Three Down, Two to Go? Apparently Not
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer
There are five Arab countries along the Mediterranean in North Africa: Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, known collectively as the Maghreb.
In three of them, dictators have effectively been eliminated. Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak, and now Moammar Gadhafi, are history.
However, rulers in Algeria and Morocco, both former French possessions, are hanging on.
Algeria, a huge state that borders Libya and Tunisia to its east, has had a particularly violent history. From 1954 to 1962, the National Liberation Front (FLN) fought a war against the country’s French overlords, gaining independence after the deaths of as many as one million people.
As well, about one million European settlers, the so-called pied-noirs, of mostly French descent, who accounted for some 10 percent of the population, fled to France.
The FLN proclaimed a socialist state, the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria, and the country’s first president was the FLN leader Ahmed Ben Bella. He was overthrown by his defence minister, Houari Boumédienne, in 1965.
Boumédienne turned the country into a military dictatorship, allowing the FLN to effectively wither away. After his death in 1978, his successor, another officer, Chadli Bendjedid, took over as president.
By the early 1990s there was massive unrest in Algeria, so Bendjedid allowed the formation of political parties, and scheduled elections for 1991. However, when it became clear that the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), founded two years earlier, was poised to win, the army mounted a coup and cancelled the elections.
A civil war followed in which between 160,000 and 200,000 people were killed over the next decade.
Abdelaziz Bouteflika, in office since 1999, continued repressive emergency rule. However, in January opposition parties, unions, and human rights organisations, inspired by events in neighbouring Tunisia, began to spearhead popular demonstrations against the regime.
Forced to accommodate their demands, Bouteflika lifted political restrictions in February. He also announced new measures to create jobs.
While sporadic opposition to the regime continues to flare up, at the moment no serious challenge to the government seems to be in the offing.
The ancient kingdom of Morocco, divided between and ruled as a protectorate by France and Spain between 1912 and 1956, has been far more stable than Algeria.
The Alaouite dynasty, which has ruled Morocco since the seventeenth century,traces its ancestry back to the Muslim prophet Muhammad, and so has far more legitimacy than most Arab rulers.
The current king, Muhammad VI, who ascended to the throne in 1999, has strengthened the economy and improved Morocco’s human rights record. Still, in February thousands of Moroccans rallied in the capital, Rabat, to demand that he give up some of his powers.
In June, the king announced a series of constitutional reforms, giving the country’s prime minister and parliament more executive authority. Elections are now scheduled for November.
While some protests have continued, organized by the February 20 Movement, this seems to have satisfied most Moroccans.
For the moment, therefore, the revolutions that have toppled other autocrats in the Arab world have bypassed these two nations.
Professor Henry Srebrnik
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Monday, August 22, 2011
Tribal Revenge a Worry in Post-Gadhafi Libya
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer
If a man is known by the company he keeps, it doesn’t say much for Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who will apparently allow his new best friend, Moammar Gadhafi, to seek asylum in his country.
I suspect even Chávez’s other comrade, Fidel Castro, is embarrassed.
After an inconclusive six months of battle, the opposition in Libya is finally on the verge of defeating the mad tyrant of Tripoli.
But now the real work will begin.
Libya is little more than a notional state.
Most people’s loyalty is first and foremost to their own tribal group. Many Libyans have traditionally relied on tribal connections more than civil society for justice and security.
In recent weeks, anti-Gadhafi insurgents in Libya’s western mountains and around Misrata have attacked civilians whose tribes supported Colonel Gadhafi, looting mountain villages and emptying a civilian neighbourhood.
The city of Yafran, southwest of Tripoli, has become the easternmost outpost of a cultural and linguistic reawakening of the Amazigh, the Berber people long oppressed by the Gadhafi regime.
Amazigh cultural and political leaders have framed a set of public demands for a post-Gadhafi Libya.
As part of their vision, their native language, Tamazight, will have an equal standing with Arabic.
But at the same time, the houses in Yafran of the Mashaashia, a tribe whose members supported the Gadhafi dictatorship, were burned.
