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Ed Blanche, “Aleppo’s fate sealed but it won’t end the Syrian war”

December 5, 2016 - The Arab Weekly

Beirut — Syrian regime forces are steadily overwhelming rebel-held strongpoints in besieged eastern Aleppo in fierce fighting backed by a pulverising Russian air campaign that is shaping up to be Syrian President Bashar Assad’s most important victory of the war.

The fall of the rebels’ last major urban stronghold will not mean the end of the war, however.

“What’s happening in Aleppo will only fuel chaos and terrorism,” France’s UN Ambassador François Delattre warned during an emergency Security Council session on November 30.

The objective of the Syrian regime and its main backers — Russia and Iran — appears to be to reconquer the sector of the northern city held by rebels since mid-2012 before Donald Trump is sworn in as president of the United States on January 20.

With all of Aleppo in regime hands, Assad and his two key allies should be able to absorb any change in US policy on Syria and hold the high cards in any US-backed peace initiative aimed at halting the conflict.

The rebel forces in Aleppo, about 8,000 strong, are heavily outnumbered and outgunned, cut off from any relief after being hammered for months by the relentless Russian-led aerial blitz and shelling by regime artillery.

The rebels, who have been losing ground since Russia intervened in September 2015 to save Assad from what looked like certain defeat, were reported to have recently lost 40% of the territory they held as the regime tightened the noose around the opposition bastion.

Eastern Aleppo is becoming “one giant graveyard”, UN humanitarian chief Stephen O’Brien warned on November 30th as regime forces spearheaded by Hezbollah’s elite Radwan regiment advanced in fierce street fighting.

With much of eastern Aleppo in ruins and its streets strewn with bodies from day-and-night bombardment, about 50,000 of the estimated 250,000 shell-shocked inhabitants who have survived months of the regime’s starvation tactics have been seeking to flee the city.

The exodus is likely to swell as regime forces close in for the kill, with the United Nations and the United States unable to prevent the final bloodbath.

The seemingly inevitable rebel collapse in a historic city that was once the heart of Syria’s economy will greatly bolster Assad’s position and his allies in any negotiations to end the war. Some 400,000 people have died and half of Syria’s pre-war population of 22 million has been driven from their homes in nearly six years of conflict.

UN-mandated and US-backed efforts have failed. Russia, its power in the Middle East restored by the 2015 intervention to save Assad, now seems to be in the driver’s seat and able to negotiate from a position of strength.

In what appears to be a fresh diplomatic effort, opposition sources reported that at least four rebel groups linked to the Syrian National Coalition are having secret negotiations in Ankara with the Russians, brokered by Turkey, with the immediate purpose of ending the bloodletting in eastern Aleppo.

These talks, the first to involve a large number of key opposition groups, have reportedly made little progress.

The gathering underlines Russia’s growing importance in the Middle East and possibly signals a new phase in the quest for a political settlement to end the war with Russian power in the ascendant while US influence in the Middle East wanes.

Moscow is reported to have been seeking to arrange a meeting in Damascus of key rebel leaders, possibly as early as January, to discuss having a national dialogue that would later be attended by Assad’s government.

The objective, according to political sources, is to achieve a political agreement that would lead to parliamentary and presidential elections in which Assad would run for a fourth term while overseeing the transition of what has been essentially a one-party state to a power-sharing arrangement with Assad remaining as president.

Amid Moscow’s efforts to secure a ceasefire, however, Russian warplanes continued their blistering day-and-night bombardment of eastern Aleppo, where whole neighbourhoods have been reduced to rubble.

A political settlement to the conflict remains a distant prospect even though the impetus for getting rid of Assad by Western and Arab powers such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey has grown as the war drags on with no end in sight.

The seemingly inevitable regime victory in Aleppo could unleash new dangers, not least of which would be providing motivation to the jihadist forces that have become the core of the resistance to the minority Alawite Assad regime’s sectarian policies which have tormented Syria’s Sunni majority for decades.

Nor is there any sign of a lessening of largely covert US support for rebel forces outside Aleppo where the Islamic State (ISIS) is the prime target, particularly in northern Syria where anti-regime Kurdish groups are strong.

According to British analyst Charles Lister, who has interacted with most rebel factions, they have about 150,000 fighters in the field, with only 5% of that total in Aleppo.

Rebel forces, including ISIS, still hold Idlib province in the north along with much of neighbouring Aleppo province. It is likely to be the regime’s next objective. The rebels also hold sizeable territory in southern Syria.

Ed Blanche has covered Middle East affairs since 1967. He is the Arab Weekly analyses section editor.

Copyright ©2016 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 05 December 2016
Word Count: 847
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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We do not need more feel-good, zero-impact policies

December 4, 2016 - Rami G. Khouri

BOSTON — The Middle East-related policy world of former and hopeful officials, think tanks, analysts, scholars, and researchers in the United States that I have followed at close range in the past three months is more turbulent than ever, given the Donald Trump presidential victory and the considerable uncertainty it portends for the region. This universe is now running in overdrive, with the usual string of study group reports, policy recommendations, seminars, and lectures anticipating and suggesting what the United States might do in the Middle East, amidst irritating unpredictability of Trump’s priorities and policies.

