Most aspects of life changed in Iran after the Islamic Republic replaced the Pahlavi dynasty in 1979. Women’s bodies became the main battlefield for ideological wars.

Just two weeks after the success of the Islamic revolution, Iran’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, cancelled the “Family Protection Act” — which made 18 the minimum age for marriage and imposed some restrictions on polygamy — and passed the compulsory veil law.

On the eve of March 8, International Women’s Day, of the same year, Khomeini said all female government employees would have to wear a veil if they want to go to work. His announcement triggered protests in the streets of Iran, and 5,000-8,000 women demonstrated at the University of Tehran.

Unfortunately, no groups supported those women, and Khomeini’s supporters attacked unveiled women in the streets, pushing pins into their foreheads.

Most left-wing activists at the time were only interested in class war. Fearing that a counter-revolution might erupt, they remained silent. Some of them went so far as to brand women’s demands for equality as “imperialist attempts” to undermine the young revolution.

During the reign of the Pahlavi regime, Western lifestyle and clothing were endorsed. Wearing a scarf was not forbidden but it was not tolerated in government institutions. Women were also objectified then but in a different way: sex and women’s bodies were used for profit.

Khomeini’s regime used images of women in the West to justify its compulsory dress code, which included not only the veil but also a full black cover for women in government intuitions. His regime’s reasoning was that women’s bodies are attractive and can distract men as well as cause people to sin.That was the logic that Khomeini used to objectify women.

Supporters of the Islamic Republic in the 1970s came mainly from conservative families. With new gender segregation regulations and a compulsory body cover in place, these families allowed their female members to participate in public life. But that did not mean women’s lives had improved — it simply meant that women who grew up conservatively were more empowered than other women.

Women with conservative views became members of parliament. Ironically, a female lawmaker Fatemeh Alia, said in 2014: “Women’s duty is to have and raise children; and take care of their husbands and not to watch volleyball.”

Her statement was in response to news of police using force to prohibit women from entering a stadium to watch a volleyball match between Iran and Italy. These women were not only forced to cover up but were denied entering a sports stadium to watch “men playing sports.” Thus women were denied access to public space.

Iran only began allowing women to enter sport stadiums last October after threats from football governing body FIFA over Tehran’s discretionary measures. It took the death of Sahar Khodayari (nicknamed Blue Girl), who set herself on fire in to protest against the ban, to spark international recognition of Iranian women’s plight.

However, the Iranian regime’s move to allow women to enter stadiums came with conditions that show its gender segregated system is still in place: seats, parking spaces, and entrances/exits were all segregated.

The regime uses the excuse that the public’s “culture” is not yet ready to accept women in stadiums. Using the word “culture” in this ambiguous way is a dangerous way to justify gender discrimination.

Unfortunately, these kinds of “cultural” excuses find support from some self-proclaimed “feminists” in academia. Some of them disregard the fact that families or political systems that force women to wear the hijab are a clear expression of patriarchy. They praise the “success” that women achieved in Iran in order to mask the fact that women are still fighting to be liberated from the dress code being imposed on them.

However, the Iranian regime has failed in its bid to hide its women. In the anti-government protests that kicked off in November, Iranian women — like their sisters in Lebanon and Iraq — played a big role, despite Tehran’s attempts to censor them.

Iran’s national television showed women being forced to confess they had received training from foreign countries. It was a clear attempt to try and portray women as lacking agency and as agents of foreign agendas.

Mahmoud Mohammadi Araqi, the representative of the supreme leader in the city of Qum, said Iran’s enemies are distracting Muslims with women and wine. This statement reduces women to an object, like wine, that can be used to manipulate men.

For forty years now, Iranian women have been on the forefront of the fight against the system. This uprising has shown that women will remain a part of the social movement. They are an active part of the community and not objects that others can decide whether to cover or uncover.

Iranian women’s campaign for “Optional Hijab” expresses the view that women have the right to self-determination and control over their bodies. Only women can decide whether they want to wear the hijab or not. It is not a decision men can make on their behalf.

Mona Silavi is an Ahwazi rights activist based in Brussels.

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 10 December 2019
Word Count: 841
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Circumventing every possible obstacle, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan keeps moving ahead on the path he set, cementing his rule in Turkey, as he takes every opportunity, big or small, to consolidate his legitimacy on the basis of “stability in Turkey.”

Having survived political defeat in the local elections some seven months ago, Erdogan is back in the game, using the same fundamental tools that have kept him in power: use of religion in a rhetoric similar to the one applied by the Muslim Brotherhood; conducting divisive policies at home, fiercely exercised to keep the opposition as polarised as ever before; constantly driving a wedge between bodies such as NATO and the European Union and, as the Syrian incursion exemplified, raising the stakes for Turkish nationalism; and irredentism, which causes growing concern in the Eastern Mediterranean basin.

In all these efforts Erdogan seems unstoppable. Regarding religion as a political tool, he knows he has the powerful backing of the overwhelming Muslim majority at home, which he hopes will see him as the unchallenged leader of the country.

