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Spartan Olympics

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In an era of economic austerity, we must revive the idea of a permanent venue for the Olympics, which would also help to de-politicise the games.

Tuesday 7 August 2012

The Olympics have sometimes been used as a podium for shameless propaganda. Image: okänd

The London Olympics have been an entertaining spectacle and, as usual, a thrilling sight of sporting prowess, enabling largely harmless shows of patriotism, as fans cheer on their national stars, often in some of the world’s most obscure sports.

But this carnival carries an exorbitant price tag. Although the UK government has announced that the 2012 games will cost the taxpayer less than initially advertised, the final cost will still be an astronomical £9 billion ($14 billion). At a time of severe austerity, high youth unemployment and dramatic insider bank heists, it is welcome news that the Olympics in London will cost less than half of the Beijing games.

Nevertheless, this is an enormous cost for what, judging by previous experience, is an investment in disposable infrastructure that, like in Athens and Barcelona, usually lies abandoned and decaying for years as a monument to modern excess.

Given the amount of scarce resources the games require, organisers and their supporters have for years sought to deflect criticism by talking up the regenerative power of the games on deprived urban areas and the economic dividend the raised profile delivers the host city. But research suggests that both these claims are tenuous at best.

So that leaves national prestige and/or vanity. While there is nothing wrong with channelling nationalism into the often harmless avenue of sport and people seizing the chance for some good-humoured flag waving, but it is the taking part that should matter, not the hosting.

Besides, sporting nationalism is not always harmless or good-humoured. In fact, the Olympics have sometimes been used a podium for shameless propaganda. The most notable case was the 1936 games in Nazi Berlin. The silver lining was the sportsmanship exhibited by German athlete Luz Long who helped the African-American athlete Jesse Owens to win the long jump – a poignant gesture of subversion against Nazi race politics and American racial segregation.

In the West, the Beijing Olympics were also rightly criticised as an attempt by the Chinese authorities to whitewash the country’s poor human rights record, democratic deficit and the Tibetan question, not to mention the separatist rebellion in Xinjiang which flared up shortly before the games.

But despite its self-image, the West is not above playing such political games, and the London Olympics can be seen partly as a propaganda exercise to try to repair the damage to Britain’s image abroad caused by its bloody military misadventures of the past decade. Ironically, the United States led a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics to protest the Soviet Unions 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, yet no one has spearheaded a similar boycott against the UK for taking part in the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. British double-standards here are not as blatant as America’s, given that the UK did allow its athletes who wanted to compete to go to Moscow.

So how can we both reduce the cost of the Olympics and abolish the political track and field side events?

The answer is, symbolically speaking, to make the games less Olympian and more Spartan, by re-establishing the ancient idea of a permanent neutral venue for the Olympics. This would not only depoliticise the hosting of the Olympics, but would also slash costs dramatically and ensure the efficient reuse of infrastructure.

Finding an appropriate location would not be easy. Olympia in Greece would certainly have a powerful symbolic advantage, but some of Greece’s neighbouring rivals might object.

To avoid the political wrangling that would inevitably arise in deciding where to locate a permanent Olympic venue, the International Olympic Committee could invite interested countries to bid a tiny part of their country which would be declared, rather like the UN headquarters, neutral international territory.

The different sites would be put up for an international vote and the selected one would immediately become a non-political international zone. In addition, an international fund would be set up to construct a fully-equipped Olympic city with all the necessary sporting facilities and accommodation.

Of course, though this would save a bundle in cash, it will not entirely de-politicise the Olympics since the games will remain an outlet for petty nationalism and flag waving. But it will allow a purer expression of the Olympic ideal: it seeks to make of sport an arena where countries can cast aside their political differences and build understanding through friendly competition.

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Tags: afghanistan, britain, china, greece, human rights, international olympic committee, london olympics, nationalism, olympics, propaganda, uk, united states, west

A common cents approach to money

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By Khaled Diab

With the United States and Europe on the verge of bankruptcy, the time has come to consider a radical solution – a single global currency.

Monday 26 September 2011

Western economies – and the global economic order they still dominate – seem to be stumbling from one debt crisis to the next: from the sub-prime mortgage crisis, which triggered the whole sorry mess, to the ongoing euro and European sovereign debt crises, not to mention the near-default of the United States on its ballooning foreign debt.

This ocean of debt in which the West is being subsumed is largely due to irresponsible lending – and also borrowing – decisions fuelled by the unprecedented availability of ‘cheap credit’ in consumer-driven societies apparently bent on living beyond their already-considerable means while widening the gap between the haves and have-nots.

Critics have rightly singled out the banks who, in the belief that they had magically eliminated ‘risk’ through financial hocus pocus, have taken us to the edge of the abyss. They were aided and abetted in their pillage by the removal of many of the checks and balances from the international financial system.

But it is not just the architecture of financial markets that is at fault. Not only is the sovereign debt crisis currently being compounded and made worse by financial speculation, the unsustainable levels of sovereign debt on both sides of the Atlantic – with traditional trust in and sentimentality towards the dollar keeping the wolves at bay for now from the United States – are to a large part a product of the current currency regimen.

The United States, especially, and Europe, to a lesser degree, both possess powerful reserve currencies, which is both their fortune and misfortune, owing to the distortionary effects. Their fortune because its attractiveness to the world – both as a medium for international trade and as a reserve currency held by central banks and even individual businesses and citizens – means they can borrow at cheaper rates than they would be able to get if the dollar and euro were just local currencies.

