begin and Sadat, and appeal for nationalist-Islamist unity in the Arab world in order to confront "our real enemy," the United States. Leaving aside the fact that more radical groups, including Al Qaeda, arose directly from the Muslim Brotherhood--the mentoring relationship in Afghanistan between Brotherhood stalwart Abdullah Azzam and Osama Bin Laden has been ably chronicled in an Al Jazeera documentary--the stated goals of the mainstream Brotherhood leaders are bone-chilling enough. For instance, they aspire to undo the entire framework of Arab-Israeli peace. Hamas, the Brotherhood's offspring in Palestine, is now in the delicate early phases of political détente with the Palestinian Authority--an encouraging move due in no small part to the prodding of Egypt's intelligence services. A new Egyptian governing coalition with any significant Brotherhood presence would likely switch off such pressure, and Hamas could well regress toward militancy. In the Palestinian territories and throughout the Sunni-majority Arab world, political gains for the Brotherhood in Egypt--the country where the movement was born, and still the cultural and political capital of the region--would give a dramatic boost to hardline groups and undermine the nascent liberal movements that oppose them.

Yes, such dire warnings of an ascendant Muslim Brotherhood play right into Mubarak's hands. Indeed, Mubarak has long used the strength of the Brotherhood as an excuse for his authoritarian rule. But he has done more than merely talk up this threat--he has done his best to make it real by working to undermine Egypt's liberal movement and outdo his Islamist rivals on religious matters. There are now over 100,000 mosques in Egypt, most of which were built under Mubarak's reign. The Ministry of Islamic Affairs has greater influence today on public mores and government censorship of writers and artists than at any time in the country's modern history. All these gestures to appease potential Brotherhood recruits have only helped strengthen a physical and legal infrastructure that enables the Brotherhood to function as a semi-overt social movement. Meanwhile, most of the liberals whose views would be more amenable to the United States and Europe have become marginal players--due to their comparative lack of legal and cultural influence, their thwarted attempts to start newspapers of their own, and Mubarak's penchant for throwing them in jail.

As a result of all this, liberalism is weak in Egypt, and it needs time to strengthen itself. True, it may be pleasing to hear the following words from Muhammad Farid Hassanein, a former parliamentarian who wants to run against Mubarak: "I see the Europeans who came to Israel with a culture of freedom, and we can learn from them by becoming closer to them." But a more mainstream voice with a much larger following, Mustafa Bakri, has written in response, "I am willing to bet that if he were to say these things in the streets, he wouldn't get away unharmed." And he's probably right. A liberal voice with a party and following of his own, Ayman Nour--who now sits in solitary confinement in Cairo--is by all accounts a lovely man with a progressive social agenda. But even Nour must pay homage to the Brotherhood. In his own words: "We have no objection to the Brotherhood or any political force whose legitimacy is from the people, rather than via a mere license." If Nour were to win a presidential election this spring, he would have little choice but to pander to the Brotherhood in order to stitch together a coalition that could command a governing majority.

In short, the skewed political environment that has been created by Mubarak's long years of anti-liberal manipulations would only be enshrined if free and fair elections took place now. To foster a semblance of political balance in Egyptian society, political and cultural pressure must first be exerted from the top--a twenty-first century Ataturk-style project to undo the country's decades-long tilt toward Islamism is needed. This means opening Egyptian broadcast media to progressive voices, not just religious clerics and the political establishment. It means advancing a secular humanist agenda through the educational system. It means opening the organs of state, from the judiciary to the executive, to the sort of exchange programs with democratic countries that bore fruit so profoundly in the Ukraine in recent months. The details of the project would best be left to Egypt's liberals themselves, who know better than outsiders what they need to gain ground. But the central question has already been well expressed by Egyptian dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim, no stranger to the country's prison system himself: "What, Mr. Mubarak, have you done to preserve the popularity of non-Islamist forces in the country?"

The idea that Mubarak might be counted on to perform such an about-face will induce skepticism--and rightly so. But two new factors argue in his favor. First, he has lately demonstrated that he responds to robust American pressure. His contribution to the fragile truce between Israel and the Palestinians marks a departure from previous years of cold peace and obstructionism toward Israel. And as Max Boot observed in his Times op-ed: "Dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim credits US pressure with helping to win his release from prison in 2003. And that involved a threat to withhold merely $130 million in supplemental aid. What might a threat to cut off $2 billion accomplish?" With Bush signaling that he intends to make the promotion of liberal democracy a staple of his second term, it would be a bad time to see one of the world's more malleable Arab despots pass from the scene--assuming, as seems likely, that a replacement governing coalition gleaned from today's political opposition groups would be worse.

Second, the 76-year-old Mubarak's own calculations have changed. His personal horizons are shorter and his long-term agenda revolves around his son Gamal. Unlike Saddam's son and chosen heir, a homicidal psychopath, Gamal Mubarak is a well-liked businessman with the esteem of Western-oriented liberals in the country--but he is not well liked by radicals. Mubarak's Egypt is not Saddam's Iraq, where a ruler's offspring could conceivably have been forced upon the population. Nor is it Assad's Syria, where the minority ethnic clique that brutally rules naturally coalesced around the late president's son in order to perpetuate an unnatural status quo. In Egypt, perhaps the most thoroughly globalized Arab country, Gamal's future lies with the class of secular liberals who, up until now, have been discouraged from entering the political fray. He hasn't paid his dues with the Islamists and he has no credentials with the military and security establishment. His ambitions require a change in Egypt's political landscape--a change for the better. In this respect, the old man who rules the country has more hopes in common with liberals and reformers than he used to, albeit for entirely selfish reasons. This confluence of interests should be exploited by the United States--not discarded.

Of course, there is always the possibility that Mubarak will die in office--he would be the third Egyptian dictator in a row to do so. The ruling regime's 35-year precedent would call for a senior member of the security establishment to succeed him--defense minister and armed forces chief Muhammad Hussein Tantawi is a possibility, as is the minister of intelligence, Umar Suleyman, who happens to be making the rounds in Washington this week. In either event, American leverage over a new interim president to prod reforms forward would be just as strong as American leverage over Mubarak, because the state would rapidly turn insolvent without our foreign aid. Furthermore--as I know from personal experience, having met with Egyptian brass as a telecommunications consultant in 2001 and 2002--institutional culture within the armed forces is evolving. A prominent stratum of technocrats who are deeply involved in systems overhauls within the security establishment is made up of Western-oriented liberals with degrees from American and Canadian universities. Many would be receptive to U.S. exhortations to reform.

It's true that calls of "five more years" for Hosni Mubarak might seem at first to be pouring cold water on the vision of cascading democracies in the Middle East--especially after the successful elections in Iraq. And it's understandable that nothing would please democracy advocates more than to see last month's massive Iraqi turnout one-upped by free and fair elections in Egypt this spring. But a bit of patience is sometimes wise--and now may be one of those times. At this writing, I observe reports on Arabic television suggesting that Egypt's ruling party intends to grant dissidents the constitutional amendment for which they are clamoring, to make it easier to contest the presidency--but only after the spring elections. This move will anger Mubarak's many detractors because it would enable the incumbent to squeak by and have his sixth term. But it also would redefine the political system in Egypt in the leader's final years, creating a set of expectations for reform that America can hold him to on penalty of bankruptcy. The alternative, an ostensibly democratic government dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, would only set back the cause of liberalism in the Middle East. For Egyptians, true democracy is finally on the horizon--and also worth waiting for.

Note: Translated quotes from Abd Al Halim Qandil, Muhammad Farid Hassanein, and Mustafa Bakri were taken from the website of the Middle East Media Research Institute. All other translations are mine.

Joseph Braude is the author of The New Iraq: Rebuilding the Country for Its People, the Middle East, and the World. This essay first appeared in The New Republic Online on February 17, 2005.