Addressing the sixth Religious Council meeting of the Presidency of Religious Affairs November 28 in Ankara, his gambling became obvious once more: “Even if it may burden ourselves, we shall place the decretals, and not the rules of the present, at the centre of our lives,” Erdogan said. “Islam is an acquis of rules and prohibitions which encircle all the sections of our lives. We believe in a religion that encompasses its every phase. We are ordered to live as Muslims until the very end.”

Even if Erdogan took his time to underline the traps of “fault lines among Muslims in the world,” it was these words that echoed in Turkey’s increasingly oppressed secular circles, more than his unanswered ambitions to emerge as the leader of the Islamic world.

He also knows that such statements are without a doubt breaches of the constitution, which emphasises that the president remains an impartial and unifying figure. But his challenging in-your-face gestures have always remained his game. He knows that dropping the rhetoric of religion altogether may spell a lethal weakening of his power. Nevertheless, the result of such statements is a continuous Islamisation of the education system, undermining Turkey as a modern nation.

His use of nationalism has pushed the centrist opposition into a corner but, for Erdogan, it is not sufficient, unless coupled with bold divisions within it.

The chain of events placing the secular main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), have recently presented a taste of what is bound to come in the near future. It all began with an obvious piece of disinformation spread by a couple of murky reporters in the press. The “rumour,” these reports said, was that a prominent figure of the main opposition had secretly met Erdogan at his palace to hear from him that “it would be a fine idea if he had replaced the current leader of the CHP, Kemal Kilicdaroglu.”

The media jumped on the bandwagon, dragged by the unconfirmed piece aimed at manipulation. It took several days to deny it, as the opposition party was delivered blow after blow, and internal rifts surfaced. The damage was done, proving, as it were, the oppressed Kurdish politicians who had warned the CHP figures that “you remain silent before the cruelties to us, but you will be next in line.” Erdogan was visibly content and in waves of joyful attacks, as was expected of him. He felt assured that he has his opponents in control.

In foreign policy, Erdogan is benefiting enormously from the overall turbulence and international folly developing day by day. Volatile conjuncture in the Middle East and Europe leaves his daredevil policies room to develop and enlarge, so far so that Ankara feels a growing appetite for irredentism for redrawing the map of the eastern Mediterranean, testing the reaction capacities of the EU.

The more the EU appeases, the more it encourages an escalation of the crisis with Turkey at one side and Greece, Cyprus and Egypt on the other. Amnesia reigns: It was the reactions to the Treaty of Versailles that shaped the Nazi regime in Germany and, in some sense perhaps, the discontent with the Lausanne Treaty will have a similar effect in Turkey’s path to totalitarian rule.

Erdogan, while challenging the European Union, places his bet on the EU trauma. The violent fall of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya is the main source of the refugee crisis that has been reshaping the European political landscape to far-right populism and overall disorder. Erdogan knows very well that the EU at the end of the day would prefer to have him as the leader of Turkey, who will maintain its stability, as opposed to any alternative that would amount to deeper chaos.

The same fear — a prospective instability bigger than in Libya — applies among NATO’s European allies. Thus, Erdogan and his team feel free to block NATO’s plans for its Baltic members, as the bloc turns into a witness as Ankara develops into a Trojan horse.

All these factors explain the success of Erdogan’s survival. He reads the new global reality better than all the others — except perhaps Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Yavuz Baydar is a senior Turkish columnist, and news analyst. A founding member of the Platform for Independent Journalism (P24) in Istanbul, he has been reporting on Turkey and monitoring media issues since 1980. A European Press Prize Laureate in 2014, he is also the winner of Germany’s ‘Journalistenpreis’ in 2018.

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 December 2019
Word Count: 870
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The Trump administration removed another major obstacle to Israel’s annexation of the West Bank by reversing Washington’s long-held view that Israel’s creation of settlements in the occupied territories was a violation of international law.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the new policy on November 18, 102 years after publication of the historic Balfour Declaration signalled British support for a Jewish state in Palestine.

In his announcement, Pompeo employed the same logic underlying the Trump administration’s decisions on Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. He explained that “what we’ve done today is we have recognised the reality on the ground. We’ve now declared that settlements are not per se illegal under international law,” he said.

“We think, in fact, we’ve increased the likelihood that the vision for peace that this administration has, we think we’ve created space for that to be successful. I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to move forward on that before too terribly long.”

A US policy based upon a recognition of “facts on the ground” signifies a ringing endorsement of an Israeli strategy pursued since the first settlement was established in areas conquered in June 1967 and, indeed, since the Balfour era a century ago.

Trump’s decision signifies “a huge achievement” in the words of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, for whom the Trump presidency has been a gift that keeps on giving. Like its previous departures from the international consensus on the Golan and Jerusalem, US recognition of the legality of settlements marks a complete and irreversible victory for Israeli efforts aimed at undermining the ability of Palestinians to establish a sovereign presence anywhere in the Palestinian territories.

