What Americans should learn from Egypt

I have a new piece up on GOOD magazine about what Americans can learn about democracy from Egypt, namely that protests are a useful tool to push for change. You can read it here.

I initially wrote this a while ago, while the both the Tahrir sit-in and the US debate over the debt ceiling were going on. (Also before the London riots, which I think is a tangentially related issue.) The essay was also (very understandably) cut down to a more manageable size for publication, but I’m posting the whole thing here because I think it deals with a lot of other interesting issues about how democracy is practiced in the United States that I couldn’t get to in the GOOD piece. Also, you can do stuff like that when you have a blog. Read it after the jump.

And with that, I make yet another attempt to revive this blog. Hope I’ll be back soon. Bizarre to think that the last time I posted was on January 26

#Jan25

I wasn’t in Egypt yesterday because I’m in Turkey, but I have been glued to Twitter, Facebook, my Gmail contacts list, and the media reports, trying to get a grasp on the situation and getting inspired by everything I’ve seen and read.

The most exciting aspect of yesterday’s demonstrations is the sheer scale. Accurate crowd estimates are difficult to ascertain, but even the Ministry of the Interior put the number of protesters in Cairo at 10,000, which makes me suspect that the real number is much higher. Some activists suggested that there were over 100,000 people there, which seems a bit dubious. No matter what, though, the number is clearly the biggest in a long while, perhaps since the bread riots of 1977, though maybe comparable to the demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But there are important differences between the 2003 protests and yesterday’s: First, in 2003, Egyptians were demonstrating against an external issue, even if it is one tangentially related to their US-backed dictator. Second, those protests were almost exclusively in Cairo, whereas yesterday demonstrations took place throughout the country.

Related to the size and geographic diversity of the protests is that they were a decentralized movement. Much of the organization and mobilization may have taken place on Facebook via the We Are All Khaled Said group (through which 90,000 people said they planned to attend demonstrations), but the turnout seems like it was much more diverse than the usual web-savvy crowd. I’ve been to a number of pro-democracy demonstrations in Cairo and it’s typical to see the same handful of activists at each. Yesterday seemed to attract a different crowd.

A friend in Cairo who was in Tahrir Square yesterday, the site of the main protest, put it this way in a Gchat conversation: “you can find cooperation between youth with beard and girls wearing foreign clothes.” Check out the video below from Al Jazeera English at around 2:05, where a older, middle-class-looking woman goes on a rant about the government. She’s not the typical Cairo protestor.

The question now is what will happen next. Can Egyptians, inspired by Tunisia, sustain a month-long rebellion and bring down their dictator? Everyone I have talked to is taking a very wait-and-see approach. An activist friend in Cairo wrote to me:

I think this is a ripe moment to call for a nation-wide strike so that no one goes to work and more people empty into the streets – but I somehow doubt that will happen. It is much easier for people to go to a mass protest/rally than to miss a day of work – a nation-wide strike really assumes certain privileges that most people (including most of the people that were out yesterday!) do not have. That’s why 6th April and 5th May and all those movements never really got anywhere.

It is still early in the day in Egypt as I write this. Demonstrations may pick up again after school and work get out. On the other hand, I’ve heard people say they fear that Egyptians will now sit back, satisfied that they made their point yesterday and unwilling to continue. Moreover, I think that after yesterday the regime will want to clamp down quickly. Mubarak, I fear, has learned from Ben Ali’s mistakes. (Good thing the New York Times was willing to give him advice!)

Yesterday’s protests were, without a doubt, violent. See this video of the police evacuating Tahrir Square with tear gas and rubber bullets for evidence. But they weren’t nearly as violent as they could have been or, for that matter, as violent as I would have expected. But the Ministry of the Interior has already stated that they will not allow more protests and if the day of anger turns into a week of anger or a month of anger, I think the government will be more heavy handed as they try to prevent a Tunisia situation. I’m afraid the future could hold lot more beatings, arrests and maybe even live fire than we saw yesterday, when three people died.

