Posts by James M. Dorsey.:
From Syria and Iraq to Iran: Kurdish Minorities Push For Autonomy
December 19th, 2014
By James M. Dorsey.
Synopsis
While Syrian and Iraqi Kurds battle against the Islamic State organisation, Sunni Muslim Iranian Kurds are campaigning for greater rights within the mainly Shiite Islamic republic. President Rouhani’s approach appears to be producing results.
Commentary
MORE THAN than three years into Syria’s brutal civil war, Syrian Kurds have carved out an entity of their own close to the border with Turkey. Their battle against Islamic State, the jihadist group that has conquered chunks of Syria and Iraq, for Kobani, a stone’s throw from the Syrian-Turkish border, symbolises Syrian Kurdish aspirations. It has galvanised Turkish Kurdish emotions at a time of fragile peace negotiations between Turkey and the insurgent Kurdish Workers Party (PKK).
Across the border in northern Iraq, Iraqi Kurdish militiamen or Peshmerga, (those who confront death), man the frontlines against the jihadists in defence of their semi-state. Meanwhile the Peshmerga’s allies, the 60-country coalition the United States has marshalled against Islamic State, seek to ensure that Iraqi Kurdistan remains part of a restructured Iraqi state.
Pacifying minorities
From their vantage point, Iranian Kurds who account for 11 percent of Iran’s 77.5 million inhabitants, are no less fervent about their aspirations but keen to avoid the chaos and violence enveloping their Syrian and Iraqi brethren. To them, Iran’s Islamic republic, established with the fall of the Shah in 1979, constitutes a bulwark against the violence that has enveloped much of the Middle East.
Yet, the Iranian Kurdish campaign, rooted in a bloody insurgency in the first decade after the toppling of the Shah, goes to the core of identity issues fuelling conflict across the Middle East; it poses no less a challenge to an Iran that has long denied its minorities communal political rights. Their decades-old struggle takes on added importance in a country in which 50 percent of the population belong to non-Persian minorities and a region in which ethnicity and sectarianism are redrawing borders.
Suppression of the Iranian Kurdish insurgency in the 1980s was but one instance of post-revolution Iranian efforts to pacify the country’s minorities amid suspicions that Iran’s multiple distractors had sought to fuel ethnic unrest. Iraq launched in 1980 its eight-year long Saudi- and Kuwaiti-backed war against the newly established Islamic republic – in the vain hope that the predominantly Arab population of the southern Iranian province of Khuzestan would rise in revolt and welcome Iraqi troops as liberators.
Iran suspects the United States of supporting Jundallah, a shadowy group that has claimed responsibility for more than 350 deaths in a series of bombings since 2007 in Sistan and Balochistan, Iran’s largest, most impoverished predominantly Sunni, south-eastern province.
Falling behind
In Tabriz, the capital of the predominantly Azeri province of Eastern Azerbaijan, Traktorsazi FC, the football club, has emerged as a symbol of an Azeri national identity. Its stadium has been the scene of a number of environmental and nationalist protests and clashes with security forces in recent years in which fans chanted secessionist slogans. “The main (Iranian concern) is that the idea of Turkism is strengthening in South Azerbaijan,” News.Az, a pro-Azeri news website, quoted Saftar Rahimli, a member of the board of the World Azerbaijani Congress, as saying. Rahimli was referring to Eastern Azerbaijan by its nationalist Azeri name.
Unrest among Azeris, Iran’s largest ethnic minority, despite the fact that many Azeris have risen to high positions and exert influence within government, the military and the security forces, suggests that Iranian attempts to silence political demands by enhancing individual social and economic rights is failing.
Recent events in Iraq and Syria have refuelled the aspirations of a new generation of Iranian Kurds who fear they may be left behind. “We feel we have lagged behind and fallen from first position (among Kurds) to the fourth,” a Kurdish activist recently told the Financial Times.
Like the PKK which has moved from pan-Kurdish aspirations to demands for greater freedom and self-rule within Turkey, Iranian Kurdish ambitions focus on equal rights and autonomy. They complain about being treated as second class citizens and as a security risk despite significant investment in Kurdish regions that has substantially elevated educational levels but failed to reduce unemployment of almost 30 percent.
Stepped-up Iranian Kurdish activism has sparked divisions in the Tehran government about how to respond and driven fears that US support for the Iraqi Kurds as well as Kurdish fighters in Kobani, and past and current Israeli support for the Kurds, could mean that Iran’s foes may want to fuel conflict in Iranian Kurdistan.
Easing repression
Reformists and hardliners are united in their rejection of federalism which would involve granting other minorities the same right and a restructuring of the state that would significantly undermine the regime’s grip on power.
Yet, in contrast to the Revolutionary Guards who advocate repression of dissent, President Hassan Rouhani sees economic development and inclusion of Kurds in his efforts to grant Iranians greater individual rights as the way forward. Iranian Kurdish leaders denied a statement in parliament by Intelligence minister Mahmoud Alawi that he had met in October with representatives of the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI) and the Organisation of Revolutionary Toilers of Iranian Kurdistan (Komala).
President Rouhani’s approach appears to be producing results, first and foremost among which is a desire by activists to push their demands peacefully. Violence has in recent years been limited to isolated, small scale attacks by The Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK), an offshoot of the PKK (The Kurdistan Workers’ Party).
Iranian Kurds concede that repression has eased considerably since Rouhani was voted into office last year even if hundreds of Kurdish political prisoners remain behind bars. A mass rally in October in support of Kobani was the first time Kurds were allowed to publicly gather in an expression of their Kurdish identity. Islamic Azad University, Iran’s largest university network, this year established the country’s first Kurdish Studies Centre.
Expressions of Azeri nationalism in recent years would suggest that greater freedoms is ultimately unlikely to keep the nationalist Iranian Kurdish genie in the bottle. Some Kurds, nonetheless, believe Rouhani could succeed. “Even federalism can gradually wane if people see a fair distribution of power and wealth. Kurds are not Persians but are Iranians. The view that Iran belongs to us is gaining strength,” Omid Varzandeh, the centre’s director, told the Financial Times.
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School shootings and lone wolf attacks: What’s the difference?
November 4th, 2014
By James M. Dorsey.
Michel Zehaf-Bibeau storms the Canadian parliament
A recent school shooting in the US state of Washington and a lone wolf’s assault on the Canadian parliament in Ottawa are but two of the latest headline-grabbing incidents of home-grown violence.
One had nothing to do with politics, the other is classified as a terrorist attack perpetrated by a jihadist Muslim.
Yet, both involved troubled young men groping with personal problems and demons. Their actions are in many mays ways cries of desperation in the absence of badly needed help. They beg the question whether criminalization and stepped-up security is an effective one-stop prevention tool without developing mechanisms that provide early warning and help to individuals about to go off the deep end.
At the surface, Jaylen Fryberg, a popular freshman, who last month opened fire on classmates during lunch at a high school near Seattle, appeared to be a happy student. He was a well-liked athlete who shortly before he went on his shooting spree had been named his school’s freshman homecoming prince. Fryberg, who shot himself during the incident, no longer is able to explain what prompted him to shoot fellow students and put an end to his own life. But the subsequent police investigation suggests that he was angry at being rebuffed by a girl that chose his cousin rather than him.
By contrast, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, the 32-year old convert to Islam, who last month killed a guard at Ottawa’s National Monument and then stormed the Canadian parliament, had all the trappings of a troubled down-and-out individual. Canadian media reported that Zehaf-Bibeau had a history of mental illness and a criminal record that included drug possession, theft, and issuing threats. He was addicted to crack cocaine and spent the last weeks of his life in a homeless shelter. The Globe and Mail quoted a friend his, Dave Bathurst, as being told by Zehaf-Bibeau that the devil was after him. “I think he must have been mentally ill,” Bathurst told The Globe and Mail.
Zehaf-Bibeau’s case viewed on its own provides insight into the recruitment tactics of Islamic State, the jihadist group that controls a swath of Syria and Iraq and its targeting of Muslims, including converts, troubled by a feeling of alienation, personal problems or mental issues. Lone wolves like Zehaf-Bibeau seeking salvation by becoming part of a larger movement and seeking to give apocalyptic meaning to their lives even if it means putting their lives at risk serves Islamic State’s purpose. It is a state of mind that Islamic State understands as is evident from its urging of Muslims to use whatever weapons they can put their hands on, including knives and cars, to launch attacks in their home countries.
But taken together the cases of Fryberg and Zehaf-Bibeau raise the question of whether there is a difference between a school shooting and a politically motivated terrorist attack by a lone wolf from the perspective of applying lessons from psychology and psychiatry to crime prevention. Both Fryberg and Zehaf-Bibeau had issued cries for help in their own ways.
Writing on Twitter, Fryberg warned the woman who had rejected him that “your gonna piss me off… And then some (expletive) gonna go down and I don’t think you’ll like it.” Several days later, he tweeted “It breaks me… It actually does… I know it seems like I’m sweating it off… But I’m not… And I never will be able to.”
Bathurst, like Zehaf-Bibeau a convert to Islam, was perhaps the one person Zehaf-Bibeau appeared to confide in. Beyond telling him about his alleged persecution by the devil, Zehaf-Bibeau shared his plans to go to Libya to study with Bathurst who suggested to him that something else rather than learning may be what his driving him. Zehaf-Bibeau’s apparent sense of alienation was deepened when the mosque that he and Bathurst attended asked him to no longer come to prayer because of his erratic behaviour.
The school shooting prompted renewed calls for stepped-up gun control in the United States. It also sparked debate about ways of ensuring that troubled students are identified early on and offered the assistance they were pleading for. By contrast, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper denounced Zehaf-Bibeau as a “terrorist” and linked his acts to an attack two days before the assault on parliament in which Martin Couture-Rouleau hit and killed two Canadian soldiers with his car. Harper said both attacks had been inspired by Islamic State.
That may indeed be the case. Nonetheless, radicalism’s attraction is not uniquely Islamic. Canadian writer Jeet Heer suggests that militant political Islam has the same attraction for mentally unstable individuals as did anarchism for Leon Czolgosz who assassinated US President William McKinley in 1901 or Marxism that prompted Lee Harvey Oswald to kill John F. Kennedy. “If you are alienated from the existing social order, the possibility of joining, even as a ‘lone wolf’ killer, any larger social movement that promises to overturn that society may be attractive. For a person radicalized in this manner, the fantasy of political violence is a chance to gain agency, make history, and be part of something larger,” Heer wrote.
The Fryberg and Zehaf-Bibeau cases may differ in detail and motivation, yet they both reflect societal problems whether they are concepts of misguided masculinity in which young men feel inhibited in expressing emotion or increased isolation and alienation as a result of prejudice against mental instability. Both cases illustrate the need to develop early warning mechanisms that help ensure that troubled individuals receive the help and support that will prevent them from possibly committing violent acts. That rather than an approach that exclusively seeks to pre-empt terrorist violence through criminalization and increased security is likely to prove to be a more effective safeguard.
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Reshaping the Middle East: UAE Leads the Counter-revolution
October 18th, 2014
By James M. Dorsey.
Synopsis
The United Arab Emirates backed by Saudi Arabia and Egypt is spearheading a conservative Arab effort to reshape the Middle East and North Africa in their mould, in parallel with the US-led war against Islamic State jihadists in Syria and Iraq. The effort targets the Muslim Brotherhood and seeks to preserve the status quo against expressions of political Islam.
Commentary
WAR PLANES from oil-rich Gulf states play a supporting role in the US-led air campaign to counter the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Despite their massive weapons acquisitions in recent years the Gulf states’ participation may make little military difference in the war against the jihadists, but it serves everyone’s political purpose.
It shields the US against accusations that the West is waging war against Islam and the Gulf states and from claims that they are unwilling to play their part in confronting what constitutes first and foremost a threat to regional stability rather than to the homeland security of the United States or Europe. It further allows the Gulf states to project themselves as pro-Western beacons of modernity; the United Arab Emirates in particular milking its deploying of the first woman fighter pilot for all it is worth.
Filling the vacuum
Under the radar, Gulf participation has enabled Saudi Arabia and the UAE to step up their effort to thwart the Muslim Brotherhood, political Islam and its Qatari backers as well as squash hope for political change across the Middle East and North Africa. The Saudi-UAE effort went into high gear with support for last year’s ousting by the military of President Mohammed Morsi, a Muslim Brother and Egypt’s only democratically elected president, and the withdrawal of their ambassadors from Doha earlier this year. The effort reflects a new assertiveness of Gulf rulers to further goals that the US may not fully share.
Writing on the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya network, Saudi journalist Mohammed Fahad al-Harthi noted that the alliance between Saudi Arabia and the UAE has raised the “real possibility that the current power vacuum could be filled… Saudi Arabia and the UAE have always shared similar views on how to tackle problems in the Arab world, including their approach on creating a future free from extremism and terrorism”.
The UAE, long distrustful of the Brotherhood and Qatar, has taken the lead in cementing the Brotherhood’s downfall and countering Qatari support for political change in the region as long as conservative Gulf monarchies remain ring-fenced. UAE warplanes operating from bases in Egypt are believed to have in recent months launched several attacks on Islamist forces associated with the Brotherhood in divided Libya. The attacks supported rogue Libyan general Khalifa Haftar who is known for his opposition to the Brotherhood.
According to Middle East Eye, the UAE supported efforts of ousted Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh to use his erstwhile Houthi rebel opponents to derail political transition in Yemen as well as President Abd-Rabbuh Mansur Hadi’s government in which the Brotherhood-aligned Islah Party is represented. Saleh is believed to have worked through his son, Ahmed Ali Saleh, a former commander of Yemen’s Republican Guard and the country’s ambassador to the UAE. Houthis, a Shiite Muslim sect, last month effectively took control of Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, and have since agreed to join the Hadi government as its dominant force.
Gulf differences
Ironically, Saudi Arabia, unlike the UAE an implacable ideological and political opponent of Shia Islam, has been caught in a Catch-22 situation. The Saudis suspect the Houthis of having ties to Iran. Yet, the Houthis oppose the Muslim Brotherhood that was influential in the Yemeni government until the Houthis invaded the capital Sana’a. If that were not complicated enough, Saudi Arabia would like to limit the degree of change in Yemen, a country on its border that is slated to join Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). GCC foreign ministers have warned that the Houthi advances threatened regional stability and demanded the restoration of government authority in Yemen.
The counter-revolutionary Gulf strategy has opened a window on potential differences not only between Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain on the one hand and Qatar on the other but also within the conservative counter-revolutionary camp itself. Beyond apparent tactical differences between Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Bahrain, virtually a Saudi outpost, joined the Saudis and Emiratis earlier this year in withdrawing its ambassador from Doha but has refused to ban the Brotherhood or label it a terrorist organisation.
More fundamentally, the strategy faces potential pitfalls given the fact that the Brotherhood, with the backdrop of almost a century of repression, has proven to be a cat with nine lives and that Arab autocracy has helped produce ever more virulent forms of political Islam as evidenced initially by Al Qaeda and more recently by Islamic State.
Rising from the ashes
In a recent book, Answering the Call: Popular Islamic Activism in Sadat’s Egypt, historian Abdullah Al-Arian documented how the Brotherhood, after being crushed in the 1950s and 1960s by former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, rose from the ashes in the late 1970s propelled by a rebellious student movement.
“As we ponder the future of the Muslim Brotherhood—and popular activism in Egypt more generally—it may be instructive to consider the historical precedent for the resumption of activism following a period of severe repression… It is more instructive to examine these movements, not as an alien force committed to the widespread destruction of society, but rather as a natural product of the societies from which they emerge,
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The rise of the Islamic State: Who is to blame
September 24th, 2014
By James M. Dorsey.
Behind the façade of a united front against the Islamic State the United States and its Gulf allies blame each other for the spectacular rise of the jihadist group that has overrun a swathe of Syria and Iraq. With the launching of US-led air attacks on Islamic State targets in Syria itself, Syrian president Bashar Al Assad is likely to emerge as a winner while his allies Russia and Iran lie low about their abetting of the Islamic State.
Before the airstrikes began, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif charged that most of the alliance’s members, whom he dubbed a “coalition of repenters”, had contributed to the Islamic State’s rise by supporting armed opposition to the regime of Bashar Al-Assad. While not far off the mark the Iranian minister would have hit the nail squarely on the head had he included Russia, a member of the coalition, as well as his own country, though it had not been invited to the alliance’s founding meeting in Paris earlier this month.
If anything, Russia and Iran may even share a greater responsibility because as Assad’s main backers they were more likely to have been privy to the Syrian leader’s grand strategy to defeat the popular uprising-turned armed rebellion against him. If Iran blames the United States for supporting the Syrian rebels, the US’ Arab allies argue that Washington’s failure to supply moderate Syrian rebels with the sophisticated weaponry and funding they needed to defeat Assad’s forces or allow Gulf states to do so, had created a vacuum that the Islamic State filled.
Frustrated by the US failure, as a result, Gulf states and Turkey aided a host of rebels groups, including the Islamic State, in a bid to topple Assad with or without full-fledged US support. Their resolve was strengthened by the fact that Assad enjoyed the support of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and its Lebanese Shiite ally Hezbollah.
In doing so, the US and its allies walked into the trap Assad had set for them. For much of the last three years of bitter fighting in Syria that has killed an estimated 160,000 people and displaced 6.5 million others, Assad’s forces have confronted non-jihadist forces rather than those of the Islamic State in Syria and the Levant (ISIL), the name by which the group was known before it rebranded itself as the Islamic State in June. Assad’s sparing of the jihadists was designed to allow them to emerge as the dominant force rallied against him so that he could project himself as indispensable in the struggle to contain Islamist extremism.
Syrian support for jihadists dates back to aid provided by the Assad government to Al Qaeda in Iraq for its’ targeting of US troops, according to documents captured by American forces in 2007 in Iraq’s Sinjar mountains and published by the US Military Academy at West Point. The documents revealed that Syria facilitated the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq. Many of them were Saudi and North African nationals, who today are among the largest of Islamic States’ foreign fighter contingents. They utilise the same support structures and logistics networks that were originally established in Iraq with Syrian aid. Moreover, several Islamic State operatives are men who were detained by Syrian authorities on charges of terrorism and later released in a series of general amnesties, according to The New York Times.
Assad’s strategy has worked well. Islamic State has emerged as the Syrian leader’s foremost opponent. The United States and its allies struggled with how to confront the group not only in Iraq but also in Syria without legitimising or cooperating with the one Arab leader whose ouster they sought. Irrespective of whatever strategy the allies develop, Assad benefits. Cooperation with his regime as is being demanded by Russia would bring Assad in from the cold. If the coalition opts to take on the Islamic State in Syria without coordination with Damascus, Assad can sit back as his enemies confront the most immediate threat to his regime and do the dirty work for him.
It is hard to believe that Iran and Russia with their intimate involvement in the Assad regime’s battle for survival had been oblivious to the Syrian leader’s nurturing of jihadist forces first in Iraq and, since the eruption of widespread opposition to his regime in 2011, in Syria itself. It was a high risk strategy for both Russia, with its soft underbelly in the Caucasus repeatedly wracked by jihadist violence, and Iran that sits at one extreme of the Middle East’s increasing Sunni-Shiite divide.
Like with US and Gulf policy failures and mistakes, Russia and Iran’s high-risk gamble resembles a chicken that has come home to roost, witness Russia’s inclusion in the US-led alliance against Islamic State and Iran’s support for the war against the group. Their opposition to Islamic State is nonetheless tempered by their efforts to legitimise Assad by insisting that he be acknowledged in military strikes against the group inside Syria. There is little reason to doubt Russia and Iran’s sincerity in wanting to confront the Islamic State. That however does not erase the legitimate suspicion that they more than others were witting accomplices in IS’ rise given the nature of their involvement with the Assad regime.
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Islamic State: Ideological Challenge to Saudi Arabia
September 3rd, 2014
By James M. Dorsey.
Synopsis
With its control of a swath of Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State represents a paradigm shift in jihadist strategy and tactics. It also poses an ideological challenge to Saudi Arabia as it fuels Salafist debate about political Islam and the legitimacy of the region’s rulers.
Commentary
THE METEORIC rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and its declaration of an Islamic State straddling the two Arab countries raises the spectre of a militant Islamist state in the heart of the Middle East close to the borders of US allies like Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. If the threat to Israel and Jordan is primarily security, to Saudi Arabia it is also ideological, with IS tracing its roots to the philosophy of the 18th century warrior-jurist Mohammed Ibn Abdul Wahhab and other Islamic sources on which the kingdom was built, and constituting a reference point that Salafists cannot ignore.
With its military advances in large swathes of Syria and Iraq, IS has achieved extremist control of the largest chunk of territory in recent times. It is the first jihadist group to seize control of resources like oil fields and refineries. They add to significant revenues earned from extortion and kidnapping as well as a revived flow of funding from individuals and charities in the Gulf. The group has currently seized seven oil fields and two smaller refineries in northern Iraq in addition to its Syrian assets.
Ideological affinity, political pragmatism
IS’ focus on control of territory rather than spectacular international suicide attacks makes the United States and Europe less of an immediate target. As a result, IS projected the brutal and demonstrative killing of American journalist James Foley as retaliation for US air strikes rather than the launch of an anti-American terror campaign. Western policymakers and intelligence officials fear nonetheless that foreign volunteers joining the group’s ranks could return home as hardened global jihadists.