Within this swirling arena of imprecision and speculation, one issue seems to have captured the attention of assorted credible experts and analysts: whether President Barack Obama should use his last seven weeks in office to lay down a more emphatic U.S. position on the status of the occupied Palestinian lands and the ultimate shape of a permanent Israeli-Palestinian agreement. Former President Jimmy Carter and the respected International Crisis Group, among others, have called for moves such as Obama formally recognizing the State of Palestine, issuing a set of parameters the United States supports for a permanent peace agreement, or supporting a UN Security Council resolution that would affirm such parameters that all council members agree upon.

It is fascinating, first of all, that men and women of wise and serious ways would pick out the Palestine issue and the unresolved Arab-Israeli conflict as a specific foreign policy move that Obama could make in his last weeks in office. This runs against the broad trend in policy circles in the United States that discounts the Palestine issue as a priority, because the Middle East is consumed with more urgent dangers and problems. My sense is that this partly reflects exasperation among officials and other experts whose attempts to broker Arab-Israeli peace have failed miserably and consistently, and partly the continuing ability of Israel’s Likud-led government to influence thinking about Israel-Palestine among many American officials in Washington.

Palestine is a low priority issue in the Arab world, according to many mainstream U.S. and Israeli policy circles that feel the new administration should not waste time entering into new diplomatic mediation. This is desirable in the eyes of the Israeli government that wants to continue its colonization of Palestinian lands without the irksome interference of foreign mediators seeking to reverse that process. It is also convenient for the U.S. policy elite that has run out of ideas, after trying many peace-making ideas that all failed, decade after decade.

So it is noteworthy that respectable and serious quarters in the United States and Europe would continue to grapple with the idea that Obama should make a forceful and substantive diplomatic gesture on the Israel-Palestine issue before he leaves office. The arguments made in their favor of such a move are logical and realistic, including that they generate a clear global consensus on the core elements of a fair and achievable resolution of this long-running conflict, and that Trump would be able to engage on this issue if he desired with the benefits of an American position that is widely supported, without having to start from scratch and reinvent the wheel.

Such suggested moves also assume that the U.S. position would forcefully affirm the security and legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-June 1967 borders, with agreed mutual adjustments, while demanding the end of Israel’s colonization, siege, annexation, collective punishment, extra-judicial assassinations, and other illegal policies. This position would be supported by virtually the entire world; in fact, it is now already supported by virtually the entire world, including the American government.

So here is the dilemma that policy experts and advocates still dance around without coming to a credible conclusion: Reaffirming existing positions on the inviolability of Israel’s security while condemning its colonial occupation policies, and giving this position a slightly more robust stamp of approval by the United States and other governments through the UN Security Council, achieves nothing in the realm of practical politics or in changing conditions on the ground. It is a feel-good, zero-impact approach.

If the United States or other countries, unilaterally or via the UN, wish to make a gesture that affirms equal rights among Israelis and Palestinians, they need to seriously explore a more effective approach. They need to find ways to link their welcomed rhetorical statements with practical political, diplomatic, and economic actions that would prod Israelis, Palestinians, and other interested Arabs to actually retreat from the current cycle of confrontation, violence, and mutual degradation and death. Israel in particular, being the stronger occupying and colonizing power, must pay the price for its harsh policies that the world objects to. Statements that oppose colonization need triggered penalties that deter and end colonization.

Statements, parameters, and international recognitions on paper are always welcomed, but they have had zero impact in the past century of this conflict. Any moves in this direction should ponder this reality and change it, rather than perpetuate it.

Rami G. Khouri is a senior fellow at the American University of Beirut and the Harvard Kennedy School, and can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2016 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 December 2016
Word Count: 831
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The French Miracle

December 1, 2016 - Immanuel Wallerstein

When François Fillon won the first round of the presidential primary of the right on November 20, 2016 with 44% of the vote, the French newspaper Libération headlined the story “The French Miracle.” The miracle was that all the polls up to the last minute had predicted he would come in third in a field of seven with little more than 10% of the vote.

This has been a bad year for pollsters, but a gap of this kind outdoes by far the far smaller predictive error in the U.S. elections. How did this happen and what does it portend for the general election to come?

The formal structure of elections in France is somewhat unusual. Unless a candidate wins over 50% of the vote on the first round (normally rather difficult to achieve), there is a second round a week later in which only those with the two highest number of votes on the first round are on the ballot. This works well if there are two main parties. In that case, the first round displays the range of views and the second round permits the smaller parties to rally round their favorite, which is supposed to be a choice between center-right and center-left.

The system breaks down when there are three parties contending, each of significant strength. This is currently the situation in France. At a national level, the three parties are currently the Socialists (center-left), the Republicans (center-right) and the National Front (far right).

The situation is even more complex because within the Republican Party, there were three main candidates: Nicolas Sarkozy, Alain Juppé, and François Fillon. Expectations had been that Sarkozy and Juppé would share the second round. This is what did not happen.

Sarkozy is a former president of France and also president of the Republican Party. Juppé and Fillon were both Prime Ministers, Juppé under Jacques Chirac and Fillon under Sarkozy. Sarkozy stood for a program that would appeal to voters attracted by the National Front and therefore would win on the second round of the national elections. Juppé stood for a program that would appeal to undecided centrist voters and even Socialist voters (both in the primary and in the general election). Almost no one paid any attention to Fillon’s program. The predictions were that Juppé would be a stronger candidate in the general elections and would therefore probably be the next president of France.

How wrong everyone was. Not only did Fillon come in first, but Juppé was next and Sarkozy only third, therefore being eliminated from the second round. Sarkozy promptly endorsed Fillon for the second round, detesting Juppé and merely scorning Fillon. The second round gave even more decisive results. Fillon got two-thirds of the vote cast.