But it has also proven to be their misfortune by providing them with debt that is so cheap that it would’ve been almost insulting to turn it down. In the United States, the effects of the world’s willingness to lend to the treasury has resulted in a situation where four in every 10 dollars spent by the government is borrowed and total public debt is $14.7 trillion, which is roughly equivalent to the country’s annual GDP.

The solutions to the debt crisis so far envisioned or rolled out mostly involve throwing more money, in addition to the trillions already spent or committed, at the system in the hopes of shoring it up and salvaging it, in what has been labelled ‘Keynesian economics’.

But perhaps the ultimate solution is to borrow another of Keynes’s theories, which few are currently considering, and that would be to throw away the existing currency system altogether and replace it with a single global currency, or ‘supranational currency’, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, is supported by the emerging powers of China and Russia.

In the early 1940s, John Maynard Keynes, the legendary British economist, proposed the creation of what he called the ‘Bancor’ which, backed by barter and its value expressed in gold, would be used for international trade transactions, thereby removing the distortions. And, at the Bretton Woods conference, Britain suggested that a supranational currency would be the best option for the post-war world order. The United States, blinded by the idea of the dollar becoming the world’s reference currency, torpedoed the idea.

But as the so-called ‘Triffin dilemma’ highlights, there is a fundamental conflict of interests between a national currency playing the dual role of a global reserve currency, with the inevitable outcome being ballooning deficits.

In addition to addressing this deficit disaster, a single global currency can break the destructive boom and doom cycles we are experiencing increasingly intensively. It will also remove unfair distortions in the global economy, remove the possibility of speculation, and even reduce inflation.

The disappearance of the dollar and, to a lesser extent, the euro in international transactions would ensure that Western economies no longer punch above their weight and developing economies no longer punch below their weights.

The decades-old debt crisis experienced by developing and under-developed countries is not only due to poor lending decisions on the part of international banking institutes and corruption among ruling elites, but also because these debts are payable in dollars and other hard currencies. In order to earn enough dollars to pay off their debts –the enormous interest and the principal amounts – poorer countries are forced to gear their economies towards maximising hard currency-earning exports.

Although critics of a single global currency point to its alleged inflexibility and how it would hinder national governments from adopting appropriate monetary policies, but it would free them up to focus more on economic policy. What critics also overlook is that a single currency, by removing currency volatility, would make international trade more efficient by removing exchange rate distortions, not to mention fairer, by giving an accurate valuation of a country’s economic fundamentals.

A global currency could also be complemented by a global minimum wage.

As a first step in the right direction, a notional, electronic global currency, against which national currencies have fixed exchange rates, could be created to be used on global financial markets and for import/export transactions.

In the longer term, despite the logistical nightmare involved, a physical, single global currency should be the ultimate goal. But unlike the euro, it should come equipped with its own powerful and robust central bank in which all countries, or alternatively regional blocs, should have seats commensurate to their economic size.

A single global currency is not a panacea to the world’s economic woes, but it will make the international trading system fairer and more efficient.

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Tags: bretton wood, britain, business, central banks, china, corruption, debt crisis, economics, economy, eu, euro, euro zone, europe, financial markets, financial speculation, foreign debt, global currency, haves and have nots, inflation, keynes, minimum wage, reserve currencies, reserve currency, single currency, sovereign debt, sub prime mortgage, sub prime mortgage crisis, supranational currency, uk, united states, west, western economies

Are we now ‘friends’ of al-Qaeda in Libya?

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By Badra Djait

Belgium was one of the ‘Friends of Libya’ in Paris. But does the prime minister realise that these Libyan ‘friends’ include a former al-Qaeda fighter?

Wednesday 14 September 2011

Belgium’s acting prime minister, Yves Leterme (CD&V), represented the country at the ‘Friends of Libya‘ summit which took place in Paris on 1 September. The National Transitional Council of Libya, a political body representing the anti-Gaddafi rebels, also took part in the gathering.

But can Leterme, in the name of Belgium, befriend a certain Abdelhakim Belhadj, who is not only the Transitional Council’s military commander but is also a former al-Qaeda fighter and the former leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG)?

“From holy warrior to hero of a revolution,” read the sarcastic headline in the London-based al-sharq al-Awsat sarcastisch.

Against the Soviets

In 1988, Belhadj moved to Afghanistan to take part in the anti-Soviet jihad there. In 1990, the returning Libyan mujahideen set up LIFG. Belhadj was the former emir of this group which has been defined as a “terrorist” organisation since the 11 September 2001 attacks in America.

In 2004, Belhadj was arrested in Afghanistan, interrogated by the CIA and delivered to Libya, where he was eventually released in 2008. Earlier this year, he seized the opportunity to transform his defunct fundamentalist party into the Libyan Islamic Movement, which became one of the main opponents of the deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. In this capacity, he became the military commander of the Transitional Council.

Meanwhile, rumours have been circulating that Gaddafi has fled to neighbouring Algeria. A convoy of six Mercedes with tainted glass was seen crossing the border. A number of Libyan rebel leaders accuse Algeria of supporting Gaddafi. Algeria denies the allegations.

Until now, Algeria has refused to recognise the Transitional Council until it receives assurances that the new Libyan government will co-operate in combating al-Qaeda in North Africa. Why has Belgium not taken a similar stance?

