Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
If you think the struggle between the pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, and his pro-European opponents has been going on for months, think again.
This is actually the second go-around. The first time was during the so-called Orange Revolution in 2004, when then Prime Minister Yanukovych faced off in a presidential election against the pro-western Viktor Yushchenko.
Yanukovych was declared the winner, but independent observers reported widespread vote rigging. Yushchenko launched a campaign of mass street protests and civil disobedience, and the Ukrainian Supreme Court annulled the results. In a rerun a month later, Yushchenko won.
But within a few years, the political coalition he had put together had collapsed and some of his supporters joined Yanukovych’s forces in the Party of Regions. In presidential elections held in 2010, Yanukovych was returned to power.
And so the stage was set for the current crisis, which began last November. Thousands of protesters in Kyiv and other cities rallied to object to the government’s sudden decision to abandon an association agreement with the European Union in favor of a Russian loan bailout of $15 billion. The demonstrators blamed the about-face on Russian pressure.
In Soviet times, Ukraine was the second biggest republic in the country, after Russia itself. As the USSR was collapsing, Ukraine declared independence following a nationwide referendum in December 1991.
The loss of its 603,628 square kilometers and 46 million people still irks many Russians. When Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2005 described the dissolution of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, he was referring in particular to the loss of Russia’s Slavic neighbours, Belarus and Ukraine; both had been part of the Russian Empire for centuries.
Although most of the protests we see in newscasts today concentrate on Kyiv’s Independence Square, areas in western Ukraine around the city of Lviv have been in the forefront driving the insurgency against Yanukovych. The region favours closer ties with the European Union.
Why is western Ukraine so opposed to Yanukovych? It’s a long story – in fact it goes back centuries.
Although a sovereign state for more than two decades, Ukraine still faces questions regarding its national identity. It is an example of what political scientist Samuel Huntington called a “cleft” or “torn” country, because it faces both east and west religiously and politically. It comprises two distinct cultures -- a Western-oriented western portion and an eastern section that looks towards Moscow.
The eastern part of the country was controlled by tsarist Russia after 1654. As a result, the people are overwhelmingly Orthodox in religion, and many people speak Russian. Indeed, in the early 1990s, 22 percent of all Ukrainians were ethnic Russians, living mainly in the east, and 31 percent of the Ukrainian people spoke Russian as their primary language.
But the western portion was for many centuries part of Poland, Lithuania, and then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the partitions of Poland in the 18th century, the western Ukraine fell under the control of the Habsburgs.
A large proportion of western Ukrainians had over the centuries coalesced around the Uniate (Ukrainian Greek Catholic) Church, which combines Orthodox rites with a fealty to the Pope in Rome. Western Ukrainians speak largely Ukrainian and retain strong nationalist sentiments.
When Poland was reconstituted as an independent state after the First World War, these territories became part of the Polish republic. (Another small area, Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, came under Czechoslovak rule.) The eastern Ukraine, meanwhile, was incorporated into the new Russian-dominated Soviet Union.
Following the Second World War, the victorious Soviet Union annexed the western Ukraine and united it with the Soviet Ukraine. But there was strong opposition.
So cities like Lviv (previously in Poland) and Uzhgorod (previously in Czechoslovakia) were only under Soviet domination for some 45 years.
The recent elections have made these splits come to the fore. Yanukovych gained most of his support in the east, his challengers -- Yushchenko in 2004 and YuliaTymoshenko in 2010 -- in the west.
Yanukovych has agreed to create a national unity government and hold new presidential elections later this year, but now even that is in doubt. Protesters -- many from Lviv -- have taken control over much of Kyiv.
Will Ukraine eventually split in two, each half going in its favored direction? Huntington himself in his seminal “Clash of Civilizations” felt that “Ukraine will remain united, remain cleft, remain independent, and generally cooperate closely with Russia.” But centrifugal forces that may destroy the country’s unity are gaining strength.Henry Srebrnik is a profe
Professor Henry Srebrnik
Monday, February 24, 2014
Bosnia-Herzegovina Is a Failed Utopian Experiment
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
A former Yugoslav republic, Bosnia and Herzegovina (usually called Bosnia-Herzegovina) has hobbled along as a failed state since it declared its independence in 1992.
It had been an area of mixed population within Communist Yugoslavia, comprising Muslim Bosniaks, almost half the population; Orthodox Serbs, at 37 per cent; and Catholic Croats, at 14 per cent. Many lived together in mixed cities such as the capital, Sarajevo, and even ethnic intermarriages were not uncommon.
But it all quickly came undone – mainly because only the republic’s Bosniaks wanted a sovereign state. Croats wished to join Croatia while Serb nationalists, who wanted to bring Serbian-majority areas into a greater Serbia, began to engage in ethnic cleansing.
The fierce rivalries between the three groups led to a savage three and a half year war in which about 100,000 people were killed. A majority of the dead were Muslim Bosniaks; this included the massacre of some 8,000 Bosniak men and boys massacred by Serb forces at Srebrenica in July 1995. At least a million more Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs were driven from their homes, while much of the country’s infrastructure was destroyed.
Under intense American and European pressure, including a bombing campaign against Serb Bosnian forces, the Dayton Peace Accords were signed in November 1995, finally ending the fighting.
A few days later, President Bill Clinton hailed the agreement, declaring that the people of Bosnia now “have a chance to remind the world that just a few short years ago the mosques and churches of Sarajevo were a shining symbol of multiethnic tolerance, that Bosnia once found unity in its diversity.”
As well, NATO deployed an Implementation Force (IFOR) of nearly 60,000 troops to Bosnia. Later, a smaller Stabilization Force (SFOR) took on the task.
But the decentralized political system that the agreement engineered has entrenched rather than healed ethnic divisions.
The peace agreement retained Bosnia-Herzegovina’s international boundaries but created two distinct geographic entities within the country, a joint Croat-Bosniak-run Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, itself subdivided into 10 separate Croat and Bosniak cantons; and a Republika Srpska adjoining Serbia itself. The Brcko district in the northeast became a separate self-governing administrative unit.
The result was a bizarre political system, since in effect this was in all but name a partition.
The central government’s power is highly limited, as the country is largely decentralized. On the national level, there is a bicameral parliament and a three-person presidency, made up of a Bosniak, a Serb and a Croat; the chair rotates every eight months. The current incumbent is Zeljko Komsic, a Croat.
However, the country’s two parts have their own presidents and parliaments, and these are responsible for most administrative functions, including policing, education, health, and judicial courts.
Sarajevo is the capital of the entire country and of the Bosniak-Croat entity. The government of the Serb republic is based in Banja Luka.
The entire political structure is supervised by the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, selected from a European country by an international Peace Implementation Council. Valentin Inzko, an Austrian diplomat, is the current incumbent. He has the power to “compel the entity governments to comply with the terms of the peace agreement,” including the dismissal of elected and non-elected officials.
