Algeria’s Contested Elections
Winner Takes All
Eight Ways to Make Elections Risk-Free
1. When drawing the lines of the constituencies, remember to integrate as many opposition supporters as possible into your own constituencies and to transfer as many of your own supporters as necessary into the opposition’s strongholds in order to maintain the majority in both constituencies. Add some soldiers if necessary.
2. Make sure that there are no election observers around while you register the votes.
3. Invite the election observers only on short notice in order to prevent them from preparing the observation properly.
4. Discredit the opposition as being either Islamist or Communist, or being employed by a foreign government or all of the above.
Mission: Democracy
Incumbent national leaders invite foreign election monitors only when it is in their interest to do so. Rarely is significant financial assistance “conditional” on holding elections, although it does improve a regime’s image abroad to do so. For governments being observed, the trick is to orchestrate the process enough to win, but not enough to arouse observers’ suspicions.
Charting Elections in the Middle East
Although Middle Eastern countries have seen a dramatic rise in the number of national elections, there is a significant problem with “charting” the march of democracy in the region through a narrowly focused analysis of electoral processes. Numerous political, economic and cultural forces affecting electoral outcomes are easily overlooked, particularly in studies of elections that frame such processes within the borders of the nation-state.
Behind the Ballot Box
The last decade has seen multi-party competition for elected legislatures initiated or expanded in Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Kuwait, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority. Executive authority in most cases remains an uncontested, if not completely unelected, post. Nevertheless, incumbent rulers invariably tout these legislative elections as evidence of domestic legitimacy, often anointing their countries as “on the road to democracy” in their wake.
Room to Breathe
Less than a block from the seventeenth-century walls that surround Rabat’s medina (old city) is the Association Tamaynut. Inside the three-room office one can attend meetings, listen to lectures and participate in passionate discussions. A young man, Ibrahim, is there every weekday from morning until night. One of Morocco’s many thousand unemployed college graduates, he spends his free time doing volunteer work that he finds gratifying.
Beirut Dispatch
Two things one hears daily in Lebanon: The government is more corrupt than ever, and relations between people are becoming harsh. Let’s consider whether any correlation exists between government neglect and widespread individual survivalism. And let’s focus on highway transportation, where public policy and private use overlap.
If you offer to take a friend and her four children to the airport, you must drive because no one has rebuilt the country’s pre-war train system. Uncharitable tongues claim that the costly new highway system serves foreign construction interests and upper-class Lebanese at the expense of the wider public.
Two Faces of Janus
Eight years after the end of the war in Lebanon, the discrepancy between free minds and free markets is growing ever sharper. Since 1992, Lebanon’s billionaire prime minister, Rafiq al-Hariri, has been the individual most responsible for outlining an economic program for the post-war era. The prime minister has not hidden his admiration for laissez faire principles. In contemporary Lebanon, however, the free market is a most uncertain quantity.
“Sanctions Have an Impact on All of Us”
The following comments are excerpted from a speech delivered on Capitol Hill on October 6, 1998 by Denis Halliday, former UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, shortly after he resigned his post in protest over the sanctions’ devastating impact on the Iraqi people.
Arcs of Crises
Between the confrontations with Iraq in February and November, and the Cruise missile salvos directed at Afghanistan and Sudan in August, 1998 has been rather busy for the gunboat section of the US diplomatic corps. Twice, the UN secretary-general averted US military action by securing promises that Baghdad would comply with UNSCOM weapons inspectors, but the August bombings of US embassies in East Africa showed how broadly the sparks of war had spread. Washington’s hegemony in the region was challenged both by the survivalist instincts of Iraq’s dictator and by an underground Islamist network dedicated to driving foreign troops out of the Arabian Peninsula.
Editor’s Picks (Fall 1998)
Arab Resource Center for the Popular Arts. al-Jana (Special Issue on Oral History Among Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon) (Beirut, 1998).
Article 19 and Kurdish Human Rights Project. State Before Freedom: Media Repression in Turkey (1998).
Beinin, Joel. The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora (Berkely, CA: University of California Press, 1998).
Caldwell, Dan. Power, Information and War, Emirates Occasional Paper 15 (Abu Dhabi: Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research, 1998).
Hegazy, Sonia, ed. Egyptian and German Perspectives on Security in the Mediterranean (Cairo: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 1998).
Historical Road Maps for the “New World Order”
Peter Gran, Beyond Eurocentrism: A New View of Modern World History (Syracuse University Press, 1996).
From Alliance to the Brink of All-Out War
In the arid, mountainous, north-eastern corner of Africa, two of the world&’s poorest but best armed states — Eritrea and Ethiopia, allies until a short while ago — are on the brink of all-out war. Shuttle diplomacy by a succession of would-be mediators has failed to provide an exit from potential catastrophe for both sides, though it has temporarily halted the fighting that wracked the area last spring. Since then, the two countries have mobilized hundreds of thousands of troops and a staggering arsenal of Cold War arms to do battle over less than 100 square miles of disputed scrub farmland and desert. Far more is at stake than a petty border dispute, however.
Protesting Sanctions Against Iraq
Aida Dabbas is program officer for the Jordanian-American Binational Fulbright Commission in Amman. She has been an active opponent of the sanctions against Iraq and of the US arms buildup in the region. Jillian Schwedler, an editor of this magazine, spoke with her by telephone in June.
You recently visited Iraq for the first time.
Short-Circuiting the Media/Policy Machine
Media coverage of the February 1998 showdown with Iraq highlighted subtle but significant changes in the relationship between the mainstream media and US foreign policymaking. Although the major media — despite some alleged soul searching by media professionals [1] after the Gulf war — have changed little since the pro-war hysteria of 1991, activists are discovering more ways to obstruct the media juggernaut and influence policymaking — sometimes by actually using the mass media.
Points of Difference, Cases for Cooperation
In discussions between American and European scholars about Western policies towards the Middle East — an issue of increasing importance for trans-Atlantic relations — Europeans are often asked to explain why their policymakers and pundits criticize US Middle East policies instead of accepting a form of burden sharing that would allow the European Union to pursue its economic interests in the Middle East and the Mediterranean while leaving political leadership to the US. After all, did the US not defend overall Western interests in the Middle East, particularly the free flow of oil? Was not the US the only power capable of brokering peace between Israel and the Arabs? [1]
Between Clash and Cooptation
Arab Perspectives on US Hegemony in the Middle East
Oil and the Middle East
The contemporary international political economy of oil presents a puzzle: political instability in regions where oil is found coexists with steadily falling prices. This combination of continuing political conflict and uncertainty in the Middle East (particularly the Gulf), and the continuing slide in the real price of crude oil encourages consideration of relations between world oil markets, Middle East politics and the international role of the United States. To comprehend these relations, one must consider both the political and geopolitical objectives of the states involved and the economic motivations of the key actors in the international oil industry.
“Praise God and Pass the Ammunition!”
Analyses of the US-Israel relationship usually focus on the question of influence. Is the pro-Israel lobby more powerful, or are Washington’s strategic thinkers in charge? In fact, neither question is particularly useful. Rather, Israeli and US interests intersect in the political and strategic arenas of US decision making.
The past decade has witnessed the consolidation of a strategically unchallenged, post-Soviet US hegemony in the Middle East. During this period of global transition, continuity and change have characterized the political and military arenas of US-Israeli relations, particularly during the first two years of Binyamin Netanyahu’s premiership.