Analysis of a Speech by Al-Qaeda's Number 2

2005-03-17T19:22:00.000-05:00

The Democrats had their rebuttal to the State of the Union address last week; yesterday Al Qaeda offered its own. Ayman Al Zawahiri, the organization's number two, broadcast a recorded message about five minutes in length on Al Jazeera around noon, eastern standard time. In it, he offered an alternative take on the meanings of "freedom" and "reform." Al Zawahiri's speech represents a departure from the Al Qaeda addresses of recent memory, most of which amounted to direct threats of violence targeting Western and Muslim regimes (including, needless to say, their civilian populations). This statement, by contrast, was not so much threat as political argumentation, and the audience was not Western but rather Arab and Muslim. Implicit in Al Zawahiri's speech was an acknowledgement that the United States is now actively competing in the war for hearts and minds in Muslim countries--leaving Al Qaeda no choice but to engage America at the level of politics and ideas. The irony, however, is that Al Zawahiri seemed in his speech to be entering the realm of politics precisely to make clear what Al Qaeda won't do politically: namely, countenance the entrance of Islamists into the democratic arena.
Below is my translation of parts of the speech, with my commentary. Al Zawahiri began by explaining what freedom is not:

The freedom that we want is not the freedom of interest-bearing banks and vast corporations and misleading mass media; not the freedom of the destruction of others for the sake of materialistic interests; and not the freedom of AIDS and an industry of obscenities and homosexual marriages; and not the freedom to use women as a commodity to gain clients, win deals, or attract tourists; not the freedom of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and not the freedom of trading in the apparatus of torture and supporting the regimes of oppression and Copts and suppression, the friends of America; and not the freedom of Israel, with their annihilation of the Muslims and destruction of the Aqsa mosque; and not the freedom of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

No big surprises here. Al Zawahiri draws attention to mainstream Muslim grievances against the United States, ranging from the universal abhorrence of our own human rights violations to the more parochial Islamist disdain for America's liberal sexual culture. The dig at "Copts," Egypt's sizeable indigenous Christian minority, is also a dig at the Mubarak government, which the Egyptian-born Al Zawahiri regards as more closely allied with American and Christian interests than the agenda of Islamists. This laundry list of anti-American headlines is Al Zawahiri's way of making the case to mainstream Muslims that America is not a desirable model for democracy or reform. He goes on to offer an alternative:

Our freedom is a freedom of monotheism and morals and probity and asceticism and justice. The freedom that we are striving toward is on three foundations: The first is the rule of the Shari'a. The Shari'a, revealed by Almighty God, is the path that is obligatory to be followed. ... The second foundation, upon which reform must be established--and this is a corollary to the first foundation--is the freedom of the lands of Islam and their liberation from every robbing and looting aggressor. It is unimaginable that any reform may be realized for us while we are under the coercion of American and Jewish occupation.

Al Zawahiri is developing an argument that many in the Arab world would embrace for reasons of their own--the notion that there can be no political freedom under occupation. This is Al Qaeda's equivalent of speaking to the center--trying to reach Al Jazeera's mainstream Arab and Muslim audiences. Having made his pitch to them, however, he moves on to what is almost certainly a less popular plank of his argument:

Reform cannot be realized under the coercion of governments installed by the occupier, through fraudulent elections, administered under the supervision of the United Nations, and under the protection of B-52 bombers and the missiles of Apache planes [sic].

The "governments" he is alluding to are apparently both the forthcoming Iraqi government and the government formed by the recent Palestinian election under "Jewish occupation," which he regards as equally illegitimate. Although there is no specific reference to Tuesday's Israeli-Palestinian mutual ceasefire declaration in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el Sheikh, it's fair to assume that the Al Qaeda leadership is eager to see the nascent quest for a truce derailed. Arguing for the illegitimacy of the Palestinian elections--and any moves toward rapprochement subsequently attempted by the elected Palestinian leadership--is Al Zawahiri's contribution to ongoing Islamist attempts to thwart the peace process. But perhaps more importantly, it is also his way of saying that Islamist groups like Hamas should accept no role in the deliberative democratic institutions emerging in the Palestinian territories.

As for the third foundation, which is also a corollary of the first foundation, it is the liberation of man. The Ummah [pan-Islamic nation] must snatch back its right to choose its ruler and call him to account and criticize him and depose him, and snatch back its right to enjoin good and end that which is abominable. ... The Ummah must undertake [to end] repression and brute force and theft and fraud and corruption and dynastic succession in rule, which our rulers are practicing with the blessings and support of the United States.

The reference to dynastic succession is meant to condemn the Gulf regimes, Morocco, Syria, and Egypt--where Hosni Mubarak is believed to be grooming his son Gamal for succession--all in one fell swoop. But note that Al Zawahiri refrains from using the word "democracy" or calling for free elections. He is in essence calling for the freedom of Muslim nations to choose an Islamist ruler. Mind you, he uses the word "ruler" in the singular, because Al Qaeda calls for one caliph to preside over the whole region.

As for the reference to the "liberation of man," it is a trope that Islamists experimented with during the 1990s--notably the urbane leader of Tunisia's Islamist Al Nahda ("Renaissance") movement, Rashid Al Ghannouchi. The idea, then as now, was to espouse a pseudo-universalist rhetoric that might begin to sound palatable to human-rights activists and the secular left. Islamist groups such as Al Nahda have historically been aware of the importance of making rhetorical overtures to left-wing and human-rights movements in the West--valuing their intervention on behalf of political prisoners tortured by Arab regimes, not to mention the potential for making common cause in a united front against globalization. (Al Zawahiri, to be sure, can only pay lip service to these ideas because, as evidenced by his anti-Coptic and anti-gay references, there isn't exactly a place for all mankind in the political union his movement envisions.)

But while Al Zawahiri is willing to make a nod to the Western left, he makes no similar overture toward reformers in the Arab world. On the question of whether Sunni Islamists of any shade should participate in Arab elections--be they in Gaza and the West Bank a few weeks back, or perhaps in Egypt down the road--Al Zawahiri seems to be taking a decisive stand. He urges the Ummah to "snatch back" the reins of power, apparently eschewing the possibility of gains for Islamists through a nonviolent electoral process. This is a rejection, for example, of Hamas ideologue Mahmoud Al Zahhar's statement earlier this week to a Gaza newspaper suggesting that his movement might join the Palestinian legislative assembly.

Al Qaeda may kill hundreds of innocents in Spain to influence the outcome of elections there--or deliver a tirade against George Bush on the eve of the American elections, apparently to influence voters here--but the movement seems to have no appetite for achieving its goals through elections in Arab and Muslim countries. In this respect, today's message wasn't just another hyperbolic rant. It drew a philosophical line in the sand. And among Arabs and Muslims, it may prove to be an unpopular one.

Joseph Braude is the author of The New Iraq: Rebuilding the Country for Its People, the Middle East, and the World. This essay first appeared in The New Republic Online on February 11, 2005.

Palestinian Factions React to Condoleezza Rice

2005-03-12T20:10:00.000-05:00

Hopes brightened for a revival of the Middle East peace process today in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el Sheikh. With Jordan's King Abdullah and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in attendance, Palestinian and Israeli leaders declared a cease fire. Meanwhile, in her first visit to the region as America's chief diplomat, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday shuttled from Jerusalem to Ramallah, where she announced the appointment of General William Ward as "security coordinator" to supervise an overhaul of the Palestinian security services. She also said the United States would remit $41 million in aid to the Palestinians--the first installment in a $350 million package proposed by President Bush last week in his State of the Union address.

But to read the Palestinian press from the last few days is to learn that all this good news is not without its detractors. Palestinian factions from Hamas and Islamic Jihad to the PLO itself are voicing criticism of Rice and serious reservations about the new plans. They are also trading blows with one another, revealing rifts both within the Palestinian Authority and among the various movements that could stymie a push for peace with Israel.

Some PA officials welcomed Rice's visit in warm tones. Chief Islamic Judge Sheikh Taysir al Tamimi, for example, had an op-ed in Sunday's edition of the PA mouthpiece Al Hayat al Jadeeda, titled HER EXCELLENCY DR. RICE, WELCOME. The piece cited Rice's success in overcoming prejudice as a child in Birmingham, Alabama, as a sign that she might learn to empathize with the Palestinian cause. But the same newspaper's editor-in-chief, Hafiz al Barghouthi, penned a piece in yesterday's edition headlined NO TO SUBORDINATION, which slammed the specifics of America's $350 million aid package. He claimed that an allocation of $80 million to Israel to build modern transit points (intended to facilitate the import and export of goods between Israel and the territories) "will once again benefit the Israeli economy, and not the Palestinian [economy], because the crossings in practice amount to economic subordination--that is, rather than establish the port of Gaza and permit our merchants to import by way of Jordan, we find Israel, together with the Americans, eager that our economy should be made to remain hostage to Israel." In fact, the allocation is for $50 million and does not preclude expenditures on the port of Gaza. But Barghouthi's greater argument reflects his disdain for the notion of economic interdependency in a two-state solution: He argued that "[d]isengagement from the Palestinians ... means economic disengagement as well." Not strictly true--at least, not as far as American and European policymakers have envisioned. Another op-ed in the same pages by a deputy PA minister, Adil Sadiq, opposed America's "Middle East project" for similar reasons, but more broadly:

They are striving for a coercive and deceptive peace process by which the American administration may spread lies among the countries of the region, that the Middle Eastern market may thereafter be opened to the Israelis, and the engagement with the Palestinian Israeli conflict--as if it is the remnants of the conflict--will be relegated to a small pocket, which may be contained, within a broader strategy.