In contrast with Libya, Bahrain and Syria will not be on the receiving end of a military intervention from NATO, the UN or any other international coalition, in the name of democracy, human rights or the “responsibility to protect”.

Syria has a mutual defence pact with Iran (renewed in 2006 and 2009). This means that an attack against Syria would constitute an attack on Iran. And didn’t China and Russia recently warn that attacking Iran could trigger a world war?

Why are the popular democratic protests in Bahrain, the neighbour of Western ally Saudi Arabia, not appreciated? More importantly, why were the elite Saudi troops sent to crush the uprising in Bahrain trained by Great Britain? It was confirmed in the British parliament that the Saudi National Guard was taught how to “maintain public order”.

Reconstruction

The West has declared its official commitment to help build democracy in Libya. Restoring security, improving the humanitarian situation and the establishment of a multi-party, pluralistic political system are officially the top priorities. But Mustafa Abdul Jalil, head of the National Transitional Council, knows better what it is all about. He promised, in a statement, to grease the palms of the the countries which helped Libya in the fight against Colonel Gaddafi with lucrative oil contracts. Libyan oil is highly sought after for its high quality which, among other things, makes it ideal for the production of kerosine, which is often used as jet fuel.

A number of countries, including Britain and Germany, have promised to release tens of billions of dollars in frozen Libyan assets to the Transitional Council. Other countries which did not immediately take part in the military intervention – such as Brazil, China and Russia – are hoping to get a second chance with the transitional government.

But the question for now is whether the “friends of Libya” will co-operate with a former al-Qaeda fighter in order to acquire those lucrative oil contracts?

This column is based on an editorial published, in Dutch, by De Morgen, on 30 August 2011. Published here with the author’s consent.

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Tags: Abdelhakim Belhadj, afghanistan, africa, al-qaeda, algeria, bahrain, Belgium, brazil, britain, china, democracy, france, gaddafi, germany, human rights, iran, libya, Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, muammar gaddafi, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, national transitional council, north africa, oil, rebel, revolution, saudi arabia, syria, uk, un, war, west

Arab spring and Turkish autumn?

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By Andrew Eatwell

Is Turkey truly a role model for the Arab Spring or is it actually a secular democracy in its autumn years?

Wednesday 8 June 2011

In the midst of the Arab Spring, Turkey is being looked to as a role model for post-revolutionary Arab states: a large, mostly Muslim country that has moved from military domination to civilian rule, led by a popular democratically elected government. Surely, conventional thinking goes, the so-called ‘Turkish model’ is a template for countries like Tunisia, Egypt and a post-Gaddafi Libya or a post-Saleh Yemen.

But as people in many Arab countries look forward to a new democratic dawn, many Turks are wondering if their secular democracy is not moving into its autumn years.

In recent months, as Tunisians and Egyptians celebrated the overthrow of their authoritarian regimes, Turks watched as police rounded up journalists, bloggers and military officers. As Arab revolutionaries coordinated anti-government protests over the internet, the Turkish government announced new internet regulations that critics say will increase censorship and restrict freedom of expression.

Many secular Turks worry that opposition to years of authoritarian rule in the Arab world is running parallel to rising authoritarianism at home. And they fear what will be next if Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan wins the upcoming general election on June 12, as is widely expected.

Since coming to power in 2002, Erdoğan has sought to curtail the power of the meddlesome military – long the guardian of Turkish secularism – and the country’s militantly secular judges. A former radical Islamist who was once jailed for inciting religious hatred and whose party was previously banned, Erdoğan has reincarnated himself and his Justice and Development Party (AKP), publicly espousing a moderate, democratic brand of political Islam. As such, he has framed his efforts to trim the influence of the secular military as a step toward full-blooded Western-style democracy rather than a step away from secularism.

Outside Turkey, Erdoğan, in his new incarnation, has been widely applauded. A constitutional reform package that was approved in a referendum last September won praise from Western officials and the European Union, which Turkey is trying to join (though obstacles on both sides have recently cast shadows over the membership process). The reforms, which Erdoğan will seek to implement should he win the 12 June election, allow for previously untouchable army officers to be tried in civilian courts – in line with EU norms – and put an end to the legal immunity of top military officials implicated in a 1980 coup. It also increases the number of judges on the Constitutional Court – Turkey’s highest – and on the powerful Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors.

Inside Turkey, Erdoğan, who grew up in a poor Istanbul neighbourhood, became a semi-professional football player and went on to serve as mayor of the city in the 1990s, remains popular in low-income urban areas and in the country’s conservative rural Anatolian heartland. He is credited with bringing jobs and economic growth, taming formerly rampant inflation and doing more than any previous leader to move Turkey along the road to EU membership.

But in fast-modernising areas of major cities and coastal towns, many secular Turks question his aims.
They see the army, which has had a hand in the overthrow of four governments in the last 50 years, not as a threat to democracy per se but rather as the guardian of Turkey’s secular political order, a role it has played since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, himself a senior army commander, established the modern republic in 1923 following the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

For them, Erdoğan’s efforts to curtail the military’s power risks opening the door to Islamisation. And they worry that the independence of the courts, which have strictly upheld the secular Constitution, will be undermined by the increase in the number of judges, more of whom will be appointed by the president and parliament, currently under the control of Erdoğan’s AKP.

