KAIS SAIED’S birthday is not until February, but his speech on December 13th contained an early gift to himself. Tunisia has been in crisis since July, when Mr Saied, the president, suspended parliament and much of the constitution. He told his constituents that Tunisia’s democracy was broken (many of them agreed) and portrayed himself as a sort of Carthaginian Cincinnatus, called on to save the state in its hour of need.Mr Saied (pictured) promised two votes in 2022: a constitutional referendum in July and a parliamentary election in December. First, though, he will oversee changes to the national charter. A constitutional-law professor before he was president, Mr Saied has long dreamed of remaking Tunisia as an indirect democracy. Now he has arrogated to himself the power to do so.
Tag Archives: Middle East
The Gaza conflict has shown that the Trump-Netanyahu policy has utterly failed
Israel and Hamas have ended their 11-day “war”, but even before the shooting stopped it had transformed the political landscape. The Israel/Palestinian confrontation has shifted away from focusing solely on Gaza to multiple fronts – Jerusalem, the West Bank, Israel itself– and an upsurge in any one of them could start a new round of violence.
Events in Jerusalem ignited the present crisis and there is every chance that they will do so again. Far-right Israeli groups are intent on tightening their grip on the city and eliminating the Palestinian presence wherever they can. “The political temperature will stay high, simmering just below boiling point” says Daniel Levy, a former Israeli diplomat and president of the US/Middle East Project. “Another flare-up in Jerusalem would make it boil over.”
Israeli leaders had hoped that the cantonisation of the Palestinians – three million on the West Bank, two million each in Israel and Gaza, 300,000 in Jerusalem – would fragment them politically as well as geographically. For a time, this strategy appeared to work, but over the last two weeks the crisis in one Palestinian canton has swiftly spread to the three others.
The Forgotten Sea Shanties of the Gulf
Ahmed Ruqait Al Ali was just 16 years old when he survived a shipwreck off Oman’s coast by latching onto a piece of the mast until he floated upon a desert island. It was 1958. That year, he was one of the luckiest sailors from his neighborhood. It was a monstrous one for typhoons, and three other ships from his neighborhood in Ras Al Khaimah were lost. On the other ships, all perished.
For men of his generation, life revolved around the sea. They circumnavigated centuries-old Indian Ocean trade routes on great wooden ships and sailed to pearling beds in the final chapter of the Gulf’s ancient pearling trade.
Song provided solace and strength for Gulf mariners at the mercy of God, the winds, and waves, recalled Al Ali, now in his 70s.
He was about 12 years old when he heard the mariners’ melodies on his first voyage aboard his father’s ship, from Ras Al Khaimah to Bahrain. Sea shanties, or maritime work songs, helped sailors keep time during the day’s labor. When darkness fell and the day’s work was over, music provided the evening’s entertainment.
“The sailors sang when they raised the sails, they sang when they rowed, they sang for everything to encourage the group, oh yes, to encourage them,” says Al Ali, who captained dhows, the sailing vessels used across the region, on the Indian Ocean in the 1950s and 1960s. “We sang of life, of love and longing, of anything.”
https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/the-forgotten-sea-shanties-of-the-gulf/
Things I Learned on How not to Remember the Revolution
At the beginning of 2011, popular uprisings shake Tunis, Cairo, Tripoli, and bring down dictators. The shock wave will be immense throughout the region, from Morocco to Oman, from Syria to Iraq. Then came the time of the status quo, fierce repression, war and misfortune. People wanted change, they often inherited the worst.
In a series of articles in partnership with our network Independent Media on the Arab World, several journalists and specialists from the region analyse the Arab Spring and its aftermath. To begin, Lina Attalah, editor-in-chief of the Egyptian online media Mada Masr draws on a collective study of a text written in 1940 by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin to try to grasp how far we have come. In spite of death and despair, it may not be all over yet. There is something exhausting in how the Arab Spring is being remembered. There is something exhausting about the very act of remembrance. I am asked identical questions by different journalists on assignment to produce content on the occasion of the 10-year anniversary. I don’t feel my answers matter. The story is somewhat pre-written; the revolution is over and I should somehow confirm it in my answers.
https://orientxxi.info/magazine/things-i-learned-on-how-not-to-remember-the-revolution,4484
The Arab Spring failed but the rage against misery and injustice continues today
Ten years ago, people across the Middle East and North Africa rose up in protest against their rulers, demanding freedom and democracy. Despotic rulers were toppled or feared that power was being torn from their grasp in countries across the region, as millions of demonstrators surged through the streets, chanting that “the people demand the fall of the regime”.
There was nothing phoney about this mass yearning for liberty and social justice. Vast numbers of disenfranchised people briefly believed that they could overthrow dictatorships, both republican and monarchical. “We are the people who will kill humiliation and assassinate misery,” recited the 20-year-old poet Ayat al-Gormezi, speaking to thousands of cheering protesters in Manama, the capital of Bahrain. “We are the people who will destroy the foundations of injustice.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/arab-spring-anniversary-bahrain-libya-egypt-b1801586.html
There is a historic change taking place in the Middle East
President Donald Trump is cock-a-hoop over the United Arab Emirates becoming the first Arab Gulf state to normalise its relations with Israel. He needs all the good news he can get in the months before the US presidential election.