In effect, he is the final authority, and so the country is in reality a European protectorate.
Political scientists Patrice C. McMahon and Jon Western in their September-October 2009 Foreign Affairs article “The Death of Dayton” noted that Bosnia was “once the poster child for international reconstruction efforts” and was considered “proof that under the right conditions the international community could successfully rebuild conflict-ridden countries.”
It didn’t work out that way. Bosnian Croat and Serb nationalists continued to block the emergence of a unified Bosnian state. Nationalist parties gained sweeping control of state-run enterprises, government jobs and the issuing of lucrative state contracts.
The multiple layers of government have led to corruption and economic stagnation, and today the country of 3.9 million people stands on the brink of collapse, despite having received billions of dollars in aid.
With unemployment at 44 percent and one in five people living below the poverty line, Bosnians have recently taken to the streets in a number of cities to vent their anger.
In 2004, NATO handed over peace stabilization duties to a European Union force (EUFOR), now numbering some 600 troops, but backed up by “over-the-horizon” reserves, allowing a rapid surge in numbers if needed. Renewed warfare is only avoided thanks to their presence.
Even Lewis Carroll couldn’t have created this Alice-in-Wonderland state.
A former Yugoslav republic, Bosnia and Herzegovina (usually called Bosnia-Herzegovina) has hobbled along as a failed state since it declared its independence in 1992.
It had been an area of mixed population within Communist Yugoslavia, comprising Muslim Bosniaks, almost half the population; Orthodox Serbs, at 37 per cent; and Catholic Croats, at 14 per cent. Many lived together in mixed cities such as the capital, Sarajevo, and even ethnic intermarriages were not uncommon.
But it all quickly came undone – mainly because only the republic’s Bosniaks wanted a sovereign state. Croats wished to join Croatia while Serb nationalists, who wanted to bring Serbian-majority areas into a greater Serbia, began to engage in ethnic cleansing.
The fierce rivalries between the three groups led to a savage three and a half year war in which about 100,000 people were killed. A majority of the dead were Muslim Bosniaks; this included the massacre of some 8,000 Bosniak men and boys massacred by Serb forces at Srebrenica in July 1995. At least a million more Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs were driven from their homes, while much of the country’s infrastructure was destroyed.
Under intense American and European pressure, including a bombing campaign against Serb Bosnian forces, the Dayton Peace Accords were signed in November 1995, finally ending the fighting.
A few days later, President Bill Clinton hailed the agreement, declaring that the people of Bosnia now “have a chance to remind the world that just a few short years ago the mosques and churches of Sarajevo were a shining symbol of multiethnic tolerance, that Bosnia once found unity in its diversity.”
As well, NATO deployed an Implementation Force (IFOR) of nearly 60,000 troops to Bosnia. Later, a smaller Stabilization Force (SFOR) took on the task.
But the decentralized political system that the agreement engineered has entrenched rather than healed ethnic divisions.
The peace agreement retained Bosnia-Herzegovina’s international boundaries but created two distinct geographic entities within the country, a joint Croat-Bosniak-run Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, itself subdivided into 10 separate Croat and Bosniak cantons; and a Republika Srpska adjoining Serbia itself. The Brcko district in the northeast became a separate self-governing administrative unit.
The result was a bizarre political system, since in effect this was in all but name a partition.
The central government’s power is highly limited, as the country is largely decentralized. On the national level, there is a bicameral parliament and a three-person presidency, made up of a Bosniak, a Serb and a Croat; the chair rotates every eight months. The current incumbent is Zeljko Komsic, a Croat.
However, the country’s two parts have their own presidents and parliaments, and these are responsible for most administrative functions, including policing, education, health, and judicial courts.
Sarajevo is the capital of the entire country and of the Bosniak-Croat entity. The government of the Serb republic is based in Banja Luka.
The entire political structure is supervised by the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, selected from a European country by an international Peace Implementation Council. Valentin Inzko, an Austrian diplomat, is the current incumbent. He has the power to “compel the entity governments to comply with the terms of the peace agreement,” including the dismissal of elected and non-elected officials.
In effect, he is the final authority, and so the country is in reality a European protectorate.
Political scientists Patrice C. McMahon and Jon Western in their September-October 2009 Foreign Affairs article “The Death of Dayton” noted that Bosnia was “once the poster child for international reconstruction efforts” and was considered “proof that under the right conditions the international community could successfully rebuild conflict-ridden countries.”
It didn’t work out that way. Bosnian Croat and Serb nationalists continued to block the emergence of a unified Bosnian state. Nationalist parties gained sweeping control of state-run enterprises, government jobs and the issuing of lucrative state contracts.
The multiple layers of government have led to corruption and economic stagnation, and today the country of 3.9 million people stands on the brink of collapse, despite having received billions of dollars in aid.
With unemployment at 44 percent and one in five people living below the poverty line, Bosnians have recently taken to the streets in a number of cities to vent their anger.
In 2004, NATO handed over peace stabilization duties to a European Union force (EUFOR), now numbering some 600 troops, but backed up by “over-the-horizon” reserves, allowing a rapid surge in numbers if needed. Renewed warfare is only avoided thanks to their presence.
Even Lewis Carroll couldn’t have created this Alice-in-Wonderland state.
Thursday, February 20, 2014
Vietnamese-American Relations Recover from the Vietnam War
Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
Like many people of my generation, I was a passionate opponent of the Vietnam War while a college student. I took part in anti-war marches as a student at McGill University in Montreal in the 1960s and remained against the war while in graduate school at Brandeis University near Boston (then a hotbed of left-wing causes) in the early 1970s.
The war resulted in the deaths of more than 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese. The country was in ruins by the time the North Vietnamese Communists completed their conquest of the south in 1975.
Four decades later, it is more obvious than ever that the anti-war people were correct in their view that American involvement in Vietnam was not only tragic but absurd.
American intervention was based on the “domino theory,” which asserted that a monolithic worldwide Communist conspiracy, centred in Beijing and Moscow, rather than an indigenous nationalist movement, was behind the war, and that a Viet Cong victory would facilitate the spread of Communism throughout Asia and beyond.
In fact, the Chinese and Vietnamese have historically been at odds, and even fought a border war in 1979. Border conflicts between Vietnam and China continued until 1988.
True, Vietnam remains a Communist state, but it poses no threat to its neighbours, and is – ironically – today one of the safest countries in which Americans might find themselves.
Now a nation of 90 million people, Vietnam initiated economic reforms (known as “Doi Moi”) beginning in 1986, shifting from a centrally-planned economy with state subsidies to an “open door” market economy.
Vietnam signed cooperative economic and trade agreements with the European Union in 1992, became a member of ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) in 1995 and of APEC (the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum) three years later.
Nguyen Tan Dung, elected Prime Minister in June 2006 by the National Assembly, has continued the process of gradually liberalizing the economy, promoting more competitive, export-driven industries, and lifting millions out of poverty. He won Vietnam admission to the World Trade Organization in 2007.