It is true that Washington wants to reduce Palestinian-Israeli violence and that Israel eventually wants to establish political and economic relations with most Arab countries. Both achievements would stand to bolster the Palestinian economy, as well as the Israeli economy. If a deputy minister of the Palestinian Authority doesn't see this as desirable, that's not a good sign.

Nor did a spokesman for the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of the PLO responsible for many attacks on Israeli civilians in recent years, offer the most winsome assurance, in his televised statement on Al Jazeera yesterday, that the cease fire would stick. "Abu Layth," a masked spokesman, reiterated calls for the release of all Palestinian prisoners, "particularly those who placed their hands in the bowels and necks of the tyrants, without condition or discrimination. Furthermore, we demand of our Authority to release the General Secretary of the Popular Front, the brother Ahmad Saadat, and not to return to opening the door to political arrests." The specific reference to PFLP hit man Ahmad Saadat--arrested in Jericho on Israel's insistence and detained under American and British supervision after being accused of killing Israeli tourism minister Rehavam Zeevi three years ago--came only a day after Sharon's denial that Israel would agree to such a release. By making such a demand and risking a rebuff, the Al Aqsa Brigades spokesman created a potential pretext for further attacks on Israel.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad have their own beefs with the American-backed initiatives, stemming from both Rice's announcement of a "security coordinator" yesterday and from the overall suspicion that the United States wants PA President Mahmoud Abbas to confront Islamists by force. The leadership of Hamas, buoyed by the movement's recent landslide in municipal elections in Gaza, would like to be treated more like Shia Islamists in Sadr City--as opposed to Sunni insurgents in Fallujah. Both in Gaza and in Cairo, Hamas and Islamic Jihad officials have been negotiating the terms of a temporary truce with Israel through mediators from Egypt's intelligence services. Palestinian Islamic Jihad chief Ramadan Abdullah Shallah told Al Jazeera yesterday he was open to the possibility of joining the political umbrella of the PLO, while Hamas ideologue Mahmoud al Zahhar told the Palestine Press that his group might conceivably join the Palestinian Authority's legislative assembly. But any such ventures, both groups contend, would not lead to their movements disarming.

Thus the pro-Islamist daily Al Quds ran an editorial Sunday, RICE AND HER CRIPPLING CONDITIONS, which faulted the Secretary of State for "call[ing] upon the Palestinian Authority to confront the armed Palestinian opposition factions, which the Secretary describes as terrorist, and go[ing] in her demands so far as to make this confrontation a condition for the resumption of the peace process and proof of the good intentions of the Palestinian side toward Israel." An official Hamas communiqué yesterday explicitly condemned "the appointment of an American security coordinator to reform the Palestinian security services" as "not merely an intervention into internal Palestinian affairs, but also representing ... a new attempt to push the Palestinian security services toward confronting the Palestinian resistance." And an open letter to Abbas in yesterday's edition of the daily Falastin contained a thinly veiled threat:

Isn't what happened two days ago--the violent clash because of the results of the municipal elections between Fatah and Hamas in the middle of the Gaza Strip--the first step toward showing that you [President Abbas] understand what the enemy is demanding of you? ... Those who carry out these acts of sedition are a greater danger to us than the Jews.

Whether the United States or Israel will press Abbas for the all-out confrontation his opponents expect remains unclear. In her press conference in Ramallah yesterday, Rice evaded a question by a Washington Times reporter about the implications of the Hamas landslide in Gaza. What is clear is that Islamist groups want a prominent political role in a nascent Palestinian state, and to that end they have committed to indirect negotiations with Israel. Some hard-line nationalists already fault the Islamists for having caved, just by agreeing to hold talks over a cease fire. Writing in yesterday's London-based daily Al Quds al Arabi, for example, Al Najah University professor Abd Al-Sattar Qasim says of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, "The two movements have broken their political barriers which they had made clear in their rhetoric by dealing directly with the Egyptian government, which recognizes Israel and is exchanging with it diplomatic, economic, and security relations." Qasim, whose aborted run against Mahmoud Abbas for the presidency had hinged on his unsuccessful attempt to unite the opposition groups into one coalition, is in many ways the odd man out in the maelstrom of Palestinian politics today. The "rejectionist front" he represents is weaker than it's been in four years or more. Then again, that doesn't mean the rejectionists have disappeared. They're simply waiting at the doorstep of the Palestinian Authority, with the price of entry not yet determined.

Joseph Braude is the author of The New Iraq: Rebuilding the Country for Its People, the Middle East, and the World. This essay first appeared in The New Republic Online on February 8, 2005.

Paper Over: How Arab Newspapers Spun the Iraqi Elections

2005-03-05T12:48:00.000-05:00

This past Sunday must have been a rough day at the office for editors of the Arab world's pro-government newspapers. How do you spin democratic elections in Iraq when your boss is an authoritarian ruler with a restive population?

First option: Pretend those elections never happened. I scoured this Monday's major Libyan papers online for any evidence that Iraqis voted the day before and found nothing. Well, almost nothing: The Tripoli daily Al Zahf al Akhdar buried--under reports of momentous African conferences and ambassador meet-and-greets--a piece titled, 27 People Killed in Iraq. The article noted that "Police sources in Iraq said that no less than 27 people were killed in attacks targeting voting centers in sundry parts of the country." Voting centers? Whatever for? It seems unwise for a government-run propaganda sheet to print stories that create more questions than they answer--advice apparently heeded by the Sudanese daily Al Ra'i al Am, which in contrast to its Libyan counterpart, simply printed nothing about Iraq in its Monday edition.

The other tactic--and the more popular one--takes into account the fact that most Arab majorities have alternative sources of information, making a news blackout on the Iraqi elections infeasible. In these countries, the role of the pro-government press isn't to hide facts, but rather to spin them to the benefit of the ruling regime. Which explains why so many Arab newspapers dwelled on the negative Monday in their pieces on the Iraqi election. In Tunis, Al Sabah led with the headline, Bloody Election Day: A Giant British Plane Crash, Nine American Soldiers Killed, and Explosions in Voting Centers Leave 36 Iraqis Dead. The coverage is in keeping with a trope routinely expressed by apologists for the Tunisian regime: that full-blown Arab democracy stands to yield full-blown violence. (For example, in an Al-Jazeera debate on democratization two months ago, the Tunisian writer Burhan Bsayyis asked: "Do you want us to embark on a democratic experiment that could result in 100,000 dead, like in Algeria? Do you want us to allow a freedom of the press that could result in vituperation and calumny that could pit the society against the state and result in violent conflict--civil war?")

Other Arab papers sought to use the Shia-Sunni division in Iraq for maximum political benefit at home. That's why coverage in Syria's establishment daily Teshreen emphasized Sunni disenfranchisement. The paper reported "a great disparity in participation from one region to another; thus while turnout was extremely high in some regions, there was no election process at all in Ramadi, for example, and four municipalities in Mosul were not able to vote because they had not received their ballot boxes." Such coverage encourages readers in Syria, a Sunni majority country ruled by a minority Alawite clique, to associate Iraqi democracy with Sunni marginalization--and to therefore see it as no better than Syria's status quo.

What about in countries where pressure for democratic reform is coming not only from restive populations but also from a powerful patron--the United States? That's the dilemma now confronting Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, America's most populous Arab allies. Their solution? Play up the threat of Iranian regional dominance posed by a Shia victory in Iraq's elections--and, in doing so, appease their Sunni populations and appear concerned for the welfare of their patrons in Washington, all at the same time. Jordan's King Abdullah blazed the trail recently when he warned The Washington Post of a "Shia crescent" running through Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Egypt's semi-official daily Al Ahram echoed this sentiment more softly on Monday, writing in an editorial about "the difficulty of denying the role of regional intervention, direct or indirect, in the electoral process, beginning with the role of regional powers functioning as role models ... and ending in their direct support for Iraqi factions." Egyptian readers understand that "regional power" refers to Iran and that "role model" is an allusion to Khomeini-style governance. (Relations between Iran and Egypt remain strained; it's only been a year since the mullahs took down a street sign in Tehran that had named a busy intersection after the man who killed Anwar Sadat.) Meanwhile, a post-election editorial in the Saudi daily Al Riyadh similarly laments "regional and international interventions" in the Iraqi vote. The piece invites the conclusion that Iraqi democracy is hopelessly marred by the meddling of Iran, Syria, and Al Qaeda.

