Violence and its Rhetoric
Assessing the Iraqi Opposition
Sharon’s National Unity Government
Editor’s Picks (Spring 2001)
Ahmad, Eqbal. Confronting Empire: Interviews with David Barsamian (Boston: South End Press, 2000).
Akash, Munir and Moore, Daniel, eds. Mahmoud Darwish: The Adam of Two Edens (Syracuse, NY: Jusoor/Syracuse University Press, 2000).
Al-Ali, Nadje. Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East: The Egyptian Women’s Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Economic Reform in Egypt
Texts Reviewed
Ray Bush, Economic Crisis and the Politics of Reform in Egypt (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999).
Nicholas S. Hopkins and Kirsten Westergaard, eds. Directions of Change in Rural Egypt (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1998).
Marsha Pripstein Posusney, Labor and the State in Egypt: Workers, Unions and Economic Restructuring (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
“This Time I Choose When to Leave”
Fatna El Bouih was born July 10, 1955, in Benahmed, a village in Settat province. In 1971, she received a boarder's scholarship to Casablanca's prestigious girls' high school, Lycée Chawqi, and became active in the national union of high school students (Syndicat National des Elèves). Arrested the first time as a leader of the January 24, 1974 high school student strike, for her second arrest she was forcibly disappeared from May 17 to November 1977 in Derb Moulay Cherif, Casablanca's notorious torture center, with other women activists, such as Latifa Jbabdi, Ouidad Baouab, Khadija Boukhari and Maria Zouini. Transferred to Meknes Prison, they were held from 1977-79 without trial.
Sahrawi Demonstrations
Within two months of the death of King Hassan II and the enthronement of his eldest son, King Mohammed VI in July 1999, a series of demonstrations erupted in the Western Sahara. This territory has been administered by the Kingdom of Morocco since 1976, though Morocco’s claim of sovereignty in the Western Sahara is not recognized internationally. Since September 1991, the United Nations has deployed a mission there to organize a referendum that would give qualified Sahrawi voters the choice of integration into Morocco or independence.
From Madrasa to Maison d’hote
There’s a Moroccan expression similar to the English expression “the apple never falls far from the tree.” In Morocco, it’s phrased as a rhetorical question: “Where does wood come from? From the tree.” A year and a half after King Mohammed VI’s ascension to the throne, many Moroccans are wondering just how much the wood will be like the tree.
Networks of Discontent in Northern Morocco
What are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale? What are criminal gangs but petty kingdoms? A gang is a group of men under the command of a leader, bound by a compact of association, in which the plunder is divided according to an agreed convention. If this villainy wins so many recruits from the ranks of the demoralized that it acquires territory, establishes a base, captures cities and subdues people, it openly arrogates itself the title of kingdom.
— Saint Augustine
Risking the Strait
Democratization Without Democracy
A Truth Commission for Morocco
The grim names Moroccans assign to the post-independence years — in Arabic, zaman al-rusas and al-sanawat al-sawda, in French les anneés de plomb and les années noires or in English “the years of lead” and “the black years” — evoke an era of grayness and lead bullets, fear and repression. During les années sombres, the “somber years” of forcible disappearances and farcical mass political trials, large numbers of people representing various political persuasions served long prison sentences for voicing opposition to the regime. By international standards, they were prisoners of conscience.
Political Authority in Crisis
The Rise and Fall of Fa’ezeh Hashemi
Both politics and women’s political activities are radically different under the Islamic Republic of Iran from what they were before the 1979 Revolution. But one fundamental fact has not changed: Politics is still the domain of men, and women who enter the field tend to be related — either by blood or by marriage — to prominent men. Most women politicians are hostages, vulnerable to the political fortunes of men, and only a few have managed to break free. This vulnerability is revealed during parliamentary elections, when in some ways it parallels the vulnerability of the people as a whole, who have been treated as political minors by the theocratic power elite.
Toward a War of Attrition in Palestine
Gaza Agonistes
From the Editor (Spring 2001)
On February 16, US and British warplanes bombed targets outside the no-fly zones for the first time since December 1998, prompting a brief media frenzy that refocused the world's attention on the low-level US-UK air war waged against Iraq since the 1990-1991 Gulf war. But the media mostly missed the real story. With bitter irony, George W. Bush's characterization of the raid as a "routine mission" highlighted the media's near-total neglect of the remarkable escalation of bombing inside the no-fly zones over the last two years.
No-Fly Zones
Caught in the Middle
Ethiopia-Eritrea Peace Process Creeps Forward
Two months after Eritrea and Ethiopia signed a pact to end their two-year border war, an agreement to move ahead with its implementation has finally been ironed out. The 4,000 UN troops brought here to monitor the truce are preparing for deployment to the contested frontier. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of war-displaced civilians remain in camps behind the lines, waiting to see if the truce will hold.