Ideological affinity and political pragmatism that contrasts with the ideological purity that Al Qaeda has sought to maintain, at times blur the lines between IS, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states that have yet to crack down on the flow of funds, and the region’s Salafist clergy. While IS has forged alliances with former Baathists – unthinkable in the past – its cooperation with local tribes is likely to have had tacit Saudi approval in the absence of a credible effort to establish an inclusive government in Baghdad capable of reaching out to Iraqi Sunnis.
Apparent Saudi withdrawal of that approval could, however, put IS’ alliances to the test. The kingdom signalled its shifting attitude with King Abdullah congratulating Haider al-Abadi on his mandate to form a new Iraqi government followed by the kingdom’s grand mufti denouncing IS on 19 August 2014. Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh issued his condemnation only after Abdullah had publicly criticised the clergy for failing to play its role in combatting terrorism.
Sheikh Ali Hatem al-Suleiman Al-Dulaimi, leader of one of Iraq’s most powerful tribal confederations, has meanwhile offered support for a new Iraqi government provided it meets Sunni demands for equitable power-sharing.
Salafi debate
IS’ ideological challenge is reflected in debates among Saudi Arabia’s political and religious elite as well as its Salafi base. Supporters of IS point to its confrontation of Shiites, widely viewed as heretics by Wahhabis and Salafis; its return to the roots of Salafism, and its view of existing regimes as apostates. Its Salafi critics fall into two categories: the quietists who fear a militant challenge to the Al-Saud family’s control of the kingdom and enjoin obedience to the ruler even if he is unjust, and reformists who reject IS’ totalitarianism as contradicting a Salafist tradition that promotes freedom of expression and endorses opposition to authority.
To the quietists, IS raises the spectre of a repeat of Saudi history in which the Al Sauds defeated Wahhabi tribesmen in the 1920s and transformed Wahhabism from a movement that imposed puritanism by force and propagated an austere interpretation of Islam, into a socially conservative pillar of support for the regime. Quietists argue that IS’ threat to reverse the Al Saud’s co-optation of Wahhabism illustrates political Islam’s inability to come to grips with modernity and the concept of a modern state. As a result, they argue that it necessarily will at best establish yet another authoritarian regime that already has demonstrated its rejection of any notion of liberal rights.
IS military tactics of sowing confusion coupled with speed, fearless resolve, and the use of land mines and buried explosives, has made it a formidable opponent on the ground and more difficult to target from the air. IS’ guerrilla tactics took by surprise Kurdish Peshmerga who relied on their outdated two decades-old guerrilla experience against the army of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
Beyond the security threat, IS challenges Saudi rulers with its effort to create a state that implements the very principles the kingdom’s Wahhabi rulers claim to embrace. In doing so, it forces Saudi Arabia to walk a tightrope in balancing its policies that severely restrict women’s and other human rights with its fending off of mounting international criticism that it is jihadism’s ideological mother lode.
Matching words with deeds
In a bid to counter the criticism and distance the kingdom from allegations of support for jihadism, Saudi ambassador to Britain Mohammed bin Nawaf Al Saud wrote in The Guardian: “…Muhammad Ibn Abd al Wahhab, was a well-travelled, learned, scholarly jurist of the 18th century. He insisted on adherence to Qur’anic values and the teachings of the prophet Muhammad (PBUH) which includes the maximum preservation of human life, even in the midst of jihad. He taught tolerance and supported the rights of both men and women.”
He went on to say: “The government of Saudi Arabia does not support or fund the murderers who have collected under the banner of the Islamic State. Their ideology is not one that we recognise, or that would be recognised by the vast majority of Muslims around the world – whether they were Sunni or Shia.”
To effectively counter the IS challenge, Saudi Arabia will have to match the ambassador’s words with deeds. That would involve far-reaching reform, including the abolition of debilitating restrictions on women like a ban on driving and limited access to the labour market as well as an escalating crackdown on freedom of expression. So far, there is little indication that Saudi rulers are willing to travel down that road.
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Syria’s Fallout: Rise of Islamic State jihadists
August 18th, 2014By James M. Dorsey.
US President Obama’s decision to launch air strikes against the Islamic State jihadists in Iraq is fraught with pitfalls and could persuade IS to consolidate its position in Syria.
Commentary
US President Barak Obama’s decision to launch air strikes against the Islamic State, the jihadist group that controls a large swath of Syria and Iraq, is fraught with pitfalls. Even if it succeeds in stalling the group’s advance in Iraq, the air strikes could persuade the Islamic State to re-focus its attention on Syria to consolidate its position in the knowledge that Obama is less likely to intervene to salvage the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Obama’s reluctance to support non-jihadist Syrian rebels in the early days of Syria’s civil war has produced the very nightmare he had tried to avoid: the emergence of a well-organized, well entrenched, competent and ruthless jihadist force that not only threatens to partition, if not take control of Syria but also Iraq, and poses a serious threat to Lebanon and Jordan. Also Obama left the door open to regional Sunni states to support the Islamic State often through non-official channels while allowing aid to jihadists to go unchecked.
Obama is banking on the establishment of an inclusive Iraqi government capable of reaching out to the country’s non-Shiite communities, to undermine support for the Islamic State’s popular base, foremost among whom are Sunni Muslims. While there is no doubt that many Sunnis were driven towards the Islamic State by outgoing Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s pro-Shiite sectarian policies, that gambit is countered by the fact that the United States and its allies have allowed the jihadist group to flourish In a festering sectarian milieu in which US allies like Saudi Arabia were as much drivers as was the outgoing Iraqi leader.
Fears of mission creep
With tens of thousands of Yazidis trapped by the jihadists on a mountain in northern Iraq under dire circumstances and the security of Iraqi Kurdistan under threat, until this latest crisis Iraq’s most stable region, Obama had little choice but to take action. Fears of mission creep in the United States may however not be unwarranted if the Obama administration indeed intends to defeat rather than just contain the Islamic State and attempt to maintain the territorial integrity of Iraq that is hanging by a bare thread.
However growing Saudi-fuelled sectarianism in the Middle East is likely to backfire on the US effort as many Sunnis will perceive the air strikes as an expression of a pro-Shi’ite policy. Sunnis widely believe that US policy had brought Shiites to power in Iraq with the toppling in 2003 of Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein, a Sunni. Iran, they fear, could return to the international fold if negotiations to solve the nuclear problem are concluded successfully. All of this comes on top of US reluctance to give Syrian rebels the means to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a leader of the Alawites, which is an offshoot of Shi’ism. The Sunnis sense of being embattled is reflected in the fact that they have acquiesced in the repression and effective expulsion of other Iraqi minorities such as Christians and Yazidis.
Few doubt the Islamic State’s military performance, enhanced by advice from senior military officers who served under Saddam as well its strategic and tactical flexibility. With US air strikes targeting sophisticated primarily US military hardware captured by Islamic State fighters from fleeing Iraqi soldiers as well as concentrations of the group’s fighters, the Islamic State is likely to revert in Iraq to its military origins: an infantry force that engages in guerrilla tactics and employs suicide bombers. It is a strategy that could reduce the effectiveness of air strikes.
Refocussing on Syria
On a grander scale, Islamic State may also complicate Obama’s options by re-focussing on territorial gains in Syria. It virtually crushed this week all opposition in the eastern province of Deir ez Zour, Syria’s sixth largest city. The Islamic State has proven its ability to fight on multiple fronts in contrast to Assad’s war-weary military that appears to fight one battle at a time, with campaigns that persuade civilians to flee in a bid to isolate rebels and force them to surrender.
As a result, the Islamic State could first concentrate on capturing Aleppo, Syria’s embattled largest city, rather than advancing towards the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, which no doubt would provoke intensified US military strikes. Successful in Aleppo, it could consider moving to threaten Damascus. Such a move would put Obama and America’s Gulf allies in a bind: allow Syria with its borders with Israel, Jordan and Lebanon to fall to the strongest, most brutal jihadist group to have emerged to date or step in to save a despotic, brutal leader allied with Iran and Russia whose demise is a US policy goal.
The pitfalls for Obama don’t stop there. If stopping the Islamic State in its tracks and eventually rolling back its advances with US air forces supporting Iraqi and Kurdish ground troops is the medium term goal, short term necessities force it to adopt measures that are more likely to lead to a break-up of the Iraqi nation state. With politicians in Baghdad struggling to replace Al-Maliki with a more inclusive Iraqi national government, highly motivated but poorly armed Kurdish Peshmergas with a long history of fighting Saddam are the US’ main ally on the ground. The Obama administration’s decision this week to arm the Kurds with light weapons and ammunition is likely to fuel Kurdish ambitions for independence that had already kicked into high gear with the collapse of the major units of the Iraqi military in the face of Islamic State advances.
Those fears are also justified given that the United States may not be able to continue differentiating between the situation in Iraq and in Syria. For the Obama administration, the stakes are high. While sympathetic to the goals in Iraq outlined by Obama, humanitarian relief for a community threatened with a massacre and protection of US personnel, many Americans, after a decade of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, are war weary. At the same time, US credibility is on the line in a region that has few security alternatives but the United States but is increasingly sceptical about its ability to live up to expectations.
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The Cairo Talks: Mediation or End Game in the Gaza War?
August 10th, 2014
By James M. Dorsey.
Joint efforts by Israel and Egypt to prevent Hamas from emerging from the Gaza war with a political victory not only threaten to undermine efforts to achieve a formal Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire but could also close the door to a potential breakthrough that would allow for Palestinian economic development, the creation of building blocks for a future resolution of the conflict, and at least a partial reversal of damage to Israel’s international standing.
Key to the stalled Egypt-led talks in Cairo to negotiate an end to fighting between Israel and Hamas, the Islamist militia that controls the Gaza Strip, is the intimate relationship forged between Israeli and Egyptian leaders since the military coup that toppled Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi a little more than a year ago. The relationship is built on shared political goals, first and foremost among which deep-seated animosity towards the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is an offshoot.
At the core of the virtual breakdown of the ceasefire talks is Hamas’ demand backed by all Palestinian factions, including the Palestine Authority headed by President Mahmoud Abbas that any halt to the fighting involve a lifting of the Israeli-Egyptian blockade of Gaza. It is a demand that addresses not only Israel but also Egypt which has refused to reverse its closing of border crossings with Gaza. For its part, Israel has demanded with Egyptian support the demilitarization of Gaza.
On the face of it, the gap between the Israeli and Palestinian negotiating position would seem hard to bridge.
Lifting the Gaza blockade would hand Hamas a political victory. Demilitarization would constitute a political defeat at a time that Palestinians are winning international sympathy; Israel’s image has been severely tarnished as it faces mounting criticism from some of its closest allies and a significantly strengthened movement calling for a boycott of and sanctions against the Jewish state; and world leaders, including President Barak Obama, are starting to question the blockade of Gaza.
Bridging that gap is no mean fete. It threatens to be a still-born baby when the mediator shares the political goals of one of the parties and is reluctant to put forward demands of the other party because they contradict the mediator’s own objectives. Yet, that is what is happening in Cairo.
Egypt demonstrated its approach when it a month ago it put forward the very first proposal to achieve a ceasefire in the Gaza war. The proposal was rejected by Hamas because Egypt did not even bother to consult it before putting its proposal forward. Egypt has maintained its approach throughout the talks that last week succeeded in silencing the guns for 72 hours but have failed to advance prospects for a more long-lasting ceasefire.
Throughout last week’s talks Egypt has sought to water down the Palestinian demands for a lifting of the blockade and the building of a port in Gaza that would give the strip its only link to the outside world that would not go through Egypt or Israel. In an absolution of responsibility, Egypt advised the Palestinians that their demand for an opening of Egypt’s border crossings with Gaza had been rejected by Israel. Egypt advised the Palestinians that an easing or lifting of the blockade would only be possible in exchange for demilitarization, the effective defanging of Hamas and other militant groups in Hamas. Palestinian negotiators have stuck to their core demands but dropped several of their conditions for a permanent ceasefire including the release of Palestinians who had been freed as part of US-sponsored peace talks earlier this year and have since been re-arrested and expansion from three to 12 miles of Gaza’s territorial waters.
While Israel has rejected the demand for a port as well as safe passage for Palestinians travelling between Gaza and the West Bank it has said it would allow the transfer of funds for the payment of Hamas government employees and the rebuilding of the territory as well as some easing of restrictions on border crossings. Israel has also backed down on its opposition to a Hamas-backed national unity government headed by Abbas that would extend its rule to Gaza. In agreeing to a reconstruction of Gaza, Israel has however insisted on strict controls on any goods that could be used to build tunnels or weapons.
If the peace talks have produced anything, it is a conviction among Palestinian negotiators that Israel would like to see an end to the hostilities. The problem is that this reinforces Palestinian resolve. The dilemma is that “Israel demands a cease-fire before renewing negotiations, whereas Hamas believes that only rocket fire will make Israel more flexible,” said prominent Israeli journalist Zvi Bar’el in Ha’aretz newspaper.
Egypt appears for now to have closed the door to avenues that could lead to a bridging of the gap between the Israeli and Palestinian negotiating positions such as international policing of any agreement that would be implemented incrementally based on fulfilment of obligations by both parties at each stage of the process. Egypt argued that such steps should be part of peace rather than ceasefire negotiations. Egypt’s “only concession so far has been to hold talks even in the absence of a cease-fire,” Bar’el concluded.
The stalemate in the talks in the absence of an honest broker holds out little hope for a semi-permanent silencing of the guns. Egyptian strongman-turned-president Abdel Fattah Al Sisi appeared to be signalling that with his departure on Sunday for visits to Saudi Arabia, his main foreign backer, and Russia. He has left General Mohammed Ahmed Fareed al-Tohami, the head of Egyptian military intelligence, the agency traditionally dealing with Israeli-Palestinian issues, in charge of the stalled talks.
Israel meanwhile appears to be taking care since the last ceasefire elapsed that fewer civilians are killed in the fighting witness the significantly lower casualty figures in recent days. Gaza moreover no longer monopolizes the top of the international agenda with the United States entering the Iraqi fray in a bid to roll back advances by the Islamic state, the jihadist group that controls a swath of Syrian and Iraqi territory and threatens the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq as well as Lebanon.
Egypt’s effort to exploit the Cairo ceasefire talks to its and Israel’s advantage is a reflection of a successful Israeli diplomatic effort over the past year to convince Al Sisi that they share common interests. A report in The Wall Street Journal suggests that if anything Al Sisi is more hard line towards Hamas than the Israelis themselves.
The paper quoted Israeli officials as worrying that Egypt’s closure of tunnels leading from Gaza to the Sinai that with the blockade were crucial for the delivery of badly needed civilian supplies without offering the Palestinians an alternative supply line could backfire. “They were actually suffocating Gaza too much,” the Journal quoted an Israeli official as saying. While Egypt seems bent on effectively destroying Hamas, Israel wants to see a severely weakened Hamas that is nonetheless capable of controlling more militant groups in Gaza. Egyptian attitudes toward Gaza are highlighted by the fact that Egypt since the toppling of Morsi has accused Hamas of conspiring with Morsi and the Brotherhood against the Egyptian state. In fact, some of the charges being levelled against Morsi in legal proceedings in Egypt involve Hamas.
A senior Israeli official, General Amos Gilad, the Israeli defence ministry’s director of policy and political-military relations, who played a key role in forging the Israeli-Egyptian alliance, hinted at the two countries’ close cooperation during a recent visit to Singapore. “Everything is underground, nothing is public. But our security cooperation with Egypt and the Gulf states is unique. This is the best period of security and diplomatic relations with the Arabs. Relations with Egypt have improved dramatically,” Gilad said.
It is a cooperation that in the short-term allows Israel to proceed with its military effort to soften Hamas in the hope that it will be able to dictate terms for a halt to the fighting. It could also allow Hamas and Israel to observe an undeclared ceasefire. In the medium-term however, it is a strategy that is likely to backfire given the newly found resilience among Palestinians based on their military performance over the past month. Palestinians realize that they are in no position to defeat Israel militarily. They don’t need to as long as they stand their ground. Politically, the war in Gaza despite Egyptian support, is likely to go down in history as one of Israel’s most significant setbacks.
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Israel and Saudi Arabia: Forging Ties on Quicksand
July 13th, 2014By James M. Dorsey
Synopsis
Distrust of US-led efforts for a negotiated end to the Iranian nuclear crisis, animosity towards the Muslim Brotherhood, a shared determination to defeat Al Qaeda, and questions about the reliability of the US as an ally have persuaded Saudi Arabia and Israel to go public with their tacit alliance despite the absence of diplomatic relations between the two erstwhile enemies and Arab criticism of Israeli attacks on Gaza
Commentary
LONG GONE are the days when Saudi Arabia was the only Arab country that had visa rules to bar Jews from entering the kingdom and Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al Faisal gave visiting US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger the Protocols of Zion, a 19th century anti-Semitic tract, as a gift. Saudi Arabia still declines to forge official ties with Israel as long as it refuses to withdraw from territories it conquered during the 1967 war. But perceptions of common threats have expanded long-standing unofficial ties to the point that both the kingdom and Israel feel less constrained in publicly acknowledging their contacts and signalling a lowering of the walls that divide them.
As states, Saudi Arabia and Israel share few, if any common values, despite some cultural values that are common to Wahhabism, the austere form of Islam adopted by the kingdom, and ultra-orthodox Jews. But they increasingly have common interests despite Israel’s current assault on Gaza in an attempt to crush the Islamist Hamas militia, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Both states perceive Iran, particularly an Iran that is a nuclear power, as an existential threat; both also share a determination to defeat the Muslim Brotherhood as well as Al Qaeda-inspired groups and defend as much of the political status quo in the region as possible against change that threatens to replace autocratic regimes with ones dominated by Islamist militants.
Breaching secrecy
A series of recent events indicate that those common interests have made Saudi Arabia, which projects itself as a the leader of the Arab world, less sensitive about going public about relations with Israel in the absence of a settlement of the Palestinian problem. As a result, Israel, which has long accommodated a Saudi need for secrecy, is also becoming more public about cooperation between the two states.
“Everything is underground, nothing is public. But our security cooperation with Egypt and the Gulf states is unique,” said General Amos Gilad, director of the Israeli defence ministry’s policy and political-military relations department “This is the best period of security and diplomatic relations with the Arab. Relations with Egypt have improved dramatically” since last year’s military coup against Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, a Muslim Brother.
Describing Israel’s security border with Jordan, the only Arab state alongside Egypt to have signed a peace treaty with Israel, as the border between Jordan and Iraq, Gilad went on to say: “The Gulf and Jordan are happy that we belong to an unofficial alliance. The Arabs will never accept this publicly but they are clever enough to promote common ground.”
Despite repeated Saudi denials of any links to Israel and official adherence to an Arab boycott of anything Israeli, the kingdom has signalled a relationship in recent weeks with an encounter in Brussels between former intelligence chiefs of the two countries and the first time a Saudi publisher has published an Arabic translation of a book by an Israeli academic.
Step by step
The exchange in late May between Prince Turki bin Faisal al Saud, a full brother of Foreign Minister Prince Saud who headed Saudi intelligence for 24 years, and General Amos Yadlin, a former Israeli military intelligence chief, constituted the most high profile Saudi acknowledgement of relations. Saudis and Israelis have met before in public but Prince Turki went out of his way this time to promote a 2002 Saudi-sponsored peace plan that offers Arab recognition of the Jewish state in exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal from occupied territory and a solution for the Palestinians as a step-by-step process rather than a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.
The exchange followed the controversial publishing of an Arabic translation of ‘Saudi Arabia and the New Strategic Landscape’ by Joshua Teitelbaum, a professor at Bar Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. While Saudi newspapers have long published columns by left-wing, dovish Israeli writers opposed to their government’s policy, Teitelbaum’s book was the first by a mainstream Israeli writer published by a Saudi publisher.
The openings notwithstanding, Israelis and Saudis appear to differ in their expectations of how far closer relations can go. Prince Turki signalled in Brussels that he saw cooperation between the two states on specific issues as a first step towards a solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. That was a far cry from Gilad’s tone who compared Israel’s improved ties to conservative Arab states as “good weather” and cautioned that one should not forget that “clouds will come” in a region in which states are collapsing, tribes dominate and Israeli military superiority is its only guarantee.
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The Iran Nuclear Deal: Rewriting the Middle East Map
November 28th, 2013Synopsis
The agreement to resolve the Iranian nuclear programme could rewrite the political map of the Middle East and North Africa, as well as strengthen the US pivot to Asia. It could also reintegrate Iran into the international community as a legitimate regional power.
Commentary
IF ALL goes well, the preliminary agreement between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council – the United States, Britain, China, France and Russia – plus Germany, would ensure the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear programme and ultimately reintegrate it into the international community. In doing so, it would not only remove the threat of a debilitating war with Iran and prevent a nuclear arms race in the Middle East and North Africa but also return the Islamic republic to the centre stage of the region’s geo-politics.
It would force regional powers such as Israel and Saudi Arabia to focus on their most immediate issues rather than use the Iranian threat as a distraction, while offering the US the opportunity to revert to its stated policy of pivoting from Europe and the Middle East to Asia.
Complex panacea
To be sure, a resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue is not a panacea for the vast array of social, political, economic, ethnic, national and sectarian problems in the Middle East and North Africa. Political and social unrest, boiling popular discontent with discredited regimes and identity politics are likely to dominate developments in the region for years to come.