Meanwhile, in the forthcoming primary of the left, the divisions are massive. It is probable that President François Hollande, whose figures of support are miserable and who has said he will announce whether he is standing for re-election sometime soon, will probably withdraw from the race. Otherwise, he risks the humiliation of not even winning the primary of the left. But since there is no one who stands out clearly on the left and probably no one who can rally the troops after a second round, it is likely that the left will not even have a candidate in the second round of the national elections.

If then the second round of the national elections has Fillon standing against Marine LePen of the National Front, it becomes urgent to see on what program Fillon is standing. Before the first primary, Fillon had published his three priorities, along with 15 specific measures to implement these priorities. The three were “(1) liberate the economy, (2) restore the authority of the state, to protect French persons, and (3) affirm our values.”

Translating slogans into clearer language, Fillon proposed combining a Thatcherite economic program to appeal to business-first voters, an anti-immigrant program to appeal to middle-class voters fearful of personal economic decline, and a socially-traditionalist program to appeal to right-wing Catholic voters. He had one other element in his support. Juppé had received the support of a major centrist figure, François Bayrou. But Bayrou had endorsed Hollande in the previous presidential election, and was considered a traitor by many on the right, who attributed Hollande’s defeat of Sarkozy in 2012 to Bayrou’s misdeeds.

If his combination of themes seems to you similar to those of Donald Trump and of the Brexit voters in Great Britain, you are not mistaken. The major difference lies in the two-round system in France. The question now becomes how effective LePen can be in a struggle with Fillon. The French mainstream center-left newspaper, Le Monde, warns of a weakness in the Fillon position. His support in the primary lacked what they call “the popular vote.” His support came largely from urban professionals and entrepreneurs plus retired persons. Popular classes by and large abstained from voting. Can Fillon keep these voters from finding a more adequate president in LePen?

LePen has already denounced Fillon as a spokesperson of class division, promoting the “worst such program that has ever existed.” Florian Philippot, vice-president of the National Front, thundered: “Savage globalization has its candidate; his name is François Fillon.”

Will the Fillon miracle fizzle in the general elections? Or can he find a way to get popular support, either by voting for him or at least by abstaining from voting? Whatever the outcome, France is clearly joining the rightward trend of the United States and the rest of the Global North. All eyes will now be on Germany, to see if it will resist this trend.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2016 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 December 2016
Word Count: 941
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For rights and permissions, contact:
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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Arab summits remind us of our frivolous governance systems

July 27, 2016 - Rami G. Khouri

BEIRUT — The sad spectacle of the truncated “summit” of Arab leaders in the Mauritanian capital Monday was even more embarrassing than usual for this recurring event. It highlights again the often-frivolous behavior of Arab leaderships, and the massive challenges they are failing to meet. The most troubling aspect of the event was its affirming again the capacity of Arab leaderships to ignore the actual, home-grown, causes of their countries’ problems, and instead to repeat clichés about fighting terrorism and seeking peace — two areas in which the Arab world has failed to make any headway.

The dismal state of collective and individual Arab leadership is far more troubling today than it has been in recent decades, due to the deteriorating conditions across our region. Arab leaders who care to do so have many serious options to address the real problems facing their societies — at least those Arab countries that are not at war at home and with neighbors, under international sanctions, actively struggling to avoid total disintegration, or becoming the world’s leading sources of refugees and terrorists.

The summit was destined for ignominy and irrelevance from the start when during the opening session Egyptian Prime Minister Sherif Ismail invoked his President Abdelfattah Sisi’s call for “an Arab strategy of struggle against terrorism.”

Such calls totally lack credibility, because it should have become obvious by now, including to incumbent Arab officials, that during the past two generations the main reason for state fragmentation, sectarianism, tribalism, and now terror across much of the Arab world has been government mismanagement of state resources and national development, alongside corruption and sustained absence of democratic participation by citizens. Those are realities that Arab officials, including the ones who attend Arab summits, can repair, if they wish — but there seems to be no sign of a wish to do so.

If there is a genuine will among Arab societies — citizens and governments — to work collectively on issues of common concern, then Arab summits need to be radically reconfigured to achieve that sensible goal. The first step in that direction must be the capacity of Arab citizens to have some credible input into the decisions of their governments. Citizen participation in decision-making and holding accountable state institutions and the private sector alike remain grossly absent from the modern Arab world. The result is that major policy decisions in small and large Arab countries continue to be made in a whimsical and often impulsive manner, reflecting personal inclinations, emotions, self-aggrandizement, and self-interest, more than the studied collective well-being of the citizenry. This includes decision of war-and-peace related to places like Israel, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, and Lebanon, supporting insurrections within Arab states, and launching ambitious showcase “development” projects that mostly reflect the profit motives of crony capitalist circles close to the existing power structures.

Even the occasional sensible ideas, like those suggested by Saudi Arabia and Egypt to create regional forces to fight terrorism, usually remain unimplemented, in large part because they have not been securely anchored in the expressed will and capacity of Arab citizenries to work together to achieve these goals. This is due to a very large extent to the inability or unwillingness of Arab leaderships to recognize their own domestic, self-inflicted causes of their disequilibrium, vulnerability, turbulence, and insecurity.