There were similar reports of arson against the tribe in other towns in the region.
As well, General Abdul Fattah Younes, one of the commanders of the opposition forces, was murdered by some rebels, apparently in revenge for his previous role as Gadhafi’s security chief.
In response, the head of his tribe, the Obeidi, threatened to retaliate against those responsible, setting off a crisis in the opposition’s ranks.
Members of the tribes close to Colonel Gadhafi, such as his own tribe, the Qaddafa, or the larger Maghraha, may face the greatest danger from “tribal revenge,” George Joffe, a specialist on North African politics at Cambridge University, told the New York Times.
Reprisals have been a source of embarrassment for the Transitional National Council, the de facto rebel authority, but with much of Libya close to anarchy, there is little they can do about it.
Meanwhile in Syria, another dictator fights to hold on to power.
Will Bashar al-Assad be the next to go?
It’s going to get crowded in Caracas.
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer
If a man is known by the company he keeps, it doesn’t say much for Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who will apparently allow his new best friend, Moammar Gadhafi, to seek asylum in his country.
I suspect even Chávez’s other comrade, Fidel Castro, is embarrassed.
After an inconclusive six months of battle, the opposition in Libya is finally on the verge of defeating the mad tyrant of Tripoli.
But now the real work will begin.
Libya is little more than a notional state.
Most people’s loyalty is first and foremost to their own tribal group. Many Libyans have traditionally relied on tribal connections more than civil society for justice and security.
In recent weeks, anti-Gadhafi insurgents in Libya’s western mountains and around Misrata have attacked civilians whose tribes supported Colonel Gadhafi, looting mountain villages and emptying a civilian neighbourhood.
The city of Yafran, southwest of Tripoli, has become the easternmost outpost of a cultural and linguistic reawakening of the Amazigh, the Berber people long oppressed by the Gadhafi regime.
Amazigh cultural and political leaders have framed a set of public demands for a post-Gadhafi Libya.
As part of their vision, their native language, Tamazight, will have an equal standing with Arabic.
But at the same time, the houses in Yafran of the Mashaashia, a tribe whose members supported the Gadhafi dictatorship, were burned.
There were similar reports of arson against the tribe in other towns in the region.
As well, General Abdul Fattah Younes, one of the commanders of the opposition forces, was murdered by some rebels, apparently in revenge for his previous role as Gadhafi’s security chief.
In response, the head of his tribe, the Obeidi, threatened to retaliate against those responsible, setting off a crisis in the opposition’s ranks.
Members of the tribes close to Colonel Gadhafi, such as his own tribe, the Qaddafa, or the larger Maghraha, may face the greatest danger from “tribal revenge,” George Joffe, a specialist on North African politics at Cambridge University, told the New York Times.
Reprisals have been a source of embarrassment for the Transitional National Council, the de facto rebel authority, but with much of Libya close to anarchy, there is little they can do about it.
Meanwhile in Syria, another dictator fights to hold on to power.
Will Bashar al-Assad be the next to go?
It’s going to get crowded in Caracas.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Woodstock and America, Then and Now
Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
Most people have at some time heard these lyrics, from the Crosby, Stills, Nash &Young song “Woodstock”:
“By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong,
And everywhere there was song and celebration.”
The year was 1969, of course. It was one of the highs – Americans walked on the moon – and lows – the war in Vietnam was dividing the country.
The three-day concert, which has become an iconic event in the history of the 1960s, was held at Max Yasgur’s 240-hectare dairy farm near the little town of White Lake, New York, in the Catskill Mountains, from August 15 to August 18.
I was in the Catskills earlier this month, in the town of Woodstock. It has long been a gathering place for artists, musicians, and writers, even before the music festival – which was actually held some 65 kilometres away -- made the name famous. (It was originally to be held in Woodstock itself but the venue there proved too small.)
Yet how different America seems four decades later. The hippies and flower children -- now in their sixties! -- have given way to “millennials,” younger people who wonder if they’ll ever have a decent career. The euphoria of the 1960s is now a memory, replaced by economic crisis and paranoia about terrorism.