Last year, gross domestic product (GDP) growth topped 5.4 percent, and the country’s GDP reached $153 billion.
In 1994, the United States lifted a 19-year trade embargo of Vietnam and a year later, the two countries normalized diplomatic relations. Apart from their respective embassies in Hanoi and Washington, the United States now operates a consulate in Ho Chi Minh City (the former Saigon), while Vietnam has one in San Francisco. Hanoi also signed a bilateral trade agreement with Washington in 2000.
Vietnam hosted the annual APEC gathering in November 2006, and then U.S. president George W. Bush, in addition to attending the meeting, met the Vietnamese leadership in Hanoi and visited Ho Chi Minh City, the country’s leading economic center.
Increasingly wary of China, Vietnam has also drawn closer to the U.S. in terms of defence.
China and Vietnam both claim the Paracel and Spratley island chains in the South China Sea, and in 1988 a naval battle close to the disputed islands left 70 Vietnamese sailors dead. A Chinese maritime patrol boat struck a Vietnamese fishing boat Jan. 3 near the Paracel Islands; the Chinese confiscated its catch of fish along with fishing equipment.
Vietnam’s strategically located naval bases, such as the one at Cam Ranh Bay, could also serve as an American counterweight to China’s growing naval might. Under an agreement reached in 2003, Vietnam and the United States agreed to exchange alternate visits by their defence ministers every three years, and cooperation has proceeded at a gradual but steady pace.
The two countries now hold two annual high-level security meetings: the Political, Security, and Defense Dialogue and the Defence Policy Dialogue. In 2011, Hanoi and Washington also signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Advancing Bilateral Defence Cooperation.
In July 2013 U.S. President Barack Obama hosted his counterpart, Truong Tan Sang, at the White House and the two presidents agreed to open a “new phase of bilateral relations.”
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced during a visit to Vietnam this past December that Vietnam will receive up to $18 million, including five fast patrol-boats that will be given to the Vietnamese Coast Guard, to protect its territorial waters and secure navigational freedom.
Vietnam might now well be the most pro-American country in Southeast Asia. Who could have imagined such a development forty years ago?
Like many people of my generation, I was a passionate opponent of the Vietnam War while a college student. I took part in anti-war marches as a student at McGill University in Montreal in the 1960s and remained against the war while in graduate school at Brandeis University near Boston (then a hotbed of left-wing causes) in the early 1970s.
The war resulted in the deaths of more than 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese. The country was in ruins by the time the North Vietnamese Communists completed their conquest of the south in 1975.
Four decades later, it is more obvious than ever that the anti-war people were correct in their view that American involvement in Vietnam was not only tragic but absurd.
American intervention was based on the “domino theory,” which asserted that a monolithic worldwide Communist conspiracy, centred in Beijing and Moscow, rather than an indigenous nationalist movement, was behind the war, and that a Viet Cong victory would facilitate the spread of Communism throughout Asia and beyond.
In fact, the Chinese and Vietnamese have historically been at odds, and even fought a border war in 1979. Border conflicts between Vietnam and China continued until 1988.
True, Vietnam remains a Communist state, but it poses no threat to its neighbours, and is – ironically – today one of the safest countries in which Americans might find themselves.
Now a nation of 90 million people, Vietnam initiated economic reforms (known as “Doi Moi”) beginning in 1986, shifting from a centrally-planned economy with state subsidies to an “open door” market economy.
Vietnam signed cooperative economic and trade agreements with the European Union in 1992, became a member of ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) in 1995 and of APEC (the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum) three years later.
Nguyen Tan Dung, elected Prime Minister in June 2006 by the National Assembly, has continued the process of gradually liberalizing the economy, promoting more competitive, export-driven industries, and lifting millions out of poverty. He won Vietnam admission to the World Trade Organization in 2007.
Last year, gross domestic product (GDP) growth topped 5.4 percent, and the country’s GDP reached $153 billion.
In 1994, the United States lifted a 19-year trade embargo of Vietnam and a year later, the two countries normalized diplomatic relations. Apart from their respective embassies in Hanoi and Washington, the United States now operates a consulate in Ho Chi Minh City (the former Saigon), while Vietnam has one in San Francisco. Hanoi also signed a bilateral trade agreement with Washington in 2000.
Vietnam hosted the annual APEC gathering in November 2006, and then U.S. president George W. Bush, in addition to attending the meeting, met the Vietnamese leadership in Hanoi and visited Ho Chi Minh City, the country’s leading economic center.
Increasingly wary of China, Vietnam has also drawn closer to the U.S. in terms of defence.
China and Vietnam both claim the Paracel and Spratley island chains in the South China Sea, and in 1988 a naval battle close to the disputed islands left 70 Vietnamese sailors dead. A Chinese maritime patrol boat struck a Vietnamese fishing boat Jan. 3 near the Paracel Islands; the Chinese confiscated its catch of fish along with fishing equipment.
Vietnam’s strategically located naval bases, such as the one at Cam Ranh Bay, could also serve as an American counterweight to China’s growing naval might. Under an agreement reached in 2003, Vietnam and the United States agreed to exchange alternate visits by their defence ministers every three years, and cooperation has proceeded at a gradual but steady pace.
The two countries now hold two annual high-level security meetings: the Political, Security, and Defense Dialogue and the Defence Policy Dialogue. In 2011, Hanoi and Washington also signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Advancing Bilateral Defence Cooperation.
In July 2013 U.S. President Barack Obama hosted his counterpart, Truong Tan Sang, at the White House and the two presidents agreed to open a “new phase of bilateral relations.”
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced during a visit to Vietnam this past December that Vietnam will receive up to $18 million, including five fast patrol-boats that will be given to the Vietnamese Coast Guard, to protect its territorial waters and secure navigational freedom.
Vietnam might now well be the most pro-American country in Southeast Asia. Who could have imagined such a development forty years ago?
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
The Self-Destructive Policies of Nations in the Grip of Madness
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
Though it seems to most of us almost impossible to fathom, there are times in a nation’s history when it engages in such self-destructive policies that its very future is in doubt.
Three of the most horrific examples in the 20th century were driven by ideologies gone mad, and they almost ruined Germany, Russia and China.
The case that first comes to mind is the Holocaust, the murder by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany of some six million Jews, as well as millions of Roma, gays, the disabled, Soviet prisoners of war, and other so-called “undesirables.”
This genocide involved the construction of hundreds of concentration camps and extermination centres, the use of railways to bring victims to their deaths, and it required the services of hundreds of thousands of guards, functionaries, police and other murderers -- all this, while Germany was fighting a world war.
Even after 1943, when it became clear the country would be defeated, the mass murders continued, right up to the very days of surrender in 1945.
Hitler’s racial ideology cost the Nazis a tremendous amount of brainpower, as Jewish chemists, physicists, mathematicians, and others fled the country or were murdered, and the country’s universities lost their pre-eminent place in the world.