Opinion polls suggest the AKP will easily win the 12 June election, picking up around 45% of the votes, a similar percentage to in the last election in 2007. The main opposition centre-left Republican People’s Party (CHP) with its new leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, meanwhile, is on track to garner around 30% of votes, 10 percentage points more than in 2007. Despite that, the AKP stands a chance to increase its strength considerably and win an absolute majority in the 550-seat parliament if the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) drops below the 10% threshold needed to enter the chamber. Hit by a series of sex scandals – made public in videotapes distributed over the internet that have so far led to the resignation of four party members – the MHP currently looks likely to win 13% of votes, opinion polls suggest.

If the MHP fails to maintain sufficient support to enter parliament come election day, the AKP will all but certainly pick up enough seats to push its constitutional reform package – and many other laws – through parliament unchallenged. That has put secularists on edge in light of the events that have followed the constitutional referendum.

In February and again in April, dozens of military officers – among them 30 serving generals – were arrested for allegedly plotting a coup in the so-called Balyoz (Sledgehammer) case. And, over the same period, journalists were detained and blogs closed down for allegedly supporting another group of similarly likeminded coup-mongers in a separate case known as Ergenekon. Critics, among them law professors, political analysts and rights groups, say that the evidence in both cases looks flimsy and, in some instances, may have even been fabricated. Some have likened the investigations to a witch-hunt against opponents of the AKP.

“The Ergenekon investigation became a political witch-hunt tinged with obtuse paranoia in which a single, centrally coordinated – and manifestly fictional – clandestine organisation was accused of responsibility for every act of political violence in Turkey in the last 25 years,” writes Istanbul-based political analyst Gareth Jenkins. “Those who questioned the prosecutors’ claims – and the numerous breaches of due process, including the apparent fabrication of evidence – were subjected to public smear campaigns; in several cases they were arrested and charged with being members of Ergenekon themselves.”

Having already tamed the country’s largest media conglomerate, Doğan, with draconian fines for alleged tax fraud, the arrest of journalists, bloggers and the closure of an internet portal, Oda tv, which was critical of the AKP, are increasingly being seen as attempts to silence dissent and muzzle free speech.

With more than 50 journalists taken into custody in recent months, Turkey has imprisoned more journalists than any other country, ahead of China and Iran, according to the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers.
“Journalists and editors remained targets for prosecution. Legitimate news reporting on trials was deemed ‘attempting to influence a judicial process’ (and) reporting on criminal investigations was judged as ‘violating the secrecy of a criminal investigation’,” Human Rights Watch noted in its most recent World Report.

Members of the European Parliament pressed the issue in April when Erdoğan visited Brussels. Specifically, he defended the arrest of several journalists, a raid on the offices of leftist-liberal daily Radikal and the seizure of a book (banned by the government but widely circulated over the internet), all linked to the Ergenekon affair.

The book, titled The Imam’s Army and written by arrested investigative journalist Ahmet Şık, could be explosive, Erdoğan appeared to suggest: “It is a crime to use a bomb but it is also a crime to use materials from which a bomb is made. If informed that all materials needed to construct a bomb have been placed in a certain location, wouldn’t the security forces collect these materials?”

The government’s attacks on press freedom, combined with Erdoğan’s increasing hostility to Israel and warming relations with Iran, have undoubtedly tarnished relations between the NATO ally and Europe and the United States. Turkey’s chances of joining the EU anytime soon are looking increasingly slim and are likely to only get slimmer if the Erdoğan government continues down its current path.

Confiscating books, closing websites and blocking internet content is not new in Turkey: the government barred access to YouTube in 2008 over a video that was deemed to be insulting to Ataturk, a criminal offense under Turkish law. It lifted the ban two years later when the content was removed.

Previously, US officials had complained about the “absurd” trial of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk for writing about the death of up to one million Armenians in 1915, a deeply neuralgic issue in Turkey. “It will take much work to convince the Turks that freedom should cover the right to criticise and open guarantees to protect that right,” wrote former US Ambassador Ross Wilson of the Pamuk affair in a 2005 cable made public last year by WikiLeaks.

In the latest – though not entirely surprising – twist, the Turkish government has refocused its attention on the internet, announcing plans to implement new regulations that will effectively give it even more control over what content Turkish surfers can see. Under a regulation entitled “Procedures and Principles Regarding the Safe Use of the Internet” that is due to go into effect on 22 August, internet users will be given four filtering options to choose from: “family,” “child,” “domestic” and “standard”, each of which will give them access to a certain set of websites. The government claims that it is taking the step in order to protect children from pornography and uphold “family values” but it has not made clear which websites will be blocked and the most open “standard” package is still expected to maintain the restrictions Turkey already imposes.

“There is no time in Turkey when we do not face new censures and pressures. There are many barriers put in front of the right of people to be informed in Turkey,” the main opposition CHP said in an online statement, comparing the internet restrictions to the censoring and imprisonment of journalists. “You close websites, we will open them,” the party said, promising the change if it wins the forthcoming election.

In 2009, the government stopped releasing figures on the number of blocked sites (most of which are restricted arbitrarily by government officials without court orders), but it is now believed to be in excess of 8,000. Most of them contain pornographic material, though websites linked to Kurdish rights groups, blogs critical of the government and even some foreign media sites are also blocked.

“Depending on the government, depending on the ministers, you can be put on the blacklist,” says Nadire Mater, the head of the Turkish human-rights website Bianet. “This is not a democracy.”