There’s no need to reiterate the depressing data regarding debt, deficits, and dismal unemployment numbers. Things remain dire and there seems little government nor business can do about it.
Concerns over security have made it almost impossible to walk into many buildings or board airplanes without waiting in lines to be searched. Gone are the days when it was as easy to get onto a plane as to hop on a bus.
In New York City, I spoke to friends and relatives – doctors, professors, real estate agents, journalists -- about America’s woes. All were pessimistic. They were all liberal Democrats, as well, and feared Barack Obama might lose next year’s presidential election to a Republican.
“Woodstock,” it turns out, was in retrospect not “the dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” but a fleeting moment in American history.
Things are not looking good in America. But as my mother once said, at least “New York is New York.”
Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
Most people have at some time heard these lyrics, from the Crosby, Stills, Nash &Young song “Woodstock”:
“By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong,
And everywhere there was song and celebration.”
The year was 1969, of course. It was one of the highs – Americans walked on the moon – and lows – the war in Vietnam was dividing the country.
The three-day concert, which has become an iconic event in the history of the 1960s, was held at Max Yasgur’s 240-hectare dairy farm near the little town of White Lake, New York, in the Catskill Mountains, from August 15 to August 18.
I was in the Catskills earlier this month, in the town of Woodstock. It has long been a gathering place for artists, musicians, and writers, even before the music festival – which was actually held some 65 kilometres away -- made the name famous. (It was originally to be held in Woodstock itself but the venue there proved too small.)
Yet how different America seems four decades later. The hippies and flower children -- now in their sixties! -- have given way to “millennials,” younger people who wonder if they’ll ever have a decent career. The euphoria of the 1960s is now a memory, replaced by economic crisis and paranoia about terrorism.
There’s no need to reiterate the depressing data regarding debt, deficits, and dismal unemployment numbers. Things remain dire and there seems little government nor business can do about it.
Concerns over security have made it almost impossible to walk into many buildings or board airplanes without waiting in lines to be searched. Gone are the days when it was as easy to get onto a plane as to hop on a bus.
In New York City, I spoke to friends and relatives – doctors, professors, real estate agents, journalists -- about America’s woes. All were pessimistic. They were all liberal Democrats, as well, and feared Barack Obama might lose next year’s presidential election to a Republican.
“Woodstock,” it turns out, was in retrospect not “the dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” but a fleeting moment in American history.
Things are not looking good in America. But as my mother once said, at least “New York is New York.”
Tuesday, August 02, 2011
The State that Gets No Respect
Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
Later this month I'll be visiting New York and New Jersey.
Everybody loves New York, of course. But New Jersey probably gets more bad press, and endures more ridicule in popular culture, than any other American state.
Who has not at times chuckled at the uncouth accents (think "Joyzee"), cringed while watching movies and television shows about the Mob, or gasped when inhaling the terrible pollution on the Turnpike when driving in the northern part of the state.
Although two National Football League teams, the Giants and the Jets, play in New Jersey's Meadowlands sports complex in East Rutherford, both call themselves New York teams!
The many jokes about the state perpetuate a stereotype of New Jerseyites as classless yahoos.
If Connecticut, which borders New York to the east, is perceived as the home of New England gentility, then New Jersey, on the western side of the Hudson River, is the place where the rough and tumble working class aspires to grab a piece of the American dream.
That's not easy to do these days. Some of the state's cities, such as Newark, Paterson and Trenton, are amongst the poorest in the nation, rife with crime, corruption and all manner of social pathologies. They are urban wastelands.
The state's unemployment rate is close to 10 per cent. Conservative Republican Governor Chris Christie has dealt with the financial crisis by slashing budgets and taking on public sector unions.
But there's another side to the Garden State (which actually has vast farms covered with vegetables and floral products and is also home to Ivy League Princeton University). It is exemplified by people like Bruce Springsteen, the populist singer who voices the frustrations of America's forgotten underclass in songs like "Born to Run" and "Born in the U.S.A."