Nonetheless, Iran’s return to the international community is likely to provide the incentive for it to constructively contribute to ending the bitter civil war in Syria, breaking the stalemate in fragile Lebanon where the Shiite militia Hezbollah plays a dominant role, and furthering efforts to achieve peace between Israelis and Palestinians. That would also take some of the sting out of the region’s dangerous slide into sectarian Sunni-Shiite conflict.
All of that would reduce the number of fires in the Middle East and North Africa that the Obama administration has been seeking to control and that have prevented it from following through on its intended re-focus on Asia.
Countering US policy
A resolution of the nuclear issue offers Iran far more than the ultimate lifting of crippling international sanctions. Iran has over the last decade been able to effectively counter US policy in the Middle East and North Africa through its support of Hezbollah which is the single most powerful grouping in Lebanon; Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian faction in Gaza; its aid to the embattled regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad; backing of restive Shiite minorities in the oil-rich Gulf states and Iraq; and ensuring that the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki looks as much toward Tehran as it does to Washington.
Iran’s incentive to become more cooperative is the fact that resolution of the nuclear issue would involve acknowledgement of the Islamic republic as a legitimate regional power, one of seven regional players – alongside Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Pakistan – that have the ability or economic, military and technological strength to project power. It would also allow Iran to capitalise on geostrategic gains it has made despite its international isolation.
Iran is likely to be further motivated by an easing and ultimate lifting of the sanctions that will allow it to address boiling domestic social and economic discontent. President Hassan Rouhani’s election earlier this year has for now replaced that powder keg with high expectations that his more moderate policies would ease the heavy economic price Iran was paying for its nuclear programme. This is despite many Iranians feeling disappointed that Iran will reap only US$7 billion in benefits from the freshly concluded agreement in the coming six months. The $7 billion serve, however, as an incentive for Iran to come to a comprehensive and final agreement on its nuclear programme.
From spoiler into a constructive player
What worries opponents of the nuclear deal like Israel and Saudi Arabia most is the potential transformation of Iran from a game spoiler into a constructive player. The nuclear deal removes the Islamic republic as the foremost perceived threat to the national security of Israel and Saudi Arabia. For Israel, this risks peace with the Palestinians reclaiming its position at the top of the agenda, making it more difficult for the Israelis to evade the painful steps needed to end a conflict that is nearing its centennial anniversary.
For Saudi Arabia, it complicates its efforts to fuel regional sectarianism, deflect calls for equitable treatment of its Shiite minority as well as for greater transparency and accountability, and establish itself as the region’s unrivalled leader.
Nowhere is that likely to be more evident than in Iranian policy towards Syria. Contrary to perception and what Saudi Arabia and its allies would like the world to believe, Iranian-Syrian relations are not based on sectarian affinity but on common interests stemming from international isolation. That reality changes as Iran rejoins the international community.
For the US, a deal means evading at least for now the threat of another Middle East war with potentially catastrophic consequences and enlisting Iran in addressing the region’s problems. That creates space for it to focus on long term goals in Asia.
However, in removing Iran as a regional lightning rod, the US is likely to be forced to clearly define a Middle East policy that balances short term national security with the reality of years of regional volatility and unrest to come that could redraw some national borders and is likely to involve messy political and social transitions, following the toppling in recent years of autocrats in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen and the civil war in Syria.
James M. Dorsey is a Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. He is also co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog and a forthcoming book with the same title.
Wahhabism vs. Wahhabism: Qatar Challenges Saudi Arabia
September 9th, 2013
By James M. Dorsey.
Introduction
As Saudi Arabia seeks to inoculate itself against the push for greater freedom, transparency and accountability sweeping the Middle East and North Africa, a major challenge to the kingdom’s puritan interpretation of Islam sits on its doorstep: Qatar, the only other country whose native population is Wahhabi and that adheres to the Wahhabi creed. It is a challenge that is rooted in historical tensions that go back to Qatari efforts in the nineteenth century to carve out an identity of its own. It also stems from long-standing differences in religious interpretations that are traceable to Qatar’s geography, patterns of trade and history; and a partially deliberate failure to groom a class of popular Muslim legal scholars of its own. More recently, Qatar’s development of an activist foreign policy promoting Islamist-led political change in the Middle East and North Africa as well as a soft power strategy designed to reduce its dependence on a Saudi defence umbrella was prompted by a perception that it no longer can assume that the kingdom would be able to effectively protect it. Although long existent, the challenge has never been as stark as it is now, at a time of massive change in the region. The differences are being fought out in Syria and Arab nations who, have in recent years, toppled their autocratic leaders, Egypt being one of the first and foremost.
While the differences in social, foreign and security policies cannot be hidden, Qatar, which hosts the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East, and Saudi Arabia have nevertheless moved in recent years from a cold war to a modicum of good neighbourly relations and cooperation with clearly defined albeit unspoken red lines to outright proxy confrontation. In the process, Qatar has emerged as living proof that Wahhabism, the puritan version of Islam developed by the eighteenth century preacher, Mohammed Abdul Wahhab, that dictates life in Saudi Arabia since its creation, can be somewhat forward and outward looking rather than repressive and restrictive. It is a testimony that is by definition subversive and is likely to serve much more than the case of freewheeling Dubai as an inspiration for conservative Saudi society that acknowledges its roots but in which various social groups are increasingly voicing their desire for change.
The subversive nature of Qatar’s approach is symbolized by its long-standing, deep-seated ties to the Muslim Brotherhood that faces one of its most serious litmus tests at a time of the ascension of a new emir and a successful Saudi counter-revolutionary campaign that helped topple the government of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi in July 2013, and that same month, curtailed Qatari influence within the rebel movement opposed to embattled Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.
Everything but a mirror image
A multi-domed, sand-coloured, architectural marvel, Doha’s newest and biggest mosque, symbolizes Qatar’s complex and volatile relationship with Saudi Arabia as well as its bold soft power policy designed to propel it to the cutting edge of the twenty first century. It is not the mosque itself that has raised eyebrows but its naming after an eighteenth century warrior priest, Sheikh Mohammed Abdul Wahhab, the founder of Islam’s most puritan sect.
The naming of the mosque that overlooks the Qatar Sports Club in Doha’s Jubailat district was intended to pacify more traditional segments of Qatari society as well as Saudi Arabia, which sees the tiny Gulf state, the only other country whose native population is Wahhabi, as a troublesome and dangerous gadfly on its doorstep challenging its puritan interpretation of Islam as well as its counterrevolutionary strategy in the Middle East and North Africa. Qatar’s social revolution in the past two decades challenges Saudi efforts to maintain as much as possible of its status quo while impregnating itself against the push for greater freedom, transparency and accountability sweeping the region. By naming the mosque after Abdul Wahhab, Qatar reaffirmed its adherence to the Wahhabi creed that goes back to nineteenth century Saudi support and the ultimate rise to dominance of the Al Thani clan, the country’s hereditary monarchs until today who account for an estimated twenty per cent of the population.[1]
Yet, despite being a traditional Gulf state, Qatari conservatism is everything but a mirror image of Saudi Arabia’s stark way of life with its powerful, conservative clergy, absolute gender segregation; total ban on alcohol and houses of worship for adherents of other religions, and refusal to accommodate alternative lifestyles or religious practices. Qataris privately distinguish between their “Wahhabism of the sea” as opposed to Saudi Arabia’s “Wahhabism of the land,” a reference to the fact that the Saudi government has less control of an empowered clergy compared to Qatar that has no indigenous clergy with a social base to speak of; a Saudi history of tribal strife over oases as opposed to one of communal life in Qatar, and Qatar’s outward looking maritime trade history. Political scientists Birol Baskan and Steven Wright argue that on a political level, Qatar has a secular character similar to Turkey and in sharp contrast to Saudi Arabia, which they attribute to Qatar’s lack of a class of Muslim legal scholars.[2] The absence of scholars was in part a reflection of Qatari ambivalence towards Wahhabism that it viewed as both an opportunity and a threat: on the one hand it served as a tool to legitimise domestic rule, on the other it was a potential monkey wrench Saudi Arabia could employ to assert control. Opting to generate a clerical class of its own would have enhanced the threat because Qatar would have been dependent on Saudi clergymen to develop its own. That would have produced a clergy steeped in the kingdom’s austere theology and inspired by its history of political power-sharing that would have advocated a Saudi-style, state-defined form of political Islam.
By steering clear of the grooming of an indigenous clergy of their own, Qatari leaders ensured that they had greater maneuverability.by ensuring that they did not have to give a clergy a say in political and social affairs. As a result, Qatar lacks the institutions that often hold the kingdom back. In contrast to Saudi Arabia, Qatari rulers do not derive their legitimacy from a clerical class. Qatar’s College of Sharia (Islamic Law) was established only in 1973 and the majority of its students remain women who become teachers or employees of the endowments ministry rather than clergymen.[3] Similarly, Qatar does not have a religious force that polices public morality. Nor are any of its families known for producing religious scholars. Qatari religious schools are run by the ministry of education not as in the Saudi kingdom by the religious affairs authority. They are staffed by expatriates rather than Qataris and attended by less than one per cent of the total student body and only ten per cent of those are Qatari nationals.[4] Similarly, Qatari religious authority is not institutionally vested. Qatar has for example no Grand Mufti as does Saudi Arabia and various other Arab nations; it only created a ministry of Islamic Affairs and Endowments 22 years after achieving independence.
The lack of influential native religious scholars allowed Qatar to advance women in society, and enable them to drive and travel independently; permit non-Muslims to consume alcohol and pork; sponsor Western arts like the Tribeca Film Festival; develop world-class art museums; host the Al Jazeera television network that revolutionized the region’s controlled media landscape and has become one of the world’s foremost global broadcasters;, and prepare to accommodate Western soccer fans with un-Islamic practices during the 2022 World Cup. The absence of an indigenous clerical class risked enhancing the influence of Saudi and other foreign scholars, particularly among more conservative segments of Qatari society.
In doing so, Qatar projects to young Saudis and others a vision of a less restrictive and less choking conservative Wahhabi society that grants individuals irrespective of gender a greater degree of control over their lives. Qatari women, in the mid-1990s, were like in Saudi Arabia: banned from driving, voting or holding government jobs. Today, they occupy prominent positions in multiple sectors of society in what effectively amounted to a social revolution. It’s a picture that juxtaposes starkly with that of its only Wahhabi brother. In doing so, Qatar threw down a gauntlet for the kingdom’s interpretation of nominally shared religious and cultural beliefs. “I consider myself a good Wahhabi and can still be modern, understanding Islam in an open way. We take into account the changes in the world and do not have the closed-minded mentality as they do in Saudi Arabia,” Abdelhameed Al Ansari, the dean of Qatar University’s College of Sharia, a leader of the paradigm shift, told The Wall Street Journal in 2002.[5] Twenty years earlier Al Ansari was denounced as an “apostate” by Qatar’s Saudi-trained chief religious judge for advocating women’s rights. “All those people who attacked me, most of them have died, and the rest keep quiet,” Al Ansari said.
Qatar’s long-standing projection of an alternative is particularly sensitive at a time that Saudi Arabia is implicitly debating the very fundaments of the social and political arrangements that the Qataris call into question. The kingdom’s conservative ulema and Salafis worry that key members of the ruling family, including King Abdullah; his son, Prince Mutaib, who heads the National Guard; and Prince Turki al-Faisal, former head of intelligence and ambassador to the United States and Britain, are toying with the idea of a separation of state and religion in a state that was founded on a pact between the ruling Al-Sauds and the clergy and sees itself as the model of Islamic rule. The clergy voiced its concern in the spring of 2013 in a meeting with the king two days after Prince Mutaib declared that “religion (should) not enter into politics.” Prince Turki first hinted at possible separation 11 years ago when he cited verse 4:59 of the Quran: “O you who have believed, obey God and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you.” Prince Turki suggested that the verse referred exclusively to temporal authority rather than both religious and political authority. Responding to Prince Mutaib in a tweet, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul-Aziz al-Tarifi warned that “whoever says there is no relationship between religion and politics worships two gods, one in the heavens and one on earth.”[6]
To be sure, Qatar’s greater liberalism hardly means freedoms as defined in Western societies. Qatar’s former emir, Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, who abdicated in June 2013 in favour of his son, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al Khalifa, silenced opposition to reforms. Sheikh Hamad, for example, arrested in 1998 the religious scholar, Abdulrahman al Nuaimi, who criticized his advancement of women rights. Al Nuaimi was released three years later on condition that he no longer would speak out publicly. Qatari poet Muhammad Ibn al-Dheeb al-Ajami, was sentenced in November 2011 to life in prison in what legal and human rights activists said was a “grossly unfair trial that flagrantly violates the right to free expression” on charges of “inciting the overthrow of the ruling regime.”
His sentence was subsequently reduced to 15 years in prison. Al-Ajami’s crime appeared to be a poem that he wrote, as well as his earlier recitation of poems that included passages disparaging senior members of Qatar’s ruling family. The poem was entitled “Tunisian Jasmine”. It celebrated the overthrow of Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. A draft media law approved by the Qatari cabinet would prohibit publishing or broadcasting information that would “throw relations between the state and the Arab and friendly states into confusion” or “abuse the regime or offend the ruling family or cause serious harm to the national or higher interests of the state.” Violators would face stiff financial penalties of up to one million Qatari riyals (US $275,000).[7] In a rare public criticism, Qatari journalists demanded in June 2013 greater freedoms and criticized the absence of a media law and press association.[8]
Ring-fencing the Gulf
With the reforms and their implicit challenge to the kingdom notwithstanding, Qatar shares with Saudi Arabia a firm will to ring-fence the Gulf against the popular uprisings in other parts of the Middle East and North Africa. The two countries’ diverging world views have however manifested themselves in differing approaches towards the popular revolts and protests sweeping the region. While Saudi Arabia has adjusted to regional change on a reactive case-by-case basis by recently launching a successful counter-revolutionary effort in Egypt and trying to counter the Brotherhood’s influence among Syria rebels, Qatar has sought to embrace it head on as long as it is not at home or in its Gulf neighbourhood. For that reason, Qatar supported the dispatch to Bahrain in 2011 of a Saudi-led force to help quell a popular uprising in its own backyard.
The rift between Saudi Arabia and its major Gulf allies was evident in a commentary by Abd al-Rahman Al-Rashed, the general manager of Al Arabiya, the Saudi network established to counter Qatar’s Al Jazeera. Accusing Qatar, the only Gulf state critical of the Egyptian military’s crackdown, of fuelling the flames of the Muslim Brotherhood campaign against the Egyptian military’s toppling of Morsi in the summer of 2013, Al-Rashed wrote: “We find it really hard to understand Qatar’s political logic in a country (Egypt) to which it is not linked at the level of regimes or ideologically or economically. Egyptians in Qatar moreover are only a minority. Qatar’s insistence that the moving force of the army and Egyptian political parties accept the Brotherhood’s demands is not only impossible but also has dangerous repercussions.
Supporting the Brotherhood at this current phase increases (the Brotherhood’s) stubborn insistence to stick to its guns and creates an extremely dangerous situation. So why is Qatar doing it? We really don’t understand why! Historically and over a period of around 20 years, Qatar has always adopted stances that oppose the positions of its Gulf brothers, and all of Qatar’s opposing policies have ended up unsuccessful.”[9] In scathing remarks criticizing those opposed to the Egyptian military’s removal of Morsi, Saudi King Abdullah referred to Qatar without naming it: “Let it be known to those who interfered in Egypt’s internal affairs that they themselves are fanning the fire of sedition and are promoting the terrorism which they call for fighting, I hope they will come to their senses before it is too late; for the Egypt of Islam, Arabism, and honourable history will not be altered by what some may say or what positions others may take.” the monarch said.[10]
By maintaining support for the Brotherhood as it fought for its survival, Qatar aligned itself with the very Islamists in its own backyard who were challenging Gulf regimes and that the Saudi-led bloc was seeking to suppress. In doing so, it also identified with Gulf Islamists who were exploiting their criticism of Gulf backing of the Egyptian coup to campaign for increased support for anti-Assad rebels in Syria.by comparing Egyptian military leader General Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi to Assad. The often blunt criticism by Gulf Islamists speaking from the pulpit in mosques and on Twitter resonated with the public, as tweets and videos of sermons went viral. Qatar’s positioning implicitly recognized attempts by Saudi Arabia to co-opt Islamist forces like the Sahwa, a powerful Islamist network nurtured by members of the Brotherhood that had supported the government in the early days of the Arab popular revolts, was failing. The widening rift between the Islamists and the ruling Al-Saud family was further highlighted by the death of Mohamed Al Hadlaq, a nephew of the kingdom’s terrorist rehabilitation program who died in Syria fighting as part of a jihadist rebel group.[11]
The Brotherhood, the only organized opposition force in the kingdom, albeit clandestinely, stands at the core of differences between Qatar and Saudi Arabia over Syria even though they coordinated to become the first Arab states to withdraw their ambassadors from Damascus in 2011. Their divergence over the Brotherhood posed however a dilemma for the kingdom which gravitated towards more secular as well as Salafi rebels in its bid to topple Assad’s secular Alawite (read Shiite and heretic in Saudi eyes) regime; weaken Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah; and thwart a power grab by the Syrian Brotherhood. Support of Salafi forces risked a repeat the fallout of Saudi aid to Afghan mujahedeen fighting the Soviets in the 1980s who once intoxicated by their defeat of a superpower turned against the kingdom and its allies. In contrast to the kingdom, Qatar has proven more willing to risk engagement with jihadi groups on the grounds that its priority was to see the Assad regime overthrown sooner than later and that their exclusion would only aggravate Syria’s grief.
“I am very much against excluding anyone at this stage, or bracketing them as terrorists, or bracketing them as al-Qaeda. What we are doing is only creating a sleeping monster, and this is wrong. We should bring them all together, we should treat them all equally, and we should work on them to change their ideology, i.e. put more effort altogether to change their thinking. If we exclude anything from the Syrian elements today, we are only doing worse to Syria. Then we are opening the door again for intervention to chase the monster,” Qatari Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Khalid bin Mohamed al-Attiyah told an international security conference in Manama in late December 2012. The official played down the jihadi character of some of the Syrian rebel groups. “They are only close to God now because what they are seeing from blood – and I am saying this for all of Syria. Muslims, Christians, Jews – whenever they have a crisis, they come close to God. This is the nature of man. If we see that someone is calling Allahu Akbar (God is great), the other soldier from the regime is also calling Allahu Akbar when he faces him. This is not a sign of extremism or terrorism,” Al-Attiyah said.[12]
The fundamentally different strategies of self-preservation of Qatar and the Gulf states are rooted in a Qatari perception that the role of the Saudi clergy in policymaking has resulted in Saudi Arabia failing in its ambition to provide the region with vision and effective leadership that would have allowed it to perhaps pre-empt the wave of change and resolve problems on its own. That perception has reinforced Qatar’s raison d’etre: a state that maintains its distinction and tribal independence from the region’s behemoth, Saudi Arabia, with whom it is entangled in regional shadow boxing match.
While the ruling families of both have sought to buffer themselves against protests by boosting social spending, Saudi Arabia has opted for maintenance of the status quo wherever possible and limited engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Syria and elsewhere, overshadowed by its deep-seated distrust of the group. Saudi Arabia’s attitude towards the Brotherhood is informed by a fear that Islamic government in other nations could threaten its political and religious claim to leadership of the Muslim world based on the fact that it is home to Mecca and Medina, Islam’s two holiest cities, its puritan interpretation of Islamic dogma, and its self-image as a nation ruled on the basis of Islamic law with the Quran as its constitution. The threat posed by the Brotherhood and Qatari promotion of political activism is reinforced by the fact that concepts of violent jihad have largely been replaced by Islamist civic action across the Middle East and North Africa in demand of civil, human and political rights. That hits close to home. Saudi efforts to co-opt the Sahwa movement in the kingdom whose positions are akin to those of the Brotherhood have only succeeded partially. Sahwa leader Salman al-Odeh warned the government in an open letter in March 2013 against ignoring widespread public discontent.[13]
By contrast, Qatar’s pragmatic relationship to Wahhabism eased the early forging of a close relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood. Qatar’s ties to the Brotherhood may be less motivated by ideology than by a determination to distinguish itself from the kingdom and back what at times appeared to be a winning horse. Ironically, Qatar is joined by Bahrain, one of, if not the Gulf state closest to Saudi Arabia, in bucking the region’s trend and maintaining close ties to the Brotherhood. The Bahraini Brotherhood’s political arm, the Al-Minbar Islamic Society, has been allowed to operate openly. The group, which has largely supported the government, is widely believed to be funded by the island’s minority Sunni Muslim ruling family and Islamic finance sector in a bid to counter political forces that represent its Shiite Muslim majority.[14]
Qatar’s relationship with the Brotherhood was moreover facilitated by the fact that key figures from the group like Egyptian-born Yusuf Al Qaradawi, a major influence in a country with no real clergy of its own, Libyan imam Ali Al Salabi, fellow Egyptian Sheikh Ahmed Assal and Sheikh Abdel Moez Abdul Sattar have had a base in exile in Doha for decades. Qaradawi, who has been resident in Doha since the 1970s, wields intellectual and theological influence within the Brotherhood but insists that he is not a member. “Saudi Arabia has Mecca and Medina. We have Qaradawi — and all his daughters drive cars and work,” said former Qatari justice minister and prominent lawyer Najeeb al Nauimi.[15]
Qaradawi, a controversial figure in the West, is widely credited for Qatar’s early backing of opponents to Syrian president Assad. He noted in the early days of the Syrian uprising that historic links between Egypt and Syria put Syria in protesters’ firing line.[16] Qaradawi was immediately accused by Syrian officials of fostering sectarianism.[17] The Qatari support ended the close ties Hamad had forged in the first decade of the twenty first century as a result of his strained relations with the Saudis with Assad, a leader of the more radical bloc in the Arab world.