Albert Einstein is the most famous of these scientists, but Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze’s book “Mathematicians Fleeing from Nazi Germany” describes the flight of more than 140 other mathematicians, mostly to the United States. The influx of these brilliant thinkers made America the leader in mathematics research.
In the Soviet Union, the paranoid Communist dictator Joseph Stalin unleashed the Great Terror in 1936, purging, in waves, all Soviet institutions and at all levels of society, from the highest echelons of administrative, cultural, and scientific life, to the engineers and apparatchiks, down to the factory workers and peasants. Millions died or would spend decades in gulags.
In a series of show trials he also decimated the high command of the Red Army. With his best generals dead or in prison camps, the country was in such a weakened state that it lost millions of people, and hundreds of thousands of square kilometres, when the Nazis invaded in 1941.
Even as the war raged on, the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, shot or imprisoned officers and large numbers of other mostly loyal citizens, at a time when military expertise was in desperately short supply. This further extended the war against the other fanatic, Hitler, and by the time it ended in 1945 at least 27 million Soviet citizens had perished.
In the mid-1960s, Mao Zedong unleashed the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” in China. The Communist ruler, believing that certain liberal bourgeois elements of society continued to threaten the Communist framework, encouraged groups of young people known as the Red Guards to wreak havoc against the state itself.
Chaos reigned in much of the nation, and millions were persecuted, as the schools in China were closed and intellectuals living in cities were ordered to the countryside where they performed hard manual labour, in order to be “re-educated” by the peasants.
Last August, Chen Xiaolu, the son of Chen Yi, a founder of Communist China and its long-time foreign minister, apologized for his role in the madness. A student leader in his Beijing high school in 1966, he had ordered teachers to line up in the auditorium, dunce caps on their bowed heads, as thousands of students howled abuse at the teachers. Then, suddenly, a posse stormed the stage and beat them until they crumpled to the floor, blood oozing from their heads.
An article by Evan Osnos, “Confucius Comes Home,” in the Jan. 13 issue of the New Yorker magazine documented one particularly poignant case. On August 23, 1966 in Beijing, a group of teenage Red Guards attacked 67 year old Lao She, one of the China’s most famous writers, and himself a Communist. They denounced him as a “counter-revolutionary” and whipped him with leather belts. The next morning, barely alive, he walked to a nearby lake and drowned himself.
There were many such stories. Estimates of deaths range from 1.5 million to three million across China from 1966 to 1976. The country lost an immense amount of learning and culture during that terrible decade.
All three of these examples (and many others, such as today’s North Korea and Cambodia in the 1970s) demonstrate the horrors of an ideology creating a form of mass hysteria and opening the way for unmitigated, yet sanctioned, evil by many of its “true believers.”
Though it seems to most of us almost impossible to fathom, there are times in a nation’s history when it engages in such self-destructive policies that its very future is in doubt.
Three of the most horrific examples in the 20th century were driven by ideologies gone mad, and they almost ruined Germany, Russia and China.
The case that first comes to mind is the Holocaust, the murder by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany of some six million Jews, as well as millions of Roma, gays, the disabled, Soviet prisoners of war, and other so-called “undesirables.”
This genocide involved the construction of hundreds of concentration camps and extermination centres, the use of railways to bring victims to their deaths, and it required the services of hundreds of thousands of guards, functionaries, police and other murderers -- all this, while Germany was fighting a world war.
Even after 1943, when it became clear the country would be defeated, the mass murders continued, right up to the very days of surrender in 1945.
Hitler’s racial ideology cost the Nazis a tremendous amount of brainpower, as Jewish chemists, physicists, mathematicians, and others fled the country or were murdered, and the country’s universities lost their pre-eminent place in the world.
Albert Einstein is the most famous of these scientists, but Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze’s book “Mathematicians Fleeing from Nazi Germany” describes the flight of more than 140 other mathematicians, mostly to the United States. The influx of these brilliant thinkers made America the leader in mathematics research.
In the Soviet Union, the paranoid Communist dictator Joseph Stalin unleashed the Great Terror in 1936, purging, in waves, all Soviet institutions and at all levels of society, from the highest echelons of administrative, cultural, and scientific life, to the engineers and apparatchiks, down to the factory workers and peasants. Millions died or would spend decades in gulags.
In a series of show trials he also decimated the high command of the Red Army. With his best generals dead or in prison camps, the country was in such a weakened state that it lost millions of people, and hundreds of thousands of square kilometres, when the Nazis invaded in 1941.
Even as the war raged on, the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, shot or imprisoned officers and large numbers of other mostly loyal citizens, at a time when military expertise was in desperately short supply. This further extended the war against the other fanatic, Hitler, and by the time it ended in 1945 at least 27 million Soviet citizens had perished.
In the mid-1960s, Mao Zedong unleashed the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” in China. The Communist ruler, believing that certain liberal bourgeois elements of society continued to threaten the Communist framework, encouraged groups of young people known as the Red Guards to wreak havoc against the state itself.
Chaos reigned in much of the nation, and millions were persecuted, as the schools in China were closed and intellectuals living in cities were ordered to the countryside where they performed hard manual labour, in order to be “re-educated” by the peasants.
Last August, Chen Xiaolu, the son of Chen Yi, a founder of Communist China and its long-time foreign minister, apologized for his role in the madness. A student leader in his Beijing high school in 1966, he had ordered teachers to line up in the auditorium, dunce caps on their bowed heads, as thousands of students howled abuse at the teachers. Then, suddenly, a posse stormed the stage and beat them until they crumpled to the floor, blood oozing from their heads.
An article by Evan Osnos, “Confucius Comes Home,” in the Jan. 13 issue of the New Yorker magazine documented one particularly poignant case. On August 23, 1966 in Beijing, a group of teenage Red Guards attacked 67 year old Lao She, one of the China’s most famous writers, and himself a Communist. They denounced him as a “counter-revolutionary” and whipped him with leather belts. The next morning, barely alive, he walked to a nearby lake and drowned himself.
There were many such stories. Estimates of deaths range from 1.5 million to three million across China from 1966 to 1976. The country lost an immense amount of learning and culture during that terrible decade.
All three of these examples (and many others, such as today’s North Korea and Cambodia in the 1970s) demonstrate the horrors of an ideology creating a form of mass hysteria and opening the way for unmitigated, yet sanctioned, evil by many of its “true believers.”
Friday, February 14, 2014
The World is Full of Occupied Territories
Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
What do most people think of when someone talks about “the Occupied Territories?” They assume the speaker means the West Bank of the Jordan, of course, which has been under Israeli control following a defensive war in 1967, though much of it is now internally governed by the Palestinian Authority.
It shows us the power of the long-term attempt to de-legitimize Israel -- because, in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world, there are huge amounts of land occupied by various states or ethno-religious groups.