For now we have to wait and see. I’ll be sitting at my perch in Istanbul, aching to be in downtown Cairo as I watch videos of the much-hated Central Security Forces firing tear gas and rubber bullets at crowds that include my friends.

Photo by Sarah Carr from Flickr

Egypt’s Elections: The View From Washington

The best line of the afternoon came from Mahmoud Ali Mohamed of the Egyptian Association for Supporting Democratic Development. “When we look at Egyptian political theater,” Mohamed said, riffing off an earlier statement by one of his co-panelists, “there is only one director. There is only one person who opens and closes the curtain.” Unfortunately, that important premise, which was essentially embraced by all three participants, got lost in the shuffle of talk about election monitors and voting — props in Hosni Mubarak’s farcical democratic theatrics.

I went to see a panel discussion at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on Tuesday about Egypt’s upcoming parliamentary elections: “boycott, campaigns, and monitors.” The participants were Wael Nawara, a leading member of the prominent-but-small opposition party el-Ghad; the aforementioned Mohamed of the Egyptian Association for Supporting Democratic Development (a group I’ve never heard of before despite a pretty decent knowledge of Egypt’s pro-democracy movement); and Andrew Albertson, the requisite American from a DC-based think tank, in this case the Project on Middle East Democracy.

The Egyptian parliamentary elections are scheduled for November 29 and they are being watched closely by observers inside Egypt and around the world, in large part because of what they could portend for the next year’s presidential election. The fate of that election remains up in the air and many are concerned that President Hosni Mubarak will use the opportunity to install his son in power. But the panel’s focus on elections glosses over the other important challenges that Egypt faces, from a fractured opposition to a mismanaged economy to a brutally repressive police state.

Nawara asserted at the beginning of his talk that it was the first time the Egyptian opposition had an opportunity to address Washington. I doubt that considering Saad Eddin Ibrahim’s repeated (and much celebrated) visits to DC, but that’s besides the point. It’s important that the Egyptian opposition gets its voice heard by people who make, or at least influence, decisions in Washington. But if this is a rare opportunity for the anti-Mubarak voice to be heard here, it’s too bad that it had to be focused on elections, when that is the tip of the iceberg in terms of Egypt’s lack of democracy.

When Egyptians don’t have freedom of speech, class mobility, or a viable opposition, why should anyone worry about filling out ballots for parliamentarians? Nawara commented on this, saying that the “emphasis on election technicalities may be counterproductive.” But then the matter was dropped.

But even if there were systems in place to facilitate electoral democracy in Egypt, the opposition political parties don’t seem ready for it. The panelists at the Carnegie Endowment’s series are a case in point. Nawara comes from el-Ghad Party, the group best known for its media-loving head Ayman Nour who has been resistant to standing with Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency who has been, at least to a certain extent, shaking up elections in Egypt. Ghad ended up deciding to join ElBaradei’s call to boycott the election, but the front that the groups presented was far from a united one. Mohamed, the other Egyptian participant, represented the Wafd Party, a state-sanctioned opposition group that is widely considered co-opted by the ruling regime. The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s best-organized and most-visible opposition movement declared less than two weeks ago its intention to contest 30 percent of seats in parliament, going against the opposition’s election boycott. In return, more than 150 Brotherhood members have been arrested.

With or without political parties or international election monitors, Egypt is a brutal police state, the kind of place where cops can beat a 28 year old to death in an Internet cafe in the second biggest city in the country in broad daylight; the kind of place where torture is par for the course in police stations and prisons; the kind of place where migrants (and yes, I know, they wouldn’t be voting anyway) are shot to death for trying to cross borders. Protests in Cairo are regularly met with vicious violence on the part of the state security apparatus.