Qaradawi took his advocacy of resistance to Assad a significant step further by effectively endorsing the sectarian Sunni-Shia Muslim divide in a speech in late May 2013 before the ascension of Tamim, who under his father was Qatar’s main interlocutor with the kingdom. By doing so, Qaradawi hinted at a possible change in Qatari policy once Tamim took over the reins. In line with Saudi encouragement of the divide between Sunni and Shia Muslims, Qaradawi urged Muslims with military training to join the anti-Bashar al-Assad struggle in Syria. His condemnation of Lebanese Shiite Muslim militia Hezbollah (Party of God) as the “party of Satan” was immediately endorsed by Saudi grand mufti Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, as was his assertion that al-Assad’s Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shia Islam, was “more infidel than Christians and Jews.” In a surprising gesture to Saudi Arabia, Qaradawi went on to say that “I defended the so-called (Hezbollah leader Hassan) Nasrallah and his party, the party of tyranny… in front of clerics in Saudi Arabia. It seems that the clerics of Saudi Arabia were more mature than me.”[18]
Promoting Islamist activism
Ironically, the setting up of Qatar’s state-owned Al Jazeera television network which handles Gulf states with velvet gloves, parallels the structuring of the Gulf state’s ties to the Brotherhood: the group, which dismantled its operations in Qatar in the late 1990s, was allowed to operate everywhere except for in Qatar itself. Instead of allowing a Qatari branch of the Brotherhood, Qatar moved to fund institutions that were designed to foster a generation of activists in the Middle East and North Africa as well as to guide the Brotherhood in its transition from a clandestine to a public group. Former Qatari Brother Jassim Al-Sultan established the Al-Nahda (Awakening) Project[19] to promote Islamist activism within democracies. A medical doctor, Al-Sultan has since the dissolution of the group in Qatar advised the Brotherhood to reach out to other groups rather than stick to its strategy of building power bases within existing institutions. He has also criticized the Brotherhood for insisting on its slogan, ‘Islam is the Solution.’ Al Nahda cooperates closely with the London and Doha-based Academy of Change (AOC)[20] that focuses on the study of “social, cultural, and political transformations especially in the Arabic and Islamic region.” AOC appears to be modelled on Otoper, the Serbian youth movement that toppled President Slobodan Milosevic and has since transformed itself into a training ground for non-violent protest. The Brotherhood campaigned for AOC founder Hisham Morsy’s release after he was detained during the popular revolt in 2011 that toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
The threat to Saudi Arabia posed by Qatar’s fostering of popular protest was compounded by the nature of the social contract in the kingdom and other energy-rich rentier Gulf states. The state’s generous cradle-to-grave welfare and social and no taxation policy approach in exchange for the surrender of political rights meant that the Brotherhood challenged ruling families on issues that they were most vulnerable to: culture, ideology and civic society. The Qatari government’s support of Al Nahda and AOC was part of its effort, in contrast to other Gulf states, to control the world of national non-governmental organizations. In doing so, it targeted what, according to Hootan Shambayati, effectively amounts to the Gulf states’ Achilles Heel. “The rentier nature of the state limited the regime’s ability to legitimize itself through its economic performance… Consequently, culture and moral values became sources of conflict between the state and segments of the civil society,” Shambayati wrote.[21] The government’s support for activists paralleled Qatar’s earlier bypassing of Arab elites by initially appealing to the public across the region with its groundbreaking free-wheeling reporting and debate on Al Jazeera that, at its peak, captivated an Arabic speaking audience of 60 million.
Sharpening the rivalry
Beyond historic differences in religious experience and practice, two more events sharpened the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Qatar: the 1991 U.S.-led expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait and the rise to power in a 1995 bloodless coup of Sheikh Hamad. The U.S.-led invasion called into question Qatar’s alignment with Saudi Arabia since its independence in 1971, which involved Saudi’s guarantee to protect the tiny emirate. To the Qataris, the invasion demonstrated that Qatar could not rely, for its defence, on a country that was not capable of defending itself. That realization coupled with Kuwait’s ability to rally the international community to its assistance reinforced Hamad’s belief that Qatar’s security was best enhanced by embedding and branding itself in the international community as a cutting-edge, moderate, knowledge-based nation.
The rift with the kingdom was further widened by Saudi outrage at a son revolting against his father that translated into efforts to undermine the new ruler, including attempts to unseat him, sabotage Qatar’s endeavours to export natural gas to other states in the region, and build a bridge linking it with the United Arab Emirates. By all accounts, Hamad’s voluntary abdication in favour of Tamim should have provoked similar ire from the Saudis in a region in which rulers hang on to power until death even if they at times have experienced a deterioration of health that has incapacitated them not only physically but also mentally. One reason it may not is the fact that Saudi officials appreciated Tamim’s more accommodating interaction with them and the fact that his ascension held out the hope of a down toning of the activist and adventurist nature of his father’s foreign policy.
Relations between the two countries had nonetheless already virtually ruptured before Hamad’s 1995 coup after border skirmishes in 1992 and 1994 rooted in long-standing disputes over Saudi projections of itself as first among the region’s Bedouins. They further deteriorated as a result of several allegedly Saudi-backed coup attempts in the late 1990s. The attempts prompted Qatar to strip some 6,000 members of the Al-Gufran clan of their Qatari nationalities because they had patrolled the border on behalf of the Saudis.[22]
The deteriorating relationship with its big brother made it even more imperative for Qatar to strike out on its own – the very thing Saudi Arabia thought to thwart. A struggle for a multi-billion dollar Qatari project to supply gas to Kuwait symbolized Saudi power. Asked in 2003 why the Kuwait project was stalled, then Qatar’s industry and energy minister Abdullah Bin Hamad Al-Attiyah said: “We have received no clearance from Saudi Arabia. Hence it is not feasible.”[23] It took a rollercoaster of repeated Saudi denials and approvals for the project to be finally completed in 2008.
If the natural gas deal was emblematic of Qatari-Saudi relations, so was a London libel case in which the wife of the wife of the former and mother of the new emir, Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser al-Missned, sued Saudi-owned Ash Sharq al Awsat newspaper for falsely reporting that her husband had secretly visited Israel. In her petition to the court, the Sheikha charged that the paper was “controlled by Saudi intelligence paymasters who used the newspaper as a mouthpiece for a propaganda campaign against Qatar and its leadership.”[24]
Saudi and Qatari national interests diverge further when it comes to Iran, with whom Qatar shares the world’s largest gas field. Saudi Arabia sees Iran as a major rival that is instigating civil unrest in the region. It is also the spiritual home of the Shiites, the sect most despised by Saudi Wahhabis. To navigate this minefield, Qatar has projected itself in the first decade of the twenty first century as the mediator of the wider region’s conflicts and prompted it to forge relationships with other Saudi nemeses such as Israel and Hezbollah.
Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, when he was still crown prince, refused to attend an Arab summit in 2000 because of the presence of an Israeli trade office in Doha. The appearance of Saudi dissidents on Al Jazeera two years later persuaded the kingdom to withdraw its ambassador to Qatar. In 2009, the two countries held rival Arab summits within a day of each other despite an improvement in relations in the two preceding years that included a deal allowing Al Jazeera to open a bureau in Riyadh provided it did not air dissident Saudi voices. Seemingly improved relations were highlighted when the emir amnestied several Qataris-turned Saudi nationals convicted of their alleged involvement in the 1996 Saudi-inspired coup attempts.
The improvement in relations was a reflection of Saudi leverage. That leverage was enhanced by Qatar’s own success in deploying soft power. The winning of the hosting rights for the 2022 World Cup meant, for example, that Qatar needed to project stability in its backyard. Saudi Arabia could undermine that perception. Support for the Syrian rebels had a similar potential downside. Qatari backing could backfire on its relations with Iran, driving Qatar in turn closer to the kingdom. While a majority of Qataris are likely to back improved relations, they also appeared to remain ambiguous. Qataris participating in a 2009 broadcast of the BBC’s Doha Debates overwhelmingly described their country’s relations with the kingdom as a ‘cold war.’[25] University students often glorify past Qatari tribal defence of Qatar’s only land border that separates it from Saudi Arabia.
Finally, while few have any doubt about Saudi Arabia’s policy goals – maintenance of the status quo to the greatest degree possible, retention of its leadership role, limiting of the rise of Islamist forces, preservation of monarchial rule and restrictive political reform – Qatar’s actions have raised questions about what it is trying to achieve.
Politicians and analysts grappled, for example, to get a grip on how Qatar’s competition with Saudi Arabia for influence played out in Yemen, a strategic nation at the southern tip of the peninsular. Questions they were trying to wrap their heads around included Qatar’s ties to the powerful Islamist Brotherhood-related Al-Islah movement and its emergence as a mediator in Yemen. Qatar’s role, for example, in the release of a kidnapped Swiss teacher[26] made it rather than Saudi Arabia, the go-to-address in a country in which kidnapping for political and criminal purposes are a fixture of life.
Qatar’s influence in Yemen was both remarkable and sensitive given long-standing Saudi bankrolling of the government of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh as well as the country’s major tribes, including the president’s own tribe, the Hashid tribal confederation. Qatar’s close ties to the Brotherhood as well as a history of mediation in Yemen dating back to the 1990s allowed it to make significant inroads into what the Saudis perceived as their preserve. By competing in Yemen, Qatar benefited from the fact that it was a tiny nation rather than the region’s giant and was not a supplier of jihadists to Yemen-based Al Qa’ida in the Arabian Gulf (AQAP). Qatar’s influence was sufficiently significant to prompt tribal leaders, including prominent businessmen and politician Hamid al-Ahmar, to balance their relations between the two Gulf rivals once they broke off with Saleh during the 2011 popular uprising against him and joined the opposition.
On the back of its relationship with the Brotherhood, Qatar forged ties to other key Yemeni players, including Maj. Gen. Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, a Muslim Brother and powerful advisor to President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. Hadi succeeded Saleh in 2012 in a deal with the opposition mediated by Gulf states under Saudi leadership that was designed to preserve the core structure of the outgoing president’s regime. Qatar initially participated in the diplomatic effort but later pulled out because of “indecision and delays in the signature of the proposed agreement” and “the intensity of clashes” in Yemen.[27] In an interview with Russia today, Saleh had warned a month earlier that “the state of Qatar is funding chaos in Yemen and in Egypt and Syria and throughout the Arab world. We reserve the right not to sign (the Gulf-negotiated deal) if the representatives of Qatar are present” at the ceremony.[28]
The divergence of Qatari and Saudi goals was also symbolized by Qatar’s ties to Nobel Prize winner and prominent Yemeni activist Tawakkol Karma, who emerged as the face of the popular revolt against Saleh. Gen. Al Ahmar’s first armored division, which joined the mass anti-Saleh protesters in early 2011, played a key role in the president’s ultimate demise after 30 years in office, when it attacked the presidential palace in 2012, killing several senior officials and severely wounding the embattled Yemeni leader and various of his key aids. Qatar’s relationship to Al Ahmar dates back to 2008/2009 when it was mediating an end to the armed confrontation with rebel Houthi tribesmen in the north. The general was the Saleh government’s negotiator. Qatar further garnered popularity among Saleh’s opponents by becoming the first Arab country in 2011 to call on the president to step down in response to the demand of protesters camped out on the capital Sana’a’s Change Square. In response, Saleh thundered in a speech: “We derive our legitimacy from the strength of our glorious Yemeni people, not from Qatar, whose initiative we reject.”[29]
Qatar’s success in breaking the Saudi political monopoly in Yemen was evident to all in July 2013 when Hadi stopped in Doha on his way to Washington for an official visit. Hadi was accompanied by General Al-Ahmar. Similarly, when Al Islah leader Muhammad al-Yadumi travelled to Doha in 2012 to thank the government for its support, he did not include Saudi Arabia on his itinerary. It was a glaring omission given Saudi Arabia’s key role in brokering the agreement that eased Saleh out of office.
Turning the page?
When Tamim took over the reins of power in June 2013, he inherited a state that his father ensured was tightly controlled by his wing of the Al Thanis. Hamad created institutions and government offices that were populated by loyalists as well as his offspring and bore the characteristics of autocracy: centralized and personalized decision-making, reliance on patronage networks and an absence of transparency and accountability.[30]
Few Qataris question the achievements of Hamad. With those accomplishments notwithstanding, conservative segments of Qatari society, with whom Sheikh Tamim at times appeared to empathize, have questioned some of the side effects of the former emir’s policies, including:
(i) Huge expenditure on a bold foreign policy that put Qatar at the forefront of regional demands for greater freedom and change but also earned it significant criticism and embarrassment;
(ii) Unfulfilled promises of change at home that would give Qataris a greater say in their country’s affairs;
(iii) A stark increase in foreign labor to complete ambitious infrastructure projects, many of which are World Cup-related, that have exposed Qatar for the first time to real external pressure for social change;
(iv) More liberal catering to Western expatriates by allowing the controlled sale of alcohol and pork;
(v) Potential tacit concessions Qatar may have to make to non-Muslim soccer fans during the World Cup, including expanded areas where consumption of alcohol will be allowed, public rowdiness and dress codes largely unseen in the Gulf state, and the presence of gays.
A discussion in Qatar about possibly transferring ownership of soccer clubs from prominent Qataris, including members of the ruling family, to publicly held companies because of lack of Qatari interest in “the sheikh’s club” illustrates a degree of sensitivity to popular criticism.
Tamim has however enhanced his popularity by his close relationship to Qatari tribes, his upholding of Islamic morals, exemplified by the fact that alcohol is not served in luxury hotels that he owns, and his accessibility similar to that of Saudi King Abdullah. Tamim was also the driving force behind the replacement in 2012 of English by Arabic as the main language of instruction at Qatar University. He is further believed to have been empathetic to unprecedented on-line protest campaigns by Qatari activists against the state-owned telecommunications company and Qatar Airways. Hamad appeared to anticipate a potentially different tone under Tamim by urging Qataris “to preserve our civilized traditional and cultural values.” If Hamad used initial promises of greater liberalization to garner support within his fractured tribe, one of the first to settle in Qatar in the eighteenth century, Tamim may well employ his conservatism to rally the wagons.
The Saudi counter-revolutionary campaign in Egypt and Syria, barely a month after Tamim’s ascension, constituted a serious foreign policy crisis for the new emir. The Saudi-backed coup in Egypt was Saudi Arabia’s third successful counter-revolutionary strike in a matter of weeks against the wave of change in the Middle East and North Africa, and its most important defeat of Qatari support of popular revolts and the Brotherhood. As the anti-Morsi protests erupted in Egypt, Qatari-backed Syrian National Council (SNC) Prime Minister-in-exile Ghassan Hitto resigned under Saudi pressure, and Saudi-backed Ahmed Assi Al-Jerba defeated his Qatar-supported rival, Adib Shishakly, in SNC presidential elections.
Earlier, Saudi Arabia succeeded in restricting Qatari support for the Brotherhood within the SNC and the Free Syrian Army as well as for more radical Islamists by agreeing with the Obama administration that it would be allowed to supply non-US surface-to-air missiles to Syrian rebels as long as distribution is handled by the rebel Supreme Military Council to ensure that weapons did not flow to jihadist forces. Qatar is likely to have little choice but to follow suit. The Saudi success followed its support in crushing a popular uprising in 2011 in Bahrain, massive financial assistance to less wealthy fellow monarchs in Oman, Jordan, and Morocco, and its effort to dominate transition in Yemen after the fall of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
The stakes for Saudi Arabia and Qatar in Egypt were high. A successful Brotherhood-led democratic transition would have cemented the success of popular uprisings and alongside Turkey the role of Islamists in implementing change. It would have also restored Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous nation, to its traditional leadership role in the region in competition with Saudi Arabia. Thwarting the revolt and the Brotherhood would not only eliminate these threats but constitute a substantial bodily blow to Qatari encouragement of change in the Middle East and North Africa.
The Saudi’s moves left Qatar with little choice but to congratulate the Egyptian military on its intervention, asserting that it accepted the will of the Egyptian people. But unlike Saudi Arabia and the fiercely anti-Islamist United Arab Emirates, who remained silent after the killing, days after the coup of 54 Morsi supporters by Egyptian security, and granted Egypt a day later $8 billion in grants and loans, Qatar in a bid to retain its independent position expressed regret at the incident but urged self-restraint and dialogue. At about the same time, Qaradawi, who runs one of Al Jazeera’s most popular shows, “Ash-Shariah wal-Hayat” (Sharia and Life),[31] called on the network and in a fatwa issued in Doha for Morsi’s reinstatement. Qaradawi declared the coup unconstitutional and in violation of Islamic law.[32] Ironically, Qaradawi’s own son, Abdelrahman Al-Qaradawi, took his own father to task on his support for Morsi. Abdelrahman noted that Qaradawi had long argued that a ruler is bound by the opinion of a majority of those who swear loyalty to him. He argued further that the sheikh had taught him that freedom superseded Islamic law.[33]
Saudi countering of Qatari policy followed a gradual turning of the tide in countries where it had helped topple an autocratic leader. Yemeni President Saleh rejected Qatari participation in the Saudi-led Gulf effort to resolve the crisis in his country after Qatar became the first regional power to call for his resignation. Qatari funding of multiple armed Islamist groups in Libya sparked outrage after documents were discovered disclosing the extent of its support. Then oil and finance minister Ali Tarhouni made a thinly veiled reference to Qatar when he declared in October 2011 that “it’s time we publicly declare that anyone who wants to come to our house has to knock on our front door first.”[34] A month later, relations with Algeria turned sour after Hamad, according to Arab media, warned Algerian Foreign Minister Mourad Medleci to “stop defending Syria because your time will come, and perhaps you will need us.”[35] Hamad broke off a visit to Mauritania in January 2012 hours after arriving in the country after President Mohammad Ould Abdel Aziz rejected his demand that he initiate democratic reform and a dialogue with Islamists.[36]
Qatari foreign policy setbacks are paralleled by Al Jazeera’s mounting problems resulting from perceptions that it is promoting the Brotherhood[37] and changes in the pan-Arab television market. The network experienced a boom as the primary news source in the heyday of the Arab revolts that toppled the leaders of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen, but has since seen its viewership numbers decline with Arabs turning increasingly to a plethora of newly established local news broadcasters. Market research company Sigma Conseil reported that Al Jazeera’s market share in Tunisia had dropped from 10.7 per cent in 2011 to 4.8 per cent in 2012 and that the Qatari network was no longer among Egypt’s ten most watched channels. Tunisia’s 3C Institute of Marketing, Media and Opinion Studies said that Al Jazeera Sports was the only brand of the network that ranked in January among the country’s five most watched channels. Al Jazeera reporters are increasingly harassed as they seek to do their jobs in countries like Tunisia and Egypt.
Protests that erupted after the 2013 assassination of prominent opposition leader Shukri Belaid charged that “Al Jazeera is a slave of Qatar,” accusing it of biased reporting on the murder because of the Gulf state’s support for Ennahada, the country’s dominant Islamist grouping.[38] In July 2013, Egyptian colleagues expelled Al Jazeera Cairo bureau chief Abdel Fattah Fayed from a news conference in Cairo organized by the military and the police against whom the prosecutor general issued an arrest warrant on charges of threatening national security and public order by airing inflammatory news. Twenty-two journalists resigned from Al Jazeera’s Egyptian affiliate days earlier in protest against its alleged bias towards the Brotherhood.
The Qatari setbacks raise the question of whether the idiosyncratic Gulf state will be able to sustain its activist support of popular revolts and endorsement of political Islam in the Middle East and North Africa. They also call into question Qatar’s continued ability in opposition to Saudi Arabia to support change in the region as long as it does not occur in the conservative, oil-rich Gulf’s own backyard.
Sports, a double edged sword
Qatar’s emphasis on soft power contrasts starkly with Saudi Arabia fledgling attempts to follow suit by among other things staging cultural exhibitions. The emirate’s strategy like its support for the Brotherhood and popular revolts in the region and its emphasis on country branding constitutes an integral part of its foreign and defense policy, designed to put Qatar on the cutting edge of history and to ensure that the nation is embedded in the international community in a way that enhances the chances that foreign nations will come to its aid in a time of need. In doing so, it like the United Arab Emirates challenges, as Kristian Coates Ulrichsen noted, traditional academic wisdom on the limits on the ability of small states to project power and the assumption of an automatic link between size and power.[39]
Qatar’s soft power approach is based on the realization that no matter what quantity of sophisticated weaponry it purchases or number of foreigners the Gulf State drafts into its military force, it will not be able to defend itself, nor can it rely on Saudi Arabia. The approach also stems from uncertainty over how reliable the United States is as the guarantor of last resort of its security. That concern has been reinforced by the United States’ economic problems, its reluctance to engage militarily post-Iraq and Afghanistan and its likely emergence by the end of this decade as the world’s largest oil exporter.