Finally there is the backhanded congratulatory approach, most visible in the Gulf press. Little oil-rich monarchies staunchly aligned with the U.S. for the most part hailed the Iraqi elections--but not as an historic first in a region of autocrats. They called it instead an historic first step on the long road to real democracy--a road, needless to say, that they all claim to be traversing themselves. Thus Qatar's Gulf Times asserted in an opinion piece that "Qatar is a staunch supporter of democratic ideals and elections." It added that "even though the elections in Iraq may be flawed and controversial, they are an important first step on the road to democracy." Meanwhile, Bahrain's Akhbar al Khaleej led with a front-page report of a congratulatory telegram dispatched by the country's king to his counterpart, Iraqi Interim President Ghazi Al Yawar. Gulf papers' front pages often print congratulatory telegrams between emirs--birthdays, national holidays, and so on--so the story makes the Iraqi elections appear equally momentous, that is, equally trivial.

If there is a common thread running through all these takes on the news from Iraq, it is that each state mouthpiece treated the election in a way especially tailored to deflect domestic pressure for reform. Then again, cleverly manipulative reporting of the news will only get you so far, which is why some editors also resorted to an old standby: outright invective. The same paper in which Bahrain's king offered warm congratulations to the Iraqi president also included a ferocious diatribe against "the imperialist attack of ideas ... the reinvention of all values, principles, and intellectual foundations which form the foundation of the Arab intellect and Arabic culture." This onslaught, it continued, "is beautified with resplendent ideas and principles of liberal thought about democracy, freedoms, and human rights, but in reality it is merely a deceptive show window for an American imperialist scheme." If it seems hard to reconcile such sentiments with the king's congratulatory note, welcome to the Arab status quo.

Joseph Braude is the author of The New Iraq: Rebuilding the Country for Its People, the Middle East, and the World. This essay first appeared in The New Republic Online, February 2, 2005.

Virtual Glasnost for Arabia

2005-02-28T16:39:00.000-05:00

A religious court in the Saudi port city of Jeddah recently sentenced 15 people to flogging and prison for an unusual crime: peacefully demonstrating against their government. They were demonstrating at the behest of Saad Al Fagih, a London-based Saudi dissident who heads the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia (MIRA) and runs his own website, radio channel, and TV station. A few days earlier via streaming audio and satellite, he had called on his countrymen to march in Riyadh and Jeddah. Al Fagih claimed that tens of thousands had planned to march. But hundreds of police and security forces were dispatched to prevent any large assembly. A small number persisted in protesting, and they were rounded up by the police. Al Fagih claims he has more than 50,000 supporters in the Kingdom, and his website features audio statements of allegiance from 99 Arabian tribes and clans. (I have listened to ten of them; each had dozens of signatories. For every person who had the gumption to give his or her name--a choice that carries severe consequences in the authoritarian desert kingdom--one may assume that others harbor similar sentiments, but quietly.)

The movement's heightened profile comes at a time of mounting Al Qaeda violence in many Saudi cities and towns. Since May 2003, about 170 have been killed in several incidents, and Osama Bin Laden's most recent audio message calls on the faithful to step up attacks on oil installations. Though London-based MIRA officially eschews violence as a tactic, the Saudi government insists that Saad Al Fagih and his minions are dedicated to the overthrow of the royal family and to replacing it with an Al Qaeda-inspired form of government. And Western governments seem to agree. After the United States named Al Fagih a suspected Al Qaeda financier in late December, the United Kingdom froze his London assets, and the United Nations imposed anti-terrorism sanctions on him. Meanwhile, according to the Open Net Initiative at Harvard University's Berkman Center, MIRA's website has been blocked by Saudi authorities since at least 2002. And, if Al Fagih's Arabic-language broadcasts are to be believed, Saudi security has conducted waves of arrests and interrogations of his sympathizers, jammed his satellite transmissions, and also blocked many of his mirror sites on the Web. (Full disclosure: I worked for a private firm that consulted for the Saudi Telecommunications Company, which has near monopoly control over Internet access in the country, before it was privatized in December 2002; as a result, I'm familiar with its practice of blocking mirror websites. And I would not be surprised if Al Fagih's claims in this regard are right.)

This response won't work; it only gives him a hero's status. Al Fagih may be far from a sympathetic character, but the Saudi campaign of suppression should be eased. A pragmatic carrot and stick approach--letting reformist elements in the Saudi government try to win over some of his sympathizers while the security services continue to monitor others--would be more successful in eroding his support. This view relies neither on faith that Al Fagih believes in liberal democracy, nor on the wishful thinking that Islamists across the region are reformists clad in traditional garb. Rather, it's simply practical advice stemming from a constellation of factors unique to Saudi Arabia today.

By publicly rounding up protestors and blocking websites, the Saudi government signals that it can't defeat Al Fagih in an open war of words and ideas. But it can. In the world of Internet and satellite broadcasting to which Al Fagih is confined because he lives in faraway London, he stands to be severely outsquawked, by state and society alike, once enough Saudis get the chance to hear what he has to say. MIRA seeks to win followers by persuading them that the Saudi government is insufficiently committed to Islamic tenets. Most of the people who take the trouble to search for Al Fagih's signal today--whether online or via satellite--are zealous enough to buy into this argument. If the broadcast were more easily available, however, Al Fagih would have to reckon with a larger and vastly more discriminating audience. The most progressive and worldly segment of the population, on balance, is that subset of techno-savvy Saudis, now about two million strong, who use the Internet regularly--fans of Western pop culture who generally believe that the Saudi regime and its enforcers are plenty committed to the conservative tenets of Islam already, thank you very much. Al Fagih would get an online earful from the many Saudis who want fewer Islamic mores in their country, not more--a demoralizing dose of democracy, if you will, for a London-based dissident with alleged ties to Al Qaeda. Only the regime's censorship shields him, in effect, from this backlash.

He poses a more serious challenge to the House of Saud when he complains about its corruption and ineptitude. The same young people who like American pop music also detest their government's failings, and many if not most also resent its pro-Western foreign policy. But here, too, he has a weakness vis-à-vis his potential audience: Most of what he says is old hat. Civil discourse in Saudi coffeehouses and media has evolved somewhat and now allows for open criticism of government, provided it is not existential. The other day I listened to Al Fagih, via streaming audio, rail against the rulers for not having conducted a population census in many years. Big deal; on business trips to Jeddah and Riyadh I have seen similar grievances aired in local newspapers. Al Fagih's novelty is limited to his strident personal attacks on the royal family and unbridled calls for regime change. Once he descends to the level of domestic policy, his criticism is comparatively banal. His ultra-Islamist views make him an unattractive symbol of political reform among the more progressive Saudis who clamor most loudly for it.

Which leaves the problem of his ultra-Islamist base. The real reason Saad Al Fagih is a potential threat to the government is not that he makes a compelling case to a majority of urban Saudis--which he doesn't--but that his Islamist puritanism is most winsome among the clique of tribal and clerical elites that the royal family leans on for legitimacy and security. They populate the Saudi armed forces and police and serve as teachers and guardians of public virtue. Al Fagih supporters tend to sympathize with bin Laden as well. But why suppress one in the name of defeating the other? If the problem is how to purge the state apparatus of its malcontents, then a nonviolent shadow movement such as MIRA is more useful out in the open than underground. The conservative stalwarts of the regime would be better served to simply monitor and rebut Al Fagih's dispatches. This exercise in virtual counteragitation could win back some of the group's minions for the establishment even as the government keeps tabs on the rest.

None of this is to suggest that Saad Al Fagih is a benign influence on Saudi Arabia. Nor is it to suggest that the government should, or will, ever let MIRA function as a full-fledged political party in Riyadh. Indeed, adopting a softer approach towards Al Fagih carries risks for the Saudis. But cracking down on his broadcasts and followers may well carry more. And besides, if risks must be taken either way, perhaps it wouldn't hurt the House of Saud to try erring on the side of liberal risks, for a change.

Joseph Braude is the author of The New Iraq: Rebuilding the Country for Its People, the Middle East, and the World. This essay first appeared in The New Republic Online on January 26, 2005.

The War on Phonics: Sudan at a Crossroads

2005-02-05T06:54:00.000-05:00

You wouldn't expect an obscure linguistics project to earn a headline in an international newspaper. But that's pretty much what happened in the October 3 edition of Al Hayat, a Saudi-owned Arabic-language daily, which featured disapproving coverage of a book party in an eastern Sudan village. The back story goes something like this: A group of Americans had helped a local tribe print texts in their mother tongue, a non-Arabic language dating back 4,000 years, for use in classrooms. Amid heightened U.S. pressure on the Arab government in Khartoum to take responsibility for genocide in the western province of Darfur, this seemingly innocent cultural celebration in the rebel-controlled east suddenly took on geopolitical implications.