“HUGE breakthrough today! Historic Peace Agreement between our two GREAT friends, Israel and the United Arab Emirates!” Trump tweeted. Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu claimed a triumph in establishing full diplomatic relations with an Arab state that had once been a vocal supporter of the Palestinians. The UAE, for its part, said it had averted Israeli annexation of parts of the West Bank, while the Palestinians denounced yet one more betrayal by their fellow Arabs.
Much of this is overblown. Trump and Netanyahu will exaggerate their achievement to strengthen their domestic political status. The UAE had long ago established security and commercial links with Israel and Netanyahu’s annexation of the West Bank had been postponed previously. Pious talk by the US and its western allies in pre-Trump days about fostering a non-existent peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, at the heart of which was an imaginary “two-state solution,” was always a device for ignoring the Palestinians while pretending that something was going on.
The Middle Eastern Problem Soleimani Figured Out
The Iranian general Qassem Suleimani is dead, and tensions with Iran appear to be simmering down. But the landscape he helped build is still very much a problem for the United States.
Since his killing in a U.S. drone strike last week, experts have been rushing to explain just why Soleimani mattered so much to Iran’s ambitions—and what consequences his death really holds for the region. One simple way to think about it: He was the one man who had mastered the new landscape of the Middle East.
Soleimani’s particular skill was in controlling what’s known as “nonstate actors”—a dry name that, in the Middle East, covers the fractious group of militias, religious groups and tribal forces that actually wield power in much of the region. These groups have grown vastly in importance in the past 20 years, confounding traditional diplomats and statecraft, and Soleimani not only exploited but empowered them in Iran’s interests. His absence might help the U.S. in the short term, but it also shows just how deep a challenge the region will pose in the near future—and why our adversaries, whether Iran or Russia, still enjoy a significant and unpredictable advantage in exerting power.
The drone attack on the Saudi refinery is no game-changer. But is there a new ‘axis of evil’ in the Middle East?
When, a couple of days ago, Saudi Aramco’s crude-oil processing facilities were attacked with drones – it is thought by the Houthis in Yemen – our media repeatedly characterised this event as a “game-changer”. But was it really this? In some sense yes, since it perturbed the global oil supply and made a large armed conflict in the Middle East much more probable. However, one should be careful not to miss the cruel irony of this claim.
Houthi rebels in Yemen have been in an open war with Saudi Arabia for years, with Saudi armed forces (and the US and the UK supplying arms) practically destroying the entire country, indiscriminately bombing civilian objects. The Saudi intervention has led to one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of the century with tens of thousands of children dead. As it was in the cases of Libya and Syria, destroying an entire country is obviously not a game-changer – just part and parcel of a very normal geopolitical game.
Lies and buffoonery: How Boris Johnson’s fantasy world casts dark shadows in the Middle East
I’ve worked out that in the past week, I’ve been told to wait “only five minutes” at least four times. In the Arab world, any interview that is delayed will always be accompanied by the assurance that I will only have to wait for five minutes. Or I will be called back on the phone in just five minutes. Only very occasionally is it 10 minutes. Almost never one minute. It’s five – used more in Egypt, less so in Lebanon and Syria. In Arabic, “only five minutes” is – my transliteration – khams daqiya faqat. In 43 years, I calculate I must have heard the phrase almost 9,000 times, probably more.
It’s a 99 per cent lie, of course, a lie every bit as big as the average percentage vote for an Arab dictator at election time. But I always – still – believe it. Even today, I will wait in a secretary’s office in the Middle East or glance at my phone and say to myself, ah well, it’s only three more minutes now and he/she will see me or ring back. He or she doesn’t. I know he/she won’t. But in the willing suspension of disbelief, five minutes must have credibility.
The lie has been uttered so many times that it has become more real than the truth. And I have not yet, dear reader, mentioned Brexit.
Trump’s hissy-fit over Darroch will blow a chill wind across Britain’s embassies in the Middle East
Just for a moment, let’s forget poor old Kim Darroch. Let’s jump a couple of days in front of this news story. Let me tell you how his utter humiliation and sacrifice at the hands of Trump – and with the connivance of the man who will probably be the next British prime minister – will affect the Middle East.
Let’s go first to Riyadh where, just off Al Khawabi street, stands the British embassy, wherein labours Simon Collis, our man in Saudi Arabia. He’s previously served in Bahrain, Tunis, Amman, Dubai, Qatar, Damascus and Baghdad. In other words, he’s an old Arab hand. He’s also a Muslim convert and the first British ambassador to make the pilgrimage to Mecca.
But right now, Collis is going to be thinking very carefully when he reports back to the Foreign Office about the Kingdom upon which he must report fully, fairly and truthfully for his government. For all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten his reputation if The Leaker gets his hands on the diplomatic bag from Riyadh.
Idler on a hammock 