Soft power puts Qatar regularly at loggerheads with Saudi Arabia and raises concerns in the kingdom on how far Qatar may go. The hosting of the 2022 World Cup has already made it more vulnerable to criticism of restrictions on alcohol consumption, the banning of homosexuality, and working conditions of foreign labour. Qatar’s responses, particularly with regard to alcohol and foreign labour, threaten to sharpen differences with the kingdom and highlight the fact that it is lagging behind in addressing concerns about foreign workers’ conditions, which in turn, has made it more difficult for Saudi Arabia to recruit abroad.
Moreover, Qatar’s projection of itself as a global sports hub and the role of soccer fans in the popular revolts in North Africa has reverberated in the sports sector in the kingdom particularly with regard to fan power and women’s sports, reaffirming the role of sports in the development of the Middle East and North Africa since the late 19th century.[40]
Qatar and Jordan were driving forces in the launch of a campaign in 2012 by Middle Eastern soccer associations grouped in the West Asian Football Federation (WAFF) to put women’s soccer on par with men’s football in a region in which a woman’s right to play and pursue an athletic career remains controversial. Saudi Arabia was conspicuously absent at the launch. The campaign defined “an athletic woman” as “an empowered woman who further empowers her community.” In a rebuttal of opposition to women’s soccer by the kingdom and some Islamists across the region, the campaign stressed that women’s soccer did not demean cultural and traditional values. Contradicting Saudi policy, the campaign endorsed the principle of a woman’s right to play soccer irrespective of culture, religion and race; a women’s right to opt for soccer as a career rather than only as a sport; and soccer’s ability to promote gender equality and level the playing field on and off the pitch.[41]
To be sure, Qatar has been slow in encouraging women’s sports, and like Saudi Arabia, was pressured in 2012 by the International Olympic Committee to, for the first time, field women at an international tournament during the London Olympics.
The WAFF campaign came on the back of a Human Rights Watch report[42] that accused Saudi Arabia of kowtowing to assertions by the country’s powerful conservative Muslim clerics that female sports constitute “steps of the devil” that will encourage immorality and reduce women’s chances of meeting the requirements for marriage. The charges in the report entitled “’Steps of the Devil’ came on the heels of Saudi Arabia backtracking on a plan to build its first stadium especially designed to allow women who are currently barred from attending soccer matches because of the kingdom’s strict public gender segregation to watch games. The planned stadium was supposed to open in 2014.[43]
Qatar’s endorsement of women’s sports has made Saudi Arabia the only Arab and virtually the only Muslim state that refuses to embrace the concept. Spanish consultants developing the kingdom’s first ever national sports plan were instructed to develop a program for men only.[44] Opposition to women’s sports is reinforced by the fact that physical education classes are banned in state-run Saudi girl’s schools. Public sports facilities are exclusively for men and sports associations offer competitions and support for athletes in international competitions only to men.
Saudi opposition to women’s sports and participation in international tournaments was further challenged by a decision by the International Football Association Board (IFAB), backed by Qatar and other Middle Eastern soccer associations, to allow women to wear a hijab that met safety and security standards in international matches. It also came as Saudi women, encouraged by the winds of change in the region, the advancement of women’s sports in Qatar and elsewhere and the support of liberal members of the royal family, were pushing the envelope despite being slammed in Saudi media “for going against their natural role” and being “shameless” because they cause embarrassment to their families.[45]
Similarly, fan pressure forced the resignation of Prince Nawaf bin Feisal in 2012 as head of the Saudi Football Federation (SFF) in an unprecedented move that echoed the toppling of Arab leaders in which militant soccer fans were front row players. Nawaf was replaced by a commoner, renowned former soccer player Ahmed Eid Alharbi, as the first freely chosen head of the SFF in a country that views free and fair polling as an alien Western concept.[46] Fan pressure erupted after Australia’s defeat of the kingdom’s football team in a 2014 World Cup qualifier. Nawaf’s resignation broke a mold in a nation governed as an absolute monarchy and a region that sees control of soccer as a key tool in preventing the pitch from becoming a venue for anti-government protests, a distraction from widespread grievances, and a tool to manipulate national emotions. It also marked the first time that a member of the ruling elite saw association with a national team’s failure as a risk to be avoided rather than one best dealt with by firing the coach or in extreme cases like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Moammar Qaddafi’s Libya, brutally punishing players.
The Saudi royal family, like autocratic leaders throughout the Middle East and North Africa, has associated itself with soccer, the only institution in pre-revolt countries that traditionally evokes the same deep-seated passion as religion. Nawaf’s resignation constituted the first time an autocratic regime sought to put the beautiful game at arm’s length while maintaining control. The ruling family nonetheless retained its grip on sports, with Nawaf staying on as head of the Saudi Olympic Committee and as the senior official responsible for youth welfare, on which the SFF depends alongside television broadcast rights for funding. Major soccer clubs moreover continue to be the playground of princes who at times micro manage matches by phoning mid-game their team’s coaches with instructions on which players to replace.
“Words such as freedom of choice, equality, human rights, rational thinking, democracy and elections, are terms we came to view with high concern and suspicion. We treat them as alien ideas that are trying to sneak within our society from the outside world. But last week, an amazing and irregular event took place, in one of our sporting landmarks. The members of the General Assembly of the Saudi Arabian Football Federation (SAFF) have elected through popular voting, their first president,” wrote columnist Mohammed AlSaif in the Arab News.[47]
Alharbi, a former goalkeeper of Al Ahli SC, the soccer team of the Red Sea port of Jeddah, who is widely seen as a reformer and proponent of women’s soccer, narrowly won the election widely covered by Saudi media. “Saudis were witnessing for the very first time in their lives a government official being elected through what they used to consider as a western ballot system. People eagerly followed a televised presidential debate between the two candidates the previous day,” AlSaif wrote.
Conclusion
Qatar’s foreign policy and soft power strategy effectively puts it at loggerheads with Saudi Arabia. Whether the Saudi-Qatari rivalry will contribute to spark changes in the kingdom or reinforce monarchial autocracy in the region is likely to be as much decided in Qatar itself as by the political rivalry between the two elsewhere in the region. Saudi-backed Qatari conservatives have questioned the emir’s right to rule by decree, organized online boycotts of state-run companies, and led by the crown prince, forced Qatar University to replace English with Arabic as the main language of instruction.
Qatar’s embrace of the Brotherhood, positioning it at the cutting edge of change across the region in addition to its soft power diplomacy, offers opportunities for Saudi Arabia to counter what it perceives as a dangerous policy that the emirate has exploited in Egypt and Syria. Fault lines in Egypt have deepened with the toppling of President Morsi, weakened Qatar’s regional influence and made its Brotherhood allies in other Arab nations in the throes of change reluctant to assume sole government responsibility. Jordan’s Brotherhood-related Islamic Action Front (IAF) officially boycotted parliamentary elections in January 2013 because of alleged gerrymandering. Privately, the IAF, with an eye on Egypt, is believed to have shied away from getting too big a share of the pie for their taste. Mounting opposition to the Brotherhood’s ruling Tunisian affiliate, Ennahada, and the assassination in 2013 of two prominent opposition politician prompted the Islamists to negotiate their replacement by a government of technocrats.[48]
Similarly, Qatar’s victory of the right to host the World Cup may have opened the Pandora’s Box of demographic change that could reverberate throughout the Gulf, a region populated by states whose nationals often constitute minorities in their own countries. Under increasing pressure from international trade unions which have the clout to make true on a threat to boycott the 2022 World Cup, the status of foreign nationals could become a monkey wrench.
Resolution of the dispute with the unions raises the specter of foreigners gaining greater rights and having a greater stake in countries that have sought to protect national identity and the rights of local nationals by ensuring that foreigners do not sprout roots. That effort, so far, goes as far as soccer clubs opting for near empty stadiums because there are not enough locals to fill them rather than offering the population at large something that even remotely could give them a sense of belonging.
As a result, Qatar’s foreign, sports and culture policy seems forward looking despite Saudi-backed conservative opposition at home and at first glance appears to put the tiny Gulf state in a category of its own. Yet, the challenge it poses to Saudi Arabia is increasingly proving to be a challenge to itself.
Whither the Arab Revolts? – A Response to Ali A. Alawi
August 3rd, 2013By James M. Dorsey.
Dear Ali,
I feel compelled to respond to your beautifully written and well-argued epistle to Syed Farid Alatas. I understand your sense of disappointment and betrayal as a result of how events have unfolded in post-revolt Arab nations, but want to take issue with your notions of revolution that lead you to conclude that popular revolts only produce greater suffering, loss of life, mayhem and strife and that civil disobedience is the one available way forward.
You rightfully paint a bleak future for the Middle East and North Africa; that to be clear is not exclusively but to a large extent one of its own making. Indeed, the path of Gandhi, Martin Luther King and civil disobedience would be the way to try and effect change. It’s a path that has repeatedly been defeated in the Middle East and North Africa whether it was with labor strikes in Egypt, the claiming of public space in stadiums or the Brotherhood’s current demonstrations in eastern Cairo,
It takes a great deal to remain pacifist in the face of violence directed against oneself; not impossible, but more often than not unlikely. It’s the equivalent of the conscientious dissenter who is asked what he would do if while walking in a park his girlfriend is attacked and violated. Fact of the matter is that your description of civil disobedience as an educational process is true in an ideal world; the chances that it would survive the harsh realities of the Middle Eastern and North African repressive regimes are slim at best. By the same token, one could argue that war and conflict bond, particularly when once hostile groups stand shoulder-to-shoulder against a common enemy. Sworn enemies did so on Tahrir and other squares, yet the bonding in some cases was skin-deep, in others the jury is still out.
The reality is that even if civil disobedience were a successfully adopted strategy the risks are high that it would involve a regime response that inflicts substantial bloodshed and loss of life. One just needs to look at Syria, Libya and Bahrain where popular revolts started off peacefully and current developments in Egypt. The bottom line is that there is no avoiding payment of a heavy price to redirect the region on to a path towards greater freedom and opportunity for all and founded on public virtues and interest. That is gigantic task that will take a decade and probably more but is unavoidable and historically necessary. I in no way mean to be insensitive to or callous about the pain, suffering and loss of life that it will entail. If we live for our children and grandchildren as well as future generations, this is one gift and sacrifice one can and should give them. I say this based on multiple real life experiences of revolutions, revolts, uprisings and wars in which I have lost many who were very dear to me.
I grant you that this is a tall order. I reject however the notion that the absence of a military that can play a constructive role and of a pluralistic, live-and-let-live understanding of democracy are grounds to condemn another Middle Eastern and North African generation to the stultification of autocracy. It is unfortunate but historically inevitable that the need to develop these ingredients is going to involve sacrifice, a waste of precious lives and bitter and bloody struggle. That is however a choice that people have to make for themselves and as history demonstrates at some point do make. As I grow older, my perspective on why I intuitively take certain positions becomes clearer. I trace my ingrained distrust of authority, deep-seated rejection of abuse of power and violations of human rights as well as a deeply ingrained belief in the role of the fourth estate to a family history of persecution cemented by formative years in the anti-authoritarian student movement of the 1960s.
A wave of dissent and defiance
To me, the revolts in the Middle East and North Africa are but the most dramatic elements of a wave of dissent and defiance that is sweeping the globe. That wave is fuelled by a lack of confidence in institutions; a perception of political, economic and social leadership that fails to listen and is held to different standards of accountability for wrong decisions, misguided policies and mis- or improper management; a perception of failure to root out corruption at all levels of political, economic and social leadership, including sports; a perception that economic progress has failed to ensure that infrastructure as well as health and education facilities do not trail the lifting of huge numbers out of poverty resulting in a mismatch of expectation and reality; and a demand for social justice, dignity and inclusiveness.
The Middle East and North Africa cannot divorce or isolate itself from that trend. The popular will to enact change and shoulder the risk of life, livelihood, repression and counter-revolution is one that one must salute and recognize as historically inevitable. It is by definition healthy and unavoidable even if that is only visible with a bird eye’s view.
Indeed, revolutions as you suggest, are never linear. On the contrary, they are movements that go backwards and forwards and devour their children in the process. They bring out the best and the worst. To be sure, they spark resistance, but so does much that one does in life. They may regress into a period of darkness, the very opposite of what they aimed to achieve.
Counter-revolution is par for the course even if those that stage a revolution are seldom prepared for it. To be sure, it is aided in the Middle East and North Africa by the financial and ideological muscle of the Gulf, particularly Saudi Arabia. Counterrevolutionaries find willing allies in remnants of the former regime, whose strength lies less in their numbers than in the fact that the toppling of a leader does not amount to the eradication of his system. With other words, supporters of the former regimes may not need numeric strength, they rely on the power of the institutions they continue to control. In addition revolutionary justice is seldom pretty and never just. Perhaps, all of that is inevitable and part of the price one pays. By the same token however, little if anything changes, without pressure either from the bottom or from the external. The notion that the status quo is preferable to a revolution that can backfire is equivalent to a passivist interpretation of religion in which man has no responsibility but to serve an omnipotent higher power who preordains everything.
Revolutions are also often cleansing processes. It took the Islamic revolution in Iran for many Iranians to realize that Islam may not be solution, which explains why Iran was the only Muslim Middle Eastern state to have featured pro-American demonstrations in the wake of 9/11. It may take the revival of the police state in Egypt to fundamentally alter the dynamics of change in that country. It took the 1991 war in Iraq and the emergence of an autonomous Kurdish region to initiate a process of change in Turkish attitudes towards the Kurds, a process that could lead to an ultimately healthy redrawal of borders.
‘Sturm und Drang’
The fact that history is littered with revolutionaries, participants in revolutions or supporters of revolutions who change their minds is hardly an argument against revolution, usually the only option to attempt change in an autocracy. On the contrary. There was little expression of regret about the overthrow in the walk-up and the wake of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi’s demise among a broad swath of the anti-Muslim Brotherhood coalition. If anything, many in the anti-Morsi camp held a false belief that an exclusionary approach to politics implemented by the military would put their revolution back on track. The ultimate realization that they miscalculated is likely to produce a new revolutionary force rather than a regret and a desire to return to the status quo ante. That sense of regret may be stronger in Syria as a result of its bloody war but again is more likely to produce a force that will seek to put the broken pieces back together again without simply trying to turn history back.
One reason that revolutions and certainly the current uprisings and longing for change occur is the factor of youth, that ‘sturm und drang’ period in life that is laced with infinitive optimism and endless naiveté and in which nothing seems impossible. In the Middle East and North Africa it is reinforced by a sense of having nothing to lose and an in-your-face repressive apparatus. The 1960s generation in the West is not one that looks back with a sense of regret, perhaps more one that is stunned by its degree of wide open eyedness, innocence and naiveté. It is an innocence that one should not pity; if there is regret it should be regret at that loss of innocence and confidence in one’s ability to enact change. To turn on that willingness to stand up for what is right and against tyranny amounts to indefensible submission and surrender. In the Middle East and North Africa, there is little to indicate a sense of regret among those that populated Tahrir Square in Cairo, the Pearl roundabout in Manama or Change Square in Sana’a in what were genuine uprisings. If anything, there is outrage that the goals of the initial revolt have yet to be achieved and a determination to as yet do so.
To deny the authenticity of the revolts is to ignore a fundamental change in the Middle East and North Africa that no counterrevolution or hijacking of a revolution can erase: the tearing down of the barrier of fear and a mental move from subservience and acceptance of the autocratic father figure who franchises is his neo-patriarchic traits to an unprecedented determination to question and challenge authority and decide for oneself. It constitutes a monumental shift across the political and social spectrum: liberals interrogating and resisting religious precepts, children questioning their parents and young Islamists challenging their ideological elders. The change is ongoing. It’s volatile, messy and often violent. It involves polarization and culture wars. In the words of Egyptian author, activist and writer Ezzedine Choukri-Fishere: “These things take time and they are done through conflict, trouble and confrontation and then they unfold.”
The revolts in the Middle East and North Africa were sparked by an act that generated moral outrage – the self-immolation of a vegetable and fruit vendor in Tunisia, for example, and the Khaled Said incident in Alexandria much like the killing of Senator Aquino in the 1980s in the Philippines and the torture and murder by security forces of schoolchildren in Syria’s Dera’a. What constitutes moral outrage or moral shock is never predictable and only recognizable in hindsight. However, it only does so when it taps a vein of far broader and deep-seated discontent. With other words, festering discontent inevitably sparks revolt, the only question is when and how.
To be sure, social media serve as an accelerator. But equally important, if not more important, remains 24-hour live news coverage. The failed Green Revolution in Iran may have demonstrated the limits of social media but it also serves as an example of the difference that 24-hour television can make. The importance of the cassette in Ayatollah Khomeini’s defeat of the Shah in 1979 occurred in a world in which 24-hour television was in its baby shoes. The effect of no 24-hour television 30 years later bears witness to the impact of the inability to exploit the full scala of potentially available technology. It hardly amounts to the fizzling away of a networked generation. If anything, Iran was ripe for a new revolt in the run-up to Hassan Rouhani’s victory in the latest presidential election by that networked generation despite the government’s extensive effort to deprive it of unrestricted access.
Revolutions are vulnerable
The world looked to the Arab street in the wake of 9/11 for change that would eradicate the feeding ground on which extremism feeds. When the Arab street did not come through, government officials, analysts and journalists wrote the Arab street off. Fact of the matter was, widespread discontent continued to simmer at the surface. One only needed to put one’s ear to the ground. If the current Middle Eastern revolt or series of revolts and its embracement of technology teaches us anything, it is that where discontent exists but cannot be expressed openly, it will be expressed elsewhere in what constitutes a truer reflection of reality. It is a reality that rulers and policymakers ignore at their own peril.
Revolutions are vulnerable by definition. They are staged by inchoate coalitions that share little else than a consensus on what they oppose. The goal of toppling the autocrat more often than not looms so large that the issue of what to do the day after figures in the far distance and is one that, wrongly so, is perceived, as a matter to be tackled at a later date. That is a revolution’s Achilles Heel and the opening that well-organized groups and forces exploit to shape the final outcome. It bares the seeds for inevitable setbacks and lays the ground for a second round. That may be the nature of the beast. In an ideal world revolutionaries would draw the lessons from past experience and be able to anticipate. But then they may not have the innocence and the moral rectitude that empowered them in the first place.
The vulnerability of revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa is indeed enhanced by as you rightly point out the hollowness of the region’s autocratic regimes that are either legacies of nationalist military coups or the ascent of tribal domination, the lack a pluralistic past that can serve as a reference point, and a convoluted history of experimenting with different ideologies whose legacy is nothing but a bitter after taste. Ironically, Gamal Abdel Nasser who may have been inclined towards a more open society immediately after his military coup in 1952 that toppled King Farouk but was ultimately guided by his ingrained distrust of everyone and anyone except fo a few close associates and encapsuled by security men who had a vested interest in autocracy, may be as you suggest the one figure who evokes any sense of nostalgia.
The answer to your question of whether Middle Eastern and North African autocracies are reformable lies on the streets of the region’s cities. The answer is nowhere clearer than In Damascus and other destroyed Syrian cities engulfed in a bitter and bloody battle against a regime determined to hold on to power at all cost. It also lies in the streets of Sana’a and Tripoli where outside political or military intervention, irrespective of where one stands on foreign intervention, was the decisive factor. The exceptions are perhaps Jordan and Morocco where the jury is still out but the regime has engaged to whatever degree with protesters.
There is no doubt that after decades in power Arab autocracies are entrenched. The very fact that they allow for no uncontrolled public space by definition means that well-structured, well thought through opposition forces outside the system are hard to develop. What happens to groups that are forced underground for extended periods of time is evident in the failure of the Egyptian Brotherhood and contrasted by the very different approach of Ennahada in Tunisia despite all its warts and problems.
Inevitable mayhem and strife
Like everything in life, it is easier to destroy than to build. Revolutions are no exception. The dividing line between autocracies, dictatorships and totalitarian regimes is a fine line at best. Autocracies determined to hold on to power, unwilling to put their ears to the ground and address public concerns and determined to use whatever force to ensure self-preservation are no more reformable than totalitarian states. Myanmar may be the exception but its military as I discuss further below contrasts starkly with those in the Middle East and North African state. Fact of the matter is that the failure of the Brotherhood in Egypt is not only the failure of movement shaped in clandestinity but also of a movement that sought to effect change from within the system.
To put the blame for inevitable mayhem and strife on the fact that people with no vision or cohesion for the future rebel against injustice in an attempt to ride themselves of the yoke of repression and abuse amounts to attacking the weakest link in the chain. The inevitability of mayhem and strife is built into your accurate analysis of Arab autocracy, including the perversion of public institutions to serve the ruling elites. That is no truer than with regimes whose power is based on the favoring of particular communities or social groups as you illustrate with the examples of Iraq, Egypt, Syria and Tunisia. Indeed it is a formula that ensures strife and sectarianism. The nature of Arab autocracy also makes the emergence less likely of a charismatic leader capable of uniting rather than dividing nations that by your own admission are on the brink of disintegration and in which arbitrary rule rules supreme.
Similarly it is with all likelihood true that some segments of anti-autocratic protest in the Middle East and North Africa were in it for particular interests and may have been reflections of a society whose concepts of public virtue – probity, justice, fairness, moderation, selflessness, and civility – have been eroded by the supremacy of arbitrary power. To assert that this is true for the revolts as such is unfounded and demeaning, a denial of the innocence and idealism that characterizes anti-establishment youth movements and at the very best unfair to those who have raised their voices in favor of public virtue. This is not to deny that the anti-Morsi revolt lacked the notion of pluralism and many in it are starting to realize that and regret the fact that they got into bed with the devil that is seeking to revive the very state they sought to destroy more than two years ago.