Next door to Israel, a civil war has been raging for the last three years in Syria, as the Sunni Arab majority is trying to wrest control of much of the country from the Alawite Shia minority, only 12 per cent of the population and centred in the country’s northwest. They have “occupied” the rest of Syria since the 1970s.
In next-door Iraq, the Shia-dominated regime of Nouri al-Maliki now “occupies” the “Sunni Triangle” in the mid-third of the country. Here too an insurgency in underway. The Kurdish entity in the north is now self-governing, but Kurds in southeastern Turkey, across the border, remain “occupied” by the Ankara-based Turkish state founded by Kemal Ataturk.
Kurds also live under occupation in Syria and Iran. Persians constitute just 61per cent of the population in the Islamic Republic, followed by Azeris at 16 per cent and Kurds at 10 per cent. In 1945, Azeris in Iran’s northwest, where they form a majority, were defeated in their attempt to set up their own state.
India is effectively an occupying power in Muslim-majority Kashmir, while to its north, China occupies Tibet and Xinjiang, with its large Uyghur and other Muslim populations. In Myanmar, the Burman-majority state occupies large swaths of the country inhabited by various ethnic groups, including the Shan, Kayin, Mon and Kachin. They have been fighting for independence for decades.
Most African states are artificial entities, often dominated by one group to the exclusion of others. Ethiopia, for example, occupies the Ogaden region in its southeast, populated by Somalis. Until South Sudan gained its independence in 2011, it was occupied by Arab-majority Sudan. East Timor freed itself from Indonesian occupation in 2002. The Ibo of southeastern Nigeria failed to gain an independent state of Biafra in the 1960s.
The Russian Federation is a colonial occupier in the north Caucasus region, where Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia are populated by Muslim peoples.
As far as many people in Ireland are concerned, Great Britain’s control of Northern Ireland is also little more than an occupation, following the partition of the island in 1922. In Spain, many Basques and Catalans feel the same way about rule from Madrid.
And, of course, the settler states in the western hemisphere, in particular Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay in South America, and Canada and the United States in North America, were all wrested away from indigenous populations. The same holds true for Australia and New Zealand.
So the next time someone refers, without further elaboration, to “the occupied territories,” you might wish to respond, “which ones?”
What do most people think of when someone talks about “the Occupied Territories?” They assume the speaker means the West Bank of the Jordan, of course, which has been under Israeli control following a defensive war in 1967, though much of it is now internally governed by the Palestinian Authority.
It shows us the power of the long-term attempt to de-legitimize Israel -- because, in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world, there are huge amounts of land occupied by various states or ethno-religious groups.
Next door to Israel, a civil war has been raging for the last three years in Syria, as the Sunni Arab majority is trying to wrest control of much of the country from the Alawite Shia minority, only 12 per cent of the population and centred in the country’s northwest. They have “occupied” the rest of Syria since the 1970s.
In next-door Iraq, the Shia-dominated regime of Nouri al-Maliki now “occupies” the “Sunni Triangle” in the mid-third of the country. Here too an insurgency in underway. The Kurdish entity in the north is now self-governing, but Kurds in southeastern Turkey, across the border, remain “occupied” by the Ankara-based Turkish state founded by Kemal Ataturk.
Kurds also live under occupation in Syria and Iran. Persians constitute just 61per cent of the population in the Islamic Republic, followed by Azeris at 16 per cent and Kurds at 10 per cent. In 1945, Azeris in Iran’s northwest, where they form a majority, were defeated in their attempt to set up their own state.
India is effectively an occupying power in Muslim-majority Kashmir, while to its north, China occupies Tibet and Xinjiang, with its large Uyghur and other Muslim populations. In Myanmar, the Burman-majority state occupies large swaths of the country inhabited by various ethnic groups, including the Shan, Kayin, Mon and Kachin. They have been fighting for independence for decades.
Most African states are artificial entities, often dominated by one group to the exclusion of others. Ethiopia, for example, occupies the Ogaden region in its southeast, populated by Somalis. Until South Sudan gained its independence in 2011, it was occupied by Arab-majority Sudan. East Timor freed itself from Indonesian occupation in 2002. The Ibo of southeastern Nigeria failed to gain an independent state of Biafra in the 1960s.
The Russian Federation is a colonial occupier in the north Caucasus region, where Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia are populated by Muslim peoples.
As far as many people in Ireland are concerned, Great Britain’s control of Northern Ireland is also little more than an occupation, following the partition of the island in 1922. In Spain, many Basques and Catalans feel the same way about rule from Madrid.
And, of course, the settler states in the western hemisphere, in particular Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay in South America, and Canada and the United States in North America, were all wrested away from indigenous populations. The same holds true for Australia and New Zealand.
So the next time someone refers, without further elaboration, to “the occupied territories,” you might wish to respond, “which ones?”
Monday, February 10, 2014
Chinese Enterprises in Africa Are Changing the Continent's Economies
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
China is propelled abroad by the need to secure energy, metals and strategic minerals in order to support the rising living standards of its people. Being driven by economic survival, China is, in the words of author Robert Kaplan, “an uber-realist power” that “cares little about the type of regime with which it is engaged; it requires stability, not virtue as the West conceives of it.”
Leaders in Beijing need to keep economic growth rates high to continue to bring hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. And to do so, China needs the use of arable land, oil and minerals. Africa is rich in these.
This is a boon to African states whose governments may not live up to the liking of western countries. The Chinese don’t care how African governments run their affairs, nor do they make their investments contingent on government reform.
In 2009, China became Africa’s single largest trading partner, overtaking the United States. Annual trade now surpasses $200 billion. Chinese companies operate two thousand enterprises in more than fifty African countries and claim to employ at least 300,000 Africans. They have built 60,000 kilometres of roads and 3.5 million kilowatts worth of power stations there.
Since 1995 mineral products have dominated China’s imports from African countries with Angola and South Africa being China’s main African trading partners. Trade between China and South Africa has grown to $45 billion a year. Chinese companies are investing in oil exploration in Algeria, Angola, and Nigeria. They had invested some $20 billion in Sudan before it split into two countries in 2011 -- and they now worry about the turmoil in South Sudan, which produces most of the oil.
Chinese firms are involved in mining enterprises in Gabon, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. They are also buying up land on which to build huge agribusinesses. In 2010 China signed a contract with Kinshasa to grow 2.8 million hectares of palm oil for biofuels. In Zimbabwe, Chinese investment has increased so much that Chinese-language signs greet visitors arriving at the international airport in Harare, the capital.
In January 2012, the 54-nation African Union held its summit in a $200-million headquarters financed and built by the Chinese government. “The people of China and Africa are good friends, good partners and good brothers,” a senior Chinese official, Jia Qinglin told the summit. “Our friendship is as solid as the towering Mount Kilimanjaro and as vibrant as the Yangtze River and the Yellow River.” (Soon afterward, Chinese investors opened a $27-million leather-goods factory in Ethiopia.)