One of the beach towns along the Atlantic, Asbury Park, is home to the Stone Pony, which was a starting point for many musicians, including Springsteen, his wife Patty Scialfa, and Jon Bon Jovi. It's become something of a pilgrimage site for fans of rock and roll.
"It is a place that is important -- not just to us, but to the world," then New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman said on Memorial Day weekend in 2000.
In 1976 casino gambling was legalized in Atlantic City as a way to restore the fortunes of the famous resort, which had become a rather shabby place, experiencing a long period of economic decline.
Although the city revived considerably after the 1970s, with many new hotels and casinos built - it became the Las Vegas of the east -- the current recession has again hit the city hard. The unemployment rate stands at almost 13 per cent.
Poor New Jersey —- it gets no respect.
Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
Later this month I'll be visiting New York and New Jersey.
Everybody loves New York, of course. But New Jersey probably gets more bad press, and endures more ridicule in popular culture, than any other American state.
Who has not at times chuckled at the uncouth accents (think "Joyzee"), cringed while watching movies and television shows about the Mob, or gasped when inhaling the terrible pollution on the Turnpike when driving in the northern part of the state.
Although two National Football League teams, the Giants and the Jets, play in New Jersey's Meadowlands sports complex in East Rutherford, both call themselves New York teams!
The many jokes about the state perpetuate a stereotype of New Jerseyites as classless yahoos.
If Connecticut, which borders New York to the east, is perceived as the home of New England gentility, then New Jersey, on the western side of the Hudson River, is the place where the rough and tumble working class aspires to grab a piece of the American dream.
That's not easy to do these days. Some of the state's cities, such as Newark, Paterson and Trenton, are amongst the poorest in the nation, rife with crime, corruption and all manner of social pathologies. They are urban wastelands.
The state's unemployment rate is close to 10 per cent. Conservative Republican Governor Chris Christie has dealt with the financial crisis by slashing budgets and taking on public sector unions.
But there's another side to the Garden State (which actually has vast farms covered with vegetables and floral products and is also home to Ivy League Princeton University). It is exemplified by people like Bruce Springsteen, the populist singer who voices the frustrations of America's forgotten underclass in songs like "Born to Run" and "Born in the U.S.A."
One of the beach towns along the Atlantic, Asbury Park, is home to the Stone Pony, which was a starting point for many musicians, including Springsteen, his wife Patty Scialfa, and Jon Bon Jovi. It's become something of a pilgrimage site for fans of rock and roll.
"It is a place that is important -- not just to us, but to the world," then New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman said on Memorial Day weekend in 2000.
In 1976 casino gambling was legalized in Atlantic City as a way to restore the fortunes of the famous resort, which had become a rather shabby place, experiencing a long period of economic decline.
Although the city revived considerably after the 1970s, with many new hotels and casinos built - it became the Las Vegas of the east -- the current recession has again hit the city hard. The unemployment rate stands at almost 13 per cent.
Poor New Jersey —- it gets no respect.
Monday, August 01, 2011
Hold 'Em or Fold 'Em?
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer
Why is it that some countries will invest so much effort and money in hanging on to certain territories but not to others?
In the last two decades we have seen examples of this seeming inconsistency in various parts of the world.
Ethiopia has managed to hold on to Tigray and the Ogaden, areas with long-standing grievances against the Amhara-dominated state, but allowed Eritrea to secede in 1993.
Serbia let Montenegro go its own way in 2006 but fought tooth and nail, unsuccessfully, to maintain its control of Kosovo in 1999, and still refuses to acknowledge Kosovo’s sovereignty.
Indonesia has snuffed out separatist uprisings in Aceh and other parts of the archipelago but gave up its attempt to keep East Timor, which became a sovereign state in 2002.
Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in 1982 and abandoned Gaza in 2005, while it continues to occupy much of the West Bank.
And the Sudan, while refusing to release its genocidal grip on Darfur, finally acceded to the independence of South Sudan this year.