Granted, leaders of the 2011 Egyptian revolution like Ahmed Maher of the April 6 Movement and blogger Wael Abbas as well as popular television satirist Bassem Youssef, no supporters of the Brotherhood by any stretch of the imagination, have been vilified for their criticism of the witch hunt against the Islamist group. Maher sparked outrage when he asked Abbas in a tweet: ““If we assume it’s not a coup, and I tell people it’s not a coup, when they screw us again like they did in 2011, what would I tell people?” Youssef warned that “those on this ‘victory high’ consider themselves to be different; they justify their fascism for the ‘good of the country’… We are now repeating the Brotherhood’s same mistakes. It’s as though we have the memory span of a goldfish.” Theirs are notions that without doubt will quickly regain credibility and currency. Al-Sisi and his military-backed government are already ensuring that.
Elections: A panacea or a catalyst for strife?
Similarly, the notion that elections in post-revolt environments potentially degenerate into agencies for dissension and strife is paternalistic and raises the question of who decides when a population is mature enough to embark on an electoral process. If the neo-conservatives had anything right, it was the notion that people have the unrestricted right to decide for themselves. That does not by definition mean that they make the right choices but it is their choice and they have to in principle live with it for the term of the electoral mandate unless that mandate is democratically curtailed.
One can question the integrity of elections in which the best organized groups succeed rather than those best suited for the job and in which powerful lobbies wield significant influence. But then no system is perfect and I can only think of alternative systems that are even less perfect than a pluralistic democracy. Anything less than free and fair elections deprives people of the inherent right to choose for themselves no matter how imperfect their choice is. This is not a star-eyed expression of faith in the will of the people being expressed in elections. On the contrary, I uphold the principle of elections for lack of better options despite my lack of faith in the herd’s ability to make informed, well thought through choices of its own.
One can also argue that overthrowing dictatorships is like lifting the top of a long-boiling pot that explodes the moment it gets oxygen. The experience of that explosion is not a uniquely Middle Eastern or North African one as was evident in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union and in the Balkans following the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Elections may well be part of that explosion given that they often produce divisive and fragmented results. It would be wrong however to condemn populations to continued repression because the autocracy through its policies has raised the cost of change.
Iranians may well have regretted as you note their vote for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad but his election did not occur in a vacuum. He was voted into office on the back of his anti-corruption campaign during his tenure as mayor of Tehran and against the will of the clergy. His election victory was a response to the dashed expectations and the failure of his predecessor, the reformist Mohammed Khatami. By the same token, Rouhani’s rise constitutes a response to the weirdness and stepped up repression of the Ahmadinejad era.
It would be equally wrong to assert that troubled democratic processes should only be embarked on when societies have regained notions of public interest and public virtue and have the kind of visionary leader who can guide them. Such a leader often emerges only from the chaos that ensues after the fall of an autocracy. To argue that democracy and elections runs the risk of damaging social relations amounts to an ostrich putting its head in the sand to deny the existence of a problem and allow it to fester like an open wound. The more it festers, the more difficult it is to heal it. Similarly, achieving unity is an illusion; achieving civility and a notion of pluralism is a lengthy and painful but unavoidable and necessary process. It is a process that like revolutions need not be linear and more likely than not is a zig zagging line that crawls forwards even if at times it may be difficult to see that. Elections are part of that process for good or for bad. So is confrontation between groups that need to time to learn the rules of co-existence.
Redrawing national borders
To take this one step further, the revolts and the decade if not more of dissent and defiance that we have just entered could well threaten and redraw existing national borders in the region. Think of the Kurds for example. Think of what might emerge from the creation of an independent Palestinian state. Think of the possible disintegration of Syria and Iraq. The international community’s instinctive notion is to oppose the redrawing of borders. Yet, that may not be an unhealthy development even if as Bosnia and Kosovo it may take a generation to bridge sectarian divides that were long existing even if they had been successfully papered over for a period time. The fact that they erupted in the ways that they did is evidence that harmonious co-existence and inter-mingling was hardly rooted in a way that it would be able to resist provocation.
Eritrea is hardly the model one would want to emulate. But its independence was long rejected out of fear that it would spark the break-up of artificially drawn borders across Africa. The opposite is true. Moreover, in a globalized world in which corporate diplomacy is at least as important as traditional diplomacy, sovereignty has become a relative term. Absolute sovereignty is a thing of the past. As a result, the influence of foreign powers is a given irrespective of whether states are autocratic or democratic. Proxy wars in a region like the Middle East and North Africa are par for the course. By the same token, Europe may have entered a post-military, post-violent era in its approach of dispute and conflict, but I need not note what it took to convert the world’s bloodiest continent into one that thinks instinctively in terms of peaceful resolution. To blame the spiraling sectarianism in the Middle East and North Africa exclusively on outside powers is to argue that nations have no say in their destiny and that conflict is not rooted in ideologies and interests indigenous to the region. That is a notion that belongs on the heap of popular conspiracy theories. That is not to say that outside powers have no interests in the unfolding events and more often than not are playing with fire as a result of short-term interests that are more the interest of a party or group in government rather than a truly national interest.
Transition takes time
All of this raises the question of the role of outside powers. To be clear, the battle for the future and soul of the region is a domestic and regional battle. This does not diminish the fact that the US and Britain encouraged the rise of autocracy. Take Egypt for example where, Nasser, and more importantly the security forces he had created were establishing in cooperation with the United States and Britain. This is what would effectively be a model for Arab autocracy for decades to come: a state controlled by the police and the security forces rather than the military with multiple variations ranging from the military being totally cut out of the power structure to cases where it shared power.
Construing the success so far of the Saudi-led Gulf counterrevolution as single most important thing that will defeat popular revolts suggests by implication that they themselves are immune and have been able to isolate their sub-region from what happens in the rest of the Middle East and North Africa. Nothing could be further from the truth. Bahrain with all its specificities proves the point. Discontent is bubbling in the kingdom and elsewhere in the Gulf. It will express itself, how and when is the question. It is well possible that the war in Syria and the reversal of the revolution in Egypt will cause many in the region to pause. The notion however that those developments are the death knell of the quest for change is ahistorical.
Similarly, Turkish Islamists with all their warts are living examples that Islamists are capable of getting to a point where they are able to govern and achieve significant results. They are also examples of the fact that it takes extended periods of time for Islamists to make their own transition. It took political Islam in Turkey some four decades to get from the intransigence of Adnan Menderes who was executed by the military in 1960 via Necmettin Erbakan who was forced out of office in the late 1990s to Recep Tayyip Erdogan who despite the recent protests against him is by and large a success story witness economic growth, Turkey’s regional status irrespective of the recent setbacks in Egypt and Syria notwithstanding and yes, the bridging of the gap between his country’s secular and conservative communities.
Perhaps, the dialectic of revolution and counterrevolution is like the child that has to touch a stove and burn himself before he understands the need for caution in playing with fire. On Marx’s principle of things have to get worse before they improve, events in Egypt may ultimately be the catalyst for a more pluralistic, live-and-let live approach to politics. Egypt is at an impasse in which the military and the Brotherhood have boxed themselves into corners in which they have few options for a solution that would allow all sides to save face. The counter-revolution may be the necessary midwife for an approach that will ultimately pave the way for a less tumultuous, volatile and exclusionary transition towards a more open, transparent and accountable society. That will come as significant elements of the amorphous anti-Morsi coalition inevitably realize that they have jumped from the fat into the frying pan.
The suggestion that the issue of women’s rights illustrates the fact that civic groups opposed to Islamization of their post-revolt societies are primarily motivated by a desire to preserve a cherished lifestyle while autocrats at least when it came to women sought to enact social change is at best a partial truth. For one, one can count the number of autocrats who truly sought to empower women on the fingers of one hand: Ben Ali of Tunisia, Mohammed VI of Morocco, and Abdullah II of Jordan. It is certainly not a claim that Gulf rulers could make, perhaps with the exception of Qatar. Qaddafi’s female bodyguard whom the military command saluted as they marched past the tribune on Green Square on Revolution Day was certainly revolutionary. It countered traditional perceptions of a woman’s role as does the military training for women in the UAE. It was however part of the colonel’s theatrics rather than part of a real policy designed to enhance women’s rights.
Southeast Asia’s lessons
It is in the context of the above that the comparison between the Middle East and Southeast Asia becomes relevant, particularly if one includes the latter’s experience in the 1980s, 1990s and beyond rather than restricted the comparisons to the wars of the 1960s and 1970s in Indochina. Beyond the fact that this eliminates the generational gap, it also introduces communality: popular uprisings as in the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Myanmar. In fact, by expanding the period of comparison, one creates the possibility to learn from what have been successful albeit painful and wrenching experiences and in the case of Thailand and Myanmar are still ongoing. Perhaps, the most striking lessons are the implications for the role of the military and the need to move beyond a political culture of zero-sum game approaches to politics. These lessons are relevant for both forces in the Middle East and North Africa with vested interests in the status quo as well as those seeking change.
Scholar Teresita Cruz-Del Rosario argues that the powers that be in Southeast Asian nations who offer only limited opportunities for public redress understand the benefits of a credible electoral façade and the need for public spaces that function as release valves. For their part, activists have learnt to cleverly maneuver within tightly controlled spaces by exploiting electoral contests without directly challenging entrenched authority. Malaysians have succeeded to get their messages across, created dents, raised questions, and expanded spaces for public discourse. Filipinos, Thais and Indonesians who have succeeded in regime change through relatively peaceful means, redirected the course of political life and a qualitative shift in social life has occurred.
Thai voters returned to power the party of deposed premier Thaksin Shinawatra through the landslide victory of his sister Yingluck — a victory for his red-shirted supporters that in the past involved bloody clashes with the military. For the moment, her unequivocal electoral victory ended years of strife between red and yellow shirts and put the country back on a path of relative stability and economic growth. In Myanmar, the generals have retreated, and a new civilian government promises to deliver reforms, signaling a new political direction for the country that would emulate market-based democracies. In Indonesia, broad-based social movements have helped restore democratic practice.
That is not to say that that there have not been backlashes in Southeast Asia witness the bloody repression of Rohinga Muslims in Myanmar and the rise of fiercely xenophobic and racist Buddhism infused with racism. By the same token, however, Malaysia responded to sharp criticism of the police by repealing two sweeping security laws and lifting restrictions on the media even though a new restrictive assembly law and clashes between police and demonstrators point in the opposite direction. In all of these countries in Southeast Asia, grievances were channeled via organized efforts of social movements. In all of these countries thus far, political strife has not resulted in civil wars. This is perhaps the singular feature that distinguishes protest action in Southeast Asia from the Middle East.
Most Southeast Asian countries have engaged in party politics despite the imperfections in the development of political parties in this region. Some countries like Malaysia, Cambodia and Singapore have experienced the dominance of one party that has been in power for decades. Yet, opposition politics are making inroads into the power structure witness developments in Malaysia and the election of Aung San Su Kyi to a parliament in which her party, the National League for Democracy, commands a respectable following.
The Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia as do post-revolt Arab states continue to struggle with the formation of political parties that reflect broader programs for governance rather than the personality of their front-runner candidates. Political evolution, though slow and tedious, heralds the institutionalization of a political process that in turn signals a forward march in the creation of a more modernized political culture. For all the citizens of these countries in contrast to those of the Middle East and North Africa, hopes are high that the deepening of these processes will consolidate democracy and therefore become irreversible.
For all Southeast Asian countries, an active electoral culture is in place, and citizens do take their electoral rights seriously. They insist on the legitimacy of their leaders through fair and honest elections. This should be construed as a sign of political health, and a staunch adherence to a social contract between government and their subjects.
Finally, social movements have been a part of the institutional life of Southeast Asian countries. Social movements in all these countries opt for an electoral process, thus working within institutional means that are offered by a regime which, in and of itself, desires to play by the rules of the “legitimacy game.” However unpopular, regimes seek recourse to legitimatizing procedures, even incurring the risk of potential loss. Thus far, all rulers seek a popular mandate, never mind that they might engage in the occasional electoral manipulation to ensure longevity. Notwithstanding fraudulent practices in electoral politics in Southeast Asia, the quest for political legitimacy should be construed as a hopeful development in the evolution of politics in these countries.
Political culture vs. moral
This is a far cry from the Middle East and North Africa. It is however a simplification to assert that protesters were deprived of their quest for liberal western-style democracy because of the cauldron of seething tensions and resentments fuelled if not produced by decades of suffocating repressive rule. Underlying the contrast between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa is a fundamental different vision of and approach to politics. It is a question of political culture rather than of moral. It may indeed be true that popular revolts in the Middle East and North Africa occur in a world whose decrepit, kleptomaniac autocracies have robbed it of its moral bearings. That indeed would go a long way to explain the differences with Southeast Asia. However construing that as one reason that revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa go off the rails does injustice to the protesters. History evidenced by the experience of Southeast Asia demonstrates that it takes at least a decade for a revolution with all its warts and counterrevolutionary setbacks to play out and produce a political culture that nurtures a degree of pluralism.
The crisis in Egypt provoked by Morsi’s intransigent and stubborn personality may well have been avoided if his opponents had truly had an understanding of pluralism. There is no doubt that Morsi like Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is hampered by a limited understanding of the legitimacy of the ballot box. Electoral victory indeed constitutes the basis for legitimacy. But so does recognition by one’s opponents of that legitimacy. It is that legitimacy that was withdrawn with the June 30 anti-Morsi’s demonstrations. Rather than offering or forcing a solution that would have restored the legitimacy of the ballot box, the anti-Morsi forces and the military opted for one that inevitably is leading to the resurrection of the police state.
A dearth of reformist military officers
The process of change in Southeast Asian countries was led by retired military officers who were active duty commanders at the time of autocratic rule but belonged to a reformist wing of the armed forces. Ironically in some cases such as the Philippines the existence of a reformist military group was the unintended outcome of Marcos’ distrust of the armed forces and his effort to nurture a military force on which he could depend. The efforts of autocrats in the Middle East and North Africa to neutralize a potential threat did everything but produce a reformist element in the region’s military.
If anything, the relationship between the military and Middle Eastern and North African rulers irrespective of whether they are republicans or monarchs or whether or not they had a military background is one of a forced marriage rooted in mutual distrust. To shield themselves from potential threats by the military, Middle Eastern and North African rulers opted for one of several models: totally sidelining the military; buying it off with a stake in national security and lucrative economic opportunities; focusing on key units commanded by members of the ruler’s family; creating parallel military organizations; staffing the lower and medium ranks with expatriates; or most recently creating a separate mercenary force. The resulting structure of the military provides models for responses to popular uprisings in the Middle East region and helps put recent developments in perspective.
The Egyptian military as is evident in the country’s most recent events exploits its popular support and self-understanding as the arbiter of what is right for the country to preserve its perks and privileges achieved under former presidents Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak. The deal was straightforward: the military remained loyal to the president in exchange for retaining control of national as opposed to homeland security and allowing it to build an independent relationship with its US counterparts that enabled it to create a military industrial complex as well as a commercial empire in other sectors.
The Egyptian military’s deal contrasts starkly with Tunisia, where former autocratic President Zine El Abdeine Ben Ali, in one of his first moves after coming to power, decimated the military and ensured that unlike the Egyptian armed forces it had no stake in the system he built. As a result, the Tunisian armed forces had no reason to obstruct real change; indeed if anything, it was likely to benefit from reform that leads to a democratic system, in which it would have a legitimate role under civilian supervision.
In Syria, Libya and Yemen, autocratic rulers employed brutal force in their attempts to crush revolts because rather than sidelining the military, they had ensured that key units were commanded by members of the ruler’s family and/or sect. This gave those well-trained and well-armed units a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and effectively neutralized the impact of defections. Defections, certainly in the case of Libya and Syria did not significantly alter the balance of power. Yemen is perhaps the exception that confirms the rule with the attack in 2011 by a dissident military unit on the compound of then President Ali Abdullah Saleh in which he and many of his senior officials were injured. That assault, launched only after forces loyal to the president attacked the unit’s headquarters, constituted a watershed in the ultimate removal of Saleh after 30 years in office.
A fourth model is that of Bahrain where military and security forces crushed a popular revolt. The fact that much of the rank and file consists of foreigners, mostly Pakistanis, explains the regime’s ability to employ brutal violence against the mainly Shia protesters in the island-nation of only 1.2 million people. Similarly, he UAE has invested over US$500 million in the creation of a mercenary force, designed to quell civil unrest in the country as well as in the region.
Finally, there is the Saudi and Iranian model with a variant in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that has been tested only to a limited degree. Both Saudi Arabia and Iran have built competing military forces; in Iran’s case the controversial Revolutionary Guards Corps and in Saudi Arabia the National Guard now commanded by King Abdullah’s son, that operate independent of the armed forces.
The most recent developments in Egypt puts the question of the role of the military as well as Western efforts over the last decade to strengthen democratic initiatives from which the armed forces were exempted in a whole different perspective. Egypt’s new military leadership promoted by Morsi in his attempt to replace Mubarak-era commanders has brought to the fore men whose vision goes far beyond a depoliticized armed force determined to protect its interests under the guise of its role as the protector of the nation. These commanders share many of the Brotherhoods Islamist instincts and are more critical of US policy in the Middle East and North Africa.
All of this means that the structure of Middle Eastern military forces as well as the absence of reformists with a pluralist vision of their countries’ future within the military potentially suggests that the Arab revolts are likely to be met with repeated violence and bloodshed and potentially civil war in countries with competing military forces. That by definition ensures that the process of change in the reason is and will be what it is: messy, ugly, and bloody, involving an adherence to Lenin’s principle of two steps forward, one step backward.
This is a reality that neither you nor I like. It is however one we cannot ignore.
In friendship, yours truly,
James
James M. Dorsey is Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, co-director of the Institute of Fan Culture of the University of Würzburg and the author of the blog,The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer
Syrian Civil War: Russia Forges Risky Ties with Islamists
May 27th, 2013
By James M. Dorsey.
In a strategy fraught with risk, Russian President Vladimir Putin is exploiting deep-
seated domestic anger at the United States and fundamentalist Russian Orthodoxy
to justify his support for embattled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and forge an
alliance with Islamist forces.
Commentary
RUSSIAN PRESIDENT Vladimir Putin is countering foreign criticism of his pro-Assad
policy and Russia’s declining credibility in sections of Arab public opinion by forging
ties with Islamist detractors.In a move that serves both Putin’s domestic and Russia’s foreign interests,
a crosssection of Islamist and secular political opinion in the Middle East and North Africa
recently attended a Vaidal Discussion Club conference organised by the Institute of
Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the RIA Novosti news agency
and Council on Foreign and Defence Policy, Moscow, with the backing of the Russian
Foreign Ministry.
Forging commonalities
Officially intended as a brainstorming on rising Islamist political forces in the region
stretching from the Atlantic coast of Africa to the Gulf that is wracked by popular
protest and discontent, the conference offered Russian officials, academics and
journalists an opportunity to drive home the notion that conservative Russian
Orthodox Christians and Islamists share a common value system.
Reduced international credibility for backing Al-Assad is a small price to pay,
particularly at a time when Putin has been travelling inside the country to regain
some of his lost popularity. If all foreign policy is domestic, President Putin should be
a popular man. He is standing up to the United States and the West, which in the
eyes of many Russians were the reasons for their country’s decline as a super power
and economic hardship. A significant slice of Russian public opinion believes that
Russia’s current problems stem from the US imposing neo-liberal policies on it in the
1990s.
Catching several flies in one swoop
In reaching out to the Islamists, Russia hopes to catch several flies in one fell swoop.
It aligns itself, despite differences over Syria, with a political force that is on the rise
and demonstrates that it can still wield influence in the Middle East and North Africa.
Islamists have won post-revolt elections in Egypt and Tunisia and are a major force in
Libya and Yemen – the four countries that witnessed the toppling of their autocratic
leaders in the last two years – and are an important segment in the armed resistance
to the Al-Assad regime in Syria.
It also serves Russia in its confrontation with Islamist insurgents in the Caucasus.
To achieve its goal,Russia deliberately included arch conservative Russian Orthodox
officials and journalists among the participants in Marrakech who represent an
important segment of Russian society. According to a prominent Russian analyst: “The
Soviet era is over. The post-Soviet era is over. There is nothing to fill the vacuum.
Logically something pre-Soviet will fill the vacuum. It is likely to fail, but for now that is
an ultra-conservative streak of Russian Orthodoxy.”
In exchanges with Islamists from Egypt, Iran, Lebanese group Hezbollah and Palestine’s
Hamas, among others, Russian Orthodox conservatives left more liberal Arabs and
Westerners aghast at the length to which they were willing to go in their wooing of the
Islamists. Conservative Russian Orthodox journalists and officials asserted that Western
culture was in decline while Oriental culture was on the rise, that gays and gender
equality threaten a woman’s right to remain at home and serve her family and that Iran
should be the model for women’s rights.
A senior Russian official told the conference that people understood the manipulation
employed by Western democracies. However, he said, religious values offered a moral and
ethical guideline that guarded against speculation and economic bubbles while traditional
Islamic concepts coincided with their guidelines.