The centrepiece of the move by Washington is a long quiescent legal opinion provided by the US State Department two generations ago.

In the spring of 1978, the Carter administration was deep in discussions before the historic Camp David summit between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat that would lead to a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel and efforts — realised with the Oslo Accords in 1993 — to establish Palestinian “autonomy” in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

In anticipation of the negotiations, the State Department addressed the US view of the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention to Israel’s occupation of areas conquered in the June 1967 war. Were Israeli civilian settlements in East Jerusalem, Sinai, the Golan Heights and West Bank and Gaza violations of international legal restrictions governing the transfer of civilians into areas under hostile military occupation?

The State Department legal adviser obliged in April 1978 with a three-page analysis of “the legality of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories.”

Herbert Hansell wrote that “the civilian settlements in the territories occupied by Israel do not appear to be consistent with these limits on Israel’s authority as belligerent occupant in that they do not seem intended to be of limited duration or established to provide orderly government of the territories and though some may serve incidental security purposes they do not appear to be required to meet military needs during the occupation.”

“The establishment of civilian settlements in those territories,” Hansell concluded, “is inconsistent with international law.”

The Hansell opinion did not excite much interest when it was issued. This was the era of what the New York Times described at the time as Israel’s “benevolent occupation.” Although more than 50,000 Israelis had settled in East Jerusalem, when Begin travelled to Camp David in September 1978 there were only 10,000 settlers in what were then isolated and primitive West Bank outposts.

Even before Hansell’s analysis, Washington had left little doubt about the view that settlements were both temporary and illegal. A succession of Israeli prime ministers — Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin — well understood US policy.

It was also clear that US opposition had no discernible effect on limiting Israel’s strategy of creating conditions on the ground through settlement and other means that would anchor Israel permanently in the areas conquered in June 1967 and preclude any Palestinian effort to establish sovereign control there.

Carter would unsuccessfully try to oblige Begin at Camp David to agree to a permanent freeze in settlement expansion. Begin was prepared only to keep the bulldozers quiet for three months.

With or without the Hansell opinion, over the next four decades, Washington, under Republican and Democrat leadership, proved unequal to the task of enforcing its view that international law prohibited the settlement effort — establishing a consistent record of failure to cajole, oblige or force Israel to stop the policy of creating facts. Today more than 600,000 Israelis live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Pompeo has cited this failure as justification for the change in policy. He recalled that the Reagan administration had turned US policy on its head when US President Ronald Reagan declared that settlements were not illegal. Unlike Trump, however, Reagan never formally repudiated the Hansell opinion and policy under Reagan continued the ritual opposition to Israel’s settlement expansion.

Israel, which ignored with impunity previous warnings from Washington, welcomed Reagan’s change in US policy. On the ground, however, Washington policy gyrations were all but ignored. No matter the declarations from Washington, Israel continued to follow its own settlement blueprint and its insatiable desire to create facts on the ground.

The Obama administration made no secret of its view that settlements were at the heart of the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians and the principal obstacle to the US national security interest in realising the creation of a Palestinian state at peace with Israel.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton famously declared: “[The president] wants to see a stop to settlements — not some settlements, not outposts, not ‘natural growth’ exceptions. That is our position. That is what we have communicated very clearly.”

Netanyahu was stunned by Obama’s demand but, like his predecessors, he rebuffed Washington without suffering any real consequence. Indeed, he defied the wishes of the US president and lived not only to tell the tale but to prosper.

The intensity of Clinton’s demand for a settlement freeze only made Obama’s failure to bring Israel to heel that much more significant.

Trump is right to decry this failure. However, his remedy, which is intended to encourage outright annexation, is worse than the disease.

Geoffrey Aronson is a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Monthly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 27 November 2019
Word Count: 1,044
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Day after day, anything related to the concept of justice in Turkey resembles a bitter parody of Franz Kafka’s works of literature.

The domain of the judiciary has turned into a battlefield for partisanship and clashing political interests in which various flanks of Turkey’s far-right, extreme nationalist and Islamist groups elbow each other to gain influence.

It is apparent that the power struggle in the defunct system of justice is a symbol for a showdown between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the militarist right.

The opposition is only a pawn in this cruel game. While the oppressive measures against the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) on central and local levels become unbearable, Turkey’s lonely and alienated dissidents and journalists bear the brunt of what they regard as acts of revenge for their standing up against the injustice.

The case of Ahmet Altan, former editor-in-chief of the shutdown liberal daily Taraf, is telling of the agony. He was sentenced to aggravated lifetime imprisonment for spreading “subliminal messages” supporting the 2016 attempted coup in Turkey and, when his sentence was recently reduced to 10 years, he was released — but only for five days.

A court agreed with the prosecutor that he must be sent back to prison and he was put back in his cell. During his brief period of freedom, he filed a powerful article to Le Monde.