These causes are big-sticker items like frivolous application of the rule-of-law, the slow collapse of the public education system across the Arab world, increasingly erratic access to clean water and sanitation, and security systems’ dominance of executive, judicial, and legislative authority, leaving ordinary citizens almost totally helpless in the face of the power of the state. These and other constraints eventually usually lead to one of two conditions — either states fragment and sometimes collapse (Yemen, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Lebanon, Sudan) or result in authoritarian state control as demonstrated in Egypt today, with somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 of its citizens in jail, mainly for holding views that are not shared by the small group of men and officers who manage the levers of state power.

These structural faults in Arab governance are magnified when leaders behave in the erratic manner that defines most recent Arab summit gatherings. Even when they say something sensible — such as the Mauritanian president’s call for fresh efforts to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because regional instability would continue until it was resolved — the Arab leaders leave this hanging in the air without any credible follow-up action. This is also hampered by our not really knowing very clearly whether Arab populations want to make war or peace with Israel, support or help lay siege to Palestinians, isolate or normalize relations with Israel in its current state, or collectively shape and push an international campaign to achieve a negotiated, fair peace with Israel based on the 2002 Arab Peace Plan that itself emerged from an Arab summit.

Unless Arab citizens can express their views openly, and participate in shaping decisions and holding decision-makers accountable, our Arab region will continue to lurch from one crisis to another, plagued by our self-inflicted incompetence in shaping a coherent relationship between our citizens and our states, who largely exist in two very different universes.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2016 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 27 July 2016
Word Count: 856
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Syria becomes ever more complicated

July 23, 2016 - Rami G. Khouri

BEIRUT — The failed military coup in Turkey and the country’s many links with key regional actors in Syria, Russia, Iran, and NATO clarify how difficult it has become to achieve political solutions to individual conflicts, because local, national, regional, and global interests of any single party do not line up nicely in a coherent and clear balance sheet of desirables and undesirables.

The astounding reality today is not just that events in Syria and Turkey are intimately linked, but also that Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, and Iran effectively have to be seen as a single geo-strategic arena in which hundreds of local and national actors engage one another. They also all keep their links open to regional players like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and global powers who are militarily engaged in the region, especially the U.S., Russia, U.K. and France.

The heart of this complex regional situation remains Syria. In the past few days American and French air strikes allegedly killed over 100 Syrian civilians in the area around the strategic town of Manbij being contested by forces of the Islamic State (Daesh) and American-backed and -vetted Syrian rebels in the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces. This has caused other Syrian rebels to ask the foreign powers to stop their air attacks that kill civilians.

That would be a problem because such air power, combined with local fighters, has been critical in halting and reversing the expansion of Islamic State (Daesh) in parts of Syria and Iraq. Meanwhile, Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian arm of Al-Qaeda, has emerged as probably the strongest and most effective rebel group fighting to topple the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad. It has consolidated its presence in several parts of the country, especially in the Idlib governorate and the pockets in the north-west mainly. Recent credible reports indicate that it has grown significantly in recent months, may field 15,000 trained fighters, and is considering transforming its territory into a formal province (emirate) of Al-Qaeda, giving it a new major leadership base in the heart of the Middle East. Its success reflects its close links with many other fighting groups on the ground, and working out mutually beneficial relations with local communities who share its goal of toppling the Assad government.

In principle, the United States and other foreign powers want to attack Nusra forces, but in reality such attacks run the risk of killing other rebel groups and civilians whose lives, positions, and facilities are deeply intertwined with it. Weakening Nusra also weakens other rebels. Nusra on-and-off also fights against Islamic State (Daesh), but largely focuses on entrenching itself among Syrians and fighting to topple the government. Until the United States, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Turkey and other foreign actors appreciably bolster the non-Nusra rebels and protect civilians, Nusra is likely to maintain its leading role on the ground and among many Syrians.

Russian and Syrian air forces simultaneously constantly attack all these forces that challenge the Syrian state, including Nusra, Islamic State (Daesh), U.S.-supported rebels, other major rebel forces like Ahrar esh-Sham, and the remnants of the Free Syrian Army, and ordinary civilians who pay the highest price in the end. The latest twist in this drama is that the United States and Russia are negotiating an agreement to coordinate their military attacks against Nusra and Islamic State (Daesh), hoping to weaken or destroy them so that a political transition can get underway in Syria and end the war.

The possibility of actual achieving this is zero, because of the massive contradiction between the many different aims of the several principal camps that now face off in the country. Russia, the U.S. and the Syrian government seem to want to defeat Nusra and Islamic State (Daesh); but the U.S. supports other Syrian rebels who want to topple the Syrian government; and many of these rebel groups and their local support communities are closely linked to Nusra’s fighting capabilities and their common aim of toppling Assad.

Turkey further complicates this situation by fighting against some of the Kurdish forces in Syria that the U.S. supports in the battle against Islamic State (Daesh) and Assad. The Turkish government has three strategic priorities in Syria that often are in contradiction — destroying Islamic State (Daesh), toppling the Syrian government, and preventing the establishment of an autonomous proto-state by Syrian Kurds who are the most effective ground troops in the battle against Islamic State (Daesh).