A strategy that could backfire
Russia’s deployment of conservative Russian Orthodoxy could well help Putin and Moscow
further their interests, but it is also a strategy that could backfire. It could associate Russia
with a force that ultimately proves incapable of leading reform. Egyptian President
Mohammed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood are under fire for failing to make good on
the goals of the popular revolt that overthrew President Hosni Mubarak, including greater
freedom, dismantling of the Mubarak-era repressive machinery, corruption and economic
reform. Similarly, Tunisia’s Islamist-led government has yet to demonstrate that it can
manage the country’s post-revolt transition.The difficulties Egyptian and Tunisian Islamists
are experiencing in making the move fromclandestine groups to inclusive administrations
has prompted Islamists elsewhere to rethinka too early acceptance of responsibility and power.
Jordanian Muslim Brothers boycott elections earlier this year officially in protest against
gerrymandering, but also with an eyeon what was happening elsewhere in the region.
Similarly, Russia’s position on Syria is likely to become ever more unpalatable as the
violence in Syria on both sides of the divide becomes ever more brutal. If and when
Al-Assad is forced out of office, Russia’s alliance with the Islamists could identify it with
one faction rather than as an independent player in what is likely to be a prolonged, ugly
and bloody struggle for power.
Finally, Islamists are likely to maintain their support for their brethren in the Caucasus
irrespective of their relations with Moscow. That would render Russian foreign policy in
the perceptions of many as purely opportunistic and undermine Moscow’s claim that
its policies, including its support of Al-Assad, are based on principles such as non-
interference in the domestic affairs of others. Said a prominent Russian analyst:
“It’s a brilliant strategy if it works. The problem is
that if we end up with egg in our face, we will be further from home than we are now.”
James M. Dorsey is a Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International
Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He is the author of the
blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer
Reform of Middle Eastern Militaries: Lessons from Indonesia
May 14th, 2013By James M. Dorsey.
Synopsis
The recent commando raid on a prison by Indonesian special forces provoked
renewed debate about the need to further reform the military and subject it to civilian
justice – 15 years after the end of autocratic rule in Jakarta. This illustrates the difficult
road post-revolt nations in the Middle East and North Africa have to travel.
Commentary
THE RECENT RAID of an Indonesian prison and summary execution of four inmates by
heavily armed Special Forces commandos has cast the spotlight on the risk involved in
failing to fully reform the country’s military – 15 years after the end
of autocratic rule.
The raid and subsequent charging of 11 officers as well as other recent incidents involving
security forces has sparked debate about the nature and terms of the reform including the
fact that its members are accountable to military rather than civilian courts. Those courts
have proven to be lenient in sentencing soldiers accused of murder.
Changing a culture of impunity
Critics blame the incidents on the failure to reform the internal workings and culture of the
Indonesian armed forces. At the centre of the Indonesian debate lie questions that are
certain to be raised in Middle Eastern nations like Egypt where the alleged impartiality
of the armed forces during the 2011 overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak is under fire.
Recent leaks of the report of a fact-finding mission established by President Mohamed
Morsi assert that the military killed and tortured protesters during the revolt – charges
the command of the armed forces has denied.
Human rights groups however accuse the police and security forces of continuing
to arbitrarily arrest and torture suspects while militant soccer fans believe these forces,
alongside the military, were responsible for last year’s death of 74 people in a politically
charged stadium brawl in Port Said.
The experience of countries like Indonesia and Turkey that have struggled for years with
changing a culture of impunity pervasive throughout the military and security sector
however highlight issues that go beyond upholding human rights. The military’s
exemption from full civilian control in Indonesia and Turkey limited the authority of a state
seeking to establish itself as the catalyst of democratic rule.
Parallel systems of justice impinged on the rule of law. Lack of full civilian control in Egypt
fuelled the continued existence beyond the law of a deep state – a network of vested
political, military and business interests – similar to the one in Turkey that took
decades to uproot and threatened political and economic change demanded by the
European Union. The military’s vested economic interests distorted economies because
of fiscal concessions and access to inside information.
The raid by the Indonesian special forces, known as Kopassus, put the pitfalls of military
and security sector reform back on the front burner. Kopassus members forced their way on
23 March into the prison in the city of Yogyakarta and took justice into their own hands by
shooting dead four detainees accused of stabbing to death a sergeant during a fight in a
bar. Two weeks earlier, scores of soldiers burnt a police station in South Sumatra and
injured 17 police officers in retaliation for the shooting of one of theirs. The incidents followed
the imprisonment of three soldiers in Papua in 2011 for torturing two detainees.
Fuelling discontent
The incidents sparked debate on the same issues confronting post-revolt nations like
Egypt, foremost among which is what reform is needed to adapt the military and security
forces to a democratic society; also whether non-transparent military courts are able and
willing to maintain accepted human rights standards. Human rights groups in Indonesia
are demanding that the military be accountable to the civilian justice system. Discontent in
Egypt is fuelled by the failure so far to hold military and law enforcement officials
accountable for the death of at least 900 people since the toppling of Mubarak.
A decade-and-a-half of democracy and free media enables Indonesia to publicly debate
the effectiveness of past reforms. Restoration of a measure of political stability and economic
recovery in crisis-riddled Egypt hinges in part on reform of at least the security sector –
the most despised institution because of its role in enforcing the Mubarak-era repression.
The Indonesian military responded to the raid by relieving the military commander of Central
Java of his duty for initially denying that Special Forces had been involved. By contrast,
Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) warned against efforts to tarnish the
military’s image against a perceived background of a crackdown on the media.
To be sure, distrust of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood, reinforced by the president’s reliance on
the security forces and the military despite his increasingly strained relations with
the armed forces, undermines his ability to push through necessary reforms. Like in
Indonesia where the 11 officers experienced a wave of support because their victims
were alleged drug traffickers, efforts to reform the military in Egypt are complicated by a
divided public, part of which believes that military rule is their country’s only way out of its crisis.
Shared characteristics
The recent incidents in Indonesia nevertheless underscore the need to address reform
of the military and security sector’s internal procedures, ethical standards,
education, training and compensation. Such reforms go far beyond replacing military
commanders as Morsi did last year and this month’s dismissal by Yemeni President Abd
Rabbuh Mansur al-Hadi of senior officers related to the country’s ousted leader, Al
Abdullah Saleh. Those moves were largely motivated by Morsi and Al-Hadi’s efforts to
employ the military as tools to stabilise their grip on power.
The Indonesian and Egyptian military share a desire to retain their privileges. Admiral
Agus Suhartono, the commander in chief of the Indonesian military, has rejected calls
that the 11 soldiers be tried by a civilian rather than a military court. Similarly, Egyptian
Justice Minister Ahmed Mekki insisted in a meeting with human rights activists earlier
this year that it was the interior ministry’s internal responsibility to reform its forces.
One participant in the meeting said on Twitter that Mekki’s remarks were “far worse’
than anything he had heard from Mubarak’s justice minister.
Like in Indonesia, the question of military reform in Egypt is complicated by public
perception of the police and security forces, who are widely viewed as not only
brutal but also incompetent and corrupt. Fifteen years of democracy and a vibrant
media in Indonesia have failed to resolve issues but have made viable a healthy debate
that will likely lead to change in which the armed forces have no choice but to participate.
However the viability of that debate in post-revolt Middle Eastern nations has yet to
pass the litmus test.
James M. Dorsey is a Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International
Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, director of the University of
Würzburg’s Institute of Fan Culture, and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle
East Soccer blog.
Soccer Emerges As Focal Point Of Dissent In Saudi Arabia
May 12th, 2013
By James M. Dorsey.
Prince Faisal rushes off the pitch
Soccer, alongside minority Shiite Muslims and relatives of imprisoned government critics, is emerging as a focal point of dissent in Saudi Arabia, an oil-rich kingdom that despite banning demonstrations by law is struggling to fend off the waves of change sweeping the Middle East and North Africa.
Fan pressure is evolving as a potent tool in the absence of the right to protest. It follows intermittent demonstrations and at times deadly clashes with security forces in the kingdom’s predominantly Shiite Eastern Province that hosts its major oil fields as well protests by family members of activists imprisoned for lengthy periods of time without being charged.
In the latest assertion of fan power, a Facebook page entitled Nasrawi Revolution demands the resignation of Prince Faisal bin Turki, the owner of storied Riyadh club Al Nasser FC and a burly nephew of King Abdullah who sports a mustache and chin hair. A You Tube video captured Prince Faisal seemingly being pelted and chanted against as he rushed off the soccer pitch after rudely shoving a security official aside.
The campaign against Prince Faisal follows last year’s unprecedented resignation of Prince Nawaf bin Feisal as head of the Saudi Football Federation (SFF), the first royal to be persuaded by public pressure step down in a region where monarchial control of the sport is seen as politically important.
Prince Nawaf’s resignation led to the election of a commoner, storied former player Ahmed Eid Alharbi widely viewed as a reformer and proponent of women’s soccer, in a country that views free and fair polling as a Western concept that is inappropriate for the kingdom. Prince Nawaf retained his position as head of the Saudi Olympic Committee and the senior official responsible for youth welfare that effectively controls the SFF.
Nevertheless, the resignation of Prince Nawaf and the campaign against Prince Faisal gains added significance in a nation in which the results of premier league clubs associated with various members of the kingdom’s secretive royal family are seen as a barometer of their relative status, particularly at a time that its septuagenarian and octogenarian leaders prepare for a gradual generational transition.
“The Saudis are extremely worried. Soccer clubs rather than the mosque are likely to be the center of the revolution. Kids go more to stadiums than to mosques. They are not religious, they are ruled by religious dogma,” says Washington-based Saudi dissident Ali al-Ahmad, who heads the Gulf Institute. Mr. Al-Ahmad was referring to the power of clerics preaching Wahhabism, the puritan interpretation of Islam developed by 18th century preacher Mohammed Abdul Wahhab. Saudi Arabia’s ruling Al Saud family established the kingdom with the help of the Wahhabis who in return were granted the right to ensure that their views would dominate public life.
Sport sources in the soccer-crazy kingdom say the authorities are seeking to reduce soccer’s popularity by emphasizing other sports like athletics and handball in policy and fund-raising while at the same time preparing to professionalize and further commercialize the sport using the English Premier League as a model.
“They are identifying what talent is available in the kingdom. Football is a participatory sport. They want to emphasize the social aspects of other sports. Football won only one medal in the last Asian Games. They think they can score better in other sports. There are parallel agendas with competition about who gets the visibility,” one source said.
Soccer’s popularity and competition with religion was evident during the 2010 World Cup when authorities parked trucks in front of Internet and other cafes, rolled out red carpets and urged Saudis watching matches on television screens to interrupt at prayer time.
The clergy’s puritan view of life that only allowed for the emergence of soccer in the 1950s is under pressure with clerics being forced to retreat from their refusal to permit physical education for girls and women’s sports facilities. Saudi Arabia recently announced it would allow girl’s physical education in private schools as long as they do so in line with Islamic law. Yet, a five-year national sports plan, the kingdom’s first, currently being drafted does not make provisions for women’s sports.
In a further move, sports sources say Saudi Arabia may be on the verge of licensing women’s soccer clubs that currently operate in a legal nether land often with the help of more liberal members of the royal family. These opportunities are however largely accessible only to women from wealthier families. Deputy Minister of Education for Women’s Affairs, Nora al-Fayez, was recently quoted as saying that public schools could follow suit.
With sports facilities for women almost non-existent, women are forced to for example to jog dressed so that men cannot see their bodies. Similarly, there are no opportunities to train for international tournaments. Saudi Arabia last year fielded under pressure from the International Olympic Committee for the first time women – albeit expatriate ones- at an international competition during the London Olympics. In the kingdom itself, the all-women Princess Nora Bint Abdul Rahman University is the only institution of higher education that has sports facilities, including a swimming pool, tennis court and exercise area for females.
Columnist Abdulateef al-Mulhim in the Arab News recently credited women for Al Fateh SC’s success in winning the Saudi soccer championship. The victory broke a cycle of poor performance that had depressed a key manager of the club based in the city of Al Mubaraz, Al Mulhim wrote.
“His mother was the one who encouraged him not to give up and gave him the financial support needed for running the club. Ironically, she even advised him about many of the deals which involved the transfer of the best players to the club… As time passed, people knew of more women from the families in Al Mubaraz city.
In the official website, there are more women’s names who are honorary members of this club such as, Fathyah, Ayshah and Fatimah Al Rashid. There are other ladies from other families who also were part of the general public relations through the social media means and through their direct support…. In other words, many young men and women from the city of Al Mubaraz put their hands together and accomplished a dream for being the best in the Kingdom. Last year, this club was the most admired for its performance and for the information of the readers,” Al Mulhim said.
Al Mulhim’s highlighting of the women of Al Mubaraz as well as the introduction of sports in schools positions sports as a key platform for enhancing women’s rights in which women retain economic rights but are even more restricted than men in their political rights and personal lives.
Nevertheless, it reflects gradual change. Women are prominent in various professions, will be allowed to run for office and vote for the first time in the 2015 municipal elections, were last year admitted to the more or less toothless top advisory council to the king and permitted to be sales’ clerks in female apparel shops and ride motorcycles and bikes in parks properly dressed and accompanied by a male relative. The ban, however, on driving remains in place.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute of Fan Culture, and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog.
Al Jazeera targets Spain amid dropping viewer numbers in its heartland
April 4th, 2013By James M. Dorsey.
State-owned Qatari television network Al Jazeera is exploring the acquisition of Spain’s La Liga premier soccer league rights in a bid to expand its budding global sports franchise, tweak its business model in a world in which pan-Arab television is on the decline and compensate for mounting criticism of its coverage of popular revolts in the Middle East and North Africa.
Al Jazeera’s renewed interest in Spanish rights comes as financially troubled Spain’s two major sports broadcasters, Mediapro and Canal Plus, which is owned by Grupo Prisa, are struggling under a mountain of debt. It also follows a breakdown in talks with Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, according to Spanish news website El Confidencial Digital.
Grupo Prisa with debts estimated at €3 billion and Mediapro with liabilities of €300 million hinted last year that they would not bid at current rates for the Spanish league rights when the broadcast contract expires in 2016.
Al Jazeera’s interest in the Spanish rights reaffirms its strategy of moving in behind other Qatar government institutions as they conclude sponsorship agreements and acquisitions such as the winning of the hosting rights of the 2022 World Cup, Qatar Foundation and Qatar Airways’ sponsorship of FC Barcelona, and the television network’s acquisition of French broadcasting rights in the wake of the Gulf state’s takeover of Paris St. Germain.
It also fits Al Jazeera’s move into markets such as Egypt in anticipation that they will generate revenue at a later stage rather than immediately and Qatar’s strategy of employing sports and media to leverage its global influence. Al Jazeera last year launched BelN Sports USA and early this year purchased former US vice president Al Gore’s Current TV to ease the network’s penetration of the North and Latin American markets.
Al Jazeera’s emphasis on sports as well as its acquisition of local broadcasters such as Mubasher in Egypt reflects changes in Middle Eastern and North African broadcasting. Al Jazeera’s launch in 1996 revolutionized the region’s news broadcasting that until then was dominated by state-run broadcasters who towed the official line with its free-wheeling coverage and debate of sensitive issues and willingness to offend governments. As a result, it spawned the launch of a huge number of satellite television stations eager to grab a piece of the pie and make their mark.
It’s a strategy that has paid off. More than anything else, Al Jazeera and the 2022 World Cup have put Qatar, a tiny city state, on the world map, allowing it to project soft power and engage in public diplomacy.
Nevertheless, Al Jazeera, which experienced a boom as the primary news source in the heyday of the Arab revolts that toppled the leaders of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen, has seen its viewership numbers decline recently with Arabs turning increasingly to local news broadcasters and a growing perception that Al Jazeera is in bed with the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups in line with Qatar’s support for them in various post-revolt countries as well as in Syria.
Market research company Sigma Conseil reported recently that Al Jazeera’s market share in Tunisia had dropped from 10.7 in 2011 to 4.8% in 2012 and that the Qatari network was no longer among Egypt’s 10 most watched channels. Tunisia’s 3C Institute of Marketing, Media and Opinion Studies said that Al Jazeera Sports was the only brand of the network that ranked in January among the country’s five most watched channels.
Al Jazeera reporters are reportedly increasingly harassed as they seek to do their jobs in Tunisia. Protests that erupted after this year’s assassination of prominent opposition leader Shukri Belaid charged that “Al Jazeera is a slave of Qatar,” accusing it of biased reporting on the murder because of the Gulf state’s support for Ennahada, the country’s dominant Islamist grouping.
Complicating Al Jazeera’s potential push into Spain is the fact that Spanish law requires one match a week to be aired on a free-to-air rather than a pay tv channel as well as the fact that each Spanish club sells its own rights which strengthens the negotiating position of teams like Real Madrid and FC Barcelona.
Grupo Prisa currently owns the broadcasting rights of Atletico Madrid, Celta de Vigo, RCD Espanyol, Getafe, Osasuna, Real Sociedad, Real Zaragoza, Athletic Bilbao and Real Betis while Mediapro’s franchise includes Real Madrid FC and FC Barcelona. El Confidencial Digital reported that Al Jazeera was likely to revolutionize the $600 million Spanish soccer broadcast market by acquiring La Liga’s rights as a package with Mediapro acting as its broadcast sub-contractor despite Madrid and Barcelona’s opposition.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, visiting scholar at the University of Würzburg’s Institute of Sport Science, and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog.
Civil war in Syria: The Spillover Threat
March 8th, 2013By James M. Dorsey.
Water tankers line the unpaved road outside a pre-fab United Nations meeting room in Za’atari, the Syrian refugee camp in a desert just south of the Jordanian-Syrian border that is home to 110,000 escapees from the brutal war between Bashar al-Assad and his opponents or just about a quarter of the total number of Syrians in the country. Inside the meeting room, different perspectives on resource conservation and entitlement spill into the open.
A young Jordanian aid worker complains that Syrians despite years of drought have little concept of water conservation, a sensitive issue in one of the world’s more water-starved nations that has seen its population grow by an approximate eight percent as a result of the refugee crisis. Jordanian and United Nations estimates suggest that Jordan’s Syrian population could increase to 600,000 by April and up to a million by the end of the year.
In response to the Jordanian’s plea for greater care, a Syrian soccer coach counters that his section of the camp had been without water for the last two days. UN officials advised him that they were struggling to cope with the expansion of the sprawling camp as a result of the arrival of up to 3,000 new refugees a day. “What’s the problem,” the coach says, pointing his finger in the direction of where the water tankers are. “Just bring more water.”
Underlying the exchange, is a more fundamental perspective that promises to shape post-Assad attitudes in Syria as well as attitudes of the embattled leader’s eventual successors to their neighbors and the international community. The Syrian soccer coach’s sense of entitlement echoed among players in nearby Jordanian towns, reflects the refugees’ belief that they have been abandoned and betrayed by Jordan, the Arab world and the international community and are paying for it with their blood. ”This is not just a struggle for freedom in Syria, it’s a struggle for freedom for the Arabs,” said a Syrian striker void of any sense of gratitude to his hosts. “We would rather die than be humiliated. Putting us in the middle of the desert is a humiliation,” adds the coach.
The concern about the potential fall-out of mounting claims on limted resources coupled with increasingly regular clashes between refugees and security forces in Za’atari and growing worry that militant Islamists are emerging as a dominant resistance force has prompted a review of Jordan’s policy that could increasingly rope it into the conflict. Convinced that the Assad regime is trying to destabiize Jordan by targetting the Dera’a region in southern Syria and forcing its residents to flee across the border, Jordanian officials are looking for ways to help Syrian civilians stay on their side of the border. At the same time, they are preparing for a potential opening of the flood gates should rebel forces gain control of crossing points on the Syrian-Jordanian border.
Senior officials in King Abdullah’s court pour over detailed maps seeking to figure out ways of establishing a safe zone inside Syria similar to that created by Turkey on its border 30 kilometers inside Syria. The zone serves as a safe haven for refugees fleeing Aleppo and other confrontation points in the north of the country. That is a more difficult undertaking in southern Syria with Damascus, widely viewed as the not to distant focal point of a make-or-break battle between the rebels and Assad’s forces, much closer to the southern than the northern border. As a result, Jordan has quietly started allowing arms funded by Saudi Arabia and others to reach the rebels through its territory in a bid to strengthen rebel forces in Damascus and the south in the hope that they will contribute to stemming the exodus as well as in an attempt to redress the balance between Islamist militants and moderates within the armed resistance.
The potential for rising social tension is enhanced by the pain of austerity measures promised by the government to maintain the support of the International Monetary Fund for Jordan’s economic reforms amid an 80 percent drop in trade with Syria, reduced income from transit trade to Europe and the Gulf, increased shipping costs for Jordanian exports and stepped up budgetary pressure as a result of more people benefitting from subsidized pricing of bread, electricity and gas and greater stress on education and health care. Already schools, are forced to revert to a double shift system abaionndoned a decade ago while officials predict power blackouts in the near future.
The potential for increased social tension in Jordan is fuelled by a sense among both officials and the public that Jordan as the host of the largest number of refugees in the region is paying the price for what they see as reckless Saudi and Qatari for the more militant opposition forces. Some Gulf states moreover have yet to live up to their pledges to help Jordan fund the cost of the refugee crisis.