"The armed resistance in eastern Sudan is using the Bedawie language," the Al-Hayat correspondent writes, "which is spoken by more than two million people, as a language of instruction in the 'liberated areas' where its forces are in control. [This comes] at a stage when the conflict between the 'marginalized region' and Khartoum is reaching a new phase of increased clamoring by other [non-Arab] peoples to demand the revival of their languages and to resist the Arabic language in Sudan." The article concludes: "It is expected that Sudan will confront the project fiercely." In essence, the story suggests that the promotion of Bedawie by an American NGO is part of a broad U.S. strategy to divide the country linguistically and politically--like God sabotaging the Tower of Babel.

The charge is, of course, preposterous. But it does demonstrate the kind of deep-seated suspicions confronting U.S. policy in much of the Arab and Muslim world, and the sensitivity required if Americans don't want to see their most noble ambitions in the region thwarted.
Anyone looking for evidence of benign U.S. intentions toward Sudan need look no further than the details of USAID funding for the textbook program--which at $7,000 annually had already run dry in September, before the Al Hayat piece was even published. The New York-based International Rescue Committee, which administers the project, has kept it alive on emergency funding ever since. "I've been trying to sell copies of the books here and there to people," lamented project manager Fergus Thomas, reached by phone in eastern Sudan, "to academics, universities, several departments in Europe." He is finding, alas, that Bedawie funeral rites transcribed in Latin characters do not a best seller make.

As it happens, USAID, the largest provider of humanitarian and development assistance to Sudan over the past two decades, supports a united federal Sudan and assists opposition governance structures only "on the county level and below," according to its Interim Strategic Plan for Sudan, 2004-2006. USAID has offered modest support to local leadership in the 15,000-square-kilometer region of southeastern Sudan where the rebel National Democratic Alliance is concentrated, but only to provide a modicum of health care and local governance.
The Strategic Plan calls for assisting town councils and schools in the "marginalized regions" of the country in order to make the north-south peace accords viable. USAID's plan for the next few years more closely resembles American humanitarian aid to the Kurds of Iraq throughout the 1990s than the direct military assistance that the British gave to the Saudis of Arabia in 1918.

But for all the goodwill with which American aid-givers approached their Sudan projects, what they obviously didn't appreciate was the powerful political and historical symbolism associated with the Bedawie language. The tribe that speaks Bedawie is called "the Beja." They are semi-nomadic pastoralists, merchants, and smugglers who have been resisting central governments in North Africa since the Pharaohs ruled Egypt. They are one of several ethnic groups in the Muslim world, like Kurds and Berbers, for whom the demarcations of modern nation-states have not been kind. Beja communities spill over the borders of Sudan, Eritrea, and southern Egypt.

The threat this community potentially poses to the Khartoum government stems not only from their mobility and omnipresence in the country--Beja traders, for example, are ubiquitous in Port Sudan, on which Khartoum's supply line depends--but also from their left-leaning militia, the Beja Congress, which makes up a good chunk of the armed opposition in southern Sudan. A Reuters report published a few days after the Al Hayat story describes a Sudanese intelligence official as asserting that his government had begun to arm Arab tribes in the east for attacks on eastern rebels--repeating, if true, the bloody counterinsurgency tactics infamously employed in the western province of Darfur. In light of its genocidal record, the expectation that the Khartoum government "will confront the [Bedawie] project fiercely," as Al Hayat's correspondent put it, is not hysterical speculation but a legitimate humanitarian concern.

Ironically, USAID may have done more to bolster Beja nationalism by cutting off its support this year than in all the previous four years of engagement. A lesson that ought to have been learned in Iraqi Kurdistan is that once a marginalized group begins to establish its own middle class, local governance, and mother-tongue education, it loses its taste for armed confrontation and becomes more open to a confederated arrangement with an Arab central government. If NGOs leave the Beja region for lack of funds and conditions continue to deteriorate, then USAID's achievement in the eastern province will have been just enough to provoke the ire of Khartoum but not enough to foster sustainable bourgeois leadership. Which means an end to book parties once and for all and a return to the trenches.

Joseph Braude is the author of The New Iraq: Rebuilding the Country for Its People, the Middle East, and the World. This essay first appeared in The New Republic Online, January 5, 2005.

Republic of Slick

2005-02-01T21:02:00.000-05:00

A December editorial in The New Republic, “Ought and Is,” rightly exposes hollow arguments against democratization made by Arab leaders at the recent American-sponsored Forum for the Future in Morocco. The conflict with Israel is no excuse to stymie calls for free elections, and the quest for economic progress in Arab countries need not slow political reform.

But it’s worth pointing out that neither argument enjoys the acceptance it used to in many Arab societies today. The internal debate between ruling cliques and their subject peoples has grown more sophisticated, especially over the past few months, in light of baby steps toward change by North African heads of state on the one hand and TV images of Ukraine’s non-violent revolution on the other. As a recent opinion poll and live debate on Al-Jazeera demonstrate, Arabs are overwhelmingly fed up with their leaders’ political window dressing, but remain complacent anyway, due in part to the opiate of slick new sales pitches for the status quo. American diplomats should enter the debate on Arab politics armed with a response to the regimes’ latest hits, not just the golden oldies; even “blame Israel” has been remixed.

It was the TV talk show Al-Ittijah al-Mu’akis (“The Opposite Direction”) that opened one week back in December with a breezy run-down of recent election results in Arab republics Bush rarely mentions: Tunisia, where the “incumbent” won 94.9% of the vote; Algeria, where the landslide was a more modest 83%; and Mauritania, whose president squeaked by with 67%. It is widely believed in these and other authoritarian Arab states that election results are a foregone conclusion – the President always wins, even though the days of 99.98% victories may be over – and that Arab elections are essentially tantamount to a coronation of the ruler. The host asked viewers to call and e-mail in their opinion of whether Arab elections are “a waste of time and money.” 91% said yes, they are – burdening the pro-establishment voice among the show’s two guests with the task of changing their minds.

Burhan Bsayyis, a Tunisian writer who supports the country’s president, Zein El-Abdin bin Ali, rose to the challenge. He made the case that Arabs should embrace their ersatz elections and strive to achieve change by somehow working within the system. He did so not by scapegoating Israel, but by indirectly validating a core pro-Israel argument: “It is just as when Bourguiba went to the Arabs of Jericho,” he said, “and told them, ‘Accept the legitimate international resolutions, even if they are unjust, then ask for more!’” He was referring to the landmark visit of former Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba to Jericho in 1965, wherein he urged the crowd to recognize Israel and accept a peace settlement. History proved Bourguiba right, the TV guest suggested, because if only they had played ball with the Jews then, they’d have had a Palestinian state by now. So too, he concluded, should Arab societies play ball with their governments today. Vote in any elections, however skewed the result, he urged, “then ask for more.”

The argument apparent won over a few television viewers. The running audience tally on whether Arab elections are a waste of time and money slid one point, to 90% in the affirmative.

But Bsayyis’ tiny gain was short-lived. His opponent accused him of deceiving the audience with “smoke.” Arab elections are an obfuscation of democracy and not a component of democracy as they should be, said Sa’d Jabbar, a London-based Moroccan lawyer affiliated with the Center for North African Studies at Cambridge. That’s a particular tragedy in North Africa, he went on, where Arab societies are more ripe for democracy than elsewhere in the region. “We are qualified,” he said, “more than any other Arab peoples, to begin a democratic process.” He cited the presence of an educated middle class, the region’s history of close contact with the democratic societies of Europe, and guarantees of free speech and assembly in most North African constitutions – freedoms granted in writing but not applied in practice. Jabbar’s call for democracy to replace the present dictatorships was no less idealistic than Colin Powell’s speech to Arab leaders in Morocco. But Jabbar was addressing Arab societies, rather than their leadership, and he used minimalist rhetoric – urging North Africans simply to demand that their rulers respect their own constitutions – an approach that evidently found favor. Within minutes, he had neutralized his Tunisian opponent’s modest gain in the ongoing TV poll.

Enter the hot button issues. Bsayyis countered Jabbar with a series of arguments light on reason but laced with emotional impact. “Fine, you can have a ballot box,” he said, “like you have in Afghanistan, and you elect Karzai. But are you going to tell me that’s a democracy? Look what’s happening in Iraq: over 200 political parties, 1000 newspapers, but are you going to claim there’s a transition to a real democracy in Iraq?” In the Al-Jazeera milieu, these are not questions worthy of exploration; they are meant to be rhetorical, and their politically correct answer is “no.” Jabbar did not even bother to respond. Bsayyis then invoked the memory of Algeria’s civil war following its aborted democracy experiment in the early ‘90s: “Do you want us to embark on a democratic experiment that could result in 100,000 dead, like in Algeria? Do you want us to allow a freedom of the press that could result in vituperation and calumny that could pit the society against the state and result in violent conflict – civil war?” With this emotional appeal for stability at any cost, Bsayyis won over a slightly larger segment: now only 87.3% of the running audience poll agreed that Arab elections were a waste of time and money.