“In the few days I’ve spent ‘outside’ the prison, the things I’ve heard and watched gave me the feeling that life might only comprise a prison and a madhouse,” he wrote. “It is as if a strange ideology one might call ‘lumpenism’ has, in various guises, taken hold of the ‘outside.’

“A lowly case of madness has penetrated the texture of society. The intellectual hierarchy of society has been turned upside down and those with the poorest acumen and skills have gained the right to speak the most. Intelligence, skills, knowledge and creativity are demeaned.

“One of the most horrifying questions of humankind determines everyone’s place in society: How much do you like your homeland? Everyone loves their homeland; they love it like crazy, love it to death and, in order to prove it, they keep shouting out how much they love their homeland.

“Political authority has the final say on who loves their homeland more. In this terrifying competition, there is no place for those who have not lost all wisdom and reason. Any reasonable objection, any belief in law and human rights will suffice to leave you out of the race… Lumpens have planted their flags everywhere.”

The pattern was repeated when journalists of the secular daily Cumhuriyet had a lower court defy the overturn of their lengthy prison sentences by the High Court of Appeals. The case will continue to agonise them because it means the process will begin from scratch.

These examples help understand how acrimonious the internal battle in the power echelons in Turkey has become. As a part of bureaucracy tries to prevent things from getting out of hand completely, the other part pushes for crossing all the lines in order to establish a full-scale police state.

If the cases of Altan and Cumhuriyet are not clear enough to see through the patterns, a look into the series of devastating measures employed against the HDP — with 62 seats, the third largest party in the Turkish parliament — would leave one with no doubts.

On the central level, there are more than 100 subpoenas against its deputies, all on terrorism charges. It is a question of Erdogan’s tactical timing before their immunities are lifted, paving the way for prison.

Of the 69 municipalities won by the HDP, 27 have been imposed with state trustees appointed by Erdogan. Thirteen HDP mayors are in pretrial detention, along with tens of municipal council members. They are added to the 41 former mayors of the HDP who were removed from their posts before the elections in March and sentenced to a total of about 237 years in prison.

There is another pattern: Erdogan is determined to break the backbone of the HDP’s rather solid structures and continue to conduct, to the very end, what could be defined as “ethnic cleansing in Turkish politics.” The aim is to copy-paste the Sri Lanka experience, which crushed the Tamil movement.

The despair is so deep among Turkey’s Kurdish politicians that an extraordinary meeting took place in Ankara with the question on whether the party should withdraw from parliament and local councils. After stormy debate, the decision was to continue but the HDP knows that, under such dire circumstances, it would only serve the purpose of a postponement, an act of winning some time.

Turkey continues to breathe under the state of emergency, however de facto it seems to be. Realism is useful: it will have to be much worse, before the tide eventually turns.

Yavuz Baydar is a senior Turkish columnist, and news analyst. A founding member of the Platform for Independent Journalism (P24) in Istanbul, he has been reporting on Turkey and monitoring media issues since 1980. A European Press Prize Laureate in 2014, he is also the winner of Germany’s ‘Journalistenpreis’ in 2018.

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 26 November 2019
Word Count: 809
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US foreign policy has bipolar disorder. It swings wildly between low and high moods. This is why US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo can say that Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories are not “inconsistent with international law” but that China’s increasingly threatening actions towards Hong Kong raise grave concerns.

Recognition of the Israeli settlements was presented as bowing to “the reality on the ground.” Not so Hong Kong’s plight — more than five months of escalating protests against Beijing’s attempt to limit the freedoms enjoyed by the largely self-governing city.

Pompeo’s statement on Hong Kong was the Trump administration in a high mood. It was bullish, pushing the pro-democracy, pro-freedom narrative traditionally expected — nay, demanded — of the United States.

Never mind that US President Donald Trump, who hardly ever speaks about human rights, has offered no particular statement of support for the Hong Kong pro-democracy activists. Never mind that Trump even told the Chinese president some months ago that he would not publicly back the protesters if talks to resolve US-China trade tensions continue to progress.

The announcement on Israeli settlements was the US administration in a low mood. It wasn’t vision stuff, just realpolitik, recognising, as Pompeo said, that decades of US policy “didn’t work.”

That, no matter the United States’ chosen terminology, Israeli governments, whether led by Likud or Labour, have consistently built and expanded settlements for the past half-century. There appears to be no way to turn the clock back, without Israeli acquiescence to international pressure.

However, the international pressure necessary to force Israeli acquiescence does not exist so, these settlements — hundreds of them, some official, some not — in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank — will stay. It is hard to see any Israeli government or anyone else removing the settlements by force, as long as Israel, backed by the United States, insists on its own interpretation of international law.

Yet, international law is very clear. The Fourth Geneva Convention, ratified by 192 countries after World War II, says that an occupying power “shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” The UN General Assembly, the UN Security Council and the International Court of Justice say Israeli settlements on the West Bank violate the convention.

Nine successive US administrations refused to accept that Israel is justified in allowing settlers to build homes in the West Bank as their biblical birthright. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter’s administration said settlements were illegal. Ronald Reagan disagreed, in 1981, but acknowledged that settlements were an impediment to peace. The Obama administration said that settlements were “illegitimate.”

