...Or Does It Explode?

YEAR IN REVIEW: Civil Rights Highlights

This blog launched began after New Year's Eve in 2005. What a time to start looking at civil rights in the Middle East, and to wonder what the explosion (if it would come) would look like! Despite the persistence of destructive blasts across the region, there were a bunch of inspiring - and unprecedented  - breakthroughs. Here's a quick look back at the good, the bad, and the just plain wacky:

BIGGEST OUTRAGE: Sudan Genocide
This was a tough category, but in the end the unabated killing and the international community's inability to stop the Bashir regime take the cake. An entire region is being cleared of its indigenous black African population, revealing in stark terms the hypocricy of cries of "racism," "imperialism," and "ethnic cleansing" so often thrown about by the region's rulers.

FORGOTTEN OUTRAGE: Iran's Baha'i Crackdown, Yemen's Akhdam Marginalization (tie)
The Baha'i religion is out and out banned in Iran. Followers, who must practice in hiding, are banned from universities, jailed, and even murdered. The black Yemenites known as Akhdam have lived in Yemen for centuries but continue to face egregious discrimination domestically and indifference from the outside world.

MOST MUNDANE OUTRAGE: Banning Valentine's Day in Saudi, Fearful Photocopiers in Cairo (tie)
Saudi Arabia has officially banned Valentine's Day. The men at the Xerox store in Egypt are afraid to even copy protest posters.

DICTATOR OF THE YEAR: Bashir and Bashar (tie)
Parade magazine gave Bashir its top spot in the annual ranking of the world's dictators. Bashar, meanwhile, began 2005 by hosting John Kerry but then sat in the hot seat much of the rest of the year. He is the only dictator in the region currently subject to a UN investigation. Runner-up is the region's longest-serving despot, Muammar (36 years and counting), and his son Saif - who had the audacity to title his art exhibit "The Desert is not Silent."

TURNING POINT: February 21
The dam burst on February 21 this year, as Lebanese poured out into the streets to protest the Hariri assassination. It was the first of several massive non-violent rallies that soon forced the unimaginable: a Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon. On the same day in Cairo, a Kifaya rally drew several hundred people, putting Egypt's "Enough" movement on the map. Here are a few of the protests that subsequently followed:

• Kuwait's blue revolution for women's right to vote
• Iranian women's sit-ins (successful) for the right to attend soccer games
• Tunisia's Fock Yezzi online "enough" campaign
• An interfaith vigil organized by young Egyptian Muslim bloggers

MOST DARING MOMENT: Ammar Abdulhamid blogging his interrogations 
Many people showed courage this year, but the pure audacity was displayed when Ammar Abdulhamid provided regular blog updates on his interrogation by Syrian security forces, all the way up to strongman Assaf Shawkat. The Syrian intelligence operatives evidently did not know about his blog. Then again, they also referred to Guantanamo as "Guatemala."

MOST INFLUENTIAL AMERICAN ACTIVIST: Jane Novak
Another tough call, but the award has to go to Jane Novak, a journalist whose writing and blogging has singlehandedly kept Yemen's dictatorship (and its widespread crackdown on independent journalists) in the spotlight. She has been so effective that regime-controlled newspapers now attack her personally. A one-woman dynamo.

OUTSTANDING EDITORIAL WRITING ON CIVIL RIGHTS: Mody Al-Khalaf
This groundbreaking young Saudi writer challenges the regime's many civil rights outrages and advances her own positive vision of what Saudi society could look like. Added bonus: she invokes Martin Luther King, Jr., endearing her even more to this blog.

BEST LOCAL BLOGGING ON CIVIL RIGHTS: Chan'ad Bahraini, Nora Younes (tie)
Thanks to Chan'ad, the outside world was able to feel part of the many grassroots protests that rocked Bahrain during 2005. His clear prose and photo-journalism was outstanding. Over in Cairo, Nora Younes provided several outstanding reports, including the aforementioned Xerox man, the exodus of Coptic Christians, and the Sudanese refugee demonstration. Both proved that bloggers can often do a better job than mainstream journalists in reporting on civil rights violations.