He went on to cite baby steps toward democracy in recent months by heads of state across North Africa: Bin Ali’s decision to allow a presidential challenger to win nearly 4% of the vote, Mubarak’s release of some Egyptian Jihad activists from prison, the Algerian president’s effort to promote “national healing.” But he did not manage to persuade more viewers to poll his way. The “waste of time and money” vote climbed back to 90% and stayed put for the rest of the hour. Yet another Arab landslide.

Implicit in this TV back-and-forth was the obvious, unasked question of whether Al-Jazeera audiences should try and overthrow their governments. Judging by the poll results, you’d think much of the Arab world was on the brink of revolution. The example of Ukraine’s nonviolent election vigil, invoked repeatedly by the program’s host as well as London-based Sa’d Jabbar, seemed to offer a way forward. But as callers phoned in their comments later in the segment, a less radical picture emerged. One caller said he despised the status quo but felt compelled to protect it anyway, because the alternatives are worse for Arab societies, and because democracy only serves the interests of the West. “I prefer the presence of a dictator,” he said. “Democracy has killed 100,000 Iraqis in a short period.” He also contended that the West has double standards on Arab democracy: “Bush demanded that the world have nothing to do with Arafat, may God have mercy on him, even though he was popularly elected, while demanding that the world deal with Ayad Allawi, even though he came [to Iraq] on an American tank.”

No caller embraced the Tunisian guest’s defense of Arab establishments, and one went so far as to lambast him for it. (“These rulers hold spend our nation’s money on weapons and entertainment and travel and the building of palaces,” a Saudi man said. “… They do not believe in abdicating under any circumstances.”)

And yet, Bsayyis deserves a pat on the back in Tunis. Not for having won the debate, which he didn’t, but for achieving the one goal Arab elites who defend their regimes take seriously: placating their societies. They adjust their pitch book to current events and evolving popular sentiments, and they do so artfully. American diplomats are yet to craft a serious rhetorical response.

Chief Iraq War Crimes Investigator Visits Kuwait

2005-01-25T06:26:00.000-05:00

The imminent prosecution of former Iraqi regime stalwarts for war crimes hasn't received much coverage lately in the American press. But in the January 24 broadcast of the Arabic-language Radio Free Iraq, the story is alive and kicking. Here's a translated excerpt from one report:

Informed Kuwaiti legal sources say that the matter of Iraqi war criminals will witness some movement in the next few days, after a visit which the judge Ra'id al-Juhi -- of the Iraqi War Crimes Office, which is an offshoot of the general prosecutors' office -- will pay to Kuwait, to deal with a number of cases against alleged Iraqi war criminals. The sources said that al-Juhi -- who has been put in charge of the investigative office of the Iraqi Criminal Court, and who is also in charge of the investigation of the deposed President Saddam Hussein and other former regime members -- will speak with Kuwaiti officials about the latest arrangements and manner of transmission of Kuwaiti evidence and allegations.

It seems that Al-Juhi and his team would like to increase its coordination with Kuwait, which has already prepared 200 charges' worth of indictments of Saddam and members of his former inner circle. Most of these are allegations of war crimes and human rights violations arising out of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait over a decade ago.

Imagined Community: Reading a Pro-Hamas Newspaper

2005-01-24T11:12:00.000-05:00

At first glance, you might say that Dick Cheney couldn't have put it better himself. The preelection issue of Al-Zaytouna--a pro-Hamas Arabic-language newspaper printed in Bridgeview, Illinois--endorses John Kerry for president. "The question is not so much whether John Kerry is better than George Bush," writes editor-in-chief Usama Abu Irsheid on the biweekly's front page, "but whether we want four more years of Bush." (The paper is published in Arabic; translations are mine.) He says the Patriot Act has "been cast upon our necks like a sharp sword" and declares that it would be "nihilistic on the part of our community not to vote, particularly as the very future of our existence in this country is at issue." Republicans might be inclined to take heart at what amounts to a backhanded compliment: the concern on the part of prominent Palestinian Islamists that their embattled infrastructure in America will be totally snuffed out unless Bush goes home to Texas.

The political preferences of a pro-Hamas newspaper are, obviously, irrelevant. (You could easily find equally awful people--say, Klan members--expressing vigorous support for Bush.) What's noteworthy here is that somewhere between the claim of "racist assaults on our religion" and familiar tropes assailing the administration's policy toward Israel lies the blurring of a key distinction--between America's millions-strong Muslim community on the one hand, and the subset who actively support Islamist militancy on the other. Whether this ethnically diverse community has truly closed ranks or a pro-Hamas editor is merely pretending it has, there's a problem here that Democrats and Republicans alike will need to address after next Tuesday.

A sense of embattlement often brings people together who would otherwise disagree. Four years ago, a sense of embattlement brought together secular Muslims, radical Islamists--and, of all people, Bush. After the talks in Camp David between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat broke down, and the second intifada broke out, esteem among Arab Americans for a White House-brokered peace hit an historic low. The new alliance of PLO and Islamist fighters in the Palestinian territories was echoed by expressions of solidarity among secular and Islamist-leaning Arabs and other Muslims in the United States. "The majority [of American Muslims] determined to vote for the Republican candidate at that time ... against the Democrat Al Gore and his running mate Joe Lieberman," writes the Al-Zaytouna editor, "...the position of the community having been largely determined as the result of a call from Islamic institutions which had gathered together ... to establish a clear choice for the direction of the American Arab and Muslim vote." I recall visiting several American mosques during that period and noticing leaflets signed jointly by the leaders of Saudi-funded Islamist groups in the United States--overwhelmingly Palestinian and Egyptian imams--urging the faithful to vote for Bush.

After Bush's inauguration, many of the same imams engaged in some public boasting. After all, the swing state of Florida hosts a large Muslim community and just a few hundred votes had made the difference. Illinois-based cleric Jamal Sa'id, an outspoken supporter of Palestine's "Islamic resistance," praised a large crowd in Arabic at a fund-raising event I attended in Chicago for the Islamic Association for Palestine, declaring that their votes may have altered history. Palestinian Islamic leaders including Nihad Awad of the Council on American Islamic Relations and Abdel Rahman Alamoudi of the American Muslim Council each appeared on Middle Eastern satellite television hailing the Bush victory as evidence of their community's newfound political prowess. Glib claims of having tipped the electoral scale apparently became part of the fund-raising pitch for these organizations, both in the United States and overseas. They determined that both their fundraising power and their political prestige depended on their ability to make the American Muslim community seem to be a coherent whole, capable of speaking--and voting--with a single voice.

Now, of course, the same Islamist leaders are regretting their support of Bush--some from behind bars. Alamoudi was indicted by John Ashcroft's Justice Department in March 2004 for allegedly receiving $340,000 from Libya--a sanctions violation. The Islamic Association for Palestine, which used to appear on Al-Zaytouna's masthead, is a shadow of its former self, as numerous key staffers have been named in a 50-count terrorism indictment. So is its fund-raising affiliate, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. Indeed, for the tightly-knit community of Wahhabi-oriented activists in the United States, the claim that Bush-era justice has landed "upon our necks like a sharp sword" is barely an exaggeration.

But which necks exactly are on the line? And how many don't deserve to be there? Al-Zaytouna makes its opinion clear. The pages of recent issues contain pointed coverage of each new indictment, uniformly asserting the innocence of those charged. In the October 15 edition, a favorable review of a new book, Silent Victims: The Plight of Arab & Muslim Americans in Post-9/11 America, reinforces the notion that all Arab and Muslim Americans are under siege in the United States today, regardless of their politics, regardless of their actual innocence or guilt.

Muslim groups that do not toe the Wahhabi line, on the other hand, tend to take a more nuanced view. For example, Ahmed al-Rahim of the American Islamic Congress told a Washington think tank in late 2003 of his "embarrassment" at the arrest of "prominent members of the old guard Muslim leadership. ... Now it seems that the government is beginning to crack down--at least on direct ties to terror states and terror groups. It is a case of chickens coming home to roost." Other Arab and Muslim organizations have hailed some of the major terror indictments of the past year in press releases of their own. Middle Eastern immigrant communities undoubtedly suffer from a unique social stigma in the United States, particularly after September 11, and baseless arrests have occurred far too often. But the assertion that the community faces a plight akin to Japanese Americans during the Second World War, as Al-Zaytouna's review of Silent Victims suggests, is not accepted by all American Muslims.