In light of the weasel words on settlements from multiple US administrations, it’s fair to ask why the Trump rebranding makes a difference. Israeli settlers had perforce created the facts on the ground — they are firmly in possession of land to which Israel does not have any right, at least by international law, and no one seems able or willing to do anything about it. The peace process is notable only for being absent. Why decry the Trump administration for recognising hideous, organic reality?

There are two reasons. First, it takes a two-state solution off the table but without any indication of how Israel will treat Arab residents of the de facto single state that is inexorably coming into being. Will Palestinians in the new, engorged Israel have full citizenship rights or second-class status?

Second, the low mood of US bipolar disorder affects the whole world. In validating the transgression of international law, the Trump administration is dismantling a crucial pillar of an order based on rights, both as an aspiration and a hope.

Rashmee Roshan Lall is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly. She blogs at www.rashmee.com and is on Twitter @rashmeerl

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 25 November 2019
Word Count: 608
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US President Donald Trump continues to muddy the waters on the policy of the United States in north-eastern Syria.

Trump pulled US troops out of border regions of north-eastern Syria in October, immediately after a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. This allowed Turkish troops and their Syrian allies to occupy the area, kill more than 100 Kurdish fighters and civilians and cause the flight of more than 100,000 Kurds. Still, Trump said he was determined to withdraw all 1,000 US troops from the country.

That policy elicited widespread criticism in the United States, even among his congressional Republican allies and evangelical Christian supporters.

US Defence Department officials, civilians and military alike, who were not consulted about his decision, were especially angry since it meant abandoning the United States’ Syrian Kurdish allies who had taken the brunt of the casualties in the anti-Islamic State (ISIS) campaign and because of the concern that without a US military presence in the area, ISIS could rebound.

Hence, there was considerable pushback from the Pentagon, so much so that Trump agreed to keep about 600 troops in north-eastern Syria, south of the area under Turkish control. This idea was apparently sold to Trump as a way of holding on to the oil fields in the Deir ez-Zor region, which are in an area controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

The oil idea especially appealed to Trump, who likes transactional foreign policy. He initially made comments to the effect that the revenues from the fields would accrue to the United States but Pentagon officials “clarified” his remarks to say the objective would be to keep the oil fields out of ISIS’s hands, with revenues from the fields used to support the SDF.

The policy was refined further when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff US Army General Mark Milley stated on US television November 10 that the 600 US troops would be used primarily to ensure “the enduring defeat of ISIS.”

Milley stressed that “there are still ISIS fighters in the region and unless pressure is maintained… there’s a very real possibility that conditions could be set” for ISIS’s re-emergence.

That protecting the oil fields would be a secondary objective was underscored by US Navy Rear-Admiral William Byrne, vice-director of the Joint Staff, who said: “The mission is the defeat of ISIS. The securing of the oil fields is a subordinate task to that mission and the purpose of that task is to deny ISIS the revenues from that oil infrastructure.”

However, Trump, during his news conference with Erdogan November 13, said the sole purpose of the US troop presence in north-eastern Syria was to protect the oil. He stated: “We’re keeping the oil. We have the oil. The oil is secure. We left troops behind only for the oil.”

This comment caused a negative reaction. Not only did Trump appear to contradict the Pentagon, he also caused confusion among US allies in the anti-ISIS fight who were gathering in Washington. Unnamed diplomats said Trump’s comments sowed doubt that whatever agreements were struck with the United States could be reversed by his impulsivity.

It is possible Trump made the comments about protecting the oil as the sole US mission to assuage Erdogan that the United States would no longer be the protector of the SDF, whose Kurdish fighters Erdogan claims are terrorists. However, in doing so, he upended the Pentagon’s claim that it will continue to work with the SDF against ISIS. Undoubtedly, there will again be pushback from the Defence Department to Trump’s statements.

The new US policy leaves many unanswered questions. The SDF has sold oil to the Syrian government, so does that mean US officials will do to the same? If not, where and to whom will the oil be sold? Presumably, it could be sent by lorries to Iraq. However, under international law, oil in Syrian territory must be under the purview of the Syrian government. So, how does Washington square this circle?

Second, what about the more than 100,000 Syrian Kurdish refugees who fled, mostly to Iraq, during the Turkish invasion in October? Does the United States have a moral obligation to help them? It is certain that Erdogan does not want them to return to their former homes; instead, he is planning to resettle many Syrian Arab refugees in Turkey in that area to ensure that the Kurds cannot reconstitute their statelet there.

Finally, what about the SDF and the prison camps that it controls that are full of ISIS fighters and their families? Will part of the 600 US troops be deployed to these camps? Will those troops continue to support the SDF to root out ISIS cells?

Unfortunately, none of these questions have been answered, which is indicative of Trump’s confusing and erratic Syria policy.

Gregory Aftandilian is a lecturer at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and is a former U.S. State Department Middle East analyst.