Under the new measures, attempting to access restricted sites – using proxy servers abroad, for example, as many Turks previously did to watch YouTube – could lead to arrest and hefty fines. Erdoğan’s government has tried to persuade Turks that the filtering system is similar to that offered in some European countries, while failing to point out that no Western democracy bans websites to the extent that Turkey already does.

Internet campaigners and human rights groups say the move will put Turkey on a par with China and is inconsistent with the provisions on freedom of expression in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights, both of which Turkey has signed. “We will be behind censorship software just like in China. We will not have the chance to stay out of it,” warns Serdar Kuzuloğlu, an IT reporter for the Radikal daily.

The planned restrictions on the internet drew tens of thousands of people onto the streets of Turkish cities in protest on May 15. They carried banners warning that the new regulations portend the “death of the internet” in Turkey. Many may well worry that they are also witnessing the death throes of their secular democracy.

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Mobile revolution in the Middle East

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By Christian Nielsen

“You won’t fool the children of the revolution.” Especially not if they’re Twittering away on their mobile phones.

Friday 18 March 2011

What started as a mobile-mediated youth movement has evolved into revolution and probably even war. The revolutionary wave hitting the Middle East and North Africa comes as no huge surprise to some scholars who predicted that the power of new media and instant communications would catch out unwary dictators and undemocratic governments everywhere.

In an article entitled ‘The blog versus big brother: new and old information technology and political repression (1980-2006)’, which recently appeared in the International Journal of Human Rights, the authors suggest that new technology features prominently in the current wave of globalisation which appears to be manifesting in widespread discontent, particularly among tech-savvy youth.

The authors, Indra de Soysa, director of globalisation research at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and his colleague Lucia Liste Muoz, suggest that reliable information and free communication are something of a lifeline for fledgling opposition movements.

The authors note: “Sceptics of globalisation suggest that the new technology will hamstring governments from acting in the interests of ordinary people and for furthering communitarian values, leading to demobilisation of reform movements and empowering powerful capitalistic elites.”

Yet others, the authors continue, suggest that new technologies empower people at the expense of states, paving the way “for diversity of opinions and constraining the repressive tendencies of states and bureaucracies”.

Their December 2010 article – appearing rather forebodingly just weeks before the Middle-East/North Africa winter of discontent kicked off – appears to build on a 2009 paper by the same authors under the title ‘The blog versus big brother: information and communication technologies and human rights (1980-2005)’.

“TV is especially bad for human rights,” declares de Soysa in a statement, “because the government can feed propaganda to the population.” Evidence of which can be plainly seen in Libya today, as the world media are being harassed, obstructed and, according to some reports, even abducted by pro-government henchmen. Meanwhile Colonel Muammar Gaddafi maintains his defiant – many would argue delusional (see the Chronikler’s Defiantly delusional) – stand using traditional media like TV to misinform citizens.

Last week, as the country seemed to the rest of the world to be in the grips of full-scale civil war, a Libyan army captain said on Libyan state TV that security in rebel areas is at about 95%. “There are some rats that could be lying in some alleys and inside some flats. We are capturing them one group after the other,” he said. See Gaddafi in action on Turkish TV (BBC).

Young, sceptical and not into TV

That younger generations are turning away from traditional media (or “old technology”) like television in its basic form is well documented (check out the Nielsen report ‘Young people don’t watch TV on TV’). But what we are seeing, anecdotally at least, is that they are also increasingly sceptical about the one-way, lecturing approach to traditional media like TV. This is particularly true of countries where the media is state dominated, censored, or in dictatorships like Libya, just plain mouthpieces for the corrupt state to keep its people down.

So, this is really where the new technologies, especially mobiles and social media platforms, really shake the cage of dictators and questionable democracies. The internet and mobile phones make it harder for despotic leadership to feed the whole population with the necessary propaganda to prop it up. And social media also gives people access to information which might otherwise be censored or blocked on the internet (think China).

Technology as freedom fighter

In Egypt, for example, where a Google employee mobilised so many people in such a short time, social media really showed its potential as a political tool – a force for participatory democracy in some pure form.

Indra de Soysa points to the many eyewitnesses who sent pictures from mobile phones to media organisations like al-Jazeera, the BBC and CNN. “The authorities can no longer get away with attacking their own people. In Burma, the authorities can still shoot a man in the street, and get away with it. But there are beginning to be fewer and fewer countries where that is still the case,” he notes.

In Africa, mobile phones are spreading rapidly which also means that Africans will be connected to the world in a completely different way than before. “The world is becoming flatter because people communicate horizontally,” he adds.

Saddam first

De Soysa puts the current wave of enthusiasm for democracy and freedom in the context of globalisation and the way communications have changed in just a decade. The youth today, he suggests, perceive themselves as citizens of the world – no longer believing that old men should dictate how they should live. De Soysa suggests Tunisia and Egypt were not freak events: the start of the latest wave of revolutionary unrest in the Middle East and North Africa began with the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, he believes.

“The human cost was high, and many died. But it was an important symbol that encouraged people in other repressive regimes to believe that it is possible to get rid of a dictator,” he notes.

“I would not say that George Bush should get the Peace Prize, but in retrospect this was a very important event in initiating the change that is now rolling across the Middle East.”

That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is to take Marc Bolan’s advice: “you won’t fool the children of the revolution”… not anymore that is! If Bush helped at all, it was showing younger generations how wrong the old boys with their old technology got it.