The interests of Iran, Israel, NATO, Saudi Arabia and others also come into play on most of these issues, making it virtually impossible for any power like the United States, Turkey, or Russia to achieve any consistency or clarity in their policies. The Syrian government siege of Aleppo that is now taking shape is likely to add new pressures on all parties, as humanitarian tragedies pile up, refugee flows spike again, and the bitter consequences of everyone’s contradictory existing policies become more clear.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2016 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 July 2016
Word Count: 818
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Banning opposition groups is a failed Arab legacy

July 20, 2016 - Rami G. Khouri

BEIRUT — The recent and ongoing spate of decisions by several Arab governments to dissolve and ban certain political groups (mostly Sunni or Shiite Islamists) is a reflection of two dynamics that need to be reviewed together: rising sectarian, political, and ideological tensions across the region, alongside continuing structural inabilities in every Arab country, except Tunisia to date, to accommodate a range of differing political views in a legitimate governance system.

Neither of these phenomena is new. The Arab world has long lacked credible political systems based on genuine free competition among political groups from different ideological, social, or national perspectives, other than brief moments in the 1930s and 1950s that disappeared with the post-1960s advent of one-party systems, presidents-for-life, or military control of the state’s governance mechanisms. Our region also has not been able to accommodate serious political competition from local groups that disagree with or politically challenge the ruling power elite. Typically the ruling powers ban leftists groups like Communists, or conservative groups that used the Islamic religious values as their core appeal, notably the Muslim Brotherhood and its many local offshoots, or ones that advocate terrorism, like Al-Qaeda, Islamic State-Daesh, and many smaller groups of the same ilk.

It is perplexing to see Arab governments today continue to use this same approach to resolving serious, homegrown political struggles. The latest examples include the banning of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the designation of Hezbollah as a banned terrorist group in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries, and, a few days ago, Bahrain’s dissolution of the main Shiite opposition group Al Wefaq. In these and other similar cases, governments ban such groups because they feel they are engaged in activities that are a threat to national security, cohesion, and wellbeing, or they promote terrorism and sectarian divisions, often allegedly with the assistance of third party foreign powers.

I say this is perplexing because such bans almost never achieve their aim, often backfire by generating fresh recruits to the banned groups, frequently damage the wider political fabric of the country, and usually generate negative international reactions against the governments that impose these bans. I am not writing to support these groups, but only say that government decisions to ban them is an ineffective way to deal with the genuine underlying issues in society that give rise to these groups in the first place. These groups, and others from the left of the political spectrum, came into being because local citizens felt deeply aggrieved and unjustly treated by their own societies. The issues they all raise deserve a political hearing, not a court order to ban the purveyors of the messages of reform.

The court in Bahrain that dissolved Al Wefaq this week accused it of promoting or assisting violence and “terrorism” in the country, a month after an emergency court order had shut down Al Wefaq for undermining the state, spreading sectarianism, and threatening, “respect for the rule of law and the foundations of citizenship based on coexistence, tolerance and respect for others,” while also allowing “foreign interference in national affairs.”

The decision to close Al Wefaq followed the government’s announced plans to prosecute Bahrain’s top Shia religious figure and the spiritual leader of Al Wefaq, 79-year-old Ayatollah Isa Qassim, who was also stripped of his citizenship. Last May, the political leader of Al Wefaq, Sheikh Ali Salman, was sentenced to nine years in prison on the basis of accusations that he incited sectarian hatred and sought to overthrow the regime.

These are very serious charges that any responsible government must investigate, without doubt, and take appropriate legal and police action if the accusations are shown to be true. But years of such moves in Bahrain and other Arab countries clearly have not slowed down or stopped the growth of homegrown opposition movements, presumably because the underlying grievances they express persist.

The trend in state-opposition relations in both Bahrain and Egypt appear to be worsening, suggesting that there must be a more effective political way to address the issues that are at play. The governments’ approaches probably will not work because the banned groups – regardless of what one thinks of them – are deeply anchored in local society and represent the views of large numbers of their own citizens. Banning them is problematic because it does not appreciably reduce the followers of the banned groups; probably only pushes the movements to work underground; generates a greater sense of despair among other political organizations in the country about working in the existing political system; hardens the use of violence by other, more militant, groups (like the Islamic State-Daesh group in northern Sinai); and, elicits public criticisms of the governments’ moves among many international parties, including friendly governments.

In the case of the Bahrain ban, the UN human rights office and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon have spoken out against restrictions on opposition groups and human rights activists, including some calls for the release of “political prisoners.” The U.S. government this week also said it was “alarmed and deeply troubled” by some of the Bahraini government’s recent actions against opposition leaders.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2016 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 July 2016
Word Count: 847
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Erdogan and the army: Why now?

July 20, 2016 - Richard Bulliet

Coups are nothing new for the armed forces of the Republic of Turkey. Mustafa Kemal Pasha, later known as Ataturk, joined with other officers to found the country through a coup in the 1920s. Ataturk set the pattern of a militantly secular and nationalist authoritarian ruler, a benign dictator whose slogan was “Peace at Home, Peace in the World.”

Down to the 1990s, the officer corps of the Turkish army repeatedly defended this position, by coups, beginning in 1960, when it deemed it necessary.

Then came Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the popular and congenial mayor of Istanbul from 1994 to 1998. Far from being a secularist, Erdogan opened the way for a return to public religiosity. When his popularity and piety vaulted him to Prime Minister in 2003, a military move to unseat him in the name of secularism seemed like just a matter of time.

But despite questionable evidence of a coup plot that landed many top officers in jail, no coup attempt materialized until now. Why?

Six factors converged over the recent month to finally trigger a coup:

First, Erdogan initially made good progress toward gaining Turkish membership in the European Union. The military, who also wanted to be part of Europe, realized that a coup would have torpedoed EU accession. So they held off.