Whether Kerry or Bush wins the election, the new administration will face the challenge of engaging a polarized Arab and Muslim-American community, both as constituents and as partners in the struggle against militant groups. There is a crisis of leadership among the various organizations, their members, and a larger number of Muslims who do not identify communally. The "community" has not fully extricated the extremists in its midst--nor has it closed ranks as the pages of Al-Zaytouna would have us believe.

Joseph Braude is the author of The New Iraq: Rebuilding the Country for Its People, the Middle East, and the World. This piece first appeared in The New Republic Online, October 29, 2004.

Double WAMY: Saudi Charities on a Charm Offensive

2005-01-24T10:55:00.000-05:00

Who can forget the Saudi telethon back in April 2002, which raised about $100 million for the Palestinian intifada? The images of the telethon, which found their way onto TV in the United States, told a story that alarmists in the West had been trying to put into words for years: A well-oiled international network of charities based in the Kingdom had so inculcated the connection between militant causes and the mandatory Muslim alms tax, or zakat, that it could raise vast sums of money, and fast.

But that was three years worth of joint American-Saudi crackdowns ago. A litter of Treasury Department press releases and Saudi Washington press conferences tells the official story that has ensued since September 11. Washington and Riyadh seized assets and closed down several overseas branches of the Al Haramayn Islamic Foundation, a charity that had allegedly provided logistical and financial support to Al Qaeda in Asia and Africa. Congress has called for investigating 27 Muslim charities, and Treasury Secretary John Snow has urged American Muslims to make sure that their future "generosity is not exploited for nefarious purposes" by avoiding those charities. And in a particularly dramatic move, the northern Virginia office of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (wamy), a global foundation established in 1972, was raided by 50 federal agents in June 2004. Spokesmen for the organization--whose U.S. branch was partly founded by Abdullah Bin Laden, Osama's nephew--have denied any links to terrorist groups. (Full disclosure: I assisted the FBI in counterterrorist operations between 1994 and 1999.) Whether these joint crackdowns truly crippled the global organizations is unclear--90 other branches of wamy, including those in Saudi Arabia, are still up and running. But the publicity the wamy raid garnered appears at least to have reduced charitable giving to the group. Wamy's deputy chief told the Arab News in late October that donations to the group were down 40 percent this year, citing new restrictions and bad press. Meanwhile, Muslim nonprofits in the United States assert a post-September 11 boon in domestic giving, which they believe stems from American Muslims' fear of entanglement with law enforcement should they be caught sending money to relief groups overseas.

The Saudi charities have resolved not to take all this bad news lying down. They appear to have unleashed a new charm offensive in October just before the peak giving time of Ramadan, taking aim not at the American public but at their own wary base: wealthy Arab Muslims. And as anyone who followed the U.S. presidential campaign this year can attest, you can sure tell a candidate by the way he appeals to his base. There's an unpleasant fact at issue that American officials are still hesitant to admit: While some Muslims' generosity has truly been exploited, other Muslims genuinely support militant groups and would like to help them out financially, provided they can do so with impunity. Appealing subtly to both types of donors is the essence of the Arabic-language public relations challenge the Saudi charities now face--and the reason behind the seemingly contradictory rhetoric routinely expressed by their leadership.

"The broad Western campaign against the Islamic charitable institutions ... rests on false foundations," wamy director general Salih al-Wuhaybi told Al Hayat, an Arabic language newspaper, a few weeks back, citing a plot by "the Zionists and neoconservatives in America. They want a shake-up in the Islamic world and to sow tension between [Saudi Arabia] and other nations." (Translations from Al Hayat are mine.) His counterpart at the helm of the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), Adnan bin Khalil Basha, added, "the compassionate hand that pats the head of the orphan and wipes the tears of the poor cannot participate in the spreading of fear and terror among believers, whatever their religions may be." The U.S. Justice Department has tied IIRO branch offices to the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa. To this charge, Basha offers a defense that falls short of a denial: "Saying that these institutions have transcended the limits of activity ascribed to them is a very slanderous thing to say about organizations that are governed by rules and regulations and strictly determined laws." The same paragraph quotes a pro-Saudi cleric in the United States, Jafar Sheikh Idris: "If every institution one of whose members had made a mistake were closed down and assaulted, there wouldn't remain a single institution, charitable or otherwise, on the face of the earth." After all, he goes on, some Western intelligence agencies failed to gauge the state of Saddam's weapons program, "but was the result that these agencies were disbanded? Why, therefore, make war on charitable institutions, given that what resulted from their mistakes, if mistakes were really made, is nothing compared to the results of the war on Iraq?"

The Al Hayat story spans five columns and extensively quotes leaders of several of the most established charities in the Kingdom. They line up to deny any ties to terrorism. But the piece also offers an explanation for repeated allegations to the contrary. "It is logical," opines Abd al-Rahman al-Habib, "that the first target of suspicion will be those entities that have a similar ideology but differ with [the terrorist organization] in the application of violence as a tactic." So the ends are the same but the means are different, hence the confusion by Western intelligence agencies. No militant group is mentioned by name in the piece, and only the expression "Al-Sahwa al-Islamiya [the Islamic awakening]" is used to denote the movement of Islamist resurgence, popular in the Kingdom, with which the charities identify and from which some armed groups may at one time have arisen.

The whitewashing of Saudi charities among Arabs inside the Kingdom advances somewhat every time a domestic Al Qaeda cell is busted by the government. Saudi Channel One TV in early October, for example, aired videotaped confessions of local guerillas who admitted siphoning off funds from two charities and using the money to buy weapons for attacks in the Kingdom. This proved an opportunity for wamy's director general to appear on TV shortly afterward and announce new guidelines for donating money without fear that it would be diverted to arming local militants. The groups' commitment to snuffing out armed gangs inside the Kingdom, in consort with the government, is beyond doubt.

But nagging questions persist about these charities' support for armed adventures elsewhere in the Muslim world and beyond. The very reporter who gained access to so many directors general for the Al Hayat story is Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab al-Turayri, apparently the son of Abd al-Wahhab al-Turayri--who recently joined 25 other Saudi clerics to declare their support for the insurgency in Iraq. (The father-son connection is my own inference based on Saudi Arabic nomenclature, according to which Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab al-Turayri is understood to be the son of a man named Abd al-Wahhab who hails from the clan of al-Turayri. It is a statistical improbability, given the relatively small community of clerical elites in the Kingdom, that the two are unrelated.) The statement asserts the "legitimacy of the resistance and the illegality of cooperation with the occupier against the actions of the resistance." Another signatory to the document is Mahdi Muhammad Rashad al-Hakami, a professor of Islamic legal studies who described himself, in a 2002 petition he also signed, as regional director for wamy in the Saudi province of Jazan. Yet another signatory on the Iraq petition is Salman bin Fahd al-Awdah, a superstar among Saudi clergy, whose sermons have been distributed by wamy in the United States.

The link, however tenuous, between a mainstream Saudi charity and the cause of armed insurgency in Iraq may further sully its image in the United States. But for wamy's bottom line, it's also good business. The cause to drive back the American occupier is very popular among Sunni Muslims today--at least as popular as the Palestinian Intifada was back in April 2002.

Whether American officials are fully aware of these nuances remains unclear. wamy's website recently featured a photograph of the American ambassador in Saudi Arabia, James Oberwetter, attending Ramadan festivities sponsored during the recent fast month by the organization in Riyadh. This powerful image tells potential Muslim donors that the group has cleaned up its act in the eyes of the West. Coupled with links to a message of solidarity with Iraqi insurgents, it's a compelling pitch indeed.

Joseph Braude is the author of The New Iraq: Rebuilding the Country for Its People, the Middle East, and the World. This piece first appeared in The New Republic Online, December 3, 2004.

Captive Audience: The French Secret Recipe for Resolving an Iraqi Hostage Crisis

2005-01-24T08:15:00.000-05:00

January 5- For the past couple of weeks, the massive devastation in Southeast Asia seems to have had a strange ripple effect in Iraq: it made TV airtime for a hostage video harder to come by. Tsunami disaster footage took center stage on Arabic satellite networks as it did everywhere else, leaving the comparatively banal image of a beheading wanting for an international audience.