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More to Sudan than meets the West’s eye

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By Andrew Eatwell

Despite its reputation for war and violence, there is more to Sudan than meets the West’s eye.

24 September 2010

Huge, harsh, desolate, with bloody borders and regions wracked by genocidal conflict, listed by the United States as a state sponsor of terrorism and under an international embargo, led by the only sitting leader to be indicted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court, Sudan, Africa’s largest country geographically, is the quintessential pariah state. But there is much more to this land of violence and extremes than the religious fanaticism, gun-toting militias and rebel groups, famine and poverty that is frequently portrayed in the Western media.

Despite having the odds and much of the international community stacked against it, Sudan’s northern region, the largely violence-free area where the Islamist government of President Omar al-Bashir faces little opposition, is developing at breakneck speed. New roads are carving their way across the vast stretches of desert, glass and steel buildings are climbing skyward in Khartoum, and, at least for some Sudanese living away from the country’s many conflict zones, living standards are slowly improving.

“Here there was nothing but dirt before. Now there are paved roads, all in just a few years,” Hagg Said, the brother of the owner of a roadside café near the northern town of Abri, told me during a recent visit. “We can get around and trade more easily, it’s much better.”

The road running past Hagg Said’s brother’s café, like many roads, bridges and other infrastructure projects in Northern Sudan, was built by Chinese contractors, using local laborers, Chinese foremen and imported Chinese equipment. Some locals are enthusiastic about China’s growing influence – one store owner in the area has proudly hung a photo of Chinese President Hu Jintao alongside one of al-Bashir on his wall. In contrast, many northern Sudanese view the United States with disdain. They see Washington (which bombed a pharmaceutical factory in the Khartoum suburb of Omdurman in 1998 on the spurious grounds that it was producing chemical weapons and had links to al-Qaeda) and Western nations’ policies as holding the country – and their own lives – back.

While the West has sought to isolate Sudan, banning investment and blocking trade in response to the al-Bashir government’s dire human rights record, China has seized the opportunity to expand its influence. Chinese investment in Sudan accounted for a large chunk of the $5 billion the country received last year and China is one of Sudan’s largest trading partners, a relationship that has helped the Sudanese economy quintuple in size over the last decade, one of the fastest growth rates in the world. Clearly, Beijing is not just interested in selling cheap consumer products, construction equipment and completing infrastructure projects. Sudanese oil – the country is now the third-largest producer in sub-Saharan Africa – accounts for around 10% of China’s oil needs, and Chinese investment in the country’s mineral and resource-rich regions is growing. And it is precisely those regions that have put Sudan under the international spotlight.

Darfur, whose inhabitants rose up against decades of government neglect only to be slaughtered in their tens of thousands at the hands of government-backed Janjaweed militiamen, remains a dangerous flashpoint in the west of the country – one that spread across the border into neighbouring Chad in 2005.

In the south, where 70% of Sudan’s oil is pumped, a two-decade civil war between government troops and separatist rebels representing the area’s Christian-Animist population, claimed the lives of more than 1.5 million people until a 2005 ceasefire brought an uneasy end to hostilities. A referendum on independence for the south, scheduled for January 2011, is likely to be a new flashpoint in the near term.

Just recently, the Abyei border region, an area of rich pasture lands close to key oil fields where a separate referendum is to be held next year on whether the territory should join the currently semi-autonomous south, has been the site of several killings linked to conflicting territorial claims.

In all these regions, people are dying, killed not just by the bullets of soldiers, militiamen and rebels, but by the consequences of those conflicts: famine, poverty and disease. The United Nations recently warned that places such as Akobo, a town in the south-eastern region of Jonglei, is the “hungriest place on earth” with almost half of all children suffering malnutrition. The international humanitarian aid that does get to where it’s needed is essential for millions of Sudanese living in the worst areas of conflict, but international political pressure has so far had only limited impact. Killings continue in Darfur and Abyei, the south is still tense, al-Bashir remains in power – he won a widely ridiculed election in April after opposition parties boycotted the poll – and has yet to be hauled before the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Away from Sudan’s many areas of conflict, those countries willing to deal with Sudan and al-Bashir’s regime, such as China, India and some Gulf Arab states, are having far more impact, helping not only their own interests but, by proxy, also the lives of more than 20 million Sudanese (out of a total population of around 40 million) living outside the conflict zones.

Khartoum’s souqs and commercial districts bustle with activity, traders hawk cheap Chinese-made clothes and consumer products, internet cafés abound and mobile phone shops line every other street. New buses now ply paved roads previously only served by bone-rattling pick-up trucks, and satellite dishes beam channels from across the Arab and Western world into rural and urban homes. In the city’s squares, shops and cafes, where economics, rather than politics, governs daily life, people from Sudan’s many disparate ethnic groups mingle with apparent ease.

“I go to Cairo to buy from the warehouses and bring things back to sell in Khartoum. Everything is more expensive in Sudan, but people are buying so I can make a good profit. I’ve been all over for goods,” said Ibrahim, a trader from the capital, as he sat among boxed-up washing machines, flat-screen TVs and ceiling fans on the deck of the weekly ferry across Lake Nasser from Aswan in Egypt to Wadi Halfa in Sudan.