Over the last year, however, the prospects of EU accession have dimmed. Greece was already opposed, but things like the Brexit vote, which was fueled in part by warnings of potential Turkish EU immigrants, made abundantly apparent a broad-based popular hostility to a Muslim state as part of Europe.

Second, Erdogan made good initial progress in negotiating with Turkey’s Kurds, who had long been denied recognition as an ethnic minority entitled to respect. Violence diminished, and a Kurdish political party found representation in parliament.

However, the material success of the quasi-autonomous Kurdish state in Iraq encouraged the revival of a militant separatist movement. Fighting resumed and Turkish army attacks extended into Syria, where Kurds were an effective force against both President Assad and ISIS. Over the past year, separatists have been accused of terrorist bombings in Turkey, and Erdogan has threatened Kurdish parliament members with prosecution as traitors.

Third, Fethullah Gulen went from being a friend and supporter of Erdogan to being denounced as a terrorist leader. A Sunni religious leader with a worldwide program ostensibly based on modern education and non-involvement in politics, Gulen has innumerable followers in Turkey, particularly in the business community.

Apparently in response to accusations in Gulen-owned media that Erdogan’s family was financially corrupt, over the past year Erdogan has anathematized the Hizmet, as the group is called in Turkey. The government has seized their media assets, including the country’s largest newspaper. The Hizmet has been labeled a terrorist movement undermining the state, and many Gulen followers in the police and judiciary have been replaced by Erdogan loyalists.

Fourth, the rise of ISIS has brought criticism of Turkey for having a porous southern border across which recruits from around the world have reached Syria, and Syrian refugees have reached Turkey and moved on to an unwelcoming Europe. Though Erdogan granted the American air force permission to launch missions against ISIS from the giant Incirlik airbase, the Turkish army has refrained from joining the anti-ISIS campaign.

Fifth, when Erdogan moved from being Prime Minister in 2014, he decided that that ceremonial post should be turned into something like the American presidency. He lobbied for a change in the constitution to grant him the additional powers, but he did not have a parliamentary majority.

Sixth, Erdogan’s personal trajectory over the past three years has suggested a Putinesque lust for absolute power. In Istanbul in 2013, his plan to transform popular Gezi Park in the heart of Istanbul into a development project with Islamist overtones provoked a massive popular mobilization. It seemed to many Turks to be a step too far on a path toward sultan-like authoritarianism. A giant presidential residence and grandiose mosque projects furthered a fear of presidential megalomania.

Why the officers who started Friday’s coup took the decision when they did will not be known for a while. But despite Erdogan’s vote-getting against dramatically weak opponents, the officers surely saw that a growing number of citizens—Kurds, Hizmet loyalists, secular Gezi Park demonstrators, people frightened by terrorist bombings, and soldiers who do not understand their leader’s Syria policy—thought that their president was becoming unglued. It was time to act. Perhaps it was too late.

Richard W. Bulliet is professor emeritus of history at Columbia University.

Copyright ©2016 Richard Bulliet — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 July 2016
Word Count: 746
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Bastille Day: France’s ultra-confused present

July 20, 2016 - Immanuel Wallerstein

Every year, France celebrates on July 14 the fall in 1789 of the Bastille, then the main prison in Paris. The celebration is meant to mark the end of the so-called Ancien Régime. It unifies the country around what are referred to today as Republican values.

The first time there was such a celebration was the very next year in 1790, one that was dedicated to peace and national unity. Bastille Day, however, did not become an annual celebration until 1880, when the legislature of the Third Republic proclaimed July 14 the fête nationale (national festivity), which it has remained up to today. But this year, the Republic is anything but unified, its immediate future could not be more uncertain, and there is much debate about exactly what constitute Republican values.

The present constitution is quasi-presidential, making the choice of a president politically crucial. However, at the same time, it establishes a system in which there are two rounds of voting, unless someone gets a clear majority on the first round. In the second round there are only two candidates, the two with the highest votes on the first round.

The object of this system is to allow for every political grouping to show its strength on the first round and then vote on the second round for one of the two principal parties (center-right versus center-left). The problem is that this system works if there are only two main parties. If there are three of approximately equal electoral strength (as there are at present), the system is transformed. In this case, the three main parties must stay united on the first round and urge the smaller parties to make a “useful” vote on the first round so that their preferred second-round party will actually be on the second-round ballot.

The result is confusion and havoc, first of all within the three main parties and then within the smaller political tendencies. Each of the current three main parties — the Socialists (center-left), the Republicans (center-right) and the National Front (far right) — is having an internal struggle over strategy and each risks secessions. At the same time, the smaller parties are splitting up precisely over whether they should cast “useful” votes on the first round or not. The biggest one on the further left has fallen apart over this issue.

One of the substantive issues under debate is the construction of Europe, including the euro as currency, the freedom of movement within the European Union (EU), and the reception and treatment of immigrants from outside the EU. This is of course a major debate everywhere in the EU. France’s position is somewhere in the middle of the range of European views, both that of the governments and that of public opinion.

In addition, France has had for a long time concern with maintaining and augmenting its role both in the world-system as a whole and within Europe. One of its strengths heretofore has been the de facto arrangement it has had with Germany to constitute a duo whose agreed-upon preferences became the basis of Europe’s collective policies. This worked as long as Germany was divided in two and France was the country with nuclear weapons and a permanent seat on the U.N.’s Security Council. But in the last twenty years, Germany has become so comparatively strong economically that it needs far less the legitimation that a Franco-German duo offered Germany. The duo no longer makes EU rules and policies.