In Zambia, a country of 14 million people with a GDP of $20 billion, the impact of China has been enormous. China is one of the world’s biggest users of copper, and Zambia has the second-largest reserves of raw copper in Africa, among other precious resources like coal, nickel, uranium, and gemstones.
In 2008, China and Zambia set up a zone in which Chinese investors didn’t have to pay taxes to the Zambian government and fifty companies invested a total of eight hundred million dollars.
By the end of 2013, the Chinese government and private sector had together invested $2.5 billion in the nation. More than 500 Chinese companies are engaged in farming, retail trade, pharmacies, hospitals, information and communication technologies as well as road-building, and manufacturing. China is also helping Zambia overcome electricity shortages by building a $2 billion hydro-electric project.
But there have been problems between Chinese overseers and Zambian workers. In February 2010 a Chinese supervisor was murdered at the Collum Coal Mine, owned by private Chinese entrepreneurs.
Later that year, two Chinese managers opened fire on African mine workers during a riot at the mine.
In early August 2012 a Chinese mine manager was killed during a protest against delays in implementing a new minimum wage. In February 2013 the Zambian government took over the mine, citing “gross abrogation of mining and environmental laws.”
As China continues to increase its economic footprint in Africa, are the Chinese starting to behave as badly as the Europeans did a century ago?
China is propelled abroad by the need to secure energy, metals and strategic minerals in order to support the rising living standards of its people. Being driven by economic survival, China is, in the words of author Robert Kaplan, “an uber-realist power” that “cares little about the type of regime with which it is engaged; it requires stability, not virtue as the West conceives of it.”
Leaders in Beijing need to keep economic growth rates high to continue to bring hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. And to do so, China needs the use of arable land, oil and minerals. Africa is rich in these.
This is a boon to African states whose governments may not live up to the liking of western countries. The Chinese don’t care how African governments run their affairs, nor do they make their investments contingent on government reform.
In 2009, China became Africa’s single largest trading partner, overtaking the United States. Annual trade now surpasses $200 billion. Chinese companies operate two thousand enterprises in more than fifty African countries and claim to employ at least 300,000 Africans. They have built 60,000 kilometres of roads and 3.5 million kilowatts worth of power stations there.
Since 1995 mineral products have dominated China’s imports from African countries with Angola and South Africa being China’s main African trading partners. Trade between China and South Africa has grown to $45 billion a year. Chinese companies are investing in oil exploration in Algeria, Angola, and Nigeria. They had invested some $20 billion in Sudan before it split into two countries in 2011 -- and they now worry about the turmoil in South Sudan, which produces most of the oil.
Chinese firms are involved in mining enterprises in Gabon, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. They are also buying up land on which to build huge agribusinesses. In 2010 China signed a contract with Kinshasa to grow 2.8 million hectares of palm oil for biofuels. In Zimbabwe, Chinese investment has increased so much that Chinese-language signs greet visitors arriving at the international airport in Harare, the capital.
In January 2012, the 54-nation African Union held its summit in a $200-million headquarters financed and built by the Chinese government. “The people of China and Africa are good friends, good partners and good brothers,” a senior Chinese official, Jia Qinglin told the summit. “Our friendship is as solid as the towering Mount Kilimanjaro and as vibrant as the Yangtze River and the Yellow River.” (Soon afterward, Chinese investors opened a $27-million leather-goods factory in Ethiopia.)
In Zambia, a country of 14 million people with a GDP of $20 billion, the impact of China has been enormous. China is one of the world’s biggest users of copper, and Zambia has the second-largest reserves of raw copper in Africa, among other precious resources like coal, nickel, uranium, and gemstones.
In 2008, China and Zambia set up a zone in which Chinese investors didn’t have to pay taxes to the Zambian government and fifty companies invested a total of eight hundred million dollars.
By the end of 2013, the Chinese government and private sector had together invested $2.5 billion in the nation. More than 500 Chinese companies are engaged in farming, retail trade, pharmacies, hospitals, information and communication technologies as well as road-building, and manufacturing. China is also helping Zambia overcome electricity shortages by building a $2 billion hydro-electric project.
But there have been problems between Chinese overseers and Zambian workers. In February 2010 a Chinese supervisor was murdered at the Collum Coal Mine, owned by private Chinese entrepreneurs.
Later that year, two Chinese managers opened fire on African mine workers during a riot at the mine.
In early August 2012 a Chinese mine manager was killed during a protest against delays in implementing a new minimum wage. In February 2013 the Zambian government took over the mine, citing “gross abrogation of mining and environmental laws.”
As China continues to increase its economic footprint in Africa, are the Chinese starting to behave as badly as the Europeans did a century ago?
Thursday, February 06, 2014
Boko Haram Insurgency in Northern Nigeria Intensifies
Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
The Michigan State University geographer Harm de Blij, in the 2012 edition of his book Why Geography Matters, writes about an “Islamic Front” in sub-Saharan Africa that stretches from Sudan, bordering the Red Sea in the east, to Sierra Leone on the Atlantic Ocean in the west. And the line cuts many countries, including Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, in two.
When the British created the colony of Nigeria, its territory extended from the coastal forests along the Gulf of Guinea to the semi-deserts of the north, throwing together Muslim and non-Muslim ethnic groups. While the south was Christianized by European missionaries, the north remained devoutly Islamic, its people continuing to live in pre-colonial entities such as the Sokoto caliphate, Borno sultanate, and Kano emirate.
Today, Muslims, who live mainly in the north of the country, make up a little more than half the country’s population, while Christians, who predominate in the middle and south, account for almost all of the remainder.
Of Nigeria’s 36 states, the Sharia, the civil and criminal Muslim legal system, is now in force in nine Muslim-majority states and in some parts of three Muslim-plurality states.
The Islamic Front, notes de Blij, has become “a zone of conflict that now threatens the cohesion of countries and facilitates the actions of terrorists and insurgents.” Sparsely populated places to Nigeria’s north are increasingly becoming destabilized; parts of Mali were under the control of Islamist groups affiliated with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb for much of 2012-2013.
In Nigeria, conflict began in 2001 with the formation of Boko Haram (Congregation of the People of Tradition for Proselytism and Jihad). It is particularly active in the northern states of Adamawa, Bauchi, Borno, Kaduna, Kano and Yobe.
Violence since the insurgency began has resulted in some 10,000 deaths, especially since 2009, when the group’s founder, Mohammed Yusuf was killed. The current leader Abubakar Shekau, calls interaction with the non-Muslim world forbidden, opposes western-style education, which the group considers sacrilege, and wants to overthrow the secular Nigerian state.
Many Boko Haram militants, and those of an even more radical splinter faction known as Ansaru (Vanguard for the Protection of Muslims in Black Lands), formed in early 2012, joined the Islamist insurrection in Mali and returned with sophisticated weapons and tactics learned there, according to Nigerian officials.