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 November 2019
Word Count: 803
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The Western leaders running the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East are playing with the lives of millions of Palestinian refugees.

An internal report by the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services into the goings-on at senior levels of the relief agency, known by the initials UNRWA, leadership and revealed by Al Jazeera and Agence France-Presse (AFP) last July unveiled a damning culture of nepotism, graft and abuse. UNRWA Commissioner-General Pierre Krahenbuhl resigned November 6.

Conducted late last year and to be released in the coming weeks, the report’s authors said they uncovered “sexual misconduct, nepotism, retaliation, discrimination and other abuses of authority, for personal gain, to suppress legitimate dissent and to otherwise achieve their personal objectives.”

AFP said the report “paints a picture of a small number of mostly foreign senior leaders centralising power and influence while disregarding UN checks and balances.”

Krahenbuhl is alleged to have created a position for Maria Mohammedi, with whom he was allegedly romantically involved, and taken her with him on business-class flights around the world. Both Krahenbuhl and Mohammedi are married to other people. The author of the internal report has been targeted by Hakam Shahwan, a senior UNRWA staff member, who left the agency in July.

UNRWA and the individuals named in the internal investigation vehemently deny the report’s charges and say they are cooperating with the investigation.

While the findings of the internal investigation have yet to be officially released, the incidents of bullying and the corporate misuse of critical funding uncovered show that the mostly European leaders at the head of the organisation have little regard for the people they are to help and represent and that their priorities lie somewhere else entirely.

The Israeli and pro-Israel media around the world, which for years singled UNRWA out for criticism, has had a field day with the scandal. Opinions put forward by pro-Israel press — from Canada’s National Post to the New York Post and the constellation of Israeli media — call for the organisation to be disbanded. Some even claim that UNRWA “promotes the dream nurtured among Palestinians to destroy Israel.”

None, perhaps unsurprisingly, offers a solution or alternative to an organisation that provides vital assistance for millions of displaced people — as well or as poorly it may have been run at its top levels.

More than this, in the eyes of conservative and nativist regimes in the West, the troubles facing UNRWA mirror — as US President Donald Trump and others say — broader problems within the United Nations itself. Troublingly, the scandal gives weight and prescience to the Trump administration’s decision to cut its annual $360 million funding to the agency last year. Even more worrying is that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has known about the alleged wrongdoings since December.

This speaks to something bigger than UNRWA itself — that the international community cares little for what remains the most intractable problem in the Middle East — how to solve the issue of the Palestinian right of return.

None of this is the fault of the Palestinian refugees the organisation was created to help. While such incidents and cultures are unfortunately commonplace at corporations and private institutions, in UNRWA’s case, the lives and futures of millions of Palestinians are at risk because there is a growing possibility that the agency, crippled by the loss of millions of dollars of US funding, may be closed. In addition to the United States, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium and New Zealand have pulled their funding since the scandal became public.

UNRWA is an extraordinarily disadvantaged behemoth. It’s responsible for educating, housing and providing health care for millions of refugees but boasts almost no political power and few international friends. It’s expected to operate and perform near miracles in desperate conditions in Gaza, Syria and Lebanon without any of its own money. It has not been a properly functioning organisation for a very long time, its brief and mandate severely and continually slighted and crippled over the decades.

Undoubtedly some will say these are exactly the reasons why it should be pulled apart and discontinued as an organisation.

With UNRWA’s mission to expire in June, it finds itself in a desperate place. Does Guterres tear up the playbook and shut UNRWA down? Such a move would depend on who is left to donate money to the organisation.

If other countries, especially any of Germany, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom or the European Union (though the latter is unlikely to do so) should pull its funding as a result of the scandal, then the United Nations’ senior leaders might find themselves faced with little choice than to pull the plug and subsume the organisation into the UNHCR, the UN agency for refugees, which is what pro-Israeli voices have long called for.

What would happen then? Nothing positive at least, since a refugee agency’s job is chiefly to resettle said refugees and Israel refuses to concede on the right of return.

With major donating backers likely to stand behind UNRWA when faced with no serious alternative, the organisation will probably continue to struggle on. What’s unfortunate is that much of the leadership that’s brought UNRWA close to its knees is likely to remain in place.

Stephen Starr is an Irish journalist who lived in Syria from 2007 to 2012. He is the author of Revolt in Syria: Eye-Witness to the Uprising (Oxford University Press: 2012).

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 13 November 2019
Word Count: 869
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In no particular order, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Hong Kong, Haiti, Spain, France. That list is not complete. Squalls of street protests around the world are filling television screens and Twitter feeds.

In some ways, it is reassuring that many of the same issues are resonating in different parts of the world. The “Arab spring” seems to be everywhere — and all year round.

The fabled “Arab street,” a metaphor once touted by Western analysts to explain ominous and inchoate public opinion, appears to run through many conurbations outside the region. Not too long ago, Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice-president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote: “There is not one Arab Street.” To that, one might add, the notional Arab street is now in Europe, East Asia and South America, too, at least in the sense of febrile public sentiment causing political turmoil.