France’s relations with the United States has also been an issue since at least 1945. On the one hand, the United States, and particularly the U.S. Congress, have been very critical of what they considered France’s too accommodating attitude toward first the Soviet Union and now Russia. On the other hand, France has been highly critical of what it considered the U.S. abandonment of the defense of human rights (as for example in Syria).

The recent vote of Great Britain to leave the EU has provided still further uncertainty in France. Is this a plus or a minus for France? France is seeking to present itself as a good haven for businesses (and especially financial structures) that may be seeking a calmer, less unsure environment. But France is also worried about the quasi-forced repatriation of French citizens now resident and working in Great Britain. In the forthcoming negotiations of Great Britain and the EU, France is unsure if she should push for efforts to keep Great Britain still tied to the EU in some way, or not. The appointment of Boris Johnson as British Foreign Minister weakens any sentiment favorable to Great Britain.

So, the confusion returns us to the forthcoming presidential elections. The National Front has been seeking to draw votes from the two classical centrist parties by downplaying its racist language and actually ousting members who refuse to do this. Notably, its leader Marine LePen has purged her father and long-time leader of the National Front, Jean-Marie LePen, for refusing to do this. But this risks losing some of its previous supporters to breakaway parties or to abstentions.

The center-right Republican Party, led by former president Nicolas Sarkozy, is trying to pick up National Front votes by shifting its rhetoric in their direction. This is strongly contested by two other candidates in the forthcoming party primary, Alain Juppé and François Fillon. If Sarkozy wins, Fillon may withdraw support from the party. Juppé is generally thought to be the one most likely to win the second-round national election because of his more “moderate” views on the main issues. But to be in the second round, he must win the party’s nomination in its primary, and to do this he has shifted his rhetoric to the right.

Finally, the current president François Hollande is in the most difficult position of all. The Socialist party is under pressure to participate in a primary that is a primary of the entire French left. Hollande doesn’t want such an “open” primary, as he seems quite likely to lose it. So, he is pushing for a decision to be made by the party’s convention on a more rightward platform that he believes will enable him to win the second round. He has thus pushed through new legislation that weakens trade-union rights. This is unpopular both with the left of the party who are grumbling and with two of his own presumed allies, Minister of the Economy Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Manuel Valls, both of whom are maneuvering to become the Socialist candidate, if not in 2017 then in 2022. Macron feels that Hollande is not going far enough right.

The multiple uncertainties within the parties in France make the recent back-stabbing within the British Conservative Party pale by comparison. Given that France’s economy is also in parlous condition, 2016 seems hardly a moment to celebrate national festivities based on common Republican values.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2016 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 July 2016
Word Count: 1,146
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When is the moment to ask for more effective anti-terror policy?

July 20, 2016 - Rami G. Khouri

BEIRUT — Thursday night it was in Nice, France. Tomorrow it will be in another city, on another continent. In the last month, dozens of terror attacks have killed hundreds of people across the world. Everything and everyone is a legitimate target for these new killers, who welcome death and in doing so totally confuse everyone else in the world who has tried to stop them.

With every new attack, it becomes more and more clear that the world is dealing — or not dealing, actually — with three dimensions of this now routine phenomenon of mass killings of innocent civilians. The three elements are, 1) the conditions of individuals and societies around the world that ultimately create the monsters who carry out these attacks, and recruit and train others to do the same, 2) the largely ineffective political and security measures that governments around the world take in response to the expanding terrorism threat, and, 3) the emphasis on the centrality of the Islamic religion that many of the terrorists themselves express, but that also shapes the attitudes and policy responses of governments that respond to terrorism, particularly in seeing “counter-narratives,” the assertion of “moderate Islam,” the need for “a reformation in Islam,” and other such approaches that have proven to be wildly irrelevant or ineffective.

It is alarming and surprising — actually, it’s not really surprising, if you note that two flawed characters like Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are evenly matched in the U.S. presidential election, the American secretary of state in Moscow seeks a deal with Russia for these two powers that fuel the Syria war to work together in that same war, Israel continues to expand its settlements and destroy Arab homes in occupied Palestinian lands, credible international reports document that hundreds of Egyptians have “disappeared” while the state’s security prisons hold somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 prisoners, mostly for their political views rather than for any criminal acts, Yemen continues to collapse in a wasteful and unnecessary war that has solved nothing and created another 20 million or so hungry and desperate civilians, and major global powers continue to support autocratic Arab and Asian leaders with financial and military aid, among other realities of our era — it is alarming but not so surprising that on these three central components of the global terror scourge, the response of Arab, Western and virtually all other governments has not only failed to stop terrorism, it has allowed terrorists to vastly expand the scope, adherents, and impact of their criminal world.

Every terror attack generates anger, shock, and powerful emotional and political commitments of our indomitable will not to be terrorized, to stand firm and strong, to affirm liberty, free speech, and pluralism. We are all, sincerely, Boston, Paris, London, Nice, Orlando, Dacca, New York, Baghdad, and a hundred other cities around the world, and a hundred more that will be attacked in due course. We will stand with them all in a steel chain of humanity against barbarism.