“I enjoy killing anyone that God commands me to kill,” Abubakar Shekau remarked after Boko Haram had killed more than 180 people in Kano, northern Nigeria’s largest city in January 2012.
As the violence intensified, Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian, declared a state of emergency in the three northern states of Adamawa, Borno, and Yobe last May. It did not quell the brutality.
Nigerian military officials say those being targeted are Boko Haram militants, but Western governments and international human rights organizations have also expressed concern. American Secretary of State John F. Kerry called on Nigeria to uphold human rights as it tries to crush Boko Haram.
In late December Abubakar Shekau appeared in a video, claiming responsibility for a Dec. 20 attack on a Nigerian army barracks in Bama, south of Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state.
He promised to “decapitate and mutilate” more people and ridiculed the United States for putting a bounty on his head.
There was further heavy fighting between the Nigerian army and Boko Haram in Banki, also in Borno state, last month and militants were blamed for a deadly bomb attack on Jan. 14 that killed 43 people in a crowded market in Maiduguri, during festivities marking the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad.
Worse was to come. An attack by Boko Haram insurgents on Kawuri, a village in Borno state, on Jan. 26 killed 85 people. In the village of Waga Chakawa, in neighbouring Adamawa state, they murdered at least 26 people on the same day during an attack on a Roman Catholic Church service.
Altogether, over 200 people died this past January at the hands of militants. The United Nations stated that 4,000 people had also fled northeast Nigeria to Cameroon and 1,500 to Niger since mid-January, both as a result of the insurgency and the military response to it.
In December 2013, Canada listed Boko Haram as a terrorist organisation. Ottawa’s Ambassador for Religious Freedom, Andrew Bennett, in a statement said that “Canada condemns the terrible attacks by Boko Haram in north-eastern Nigeria.”
Nigeria is an incredibly resilient nation. It has experienced civil war, military dictatorship, religious extremism, and ethnic violence since independence from Britain in 1960. Now, President Jonathan has committed himself to bringing an end to the activities of Boko Haram this year. But it won’t be easy.
The Michigan State University geographer Harm de Blij, in the 2012 edition of his book Why Geography Matters, writes about an “Islamic Front” in sub-Saharan Africa that stretches from Sudan, bordering the Red Sea in the east, to Sierra Leone on the Atlantic Ocean in the west. And the line cuts many countries, including Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, in two.
When the British created the colony of Nigeria, its territory extended from the coastal forests along the Gulf of Guinea to the semi-deserts of the north, throwing together Muslim and non-Muslim ethnic groups. While the south was Christianized by European missionaries, the north remained devoutly Islamic, its people continuing to live in pre-colonial entities such as the Sokoto caliphate, Borno sultanate, and Kano emirate.
Today, Muslims, who live mainly in the north of the country, make up a little more than half the country’s population, while Christians, who predominate in the middle and south, account for almost all of the remainder.
Of Nigeria’s 36 states, the Sharia, the civil and criminal Muslim legal system, is now in force in nine Muslim-majority states and in some parts of three Muslim-plurality states.
The Islamic Front, notes de Blij, has become “a zone of conflict that now threatens the cohesion of countries and facilitates the actions of terrorists and insurgents.” Sparsely populated places to Nigeria’s north are increasingly becoming destabilized; parts of Mali were under the control of Islamist groups affiliated with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb for much of 2012-2013.
In Nigeria, conflict began in 2001 with the formation of Boko Haram (Congregation of the People of Tradition for Proselytism and Jihad). It is particularly active in the northern states of Adamawa, Bauchi, Borno, Kaduna, Kano and Yobe.
Violence since the insurgency began has resulted in some 10,000 deaths, especially since 2009, when the group’s founder, Mohammed Yusuf was killed. The current leader Abubakar Shekau, calls interaction with the non-Muslim world forbidden, opposes western-style education, which the group considers sacrilege, and wants to overthrow the secular Nigerian state.
Many Boko Haram militants, and those of an even more radical splinter faction known as Ansaru (Vanguard for the Protection of Muslims in Black Lands), formed in early 2012, joined the Islamist insurrection in Mali and returned with sophisticated weapons and tactics learned there, according to Nigerian officials.
“I enjoy killing anyone that God commands me to kill,” Abubakar Shekau remarked after Boko Haram had killed more than 180 people in Kano, northern Nigeria’s largest city in January 2012.
As the violence intensified, Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian, declared a state of emergency in the three northern states of Adamawa, Borno, and Yobe last May. It did not quell the brutality.
Nigerian military officials say those being targeted are Boko Haram militants, but Western governments and international human rights organizations have also expressed concern. American Secretary of State John F. Kerry called on Nigeria to uphold human rights as it tries to crush Boko Haram.
In late December Abubakar Shekau appeared in a video, claiming responsibility for a Dec. 20 attack on a Nigerian army barracks in Bama, south of Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state.
He promised to “decapitate and mutilate” more people and ridiculed the United States for putting a bounty on his head.
There was further heavy fighting between the Nigerian army and Boko Haram in Banki, also in Borno state, last month and militants were blamed for a deadly bomb attack on Jan. 14 that killed 43 people in a crowded market in Maiduguri, during festivities marking the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad.
Worse was to come. An attack by Boko Haram insurgents on Kawuri, a village in Borno state, on Jan. 26 killed 85 people. In the village of Waga Chakawa, in neighbouring Adamawa state, they murdered at least 26 people on the same day during an attack on a Roman Catholic Church service.
Altogether, over 200 people died this past January at the hands of militants. The United Nations stated that 4,000 people had also fled northeast Nigeria to Cameroon and 1,500 to Niger since mid-January, both as a result of the insurgency and the military response to it.
In December 2013, Canada listed Boko Haram as a terrorist organisation. Ottawa’s Ambassador for Religious Freedom, Andrew Bennett, in a statement said that “Canada condemns the terrible attacks by Boko Haram in north-eastern Nigeria.”
Nigeria is an incredibly resilient nation. It has experienced civil war, military dictatorship, religious extremism, and ethnic violence since independence from Britain in 1960. Now, President Jonathan has committed himself to bringing an end to the activities of Boko Haram this year. But it won’t be easy.
Monday, February 03, 2014
Tunisia, Where the Arab Spring Began, Moves Towards Democracy
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
You may remember this old joke from the 1990s: What is Communism? Answer: The transition between capitalism and capitalism.
To this we can now add: What was the Arab Spring? In Egypt, it has been the transition between military dictatorship and military dictatorship (with a brief interlude of Muslim Brotherhood rule).
Remember all the nonsense about how the liberal youth in Tahrir Square were using social media to bring democracy to Egypt? Where are they now?
Actually, in Yemen and Libya, the Arab Spring brought, not military dictatorship, but semi-anarchy. And in Syria, it has resulted in a bloody civil war that has resulted in more than 130,000 deaths and two million refugees.