Economic inequality prompted the displays of public anger in Iraq, Lebanon and Chile, although each had its own bespoke trigger. Iraq and Lebanon share with Haiti the frustration of years of misgovernance.

What’s interesting about the protests almost anywhere in the world right now is their lack of form and a clear leader. Gatherings of differing sizes and intensities take random shape. Sometimes, as in Lebanon and Iraq, they sing or dance to infantile songs such as “Baby Shark” rather than revolutionary anthems.

As for goals, they are sweeping and indistinct, except for Bolivia, Spain and possibly Egypt. In Bolivia, the unrest is about President Evo Morales’s fourth-term election victory, which some describe as a fraud (and he has just resigned). In Barcelona, Spain, it is anger at the harsh prison sentences for nine Catalan leaders. In Egypt, the protests were focused on corruption after a businessman, from self-imposed exile in Europe, posted videos on YouTube alleging the squandering of public funds.

In Iraq and Lebanon, (or for that matter, Chile, Hong Kong, Haiti and France) however, there is nothing so defined. As a Lebanese protester told the BBC in reference to the now-scrapped daily charge imposed by the government on voice calls made through WhatsApp and other apps: “We are not here over the WhatsApp. We are here over everything.”

Haider Jalal, a 21-year-old protester in Baghdad, offered a broad manifesto for the sort of change he might regard as acceptable. It had to be wholesale, the draining of the entire swamp: “I hope to get rid of all the parties that participated in the political process from 2003 to today.”

So, what is happening and why? Michael Heaney, a research fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow, said: “There’s been more protests and there’s been more coverage of protests, which means that people are learning more about protests. The other is that people are sharing information through social media and communicating with one another about protests.”

Does that mean Iraq is the copycat result of nearby Lebanon and that Lebanon learnt from Hong Kong, where the cycle of protests began five months ago? It’s probably fair to say that there is an imitative element because of repeated exposure to images and video from protests.

This does not render copycat protests less authentic, organic or deeply felt but they do have a problem. The more the protests are normalised, prompting more and more people — even families with young children — to participate in them, the more routine they start to appear and the less threatening they seem to authorities.

And, while they can force through some change — Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri resigned; Iraqi President Barham Salih offered new elections — the protests’ amorphousness means they are less likely to trigger a systemic overhaul or the clear view of the shining city on the hill demanded by protesters.

Rashmee Roshan Lall is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly. She blogs at www.rashmee.com and is on Twitter @rashmeerl

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 November 2019
Word Count: 629
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Does anybody remember the Deal of The Century? Granted, there are plenty of other distractions in the Middle East today. Even so, the measure of leadership is not simply to be swept along by the tide of events but to make history.

The Deal of the Century has been shoved to the margins, not only in the Palestinian territories and Israel, where embattled politicians cannot be bothered by an American plan, whatever its merits — or absence thereof.

Impeachment has sucked the wind out of something as esoteric as yet another US diplomatic effort in the Middle East. Trump’s team of amateurs has made the plan’s release hostage to an imagined moment when all parties will cheer its publication. If such a plan exists, don’t expect its release anytime soon.

The international community, which has deferred to Washington’s diplomatic agenda since Camp David four decades ago, is prepared to humour Washington’s declared interest in peacemaking along lines that repudiate basic, long-held diplomatic constants. It is content to watch without protest as institutions such as the Quartet, created to promote an agreement in line with a fast-fading international consensus in favour of a two-state solution, wither.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, fresh from his achievements in nearby Syria, issued a standing invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to turn a new diplomatic page — in Moscow.

Russian troops are keeping the peace along the Golan and the Euphrates but, if leadership is the ability to turn a diplomatic agenda into hard facts on the ground, Moscow will be hard-pressed to displace Washington, even under US President Donald Trump’s erratic leadership, as an arbiter of Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy.

Trump has been active in the Israeli-Palestinian arena. His unprecedented gifts to Israel’s right-wing are well known. He does have a remarkable ability to make history and he revels in undisciplined actions that upend the rules.

Trump’s forte, however, is unilateralism, not diplomacy and this is the reason the US plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace will never see the light of day.

Those looking for a convincing rationale for this development need look no further than the White House.

The Trump administration is scoring big in its effort to dismantle key elements of the international consensus supporting an end to occupation and the creation of a Palestinian state at peace with Israel. But Trump’s competing vision is one of least competent efforts to resolve the Arab-Israeli dispute in a century of conflict.

Trump’s weaknesses as president and leader are at the heart of this spectacular failure. The ingredients for diplomatic success — in this case peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians — are so much more than a simple idea; in Trump’s transactional vocabulary, a “deal.”

There must be a system in place in the White House and throughout the US foreign policy and security, bureaucracy to conceptualise not just a diplomatic destination but also practical mechanisms to engage the players.