Then what? What happens when, after another dozen major attacks, the chain of their barbarism outpaces the chain of our human solidarity? When is the permissible moment to start asking if we can muster as much wisdom and realism to fight terror as we do to harness emotions of solidarity? The recent increasing pace and widening geographic scope of terror suggest we are dealing with a qualitatively new kinds of terrorists — but the policy responses of governments and the emotional responses of entire societies suggest we have no idea how to respond to quell this monster.

We incompetently and stubbornly hold on to our failed analytical and policy responses to terror, insisting on doing almost nothing of consequence in the three arenas that I mentioned above. We see no serious attacks on the many underlying drivers of dysfunctional governance, economy, and statehood that transform ordinary young men in the South into criminal bombers. We see no serious questioning of whether a primary focus on militarism reduces or increases the terror threat. We see no credible willingness among most governments, and most of their associated media and intellectual spheres, to transcend Islam as the main analytical window into the world of terror.

Not surprisingly, terror groups expand and evolve their operations, while having no difficulty finding thousands of new recruits to wage their terrible and sick war. When does it become permissible to ask how long the world must put up with this steady stream of death and pain, before we demand that our leaders in the South and North try to be more intelligent, honest, and effective in tackling the terror problem at its roots? Anger, square-jawed determination, chronic bewilderment, serial incompetence, and prioritized heavy-handed and counter-productive militarized policies managed with authoritarian partners around the world are signs of cumulative failure. Can we ask for a more serious response now, after Nice? Or wait a few more weeks, for a few more attacks, and ask then?

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2016 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 July 2016
Word Count: 823
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Listen carefully…”Burn it down, man”

July 20, 2016 - Rami G. Khouri

BEIRUT — When I followed the news Friday morning of the shooting and killing of five police officers in Dallas, Texas, following repeated police killings of young African-American men around the country, I understood better the calm words I heard in my office the previous week — “Burn it down, man” — by a South Asian-British writer friend who was telling me about his latest novel.

He was summarizing for me in a few words the inevitable need to do something — whether poetic or actual — about the frustration and humiliation that accumulate in the lives of men and women of color like himself who suffer lifetimes of dehumanizing mistreatment in White-majority cultures like England and the United States, but also in others around the world.

The planned assassinations of police officers in Dallas happened at the end of a peaceful march to protest other police officers’ murders of young African-Americans, which occur regularly now across the United States. The vast majority of Americans of any ethnicity certainly oppose killing policemen and unarmed young African-Americans alike; yet both events happen. They reflect human realities that converge in social and political waves that now flow across borders without differentiating by nationality or race. Racism and resistance always travel together.

Large numbers of people in many countries have reached the point of exasperation with political-economic systems of power that privilege a small minority and treat growing numbers of other citizens with disdain and, in many cases, fatal force. When ignorance and fear of other people of color are thrown into this mix, we get situations like some racist European and British responses to migrants, or Donald Trump supporters’ anti-Muslim and anti-Mexican hysteria in the United States. Israel, Arab societies, Iran, Burma, Russia, Japan, Brazil, and a hundred other countries around the world suffer the same human deficiencies.

The particulars of each country are intriguing, but ultimately peripheral; the common indignations, vulnerabilities, and dehumanizing pain that people feel generate similar responses everywhere. Mistreated people initially endure their pain with the expectation that conditions will improve with time. When things do not improve, and racist behavior degrades the lives of millions of people, a few men and women refuse to acquiesce in their perpetual treatment like animals.

This usually happens when parents realize that their children are doomed to lifetimes of poverty, vulnerability, and suffering, with a real probability of early death. It also happens when young people themselves appreciate that most of them have no available paths to a normal life of opportunity, well-being, and dignity, for they have forever been denied both their citizenship rights and their very humanity.

That frightening moment highlights their weakness, but also makes them realize that they are not helpless. They resist in their own minds at first, then they resist on the street, in the media, and in the courts and political systems if those opportunities are available to them. Each person, movement, and society chooses different ways to resist oppression, always with different results. Sometimes resistance uses criminal means similar to the ones used against the resisters, like assassination, terrorism, and killing innocent bystanders.

The act of resistance at that moment occurs without much thought to whether or not it achieves the aim of ending the oppressive system that prevails. It sends the message that people will not forever acquiesce in their own dehumanization and oppression, and regular deaths. When resistance uses criminal tactics like assassinating police officers or bombing restaurants and shopping malls, it completes and expands the circle of criminality. Mostly, resistance around the world has been non-violent, civil, and political, which was the case with the epic Arab uprisings in 2011 that were perhaps the most massive example of what I am talking about.

This pattern of mass suffering leading to resistance has transcended its traditional confines of subjugated or colonized communities of color or ethnicity. Millions of middle class White people across the world now challenge their power structures, to demand basic life opportunities (jobs, health care, housing) that they feel their generation may be denied. So progressive and leftist candidates in the United States, Greece, Spain, Italy, and elsewhere are winning elections or securing large popular followings, despite the simultaneous rise of racist and xenophobic movements.

We should pay more attention to those who suggest “Burn it down, man” as an appropriate actual or rhetorical response to institutionalized injustices that plague an increasingly global range of individuals and communities. It is critical to accurately understand exactly why people resist in the ways they do, what drives their despair and demand for change, and what we must do to bring about appropriate radical change. Rhetoric is always the first step to action. We must really hear and understand what people say, and take action beyond a digital “like” or “share”, to restore order in the only way that order lasts in the world — with equal justice for all.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2016 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 July 2016
Word Count: 813
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