Back in Za’atari, the Syrian coach alongside UN agencies and international and Jordanian NGOs including the Asian Football Development Project, employ soccer to reduce tensions, focus energies, empower conservative women from rural Syria and forge a sense of community in a makeshift town that ranks among the country’s top four urban centers and has already witnessed hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage as a result of vandalism. With frusttration prompting refugees to bite the hand that feeds them and irritation mounting among Jordanians as King Abdullah seeks to manage external threats and domestic discontent, Jordanian planning mnister Jafar Abed Hassan voices a concern among officials and the public alike: “We’ve passed the breaking point. I don’t see who is going to provide answers.”
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the Institute of Fan Culture of the University of Würzburg, and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccerblog. A version of this article appeared on RSIS Commentaries.
Militant Jerusalem fans challenge founding principle of Israeli foreign policy
February 24th, 2013By James M. Dorsey.
When militant supporters of right-wing soccer club Beitar Jerusalem last month vowed to keep their team pure in protest against the hiring of two Chechen Muslim players they went beyond what are usually accepted expressions of racism in Israel to unwittingly challenge a founding principle of Israeli foreign and defense policy coined by the country’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion: the need to ally Israel with non-Arab Muslim nations to compensate historically for the lack of and more recently uncertainty of its relations with Arab neighbours.
In doing so, they provoked a rare national outcry against the club’s racist policy – Beitar Jerusalem is the only top league club to have never hired a Palestinian player despite the fact that Palestinians rank among the country’s top performers – that in many ways reflected last month’s outcome of national elections and a growing awareness that Israeli policies are alienating even its closest allies. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party emerged narrowly as the winner from an election that showed Israel deeply divided between the right and the left.
In an illustration of Beitar’s importance to the Israeli right, two right-wing Israeli parliamentarians, Michael Ben-Ari, a former member of assassinated right-wing rabbi Meir Kahana, and Aryeh Eldad of Otzma L’Israel, attended a Beitar match on the eve of the elections in a bid to garner suoppert.
The outcry nevertheless included denunciations by Mr. Netanyahu himself, like many right-wing Israeli leaders, a staunch supporter of Beitar, the storied bad boy of Israeli soccer. It also reflected however unease among significant segments of Israeli public opinion with their country’s increasing isolation sparked by controversy over Israel’s settlement policy; mounting criticism of the treatment of prisoners, including last year’s release of a hunger striking Palestinian national soccer team player as a result of international pressure; and the rupture in relations with Turkey in the wake of the killing of nine Turks aboard the Mavi Marmara as it sought to break Israel’s sea blockade of the Gaza Strip.
The prisoner issue threatened this weekend to explode with thousands of Palestinian prisoners staging a 24-hour hunger strike and hundreds of Palestinians demonstrating in the wake of the death of a 30-year year old Palestinian arrested on charges of stone-throwing while he was in Israeli custody. Palestinian officials warned that the prisoner’s death could be the spark that ignites the powder keg of discontent on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip.
Conditions in Israeli prisons have further undermined Israel’s relations with its staunch ally Australia, already strained by the use in 2010 of Australian passports by Israeli agents believed to have been responsible for the killing of a Hamas operative in Dubai, after news leaked earlier this month of the death in Israeli custody of an Australian national, Ben Zygier. Mr. Zygier reportedly was an operative of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, who allegedly was on the verge of revealing details of Israel’s use of foreign passports in its covert operations.
Australia, in an unprecedented break with past unrestricted support of Israel, last year joined 26 of the 27 members of the European Union who either voted in favor or abstained from voting for a United Nations General Assembly resolution recognizing Palestinian statehood. “In a world so interconnected and interdependent, Israel cannot afford to lose the international legitimacy that flows from a readiness to make peace. There are myriad obstacles to an agreement with the Palestinians – many of them on the Palestinian side. But Mr. Netanyahu has redefined the issue in international opinion as one essentially of Israeli intransigence,” said columnist Philip Stephens in this weekend’s Financial Times.
The current outcry stems from the fact that a militant segment of Beitar’s supporters rejected the club’s hiring of two non-Arab Muslim players, who moreover hail from a region that Mr. Ben Gurion would have defined as part of the non-Arab Muslim periphery, which Israel has always sought to engage. It comes amid growing concern in Israel about mounting soccer violence that is not always related to Israel’s dispute with the Arab and much of the Muslim world.
The outcry over racism expressed towards the two Chechen players contrasts starkly with the lack of a national response to past outbursts by militant fans, including an attack on Palestinian shoppers and workers in a Jerusalem mall as well as Jewish musician who denounced their attitudes and Beitar’s refusal to hire Palestinian striker Mohammed Ghadir who in late 2011 volunteered to join the club in a challenge to its anti-Palestinian policy.
Despite the fact that the militant fans’ language and symbolism at times is reminiscent of that of the Third Reich – fans unfurled a banner with their demand to keep their club pure that was reminiscent of those employed by the Nazis – Beitar until recently defended rather than condemned its most extreme supporters. The long overdue outcry is moreover itself not free of racial attitudes.
To be sure, President Shimon Peres appealed in a strongly worded letter to Israel Football Association president Avi Luzon “to all football fans to refrain from all expressions and manifestations of racism in football stadiums and outside of them. Racism has struck the Jewish people harder than any other nation in the world. The authorities must prevent it before it starts. Today, sport is a universal declaration against racism. It is unacceptable for the opposite to take place in Israel.”
Mr. Peres’ appeal however hit deaf ears within Beitar. While the club’s owner, Russian-born Arkady Gaydamak, echoed the president’s remarks, Beitar coach Eli Cohen drew a distinction between Arabs and Muslim in a perversion of Mr. Ben Gurion’s principle. “I don’t understand the fans who don’t want to see a Muslim player in Beitar. There are a billion Muslims in the world and we must learn how to live with them. There is a difference between a European Muslim and an Arab Muslim, and the fans here have a problem with Arabs living in the Middle East,” Mr. Cohen.said.
The club’s spokesman, Assaf Shaked, went as far as explicitly defending its anti-Arab policy. “We are against racism and against violence and we pay a price for our fans. But we aren’t going to bring an Arab player just to annoy the fans,” Mr. Shaked said.
The row over Beitar’s racism goes to the heart of Israel’s increasingly troubled international relations, an increasing sense that it bears substantial albeit not sole responsibility for the failure so far of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and its strained formal and informal relations with a majority of the Arab world. Israel’s strength no doubt is its ability to discuss such issues publicly. The question is whether this debate will spark the necessary soul-searching.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog.
Post-revolt Arab Transitions Driven by Distrust and Inexperience
February 17th, 2013
By James M. Dorsey.
Synopsis
Post-revolt Middle Eastern and North African countries are struggling to manage the transition from autocratic to more transparent, accountable societies. Increasingly prejudice, distrust and inexperience are proving to be greater obstacles to a successful transition than resistance of vested interests of former regimes or alleged Islamists.
Commentary
POST-REVOLT Arab nations are experiencing tumultuous times. The assassination of a prominent Tunisian opposition leader has sparked mass protests against Islamists held responsible for his death. Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali has called for the replacement of the Islamist-dominated Cabinet by a government of technocrats that would lead the country to elections, to the chagrin of his Ennahada party that fears loss of power.
Egypt has been wracked by violent street protests that have left more than 60 people dead in three Suez Canal and Red Sea cities, forcing President Mohamed Morsi to declare emergency rule and bring the military back into the streets and soccer stadiums to maintain law and order.
Underlying fault lines
Underlying the volatility in Egypt and Tunisia as well as difficult transitions in Libya and Yemen is the increasing lack of confidence between Islamists and non-Islamist forces. That fault line is fuelled by an ever deeper secularist suspicion that the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists who by and large have emerged from the revolts as the largest, most organised political force, are bent on creating Islamist states and enforcing Islamic law. This mistrust drives the weakening of the civilian and armed opposition to President Bashar Al Assad in the continuing civil war in Syria.
For their part, Islamists, including moderates, are not certain where the allegiances of non-Islamists lie and whether significant segments of the secularists would opt for a less free society in cooperation with institutions like the judiciary, the police and security forces in a bid to halt what they see as an Islamist power grab.
To be sure, the militancy and violence of more radical Islamists in Tunisia in recent months as well as Morsi’s imperious style of government, his failed attempt to acquire absolute power, his unilaterally pushing through of a controversial constitution, his failed attempt to fire a state prosecutor and increased reliance on the despised police and security forces, have done little to assuage anti-Islamist fears.
Similarly, Syrian opposition forces with Islamists in the lead have failed to convince the country’s key minorities who could have made a difference in reducing the regime’s power base, that there would be a place for them and that their rights would be secured in a post-Assad Syria.
Yet, lost in the mixture of misperception and prejudice is the recognition that Islamists came to power virtually unprepared for government, having a history of a pressured existence either underground, a legal nether land or exile. The Muslim Brotherhood, two years after the overthrow of Mubarak and seven months after Morsi’s election as president, remains nominally an illegal organisation in Egypt. As a result, this reinforces a sense that he and the Brotherhood fail to truly understand the concept of democracy and are more focused on fending off threats and settling old scores.
A mental transition
Morsi, like his counterparts in other post-revolt Arab nations, (apart from Libya that suffers the consequences of Muammar Gaddafi’s refusal to build institutions), have inherited states dominated by police and security forces and populated by institutions moulded by the former autocratic regimes with their own vested interests. It takes a degree of political savvy, mastering of electoral politics, backroom horse trading, give-and-take and an ability to manage public expectations rather than the bunker mentality in which Islamist leaders operated in the past. With few exceptions, they have yet to demonstrate that they can make that mental transition.
In retrospect, Morsi’s deft alliance late last year with the second echelon of Egypt’s military command that allowed him to sideline long-serving commanders who unsuccessfully sought to grab power in the period between his election and his assumption of office, seems more an exception than an indication of his ability to manoeuvre the minefield that constitutes Egyptian transition politics.
Jebali’s call for an interim technocratic government in a bid to avert a second popular revolt in Tunisia comes closest to Morsi’s rare display of political deftness in his handling of the military. It contrasts starkly with Morsi’s surprising reluctance to tackle reform of the police and security forces who for many years targeted the Muslim Brotherhood, his seeming willingness to maintain Mubarak-era structures and his increased reliance on them despite the existence of reformists within all of those institutions.
Relative calm has returned to the streets of Egyptian cities, giving Morsi at best a month to build bridges in advance of the country’s next flashpoint when a court in Cairo pronounces verdict in the case of the remaining 52 defendants accused of responsibility for the deaths of 74 soccer fans a year ago in a politically-loaded brawl in Port Said.
Flashpoint offers leverage
To do so, Morsi would have to convincingly reach out to his detractors in a bid to convince them that he has put the bunker mentality behind him, wants his government to be inclusive rather than exclusive and that he is serious about reform of key state institutions and is focusing on a turnaround of the country’s economy.
As much as the Port Said case constitutes a flash point – the court’s sentencing last month of the first batch of 21 defendants to death sparked the most violent protests – it also gives Morsi leverage. In the absence of a justification of the court’s ruling, a leaked summary of the prosecution’s case put the blame for the brawl as much on the police as it did on spectators in the stadium.
The prosecutor’s case, coupled with human rights reports that document that the police and security forces are a law unto themselves, provide Morsi with the ammunition to start the difficult process of reforming law enforcement. It is a move that would prove immensely popular and would help restore political calm needed to embark on a road of economic recovery.
A convincing move to amend the constitution in ways that removes fears of an Islamist takeover would further serve to bridge the widening gap in Egyptian politics. It is too early to write Morsi off as a failed leader. The ball is in his court, though time is running out.
James M. Dorsey is Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog.
Egyptian soccer violence: a test of Morsi’s political savvy
January 27th, 2013By James M. Dorsey.
Escalating street violence in the wake of a partial verdict in the Port Said soccer brawl case pits arch enemies – militant soccer fans and Egypt’s security forces – against one another, highlighting the urgency of moves for refrom of law enforcement in a bid to end the turmoil and return the country to a path of economic growth.
The violence that has already left at least 32 people dead and 300 others wounded was sparked by the sentencing of 21 of 73 defendants charged with responsibility for the death a year ago of 74 supporters of crowned Cairo club Al Ahli SC in Port Said after a match against the Suez Canal city’s Al Masri SC.
The verdict provoked not only the ire of Port Said and frustration and mounting anger among Al Ahli fans that security officials and their political masters have yet to be held accountable for the Port Said incident. It also puts Egypt’s religious establishment in a bind. Under Egypt’s newly adopted controversial constitution, clerics at Cairo’s Al Azhar University, historically Islam’s foremost seat of learning and traditionally a rubber stamp for the government, have to ratify the death sentences.
The verdict, equally fundamentally, reflects growing popular frustration with President Mohammed Morsi’s autocratic style, the government’s failure to hold police and security officials responsible for death of more than 800 protesters since the eruption of the revolt that forced president Hosni Mubarak to resign after 30 years in office, rapid economic decline – and the lack of reform of a police and security force widely seen as the repressive arm of the Mubarak regime that has been allowed post-revolt to conduct business as usual with impudence.
A human rights report published this week by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) concluded that “the Egyptian police continue to systematically deploy violence and torture, and at times even kill. Although the January revolution was sparked in large part by police practices and vocally demanded an end to these practices, accountability for all offenders and the establishment of permanent instruments to prevent their recurrence, two years after the revolution the situation remains unchanged.”
The interior ministry, backed by the cabinet at times, continues to defend criminal police personnel by denying the facts, justifying abuses or turning a blind eye as policemen facing criminal charges pressure their victims to change their statements to undermine the case. Consecutive governments have also lacked the political will to prioritize the issue of security sector reform, and even after the election of the first civilian president. As these systematic abuses continue, policemen remain above the law and immunized from criminal accountability,” the report said.
EIPR charged that the “police, acting like a street gang, enforce vigilante justice on those who wrong them, in utter disregard for the law or professionalism.” Militant soccer fans or ultras who played a key role in the toppling of Mr. Mubarak, subsequent opposition to military rule and recent protests against Mr. Morsi lead the pack of those the police and security forces believe have wronged them.
This week’s violence that started already before Saturday’s Port Said verdict follows a pattern developed over the last two years of pitched street battles between security forces and the ultras and other youth groups who spearheaded the country’s popular revolt that has the makings of street gangs fighting it out.
“The violence was the latest in a seemingly endless series of confrontations between the disparate forces of the revolution and the still-unreformed institutions of the Egyptian state. On (Cairo’s) Yousef El-Gindi Street, where the government built a wall to keep demonstrators from approaching the ministry, the clashes settled…into a violent, halting rhythm.
The crowd of mostly young men and teenagers would approach the government wall blocking access to the ministry and hurl stones and the occasional Molotov cocktail at the riot police positioned on the other side of the wall. Then, tear gas canisters would come streaming in from the other side of the wall, sending the protesters scrambling, hacking, and red-faced with pain… Police in riot gear appeared on a rooftop behind the wall, hurling rocks and debris down at the demonstrators. Fires were lit in the street… The Ultras arrived with a roar, shooting flame throwers and beaming green laser pointers at the government troops on the opposite side of the wall,” wrote Jared Malsin on Vice.com.
In a new development, this week’s protests also marked the emergence of the Black Block, a group of protesters reminiscent of soccer hooligans in Europe and Latin America believed to largely consist of ultras who dress in black and whose faces are concealed by black masks, a tactic used by the fans during the revolt against Mr. Mubarak. The group vowed on its Facebook page to protect demonstrators against the security forces and what they termed ruling Muslim Brotherhood thugs, a sentiment that ultras repeatedly express. They say that years of abuse in Egypt’s stadiums by law enforcement have made them intolerant of police brutality.
The emergence of the group reflects an escalation in the mushrooming confrontation with the police and security forces that underlies much of Egypt’s post-Mubarak violent protests and symbolizes the ultras’ battle for karama or dignity. Their dignity is vested in their ability to stand up to the dakhliya or interior ministry.
That dignity is unlikely to be restored until the police and security forces have been reformed – a task Mr. Morsi’s government has so far largely shied away from. While reforming law enforcement is no mean fete, EIPR, in its report has proposed a series of measures that the Morsi government could implement and that would likely go a long way to break the cycle of violence Egypt is caught up in.
The measures include legislation that would guarantee the independence of public prosecutors and separate them from investigative authorities, establish an independent commission that would investigate cases of death and serious injury caused by police personnel, create an independent commission to monitor detention facilities and grant civil rights groups access to detention facilities, and amend laws that regulate the use of force and firearms by police and security forces.
Saturday’s court verdict and the escalating violence puts the ball in Mr. Morsi’s court. A first stab at reforming law enforcement alongside greater transparency and moves to reach out to the government’s critics would open the road to reducing political volatility and creating conditions for economic recovery.
The question is whether Mr. Morsi is up for the task. A man formed in a group that was clandestine for much of its 80-year history and in recent years operated in a legal nether land who now occupies the seat of power, Mr. Morsi has yet to demonstrate the politically savvy needed to draw Egypt back from the abyss.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog
Middle East and North Africa: Another year of Upheaval
January 23rd, 2013
By James M. Dorsey.
Synopsis
Political turmoil and violence promise to shape events in the Middle East and North Africa this year. Monarchies are replacing republics in facing the tidal wave of reform demands in the region. Syria continues to be wracked by civil war while post-revolt nations like Egypt struggle to build a more open society.
Commentary
THE PRE-and post-revolt Arab leaders in the Middle East and North Africa face challenges ranging from political uprisings to violent confrontations, with Gulf monarchies replacing republics facing the brunt of the tidal wave of reform demands that have been sweeping across the region the past two years.
In Jordan opposition groups boycotted parliamentary elections in protest against alleged gerrymandering. The boycott follows weeks of intermittent demonstrations that suggested that King Abdullah’s room to manoeuver is closing. The king enjoys a degree of legitimacy that ousted Arab leaders like Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi could not claim. That legitimacy was called into question with protesters for the first time shouting ‘The people want to topple the regime’ and is likely to be further challenged by the election of a parliament that will look little different from the last one.
International community’s policy dilemmas
Egypt, in the throes of a convoluted post-revolt transition, is bracing itself for renewed street violence when a Cairo court announces its verdict on January 26 in the case against 73 people, including nine mid-level security officials, accused of responsibility for the death a year ago of 74 soccer fans in a politically charged brawl in the Suez Canal city of Port Said. At issue is the difficulty in reforming institutions, in this case the overpowering and deeply resented police and security forces.
Two years into the uprising-turned-civil war in Syria, there seems no end in sight to the brutal conflict that according to United Nations estimates, has already cost the lives of 60,000 people. There seems little doubt that President Bashar al-Assad will not retain the upper hand eventually. But there is little reason to believe that his downfall will mean an end to violent confrontation and the territorial integrity of post-Assad Syria has been thrown into doubt. Fears of what post-Assad Syria will look like are enhanced by the rise of militant Islamist forces in the armed resistance against the Assad regime as well as the rise of Kurdish nationalism and concern that Assad’s Alawite sect may see secession as its survival strategy.
Besides mounting concern about post-Assad Syria, there is a new development in the form of a fatal terrorist attack on a remote gas production facility in the Algerian desert in response to French intervention in neighbouring Mali. A counter-attack by Algerian forces to the take-over of the gas plant left scores of foreign hostages dead. The fact that the rebel advance in north Mali had to be repulsed by French military forces highlight the policy dilemmas confronting the international community posed by the irresistible thrust for greater freedom by ethnic and minority groups across the Sahel region.
Decade of political turmoil and violence
All these bode ill for potential conflict in the oil-rich Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia, where efforts to fend off popular revolts with huge social spending are wearing thin. Gulf monarchies like Jordan (apart from Bahrain’s royal family), still maintain a degree of legitimacy but their ability to leverage is being reduced by their failure to address key popular demands that would allow greater political freedom but dilute their absolute power. The outlook for not just another year but a decade is one of volatility, political turmoil and violence in a region that stretches from the Atlantic coast of Africa to the Gulf.
What all these situations have in common is the fact that suppressed populations and ethnic groups increasingly no longer are willing to simply turn the other cheek. They also raise concerns about regional and international policies that in the case of countries like Algeria, Jordan and the Gulf states are tantamount to an ostrich sticking its head in the sand. Leaders seem to be hoping that mounting unrest and discontent can be contained without the introduction of political change and that they can crack down on violent jihadist groups without addressing the underlying issues that provide them a feeding ground.
The West, China and Russia, still stuck in a mould that favours stability over inevitable albeit messy political change, were caught off guard by the popular revolts that toppled the leaders of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen and dragged Syria into civil war. They have yet to apply the lessons from these popular revolts to the rest of North Africa and the Middle East.
Addressing popular grievances
Similarly, the lesson of the defeat of Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda was that it was as much a result of the Arab populations ignoring the group’s call for jihad in favour of people power as the war on terror. Extremist militants in Mali and Algeria, even when they employ the Al Qaeda label, are motivated by local grievances rather than global jihad and capitalise on the failure of governments to address those grievances. Failure to recognise that the solution is addressing popular grievances constitutes as much a threat to long-term stability as allowing those grievances to fester in a key corner of the world. Short-term volatility and instability is inevitable as the regional push for change continues. The international community would be well advised to seriously help post-revolt nations manage transition, steer pre-revolt countries towards managed reform and in the confrontation with jihadists to ensure that military and law enforcement measures are grounded in policies that address underlying grievances.
James M. Dorsey is Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and co director of the Institute for Fan Culture of the University of Wuerzburg in Germany.. He is the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.