Much of the world has sought to isolate Sudan in order to punish its political rulers. But entrepreneurial Sudanese and the few countries still willing to deal with the pariah regime, regardless of their underlying intentions, have ultimately ensured the world economy and economic opportunity have become more accessible to the average Sudanese.

Nonetheless, the unbalanced development of the country, largely based on oil wealth and with a large disparity between the center and periphery, remains a potential source for conflict and political instability, especially if oil-rich south Sudan moves to secede from the north next year.

Andrew Eatwell is currently travelling through Africa. His journey has so far taken him through Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda over the last two months. He has found the experience interesting, taxing, fun, tiring, exhilarating and saddening in almost equal measure. Sudan and Ethiopia stand out as the two most intriguing countries he has visited.

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Tags: africa, al-qaeda, arab, china, christian, conflict, crimes against humanity, darfur, development, economics, ethiopia, human rights, international criminal court, khartoum, oil, omar al-bashir, poverty, rebel, sudan, travel, usa, war

Overplaying Egyptomania

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By Osama Diab

Egypt’s pavillion at the Shanghai Expo 2010 misses the mark of modernity and dwells excessively on the country’s ancient past.

9 July 2010

It is a promoter’s wildest dream: access to some 500,000 people every day, representing all ages, nationalities and backgrounds. An opportunity to reach 70 million visitors in just six months. And thousands of journalists producing thousands of news reports for media outlets all over the world, all in the same place. Does this sound too good to be true? This is Expo 2010, running 1 May to 31 October, in Shanghai, China.

Since the first world exposition was held in London in 1851, countries have gathered every few years to raise their international profiles, show off their accomplishments and educate the world about what they have to offer. This year, more than 190 countries are represented at the Shanghai event, themed ‘Better City, Better World’. Set up over more than five square kilometers, pavillions for individual nations, regions, and some industries and corporations, vie for the visitor’s attention.

I spent a week at Expo 2010 in May, invited by the telecom company Ericsson to attend their business innovation forum held at the Swedish pavilion, a 3,000-square-metre space with as its theme ‘Spirit of Innovation’. Through its exhibits, Sweden focuses on technological advancement, overcoming environmental challenges, promoting sustainability and possible solutions to the world’s problems.

Impressed by what I had seen in the Swedish pavillion and with the expo in general, I couldn’t wait to see what the Egyptian pavillion would be like. Would we be able to compete with all these new heights of innovation, technology, architecture and development?

History meets… history

If the ‘ribbons’ are meant to connect Egypt’s past with the present, then I guess it makes sense that they are swirling aimlessly, as the pavillion’s content represents nothing of modern Egypt. ©Osama Diab

Egypt’s 1,000-square-metre pavillion was designed as a gift by internationally renowned Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid. A bit stark with swirling black and white swooshes, it is apparently meant to combine modernity with antiquity, represented by the constellation-like graphic of three pyramids above the arched entrance. Indeed, the building looks like some lost spaceship which had landed in Shanghai by mistake and was now trying to avoid notice by disguising itself as a pavillion.

While I am not a big fan of our pavillion’s design, I do think anything that is not Ancient Egyptian kitsch is huge progress. I was excited to see there was no Tutankhamun or other notable pharaohs outside to welcome visitors. The excitement was short-lived.

Despite cloudy weather and rain, thousands of Chinese people were standing in line for nearly an hour to visit our pavillion. The security guard spotted us and knew we were Egyptian even before he shouted, “Masreyeen?” Excited to see Egyptians in China other than his boss, the guard ushered us to the head of the line: “Were you thinking of standing in line or what?” he chided us, “Etfadalo, etfadalo [Come in, come in].”

Inside, the swooshes have gone wild, with a veritable hurricane of white circling the black interior. “The flying ribbons are meant to embody modernity represented by the design, and history represented by the pavilion’s content,” Mohamed Gomaa, the manager of Egypt’s pavillion, explains. “So the idea is to link the present to the past and the ribbons are that link.”

Amid this maelstrom of ‘ribbons’ are sparsely arranged eight Ancient Egyptian artifacts, including a large statue of Amenhotep IV. So much for my hopes of a pharaoh-free pavillion.

Egyptomania is apparently a strong selling point. Despite its moderate size, Egypt’s pavilion receives a fair share of visitors, averaging 14,000 per day and up to 18,000 during the first few weekends, according to Gomaa. He says that the line gets so long some days that it blocks the exit of Tunisia’s pavilion nearby.

“The police came a few times to ask us to try to get more people into the pavilion,” says Gomaa. “There’s a limit to the people that can go inside at once because we need to keep everything under control to protect the original pieces we have.”

Other than the antiquities, the pavillion’s major attraction was the gift shop sponsored by the Luxor governorate. Ahmed Eid, a fine arts graduate and Luxor native, says that they have had a high turnout. Eid’s job is to write visitor’s names in hieroglyphs on papyrus; he says he does at least 40 drawings a day. “Chinese visitors are passionate about the Ancient Egyptian civilisation,” he says, “and [they] love the idea of writing their names in the Ancient Egyptian language.”

“The point of the expo is to promote Egypt’s name rather than a certain product or service,” Gomaa explains. To hear his take on the visitors’ reaction, you would think little promotion needs to be done. “When we tell people here that we like China, they say ‘we love Egypt’ back. They always tell us that China and Egypt are the oldest two civilisations in the world and have a lot in common,” Gomaa says. “We are happy to be here in a country that is an example of an ancient history and a bright future.”