MOMENT OF LEVITY: Kharfan
This anonymous Syrian blogger burst on the scene for a few short months, offering hilarious insight on Syria and its "Lion Cub" dictator. A more consistent performer in this regard is the Religious Policeman, who gets a runner-up award. The most unintentionally humorous showing: an Austrian pop band's paean to UAE dictator Sheikh Zayed.

NOTABLE PASSING: Zouhair Yahyaoui
Yahyaoui launched the dissident blog/site TUNeZine in 2001. In May of 2002, he ran an online poll on TUNeZine asking if Tunisia was "a) a republic, b) a kingdom, c) a zoo, or d) a prison." Needless to say, he got to know President Ben Ali's internal security goons pretty well. He died in March at age 36 from a sudden heart attack. But TUNeZine lives on.

LEADERSHIP CHANGES: Mauritania, Saudi, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Sudan
So there was a coup in Mauritania, King Fahd died, the Lebanese threw off a Syrian de-facto rulers, Iran elected a new wacko president, Iraq saw several new leaders, and Southern Sudanese leader John Garang died in a helicopter crash. That's a lot of turnover for one year.

ODD FIXATION: Sexuality Issues
In 2005, this blog ended up publicizing several stories otherwise missed by English-language media and bloggers. Many had to deal with sexuality issues, including the region's first gay marriage, the first lesbian soap opera character, and transsexuals in Iran. Do your own psychoanalysis.

PHOTOS OF THE YEAR: Follow the Links

• Egyptian plainclothes police administer a beating
• Qaddafi and Bouteflika joking around at the Arab League summit
• A public hanging of Iranian teenagers
• Iranian girl-band rocks out
• Moroccan journalist Ahmed Benchemsi faces the judges
• Over one million Lebanese party for freedom and get results

2006 Risky Prediction: A "Jasmine Revolution" in Syria

HATS OFF TO 2005, LET'S SEE WHAT EXPLODES NEXT YEAR.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Storming the Protest

(UPDATE: Read Nora Younis's remarkable eye-witness account, complete with photos.)

A story that went largely ignored by the media for three months has now erupted as one of today's lead items. Earlier this week we noted the protest compound set up by thousands of Sudanese refugees in Cairo, decrying their tenuous situation in Egypt and demanding resettlement in the West. The stand-off played out in front of the UN refugee office in an upscale Cairo neighborhood, with the backdrop of a "United Colors of Benneton" billboard. Here's a shot of the calm before this morning's storm:

Cairo is said to have more police per capita than any other city in the world. The photo above from last month captures a lighter moment, as cadets lounge on the sidewalk and seem to ignore the scene behind them. But this morning, the police decided enough was enough. They stormed the protest center, setting off a riot that resulted in ten deaths.

One Egyptian reporter discovered a toddler, apparently just three years old, who may have been killed. Adults got beat up and dragged out by their necks:

The demands of the Sudanese refugees are tenuous because peace has officially been declared between the Sudanese regime of General Bashir and southern rebels. But the showing of the Cairo police is especially galling because one of the complaints of the demonstrators was the violence and mistreatment they faced in Egypt.

After the riot, one Sudanese told the AFP: "Look how this Arab country is treating us, just because we are black." As if to underscore the point, the Egyptian police brought out water cannons to disperse the demonstrators - thus underlining the visual link to police in the American south targeting civil rights demonstrators.

There will be a protest tomorrow by Egyptian human rights activists at the same spot. Meanwhile, here's a photo from Nora Younes, who returned to the park the morning after. Shattered lives indeed:

We'll be back tomorrow with a year in review on civil rights in the Middle East.

Libya Inside Out

The LA Weekly has (finally) published Michael Totten's chronicle of his trip to Libya, under the fun title: "In the Land of the Brother Leader" (a nice added touch is the green color they give the title, reflecting the Brother Leader's own Green Book).

Totten's feature is a relatively quick read, but it is jam-packed with fun (yet sad) stories and quirky insights. This is one of those articles where you really do have to read the whole thing. But in the meantime, here are some choice snippets, mostly from Totten's conversations with local Libyans:

“So, Abdul,” I said as we walked through the souk. “How many Libyans wear a   Qaddafi watch?”
 