Ian Lustick, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, may have an answer to this seeming paradox. In an article published in his co-edited anthology Right-Sizing the State: The Politics of Moving Borders, Lustick tries to explain why states will disengage from some territories, but not others.
Lustick suggests that often, a country’s political elite comes to regard a territory as being so integral to the identity of the country, that the area’s status cannot be reduced to a question of interests, costs and benefits.
On the other hand, another territory may become seen as a place apart. So leaving it does not alter the state’s very conception of itself.
Eritrea, East Timor, and Montenegro had been incorporated into the states that finally let them go for a relatively brief period of time. They had all been separate political entities prior to their annexation and therefore also had well-defined borders. So their departure did not alter the core identities of Ethiopia, Indonesia and Serbia.
The Sinai and Gaza have little real ideological significance for a Jewish state. And in the Sudan, the Muslim north had in colonial times been governed separately from the largely animist and Christian south.
Darfur, Tigray, and Aceh on the island of Sumatra, however, have been central to the modern politics of the Sudan, Ethiopia, and Indonesia. Losing these territories would be a blow to each country's sense of self-definition.
As for Kosovo and the West Bank (the biblical Judea and Samaria), both have tremendous religious-ideological importance for Serbs and Jews.
They are considered the respective birthplaces of their nations and are therefore crucial to each country’s national identity, even though other peoples -- Kosovar Albanians and Palestinian Arabs -- over time had become the majority population.
In such cases, it becomes a battle of history versus demography. These are among the most difficult political issues to resolve, because they are fraught with emotions that trump all else.
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer
Why is it that some countries will invest so much effort and money in hanging on to certain territories but not to others?
In the last two decades we have seen examples of this seeming inconsistency in various parts of the world.
Ethiopia has managed to hold on to Tigray and the Ogaden, areas with long-standing grievances against the Amhara-dominated state, but allowed Eritrea to secede in 1993.
Serbia let Montenegro go its own way in 2006 but fought tooth and nail, unsuccessfully, to maintain its control of Kosovo in 1999, and still refuses to acknowledge Kosovo’s sovereignty.
Indonesia has snuffed out separatist uprisings in Aceh and other parts of the archipelago but gave up its attempt to keep East Timor, which became a sovereign state in 2002.
Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in 1982 and abandoned Gaza in 2005, while it continues to occupy much of the West Bank.
And the Sudan, while refusing to release its genocidal grip on Darfur, finally acceded to the independence of South Sudan this year.
Ian Lustick, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, may have an answer to this seeming paradox. In an article published in his co-edited anthology Right-Sizing the State: The Politics of Moving Borders, Lustick tries to explain why states will disengage from some territories, but not others.
Lustick suggests that often, a country’s political elite comes to regard a territory as being so integral to the identity of the country, that the area’s status cannot be reduced to a question of interests, costs and benefits.
On the other hand, another territory may become seen as a place apart. So leaving it does not alter the state’s very conception of itself.
Eritrea, East Timor, and Montenegro had been incorporated into the states that finally let them go for a relatively brief period of time. They had all been separate political entities prior to their annexation and therefore also had well-defined borders. So their departure did not alter the core identities of Ethiopia, Indonesia and Serbia.
The Sinai and Gaza have little real ideological significance for a Jewish state. And in the Sudan, the Muslim north had in colonial times been governed separately from the largely animist and Christian south.
Darfur, Tigray, and Aceh on the island of Sumatra, however, have been central to the modern politics of the Sudan, Ethiopia, and Indonesia. Losing these territories would be a blow to each country's sense of self-definition.
As for Kosovo and the West Bank (the biblical Judea and Samaria), both have tremendous religious-ideological importance for Serbs and Jews.
They are considered the respective birthplaces of their nations and are therefore crucial to each country’s national identity, even though other peoples -- Kosovar Albanians and Palestinian Arabs -- over time had become the majority population.
In such cases, it becomes a battle of history versus demography. These are among the most difficult political issues to resolve, because they are fraught with emotions that trump all else.
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