And while the Egyptian economy may be “liberal,” it is far from democratic. Since the Mubarak government signed on to an IMF structural adjustment program in the early 1990s, the majority of Egyptians have continued to get poorer. The widespread privatization of state-owned factories and businesses have benefited only a small business class, one that operates hand-in-hand with the ruling party. As the Egyptian economist Galal Amin has said, “Those who continue to preach the trickle-down theory are likely to be the ones who do not really care whether anything trickles down at all.” A system as top-heavy as Egypt’s capitalism does not lay the foundation for a democratic society.

Of course, it’s possible that free and fair elections for the parliament would turn around the injustice governing contemporary Egypt. Indeed, the problems that plague Egypt are cyclical: Civil society is constricted by the police state, which is in power to protect the elite’s economic interests. Democracy is complicated and Albertson, in his brief remarks yesterday, pointed out that democratic elections are about creating accountable governments. Perhaps local and international election monitors could help change that. But when the majority of the opposition is boycotting the election anyway, that seems like a pointless course.

If I sound critical of the Carnegie Endowment for putting the panel together I don’t mean to. It’s great to see a room full of people in Washington thinking about the lack of democracy in Egypt. I just hope that in the future they can see beyond elections to the deeper problems that afflict the country.

Mubarak scared of texting

I’m sure there’s an easy way around this.

New Israeli crackdown

Israel seems to be changing tactics when it comes to the occupation.

AP ran a story about the trend yesterday:

In the most high-profile case yet, Jerusalem police detained the leader of a leading Israeli human rights group during a vigil against the eviction of Palestinian families whose homes were taken by Jewish settlers.

Since the summer, dozens of Palestinian and Israeli activists have been picked up, including those organizing weekly protests against Israel’s West Bank separation barrier as well as others advocating international boycotts of Israeli goods.

Some of the Palestinians were released without charge only after weeks and months of questioning.

This morning, Haaretz had another news item with similar implications:

The Interior Ministry has stopped granting work permits to foreign nationals working in most international nongovernmental organizations operating in the Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem, Haaretz has learned.

In an apparent overhaul of regulations that have been in place since 1967, the ministry is now granting the NGO employees tourist visas only, which bar them from working.

Organizations affected by the apparent policy change include Oxfam, Save the Children, Doctors Without Borders, Terre des Hommes, Handicap International and the Religious Society of Friends (a Quaker organization).

So you’ve got Israel arresting non-violent activists and impeding development workers, and furthermore forcing Jared Malsin, an American editor at the Palestinian t Ma’an News Agency, out of the country. Altogether, this is starting to look like a trend.

What gives? Why is Israel suddenly going after non-violent action against the occupation so heavily? I have a theory: Israel is worried about losing its legitimacy and non-violent activists, nosy journalists, and European do-gooders are not going to help its case.

I think the Israel-as-South-Africa-narrative is picking up steam. To prevent that, Israel is trying to stop people from knowing what’s going on there. Unlike a lot of other human rights absusers, Israel is fairly transparent. (I also believe this is part of what keeps it in the news so much. Hardly anyone thinks about, for example, North Korea, which is one of the worst human rights abusers in the world.)

Then again, if you want to be the Only Democracy in the Middle East, you can’t go around arresting journalists and aid workers.

Hillary pushes for Arab democracy, kind of

It turns out that the United States hasn’t completely given up on efforts to promote democracy in the Arab world. The Christian Science Monitor reports that Secretary of State Hillary was in Morocco today to meet with the Arab league about democracy.

Apparently, Hillary thinks that Morocco is a model:

Clinton kicked off the day with opening remarks that held up Morocco as an example for positive reform in the region. She recalled a visit to the country 10 years earlier, when she met an illiterate father who had supported his daughter’s aspirations of becoming a doctor. She also spoke of “devout women” who had gone on to become human rights advocates.

“Examples like these remind us there (is) much in Morocco’s experience that we can look to to guide our efforts today,” she said.

Michael Posner, assistant US secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, said on Monday that the Obama administration would use “principled engagement” to encourage regional governments to adopt democratic reforms – “both to provide security and at the same time to build democratic institutions that protect their own people.” Posner said that change “occurs from within society” and is “very hard to impose from outside.”