The only country not engulfed by chaos is where it all started, Tunisia. That North African country, whose former strongman, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, fled the country in January 2011, is in the process of creating a pluralistic, constitutional political system. Tunisia’s National Constituent Assembly on Jan. 26 approved a new constitution that has been called one of the most progressive in the Arab world by 200 out of 216 votes.
Ali Larayedh of Ennahda (the Renaissance Party), the moderate Islamist movement, stepped down as prime minister last month in an agreement with secular opponents, to put an end to the country’s months-long political crisis, triggered by the murder of two opposition politicians.
Ennahda’s founder and intellectual leader, Rachid al-Ghannouchi, who was in exile after 1988 and only returned following the ouster of ben Ali, has supported the constitutional process. “We are about to crown this historic process of democratic transition in Tunisia,” Gannouchi declared.
The role of Islam and women’s rights took up the bulk of the discussion about the constitution both inside the Constituent Assembly and in the public sphere. While Islam is enshrined, the document avoids defining it as a source of law.
Articles 20, 40 and 45 not only grant men and women an equal status but also stipulate that a certain number of seats in city and district governments must be given to women.
The country’s poorer, rural regions are being empowered, and the roles of president and prime minister are defined in a way that aims to prevent an autocratic takeover of power. Also, a newly formed constitutional court is to monitor the legitimacy of future laws.
Some on the left remain wary. Karima Souid, a member of the left-leaning Al-Massar (Social Democratic Path) party points out that the role of young people who were behind the protests three years ago has been marginalized. “Having to fight for the rights of women and young people in this day and age isn’t normal -- these rights should be something natural,” she commented.
And women’s rights campaigners fear that other articles in the constitution can be misused for the purpose of limiting the newly won freedoms. For example, they warn that the “holy right to life” can be used to combat abortion.
Still, months of acrimony gave way to a compromise between Islamists and secular leaders that contrasts sharply with upheaval in Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere. Said Ghazi Gherairi, secretary general of the International Academy of Constitutional Law in Tunis, the capital, “It is a result of consensus, and this is new in the Arab world.”
Tunisia has many advantages. It is ethnically and religiously homogenous, with well-defined borders. Its small military historically has had no interest in political power. In its civilian politics, Islamist and secular factions were relatively evenly matched, with the Islamists winning only a plurality in Tunisia’s first free vote, held in October 2011.
Pollster Craig Charney, an expert on democratization in post-conflict societies, also noted that Tunisia already had strong civil society institutions like the General Labor Union, the National Business Federation, the Tunisian Bar Association and the Tunisian Human Rights League. These “were able to play a nonpartisan moderating role between the different political factions.”
The new caretaker prime minister, Mehdi Jomaa, who has succeeded Larayedh in office, has now appointed a non-political cabinet. An election committee will then decide on a date for a presidential vote.
Jomaa has also promised to boost investment and employment in the country. “I will do everything in my power to confront the challenges, overcome the obstacles and restore stability and security to Tunisia,” he announced.
“Tunisia’s revolution was sparked not only by political grievances, but also economic grievances, and the new government will have a lot of challenges to face on the economic side,” Stephen McInerney, executive director of the Project on Middle East Democracy, told Al Jazeera.
You may remember this old joke from the 1990s: What is Communism? Answer: The transition between capitalism and capitalism.
To this we can now add: What was the Arab Spring? In Egypt, it has been the transition between military dictatorship and military dictatorship (with a brief interlude of Muslim Brotherhood rule).
Remember all the nonsense about how the liberal youth in Tahrir Square were using social media to bring democracy to Egypt? Where are they now?
Actually, in Yemen and Libya, the Arab Spring brought, not military dictatorship, but semi-anarchy. And in Syria, it has resulted in a bloody civil war that has resulted in more than 130,000 deaths and two million refugees.
The only country not engulfed by chaos is where it all started, Tunisia. That North African country, whose former strongman, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, fled the country in January 2011, is in the process of creating a pluralistic, constitutional political system. Tunisia’s National Constituent Assembly on Jan. 26 approved a new constitution that has been called one of the most progressive in the Arab world by 200 out of 216 votes.
Ali Larayedh of Ennahda (the Renaissance Party), the moderate Islamist movement, stepped down as prime minister last month in an agreement with secular opponents, to put an end to the country’s months-long political crisis, triggered by the murder of two opposition politicians.
Ennahda’s founder and intellectual leader, Rachid al-Ghannouchi, who was in exile after 1988 and only returned following the ouster of ben Ali, has supported the constitutional process. “We are about to crown this historic process of democratic transition in Tunisia,” Gannouchi declared.
The role of Islam and women’s rights took up the bulk of the discussion about the constitution both inside the Constituent Assembly and in the public sphere. While Islam is enshrined, the document avoids defining it as a source of law.
Articles 20, 40 and 45 not only grant men and women an equal status but also stipulate that a certain number of seats in city and district governments must be given to women.
The country’s poorer, rural regions are being empowered, and the roles of president and prime minister are defined in a way that aims to prevent an autocratic takeover of power. Also, a newly formed constitutional court is to monitor the legitimacy of future laws.
Some on the left remain wary. Karima Souid, a member of the left-leaning Al-Massar (Social Democratic Path) party points out that the role of young people who were behind the protests three years ago has been marginalized. “Having to fight for the rights of women and young people in this day and age isn’t normal -- these rights should be something natural,” she commented.
And women’s rights campaigners fear that other articles in the constitution can be misused for the purpose of limiting the newly won freedoms. For example, they warn that the “holy right to life” can be used to combat abortion.
Still, months of acrimony gave way to a compromise between Islamists and secular leaders that contrasts sharply with upheaval in Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere. Said Ghazi Gherairi, secretary general of the International Academy of Constitutional Law in Tunis, the capital, “It is a result of consensus, and this is new in the Arab world.”
Tunisia has many advantages. It is ethnically and religiously homogenous, with well-defined borders. Its small military historically has had no interest in political power. In its civilian politics, Islamist and secular factions were relatively evenly matched, with the Islamists winning only a plurality in Tunisia’s first free vote, held in October 2011.
Pollster Craig Charney, an expert on democratization in post-conflict societies, also noted that Tunisia already had strong civil society institutions like the General Labor Union, the National Business Federation, the Tunisian Bar Association and the Tunisian Human Rights League. These “were able to play a nonpartisan moderating role between the different political factions.”
The new caretaker prime minister, Mehdi Jomaa, who has succeeded Larayedh in office, has now appointed a non-political cabinet. An election committee will then decide on a date for a presidential vote.
Jomaa has also promised to boost investment and employment in the country. “I will do everything in my power to confront the challenges, overcome the obstacles and restore stability and security to Tunisia,” he announced.
“Tunisia’s revolution was sparked not only by political grievances, but also economic grievances, and the new government will have a lot of challenges to face on the economic side,” Stephen McInerney, executive director of the Project on Middle East Democracy, told Al Jazeera.
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