Which is not to say that the country’s media-savvy insurgents have been sitting idly by. Witness Tuesday’s assassination of the Baghdad governor and a new spate of deadly car and roadside bombings in the Iraqi capital. These attacks send a potent message to local authorities and increase the likelihood of a delay in the country’s planned late-January elections, although they fall short of earning the global public outcry that earlier hostage spectacles have done. As a comprehensive study of Iraq’s hostage crisis shows, the tactic of kidnapping has been the insurgents’ most effective tool of all. Some countries have withdrawn their troops in exchange for their nationals’ release, many businesses and aid groups have been persuaded to leave Iraq or avoid coming, and countless Iraqis are afraid to cooperate with the provisional government and may shun the ballot boxes when elections eventually take place. So there is every reason to expect a new wave of masked men to appear in grainy videos soon. (At this writing, journalist Florence Aubenas has been reported missing and is feared to have been kidnapped.)

Just ask Georges Malbrunot, a freed French hostage who has been making the rounds of radio and television since his December 21 release. Though attention to his story outside France has been relatively modest given the mega-tragedy to Iraq’s southeast, the world still wants to know how Malbrunot, his French journalist colleague, and their Syrian driver managed to escape death. And the world still does not have a complete answer. He told the BBC, NPR, and other Western networks that he did not know whether a ransom had been paid by France, although the French weekly Le Canard Enchaine has reported that there were in fact millions of francs in pay-offs. He also declined to throw much light on the negotiations that apparently took place. Instead, he mainly observed that his captors were not so much Iraqi patriots as pan-Islamists (he told a press conference in France, “…we were immersed in planet Bin Laden …”) and repeated the kidnappers’ warning to all foreigners (“They told us, ‘Iraq is a land of war now, and don’t come back to Iraq,’” Malbrunot explained to NPR’s Jacki Lyden, advising American journalists, “Don’t go there. Nothing is better than life…”). He also took pains to criticize a French Deputy, Didier Julia, for allegedly complicating matters by visiting Syria on his own initiative and trying to secure the hostages’ release through former Saddam loyalists.

But there is more to Malbrunot’s story which he appears to have saved for Al-Jazeera – to begin with, his support for the insurgents. In a half-hour interview he gave to the Arabic-language network which was broadcast Monday, January 3, he said,

I think the Islamic Army in Iraq should focus its work on resisting the American occupation and those who cooperate with it. The important thing is that there be a resistance. Islamic or non-Islamic, we believe in the sacred right of any resistance. Yet in the West, and even in the Arab world, when we see heads cut off, it does not lead to anything but the slandering of the image of the resistance in the entire world. The true resistance fighters should preserve their reputation, and demonstrate that their fight is a legitimate and just resistance …

Chalk it up to Stockholm Syndrome if you wish. But for a fluent Arabic speaker and author of two books who has spent ten years in the Arab Middle East, Malbrunot cannot claim to be ignorant of the incendiary effect these remarks have in the region. (It bears noting that he said he speaks Arabic but gave the interview in French. The above quote and all the ones to follow are my translation of the Al-Jazeera audio feed, which is in turn a running translation from French into Arabic; the original French is inaudible.) Malbrunot’s thumbs-up for “resisting the American occupation and those who cooperate with it” is understood by Al-Jazeera audiences to mean an endorsement of attacks on coalition forces in the broadest sense – including Iraqi government, police, and election officials. Coming not from an Islamist cleric but from a freed Western hostage, these comments are a morale boost to an insurgency whose bloody tactics and nihilism have been criticized by liberal Arab columnists across the region. They also serve to further endear France and its people to the more hard-line political players in Iraq and its periphery – a fact which is inseparable from the still-unanswered question of how Malbrunot and his friends escaped death.

The reason the question is so important is that other countries would like to help their own citizens escape captivity or worse in Iraq as well. The long months of hostage spectacles have caused angst and finger-pointing in Europe and the United States – both at TV media for fueling the trend by giving militants a platform to air their videos, and at various governments for allegedly paying ransoms. Arab pundits, too, are grappling with the problem. An Al-Hayat columnist in October called upon “the little countries” to stop incentivizing Iraqi militants by paying them off, and a more flippant writer in the Lebanese online daily Elaph advised Western governments to adopt the old school response of taking their own hostages – say, Iraqis who live in the West. All this, and the French secret recipe remains a secret.

At least we know what the secret is not. The French government’s robust opposition to war in Iraq clearly contributed to the kidnappers’ mercy on Malbrunot and his friends, but it is not by itself what saved them. “Our being French was to our interest …” he told Al-Jazeera. “France was occupied in 1939, and occupation means [we know] the necessity of having a resistance. Therefore, they [the kidnappers] fiercely distinguished being French from being American.” Leaving aside Malbrunot’s selective memory, which omits both the long history of French colonialism and the fact that it was American troops who ended the Nazi occupation of France, his point has merit as it reflects popular wisdom in the Arab world today – the only wisdom that matters to a hostage in Iraq. But all that this pro-French sentimentalism accomplished was to inspire the kidnappers to think more creatively about their demands. As there weren’t any French soldiers in Iraq to be withdrawn in exchange for the hostages’ release, the insurgents demanded instead that France rescind its law banning the head scarf in French public schools – and the French government publicly refused to do so. At which point France found itself in the same predicament as any other country facing an unacceptable demand from Iraqi kidnappers. (As of this writing, the presumed kidnapping of French journalist Florence Aubenas only underscores the fact that insurgents in Iraq do not play favorites among Westerners.)

By improvising its demands, however, the “Islamic Army” also exposed a potential weakness: its global agenda. And therein lies the secret of the French response. Malbrunot explained what he meant by “planet Bin Laden” on Al-Jazeera:

I meant to say that I discovered that the Islamic Army in Iraq did not have the solely Iraqi goal of putting a stop to the American occupation, but that this army identifies with the Bin Laden organization. The kidnappers repeatedly referred to Bin Laden. I spoke with one of the young men, who had been in a training camp in Afghanistan, who informed me that his organization has goals that exceed their differences with the Americans and transcend the ongoing war in Iraq. He said that they are present in 60 countries, and their priority is to depose the regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and establish a caliphate from Spain to the borders of China, in addition to ideas hostile to the West which he would express almost constantly. … I said that I lived on “planet Bin Laden,” because we had departed the realm of the Iraqi-American problem and entered with them discussions and topics of an international nature. Our discussions grew deeper and dealt with European and internal French issues including the [ban on the] head scarf and others.

The kidnappers’ hand was weakened by harboring global ambitions because they held fewer cards in international negotiations than in local ones. Bin Laden may well be an emperor in exile, but in the 60 “provinces” where he maintains cells, including France, his minions are embattled – operatives imprisoned, slush funds busted, front groups padlocked.

Malbrunot could not detail French government actions, except to note that they were extensive and coordinated between intelligence agencies and the foreign ministry, but some charming hints of what transpired came out indirectly in his interview anyway. At one point during his four-month ordeal, he recalled, “one of the [Al-Qaeda] officials came to the place where I was confined and told me, ‘You will be released soon…’ When I asked him about the reasons for the delay, he said, ‘there are several interventions and mediations, and there were Islamic personalities that had offered to pay sums of money to release you, and we had said to them, ‘we do not want monies,’ and this has delayed the release.’”

The implication here is that the French government deputized several groups to negotiate for the hostages simultaneously – perhaps in France as well as Iraq, some officially, some unofficially – including an Islamic organization, which offered a ransom. French Deputy Didier Julia’s maverick attempt to open a separate negotiating track with Saddam loyalists in Syria may have frustrated other efforts temporarily, but it also contributed to the pool of information France acquired on who the kidnappers were and who they were not. Perhaps not entirely by design, French authorities managed to size up their opponent by confronting the group with a series of ideological and moral tests – from Ba’thism to pan-Islamism, from political give-and-take to the prospect of a bribe. For several months, they did not get back their citizens but they did learn a lot about their captors.

In the meantime, there was nothing for the soldiers of the Islamic Army to do but sit around and watch satellite television. From the room adjoining that of his confinement, Malbrunot said he could hear the insurgents flipping channels. For local news, they watched the new Iraqi network Al-Iraqiya. Friday afternoons they watched the weekly sermon on Saudi satellite television. And for international coverage, they turned to Al-Jazeera. Which suited France just fine. The kidnappers watched Prime Minister Michel Barnier appear on the network to plead for the hostages’ lives. They also saw coverage of large, well-organized rallies of Muslims in Paris in support of the captives. Even the management of Al-Jazeera found it in its heart to issue its own call for their release. “They [the kidnappers] told us, ‘The Muslims in France are protesting for your benefit more than the Christians,’” Malbrunot recalled. “…I want to thank the entire Muslim community in France, which demonstrated its unity and sent this excellent message, and convinced the kidnappers that these journalists are not spies. These are messages that were repeated on your network Al-Jazeera.”

“You mean to say that the kidnappers were watching Al-Jazeera?” the interviewer asked, a twinkle in his eye.

Indeed, in the global village of “planet Bin Laden,” the kidnappers were a captive audience.