Hicham Houdaifa, a commentator with Moroccan magazine Le Journal that recently had its bank account frozen by Moroccan officials, says he was “disappointed” that Clinton did not address the issue of press freedom. In the lead-up to the forum in Morocco Reporters Without Borders sought to draw attention to a recent crackdown on the Kingdom’s press, but was prevented from holding a press conference by Moroccan officials.

Freedom House gives Morocco, which is a hereditary monarchy, middling grades on freedom and transparency. But I guess that makes it better than, you know, Syria.

Meanwhile, a recent internal audit of USAID funding to Egypt says that it is, for the most part, ineffective. USA Today reports:

More than $180 million in U.S. foreign aid to promote democracy in Egypt over the past four years has produced few measurable results, in part because the Egyptian government has stymied the effort, a newly released government audit says.

The “impact of (American-funded) democracy and governance programs was unnoticeable” in Egypt, said the report by the U.S. Agency for International Development’s inspector general. USAID auditors based their conclusions on international indexes of press freedom, corruption, civil liberties and political rights.

Then again, the US can’t afford to piss off crucial, albeit authoritarian, allies like Egypt. And Jordan. And Morocco, for that matter. So when the Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor says (quoted in CS Monitor story) that the US needs to use “principled engagement” and that democracy is “very hard to impose from the outside,” what he really means is it can’t be too much of a priority.

The Nobel Committee’s big mistake

I cried when Barack Obama got elected. I went door to door trying to convince rural Ohioans to vote for the guy. I proudly self-identify as an American liberal. I want a public option in the health care system. I support global nuclear disarmament and an emphasis on engagement in international relations.

I think that the Nobel committee’s decision to award President Obama with the Nobel Peace Prize was seriously ill advised. In fact, I think it was totally crazy.

Obama hasn’t gotten the US out of Iraq. He is contemplating sending more troops to Afghanistan. He has yet to get Israelis and Palestinians to sit down together. (In fact, Israel’s Foreign Minister is trying to dispel any hope for a comprehensive peace plan.) Obama hasn’t gotten a real agreement to reduce the world’s supply of nuclear weapons or made any substantive changes to international regulations related to global warming.

What has Obama possibly done that would warrant a Nobel Peace Prize?  He gave a pretty good speech in Germany. He gave another pretty good speech in Cairo. He… Actually, those are the only things I can think of.

So why did he get the prize? I think that the primary reason is because he succeeded George W. Bush, the worst American president ever and the greatest threat to international peace of the last thousand years. Some people (the Nobel committee, apparently) think that’s a big enough achievement to deserve a prize. I do not.

If President Obama is smart he’ll turn down the prize. He’ll say, “This is a great honor, but let’s revisit it in a few years. I have a lot of work left to do.” And then he’ll get some credibility for being humble and realistic. And Obama is smart. He’s very smart. But I doubt that his ego is going to allow him to turn down one of the most prestigious awards in the world. And so he will raise expectations for his accomplishments to unreasonable heights.

I’m not saying I don’t want Obama to deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. I hope that by the end of his first term he will achieve an equitable settlement between the Israelis and Palestinians. I hope that he will rid the world of nuclear weapons. I hope that he will stop global warming. Then he can get a prize.

“Lebanon never fails to surprise”

If Marc Lynch doesn’t have anything to add to the commentary on the Lebanese elections, then I obviously don’t either, though I feel as though I should take a serious interest since I’m going to Beirut in a couple months.

Elias Muhanna aka Qifa Nabki has great analysis. If you’d been reading his blog (as I told you to a few weeks ago) you would know that he was predicting a defeat for the ruling coalition, but, as he says, “Lebanon never fails to surprise.”

Abu Muqawama also has a great wrap up of the election’s winners and losers.  You can read it here.  In case you’re not going to read the whole thing, I’ll summarize.