“Um,” he said, and laughed grimly. “Not very many. There are, you know, enough   pictures around.” He leaned in and whispered, “I don’t like him much, to be honest.”

...I smiled at everyone who walked past. You   can learn a lot about a people and a place by trying this out. In New York,   people ignore you. In Guatemala City, people will stare. In Libya, they all smiled back, every last one of them, no matter how grumpy or self-absorbed they looked two seconds before.
 
I never detected even a whiff of hostility, not from one single person. Libyans seemed a decent, gentle, welcoming people with terrible luck. It wasn’t their fault the neighborhood stank of oppression.
 
Most apartment buildings were more or less equally dreary, but one did stand out. Architecturally it was just another modernist horror. But a 6-by-8-foot portrait of Qaddafi was bolted to the façade three stories up. It partially blocked the view from two of the balconies. The bastard couldn’t even leave people alone when they were home.
 
The posters weren’t funny anymore... I felt ashamed that I first found his portraits even slightly amusing. The novelty wore off in less than a day, and he’s been in power longer than I’ve been alive.
 
He was an abstraction when I first got there. But after walking around his outdoor   laboratory and everywhere seeing his beady eyes and that arrogant jut of his mouth, it suddenly hit me. He isn’t merely Libya’s tyrant. He is a man who would be god.
 
His Mukhabarat, the secret police, are omniscient. His visage is omnipresent. His power is omnipotent.

And he is deranged. He says he’s the sun of Africa. He threatens to ban money and schools. He vanquished beauty and art. He liquidates those who oppose him. He says he can’t help it if the people of Libya love him so much they plaster his portrait up everywhere. Fuck him. I wanted to rip his face from the walls.

...Worlds can’t meet worlds. But people can meet people. I forget who said that, but I like it, and I thought about it as I walked around inside Libya, hanging out, and talking to regular folks.
 
In a nation where so many report to the secret police, where a sideways word can get you imprisoned or killed, walking around blue-eyed and palefaced with an American accent has its advantages. I met one shopkeeper who opened right up when he and I found ourselves alone in his store.
 
“Do Americans know much about Libya?” he said.
 
“No,” I said. “Not really.”
 
He wanted to teach me something about his country, but he didn’t know where to start. So he recited encyclopedia factoids.
 
He listed the principal resources while counting his fingers. I stifled a smirk when he named the border states. (I had looked at a map.) When he told me Arabic was the official language, I wondered if he thought I was stupid or deaf.
 
“And Qaddafi is our president,” he said. “About him, no comment.” He laughed, but I don’t think he thought it was funny.
 
“Oh, come on,” I said. “Comment away. I don’t live here.”
 
He thought about that. For a long drawn-out moment, he calculated the odds and  weighed the consequences. Then the dam burst.
 
“We hate that fucking bastard, we have nothing to do with him. Nothing. We keep our heads down and our mouths shut. We do our jobs, we go home. If I talk, they will take me out of my house in the night and put me in prison.
 
“Qaddafi steals,” he told me. “He steals from us.” He spoke rapidly now, twice as fast as before, as though he had been holding back all his life. He wiped sweat off his forehead with trembling hands. “The oil money goes to his friends. Tunisians next door are richer and they don’t even have any oil.”
 
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

It's a sad portrait that emerges, but Totten also paints a largely sympathetic picture of the Libyans he met (almost entirely men). 36 years into Qaddafi's rule, Libyans appear sapped - but Totten's article reveals that their humanity has not been stamped out.

Free Elections (Again) Suppressed in Saudi Arabia

A new case of election suppression is roiling Saudi Arabia. No it's not municipal council elections, or the vote for the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce. It's the text-message vote for the winner of Star Academy. That's right, SMS-voting for the American Idol knock-off is now haram in the Saudi Magic Kingdom:

Saudi mobile operator Mobily has stopped users from text message voting for an Arab "Star Academy" competition because of an Islamic decree branding the reality show immoral, the company said on Monday.

