Under pressure to solve immediate economic problems,
Middle Eastern countries seek to industrialize as
quickly and as cheaply as possible. While developed countries around the world are very slowly adopting technologies and production methods that exert less pressure on the environment, Western industry at the same time sells its old, polluting technologies to less developed countries at cut-rate prices. Too often, the myopic drive for quick economic gains means that destruction is taken for development and deterioration for progress. Greenpeace and other international and local organizations are combating this mindset on several fronts.
Burning Trash
In 1990, citizens of Alexandria organized to fight the loss
of public access to a street in a main downtown square.
The city had given the street to the World Health Organization for a planned expansion of their local offices. In a landmark case against then-governor Ismail al-Gawsaqi, the citizens’ group, Friends of the Environment and Development-Alexandria (FEDA), argued that city authorities had denied the public’s right to “locational memory” and open space in overcrowded Alexandria. Elderly residents testified in court about their memories of promenades on the street. In a piece of effective political theater, group members sitting in court attached flowers to their lapels and laid flowers on the street outside, to symbolize their mourning of the passing of urban space. The group’s tactics were mocked at first. But in the end, the judge ruled that the allocation of the street for the WHO expansion violated the constitutional principle that “public resources should be used in the public interest.” The WHO announced it would move to Cairo, though the offices are still in Alexandria at present.
Around 10,000 of the estimated million people employed
in Egypt’s fishing sector are based in ‘Izbat al-Burg, situated at the northernmost tip of the Nile’s Damietta Branch and bordered on the east by the vast Lake Manzala. As recently as nine years ago, Lake Manzala was a major fishing area and a collective asset for this community. Small-scale fishers used simple, cheap fishing boats and equipment, faring well alongside larger operators working in both lake and sea fishing. But at the turn of the century, the lake is no longer regarded as rizq (a source of livelihood). Increasingly, local fishers have been prevented from fishing in Manzala by state-licensed private enclosures that have virtually sealed off access to the lake’s northwestern shorelines.
Only a decade after the fall of apartheid in South Africa,
after we all thought we had seen the end of that hateful
system, we are witnessing the emergence of another apartheid-style regime, that of Israel over the incipient Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and parts of Jerusalem. This, at least, seems the likely outcome of the “peace process” begun in Oslo and continued, if haltingly, at the July Camp David summit. Whether a Palestinian state actually emerges from the Oslo process or Israel’s occupation becomes permanent, the essential elements of apartheid — exclusivity, inequality, separation, control, dependency, violations of human rights and suffering — are likely to define the relationship between Israel and the Occupied Territories/Palestine.
The right-wing American Enterprise Institute (AEI) — home to Newt Gingrich, Charles Murray and Dinesh
D’Souza — would certainly prefer a Republican presidential candidate who could be distinguished on foreign policy from his Democratic counterpart. But roundtable discussions hosted by the Institute on June 14 and June 22 found that George W. Bush and Al Gore read from basically the same script. What contrasts the panelists did manage to find were not between Bush and Gore but rather between the two candidates and Bill Clinton.
Black clouds off the Nile River hang low over Mandela Camp, ushering in the storms that bring misery to an already wretched existence on the outskirts of Sudan’s capital. The clouds soon open up over the sprawling squatter settlement, and the rain begins its relentless fall. Barnaba Marial Marol, his cheeks hollow with hunger and his eyes heavy with sorrow, begins his story.
On June 7-8, 2000, the Center for Documents and Diplomatic History of the Iranian Foreign Ministry hosted an international conference in Tehran on the subject of “Iran and the Great Powers, 1950-1953,” with the participation of scholars and archivists from several countries.
The 200-page CIA official history of the 1953 coup in Iran, obtained recently by the New York Times, adds considerably to our understanding of the coup. The history, written strictly for the US intelligence community by the late Donald Wilber, a well-known scholar who wrote many books about Iran, chronicles the coup d’état in which a team of CIA officers overthrew Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq. Wilber worked on a part-time basis for the CIA and was deeply involved in planning the coup and overseeing the propaganda campaign that accompanied it. [1]
Ahmad Shamlu, leading Iranian poet, died in Tehran on July 23, 2000 at the age of 74. In many ways, he embodied the Iranian intellectual movement of his generation: an adept adapter of Western ideas, yet often unfamiliar with their underpinnings; steeped in his native tradition, yet poised uncomfortably against it; wielding immense influence, yet subjected to censorship and harassment throughout his career.
Along with his many students, friends, colleagues and relatives, MERIP mourns the death of Hanna Batatu. He died at the age of 74 on June 24, 2000 at Winsted, Connecticut after a struggle with cancer. Batatu, a former MERIP contributing editor, was also the dissertation adviser and long-time colleague of many of the present and past members of MERIP boards and committees. His work shaped many of our political and intellectual perspectives in a profound and lasting manner.
As the western and southern United States sizzled in record heat this summer, a broad swath of the Middle East was suffering through the worst drought in memory. Through June and July, Middle Easterners sweltered in unusually high temperatures. In Morocco, where half the population works in agriculture, lack of rainfall has forced thousands of peasants into the overcrowded shantytowns around large cities. In Iran, precipitation has dropped by 25 percent in the last two years.
In a public break with the US, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook today submitted a draft parliamentary bill supporting the rapid establishment of an International Criminal Court (ICC) in which to try major war criminals and violators of human rights. The British move to secure the ICC's ratification in Parliament contrasts sharply with the Clinton administration's recalcitrance on the ICC. The US continues to insist on protecting its own nationals from prosecution by the ICC–even at the cost of watering down the court's mandate.
Family and friends of Saad Eddin Ibrahim, chair of Egypt's Ibn Khaldoun Center for Developmental Studies, breathed a huge sigh of relief on August 10, when Ibrahim was finally released on bail by prosecution authorities. The arrest at gunpoint of this internationally renowned pro-democracy activist and academic in his home on June 30 deeply shocked all of Egypt's civil society activists. Yet, in the context of continued government harassment of non-governmental organizations, Ibrahim's release hardly represents an unqualified victory.
The failure of the Palestinian-Israeli-American summit at Camp David did not surprise most Palestinians or those who understand Palestinian opinion on the issues. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's well-publicized "red lines" going into the negotiations delineated a position very far from the minimum that the Palestinian national consensus could accept as a resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak postponed this week's cabinet meeting from Sunday to Tuesday in an effort to resolve the crisis prompted by the Shas Party's announcement that it is leaving his government. Shas (Sephardi Torah Guardians), with 17 seats in the Knesset, is Israel's third largest party and the second largest in the current government after Barak's Labor/One Israel. It is an ultra-orthodox religious party whose supporters are mainly poor and working class Jews whose families came to Israel from Middle Eastern countries (Mizrahim).
Banipal Magazine of Modern Arab Literature 7 (Spring 2000).
B'Tselem. Builders of Zion: Human Rights Violations of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories Working in Israel and the Settlements (Jerusalem: September 1999).
B'Tselem. Legislation Allowing the Use of Physical Force and Mental Coercion in the Interrogations by the General Security Service (Jerusalem: January 2000).
Given the rich lyricism and pointed social quality of contemporary Arabic poetry, it's no accident that politically motivated Arab music is usually vocal rather than instrumental. The close collaborations between Marcel Khalife and Mahmoud Darwish or Egyptian singer Shaykh Imam and Egyptian poet Ahmad Fu'ad Nigm offer vivid examples of politically charged connections between word and melody.