Winners: Saudi Money, Hizballah, US Central Command/Department of Defense, nepotism, and the Maronite patriarch.

Losers: Hizballah, Israeli hard-liners, and Hassan Nasrallah.

Exum explains how that works out.

American media is mostly focused on Hizballah, of course.

Don’t know what else I’ve got to say, especially since it seems like it will be a while until the real implications of the election are sorted out.  What kind of government will March 14 form?  They are probably pretty hyped-up on their unexpected win and not too excited to take in the “resistance.”

At the same time, I suspect that Hizballah, like so many other parties, are relieved that they didn’t win.  Paul Salem wrote about this the other day in Foreign Policy.

Hezbollah is a surprisingly efficient organization, despite the fact that it is many things at once. It is the dominant Shiite political party and a strong opposition voice inside and outside parliament. It also acts as an army: resisting Israeli occupation from 1982 to 2000 and fighting Israel to a draw in 2006; receiving arms, training, and financing from Iran; and serving as a military proxy for Iran and Syria. Additionally, it is an Islamist movement that adheres to the principles of the Iranian Revolution (though it has accepted that those principles cannot be implemented in Lebanon). It provides hospitals, schools, and social services in Shiite areas of the country. In many ways, Hezbollah acts as a state-within-a-state — sharing power with other groups in the government, but maintaining its own army, finances, and foreign policy.

This is Hezbollah’s preferred mode of operation: benefiting from the cover of the legitimate multicommunal Lebanese republic, while maintaining enough military and political influence to be left alone. The problem for Hezbollah is that this model does not translate easily into national office and plays badly on an international stage.

Based on what I know the organization, I’m inclined to agree.  If Hizballah ends up taking a “veto” role in the new government, that will might work out optimally for them.  They can participate but continue to be an oppositional force.

Anyway, stay tuned.

New Beginning?

Photo by the New York Times

After so much anticipation, how did President Obama’s “historic” address to the Muslim world actually turn out?  Who knows if it will actually be the “new beginning” that the Obama Administration billed it as, but it seemed to me like it hit all the right notes.

It may not be the most important thing, but Obama seemed to be making a serious effort to ingratiate himself with the Arab world.  He spoke a few words of (sometimes-mangled) Arabic, he quoted from the Qur’an with comfort, he complemented Arab history and scientific innovation.

I was impressed that from the beginning Obama recognized the treacherous legacies of colonialism, the Cold War and globalization in the Middle East.  Those aren’t obvious themes for an American president to take up, but they are important ones and I suspect that they will resonate well in the Arab world.  It also gave me great joy to hear his recognition of the 1953 coup against the democratically elected Iranian government.  If only he had mentioned the Syrian Crisis of 1957…

The best part of the speech, in my opinion, was his discussion of Israel-Palestine.  Marc Lynch sums up my feelings best:

I’m still struggling to grapple with this truly astonishing portion of his speech.  I don’t think I have ever heard any American politician, much less President, so eloquently, empathetically, and directly equate the suffering and aspirations of Israelis and Palestinians. This is the one part which I have to quote:

“Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed – more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction – or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews – is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.

On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people – Muslims and Christians – have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations – large and small – that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.

For decades, there has been a stalemate: two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive. It is easy to point fingers – for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel’s founding, and for Israelis to point to the constant hostility and attacks throughout its history from within its borders as well as beyond. But if we see this conflict only from one side or the other, then we will be blind to the truth: the only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security.”