Saudi religious scholars last May condemned the hugely popular talent show aired by Lebanese channel LBC as a crime against Islam when a young Saudi returned to a hero's welcome after winning in the Lebanese capital Beirut.

"The decision was taken last night because of a fatwa (religious decree) issued last year, since the program is culturally inappropriate," spokesman Humoud Alghodaini said...

April's victory by Hisham Abdulrahman triggered the closest thing to pop hysteria in ultra-conservative Saudi Arabia, as admirers rushed to shake his hand or even kiss him at a public appearance in a Riyadh shopping mall.

This is voter-suppression at its most... um... naked. Nonetheless, the United Nations seems unlikely to send representatives to investigate. In the meantime, enterprising young Saudis are using technology to get around the state's repressive muzzling of free expression:

Some music fans say they managed in the past to vote via the Internet, bypassing the government server which controls access.

Viva la election! The regime cannot suppress Saudi fans forever!

United Colors

Since September, hundreds of Sudanese refugees in Egypt have organized a sit-in protest at a small public park in an upscale Cairo neighborhood outside the local United Nations refugee office. The New York Times has now picked up on their protest:

There are about 3,000 now - men, women and children huddled together against the winter chill, crouched beneath soiled tarps hung across knotted strings. They have been there for three months, hanging their shoes on the metal railings, cooking, caring for each other's children, pooling money to buy food, mourning those who have died in the park. Their demand is as simple as it is complicated: They want the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to declare them refugees and relocate them to a better place to live...

As the article notes, there are an estimated 2-3 million Sudanese refugees living in Egypt. They, along with hundreds of thousands of other blacks from southern Africa who have come to Egypt, constitute an interesting parallel to the millions of North African migrants in Europe. The Egyptian government certainly does not look kindly on them, and they are not particularly integrated into Egyptian society. Not surprisingly, the Sudanese's demonstration demands from the UN a ticket out of Egypt.

This is all a prelude to noting that an Egyptian blogger went down to the protest camp last month and snapped some interesting photos. One photo captures an upscale billboard that makes for an ironic backdrop to the protest:

United Colors, indeed.

(Note blogger Sarah Sevcik's take from October on the protest, including a copy of the official demands of those protesting.)

TelQuel Declares 2005 the "Year of Broken Taboos"

The Casablanca-based Tel Quel magazine has had its share of problems this year. After running cover stories on King Muhammad VI's salary and other previously untouchable topics, the magazine got slapped with a trumped up "defamation" suit and its editors face jail time if they don't pay up hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.

But Tel Quel's editors will not yield, and have just released a special year-end double-issue. Its title boldly declares: "2005: Year of Broken Taboos." Shards surround the headline, each depicting a different object of taboo-shattering. The full article text isn't online yet, but a summary of the feature is (rough translation from the French):

Before
The royal family's intimacy was jealously guarded, the police force was opaque and scary, there was no question of investigating former torturers, nor of admitting that there were partisans of independence in "our" Sahara, and even less of recognizing the existence (and the devastation) of sexual tourism in Morocco...

In 2005
All these taboos (and many others) have been exposed. The press dared, activists broke free, new dissidents (and new causes) appeared as clear as day, braving censure and taboos... To face this new wave of dissent, the regime alternated between repression and new modes of dialogue, sometimes even proposing specific solutions.

And now?
Will we go further? Will society be able to dig the furrow of freedom further? Will the state be afraid this will all degenerate? Will 2006 be the year of maturation or regression? This is the question on everyone's mind. A group of specialists helps us answer it.

It has been quite an exhilirating year, with an uncertain future ahead. We hope to offer our own retrospective over the next few days.

Cryptic in Cairo

Follow the fresh bakery delivery down the stairs on a Cairo sidestreet and descend into the subterranean entrance to the Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus. Likely the oldest church in Cairo, it is dedicated to two early Coptic martyrs and is said to mark the spot where Mary, Joseph, and Jesus rested at the end of the journey to Egypt.

Keep heading down and discover the crypt where the family is said to have lived:

Stand in the darkness of the crypt, with the weight of Cairo precariously perched above, and marvel at the pharaohs, emperors, prophets, and poets who have passed before. Then wonder what might next explode out from the darkness...