This is all very nice, but what about our present? Our Pharaonic past has no need for further promotion. I was hoping that Egypt would promote something future-oriented that would fit better with the expo’s theme, such as opportunities for clean energy, medical tourism, the nation’s growing economy and investment opportunities, or its booming ICT industry.

After seeing the future in China, an equally ancient civilisation that is fast growing in international prominence, I can’t help but wonder when Egypt will find something newer than a few thousand years old to be proud of.

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Tainted honour

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Rana Husseini's book about honour killings

By Khaled Diab

The taboo surrounding the cruel murder of family members in the name of honour is slowly being broken.

May 2009

Though relatively rare, killing a family member in the name of honour should be a cause for shame, not pride, as it reflects a cowardly compliance with inhumane norms.

Killing someone, especially a family member, is something I cannot begin to contemplate. Of course, I realise that it is a sad fact of life that some of the worst physical, sexual and psychological abuses – and even murders – are perpetrated by relatives.

In some ways, it is more horrifying and tragic when abuses are committed not to satisfy some base motives but for the apparently exalted ideal of “honour”. Each year, thousands die around the world – from the Middle East to the Indian subcontinent, and from Latin America to China – in the name of family honour. The victims of these crimes are mostly women.

Rana Husseini – a courageous and outspoken Jordanian journalist who has dedicated most of her career to campaigning against this warped cultural practice – will publish a book on the subject at the end of May.

Murder in the Name of Honour (pdf) continues Husseini’s groundbreaking efforts to break the silence on this disgraceful crime. The book shines a human light on some of the victims of honour killings, exploring their lives, circumstances and deaths – an epitaph to women whose families and communities would rather forget.

The first case Husseini investigated, back in 1994, was that of Kifaya, a young woman from a very traditional family in a conservative neighbourhood of Amman, who became pregnant after being raped by one of her brothers, Muhammad.

Instead of understanding and sympathy from her family, the poor young woman who had been violated by her own kin was forced to marry a man 34 years her senior to cover up the scandal. When the marriage ended in divorce six months later, the perceived shame led the family to decide that Kifaya had to die, and her other brother, Khalid, was forced to carry out the ugly deed.

Although most honour killings are ordered by men and carried out by men, Kifaya’s father, who worked abroad to provide for his family, had no idea of the plot co-hatched by her mother, and the news of her death devastated him. “I would never have allowed anyone to kill my daughter, no matter what,” he confessed to Husseini.

The fact that Kifaya was a victim twice over – once for being blamed for her rape and then being murdered for dishonouring the family – is not unusual in the grizzly annals of this type of crime, where a woman’s virginity is worth more than her life. In fact, there are women in the most conservative circles who have paid with their lives for the malicious gossip of others.

Husseini points out that only a small number of men are murdered in the name of honour, despite the fact that they played a major role in the supposed dishonour. Indeed, men – even rapists – do get off lightly in this type of sex-related honour crimes. But her assertion overlooks the fact that there is a whole other world of honour that overwhelmingly claims men as its victims: the vendetta – think Romeo and Juliet or mafia films but in real life.

One place where this dated practice, known locally as ‘el-tar‘, still continues, despite decades of efforts to wipe it out, is Egypt’s stronghold of conservatism and tough traditions, al-Said (or Upper Egypt). Highly codified and ritualised, some of these feuds can last for generations, perpetuated by a stubborn belief in “el-tar walla el-aar” (“revenge is better than disgrace”).

It’s not just the fact that someone can muster up the ability to murder a loved one that disturbs, it is also the cruel manner and abandon some people bring to the task. One father hired two thugs to rape his daughter for two hours – as punishment for shaming him – before killing her. To my mind, there is no way a father like that can be anything but completely diseased in the head.

The crime can also be cruel on the chosen executioner. Families often choose one of the younger men – often a minor – to carry out the crime because he will probably get off with a lighter sentence, although the powerless youngster is condemned to a lifetime of trauma and often regret. “I know that killing my sister is against Islam and it angered God,” said Sarhan, a young honour-killer Husseini visited in prison. “She was close to me, she was the one who resembled me the most,” he said. “I alone cannot change or fix things in my society. My whole society has to change.”

And change is coming gradually. Thanks to the efforts of Husseini – who has endured slander, unpopularity and even death threats – and other activists and campaigners, the issue has become a very public one in Jordan, and concern about it has grown in other countries, particularly Pakistan.

This breaking of the taboo has incensed many, not because they approve of the crimes but because of the shame and embarrassment it brings upon their societies. At one level, this is understandable: although honour killings are pretty isolated occurrences, many in the outside world have the warped idea that most Arab and Muslim men are bloodthirsty women-bashers. However, sweeping the issue under the carpet is not an option, and it must be dealt with.

Although Jordanian campaigners have so far failed to change the law that enables honour murderers to get off lightly, the struggle is as much about changing cultural perceptions and attitudes as it is about legislation. Public and judicial tolerance of these crimes is wearing thin as the silent majority begin to raise their objections to these barbaric acts. “The protection of every woman’s life should be a key issue for the government and community alike,” emphasises Husseini. “Real honour is about tolerance, equality and civil responsibility.”

This column appeared in The Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free section on 3 May 2009. Read the related discussion.

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Tags: arab world, brazil, china, egypt, honour killings, india, jordan, middle east, murder, pakistan

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