This is quite possibly the most powerful statement of America’s stake in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the urgent need for justice on both sides that I have ever heard.  He posed sharp challenges to Israelis and Palestinians alike, directly addressing the realities of Palestinian life under occupation and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza while also empathizing with Israeli fears.  He positioned the U.S. as the even-handed broker it needs to be:  “America will align our policies with those who pursue peace, and say in public what we say in private to Israelis and Palestinians and Arabs.” Left unsaid, but clearly in the background, was the fact that he has been matching those words with deeds by forcefully taking on the issue of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

This won’t satisfy most Arabs, I suspect.  The fact that Obama reaffirmed America’s “unbreakable” bond with the Jewish state will probably alone be enough to leave many with a bad taste.  Regardless, I think it is becoming clear that Obama is taking a more even-handed approach to the Israel-Palestine problem than any American leader before him. Israel is still the United States’ ally–that will not change–but it appears that Obama genuinely believes that securing Palestinian statehood should be a priority and he is willing to commit himself to that.  That’s nothing to scoff at.

Did I have any problems with the speech?  It’s hard to say.  I wish that more emphasis had been given to democracy and rejecting authoritarianism, but I know that that would have been diplomatically dicey after his day with King Abdullah yesterday and meetings with Mubarak today.

I think that if Obama really wanted to score serious points with the Arab street he could have come closer to recognizing the trauma that the United States has inflicted on the Muslim world, particularly over the past few years.  Ali Abunimah, with whom I do not agree on most things, makes this point:

It was disappointing that Obama recycled his predecessor’s notion that “violent extremism” exists in a vacuum, unrelated to America’s (and its proxies’) exponentially greater use of violence before and after September 11, 2001. He dwelled on the “enormous trauma” done to the US when almost 3,000 people were killed that day, but spoke not one word about the hundreds of thousands of orphans and widows left in Iraq – those whom Muntazer al-Zaidi’s flying shoe forced Americans to remember only for a few seconds last year. He ignored the dozens of civilians who die each week in the “necessary” war in Afghanistan, or the millions of refugees fleeing the US-invoked escalation in Pakistan.

The Arab reactions to the speech that I’ve read so far haven’t been  kind, but I think that’s probably because it is mostly well-educated leftists who are blogging/Tweeting in English.  But I think that people are reading Obama wrong.  For example, when Obama called Cairo a “timeless city,” Will from KabobFest asked if the line was “just one of those Orientalist tropes his speechwriter read in some Bernard Lewis book or Egyptian tourism pamphlet?”

President Obama is a former professor, a well-educated liberal who used to read Frantz Fanon when he was in college.  The American president is not listening to Bernard Lewis anymore.  That’s going to be hard for a lot of people to accept–they’ve become so accustomed to dismissing and disdaining American leaders.  But hopefully it is a transformation that will happen soon.

An Egyptian friend of mine suggested that Arab bloggers and analysts are skeptical and angry out of fear that Obama’s charm is part of some elaborate conspiracy.  I suppose, though, that it is in a way an elaborate conspiracy.  The aim of the conspiracy is to make large parts of the world stop hating the United States.

Obama to meet with Muslim Brothers?

Apparent, members of the Muslim Brotherhood have received permission to attend President Obama’s speech in Cairo on Thursday.  The Project on Middle East Democracy blogs:

Al-Arabiya has just reported that, under pressure from the United States, the Secretariat-General of the lower house of the Egyptian Parliament invited ten members of the Muslim Brotherhood parliamentary bloc to attend Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo on Thursday.

The delegation will include Dr. Saad Al Katatni, leader of the bloc, who said that the invitation “came as a compromise solution between the American administration and the Egyptian government, considering that there is increasing pressure on the administration from the American press on the necessity of meeting with all members of opposition and other influential forces.”

Though Katatni explicitly denied it, Al-Arabiya’s reporter Mustafa Sulaiman speculated that Brotherhood members may also be invited to a special meeting that Obama will hold with writers, politicians and members of Egyptian civil society.

Is this the Obama Administration trying to send a message that they appreciate the opposition in Egypt?  Or should we interpret this as a public recognition of the fact that the United States must engage with political Islamists in the Middle East in order to have productive diplomacy? Maybe both, maybe neither.  But it seems like it could be a good sign, even if the Brotherhood was saying less than a month ago that Obama’s speech is just a ploy to protect the Zionist entity.