There must be a process that is competently and skilfully managed with a single-minded attention to achieve the desired outcome, backed by the assurance and credibility of presidential interest and commitment.

Virtually every US president since Harry Truman has, for better or worse, mobilised the machinery of the US policymaking and security bureaucracy in pursuit of diplomatic Arab-Israeli understandings crafted to win international support.

Whatever one thinks of them, the Camp David Accords and the Oslo Accords stand out among US diplomatic achievements over recent decades as testaments to Washington’s ability to craft and implement complex diplomatic engagements that won the enthusiastic support and commitment of former antagonists.

These essential ingredients are absent in the Trump White House.

Does anyone think anyone in the Trump administration has the discipline and experience to conceptualise a plan for peace, to mobilise the instruments of its own government and, most important, to win the president’s committed support for such an effort?

Do Trump’s relations with North Korea, Iran, China, Israel, the Palestinian territories and Syria suggest an interest in any diplomatic practice other than strong-armed unilateralism?

Trump’s team dismissed such concerns as evidence of a discredited allegiance to old ideas that have failed to deliver on their promise of Palestinian independence and an end to Israel’s occupation.

These are “the stale, decades-old talking points on this conflict” that the Deal of the Century aims to replace.

There is no shortage of reasons to criticise the inability of the international community, foremost among which is the United States, to establish a viable Palestinian state at peace with Israel but there is no basis for thinking that Trump’s Washington is in a position to orchestrate, organise, administer and lead a diplomatic engagement that would result in the creation of a Palestinian state and an Israeli retreat from the West Bank.

Geoffrey Aronson is a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 04 November 2019
Word Count: 792
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In Syria, other people’s history from lands near and far is repeating itself — not as farce but as a parody. Developments in Syria in 2019 are an ironic imitation of Iraq in 2003 and Ukraine in 2014.

Consider US President Donald Trump’s comments that a small number of US troops would remain in Syria to secure “the Oil.”

The 1,000-person US contingent in north-eastern Syria had been suddenly pulled back by Trump, effectively green-lighting the October 9 Turkish invasion of Kurdish-controlled territory. Trump, who had paid no heed to the threatened massacre of the Kurdish fighters, was brazen enough to nominate Syrian oil as worthy of the United States’ tender care.

Accordingly, US Defence Secretary Mark Esper assured that US troops would be stationed around unspecified oil areas in Syria “to deny access, specifically revenue to [the Islamic State] ISIS and any other groups that may want to seek that revenue to enable their own malign activities.”

Then the US president suggested “some of our big oil companies” could move in “and do it properly,” by which he probably meant extracting the black gold and selling it for a handsome profit.

Minus the audacious public acknowledgement that Middle Eastern oil matters more to US politicians than human lives, it might have been Iraq 2003 all over again.

When US forces rolled into central Baghdad in April 2003, they quickly took charge of Iraq’s massive Oil Ministry. Unlike other public buildings, including the National Museum, that were left unguarded and ransacked, the Oil Ministry was guarded by approximately 50 tanks and strategically positioned sharpshooters. It was clearly meant to secure the oil. The only difference is that US President George W. Bush wasn’t indiscreet enough to say as much.

Then there is Turkey’s invasion of Syrian territory. It is reminiscent of Russia’s seizure of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014 but with one crucial difference. When Russia intervened militarily in Crimea, it provoked international outrage. Crippling sanctions were imposed by the United States and the European Union and Russia’s relations with the West were ruptured. Not so with Turkey.

All signs suggest Ankara may just get away with it. On October 23, Trump lifted sanctions against Turkey, commending its promise of a “permanent ceasefire” in north-eastern Syria.

Meanwhile, the Europeans have been crying foul but not with one voice and not as furiously as over Russia’s Crimean adventure.

German Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer called out Turkey — “our NATO partner” — for having “annexed territory in violation of international law.” She wants NATO defence ministers to consider a controversial proposal to deploy international troops to establish a security zone in north-eastern Syria but the chances of any of this coming to pass are slim.

Under terms of the deal negotiated in Sochi on October 22 by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Turkey has de facto control of the area it has taken in Syria.

The focus of the 6-hour Erdogan-Putin talks, the Kremlin said, was about “normalising the situation” in north-eastern Syria. It’s something Putin strived mightily to do in Crimea through a combination of megaprojects and maximum pressure on the Crimean Tatars, a Turkic Muslim community, among others. What will be deemed normal in the Turkish-annexed part of Syria is likely to be just as arbitrary as in Russified Crimea.

However, for all the echoes of the past, events in Syria are playing out in a very different context to what went before. Putin’s Russia, swaggering and newly enshrined as the main non-regional powerbroker, continues in its usual way — unashamedly transactional with short-term friends who serve its long-term interests. Now it is also served by Trump’s America, a risible figure on the world stage, compared to the once sober, if heavy-handed protector of the international order.

Rashmee Roshan Lall is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly. She blogs at www.rashmee.com and is on Twitter @rashmeerl

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 October 2019
Word Count: 630
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