Seneferu, the latest Egyptian blog pharaoh

With news of Egyptian opposition leader Ayman Nour's conviction and sentencing to five years in jail, the scene in Egypt continues to heat up. Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak once again stakes his claim as a modern-day pharaoh (see his cult-of-personality mural below).

But now there is a new pharaoh, at least on the Egyptian blog scene. Seneferu (name background here) is the nom-du-blog of this new pundit, whose latest post marks the anniversary of Anwar Sadat's birth 86 years ago on Christmas day.  Much of Seneferu's writing challenges the conventional wisdom in Egypt with provocative historical reconsideration and trenchant critiques.

But most interesting is the blog's introduction, which speaks to both the power and the peril of the blog in contemporary Egypt:

God bless the internet...As a recent visitor to the Blogosphere, I discovered a number of Egyptians doing something really interesting: expressing viewpoints which, in the Egyptian media, aren't allowed to see the light of day. Seeing the great job some of them are doing, whether actual or symbolic, only encouraged me to add my voice to their own. So anyway, until we get arrested ;-), let's get this thing started...

"...until we get arrested..." - sigh.

Dhabihullah Mahrami, R.I.P.

Amnesty is reporting that prisoner of conscience Dhabihullah Mahrami has died in an Iranian prison. The crime for which Mahrami was imprisoned over a decade ago? - being Baha'i.

The Islamic Republic of Iran recognizes Islam's precursor monotheistic religions, but Baha'i follow a prophet who comes after Muhammad (despite revering Muhammad as well). The religion - despite being founded in Iran - is thus outlawed, and followers can be sentenced to death for the crime of apostasy.

Such was Mahrami's fate, although the Iranian judiciary eventually reduced his sentence to life imprisonment. Amnesty, which had adopted Mahrami as a prisoner of conscience, reports:

Dhabihullah Mahrami was found dead in his cell in Yazd prison on 15 December 2005. His family were apparently informed that he had died of a heart attack and were given his body, which has since been buried. However, Dhabihullah Mahrami was reported to be in good health shortly prior to his death and was not known to be suffering from heart disease, though he was apparently made to engage in strenuous physical labour while in prison raising concern that this may have caused or contributed to his death. He is also said to have received death threats...

Amnesty International also criticised an apparently increasing pattern of harassment of the Baha’i community which has seen at least 66 Baha’is arrested since the beginning of 2005... Members of Iran’s Baha’i community have reportedly been attacked by unidentified assailants in recent months and Baha’i cemeteries and holy sites have been vandalized and destroyed. Some Baha’is have had their homes confiscated by the authorities.

...Young people belonging to the Baha’i community have been denied access to higher education by an official requirement that applicants state their allegiance to Islam or one of three other recognized religions... In 2004, despite promises that this designation would be removed, only ten of the 800 or so Baha’i applicants who passed were eventually admitted. These ten refused to attend university in protest at the exclusion of their fellow Baha’is.

Now is the celebration time of the traditional Persian winter solstice festival of Yalda. We may be seeing the darkest days of the year, but this also means we can look forward to more light ahead. In this holiday season, let's remember Dhabihullah Mahrami and the Baha'is of Iran, who await the day when they can practice their religion in peace.

An Accounting on Tunisian Prisoners of Conscience

Every four months or so, TUNeZINE - a group blog for Tunisian dissidents - publishes a list of prisoners of conscience. The latest such ranking is out and available on the website.

The index claims to include 410 names. Start scrolling at the top of the page and watch as name after name floats by. (The ones with the three crosses next to their names offer links to more information.) At the top of the list is Mohammed Abbou, the lawyer imprisoned for openly comparing Tunisian prisons to Abu Ghraib - who sewed his own mouth shut in jail as an act of protest.

It's hard to connect emotionally to a list of names (this flash presentation helps). But here are few randomly selected:

• Abdelkarim Abdelhamid
• Ben Tili Samir
• Dhoueïfi Slah
• Ouafi Chouaieb
• Rkiki Abdellatif
• Seraïri Wahid
• Zarrouk Daniel