The casual Sudan observer might conclude from recent news stories that George Clooney's arrest at the Sudanese embassy in Washington on March 16 has been the most significant event of the past week. It takes some digging to find any coverage of the preliminary agreement signed by representatives of Sudan and South Sudan in Addis Ababa on March 13, which is at least a step toward the settlement of disputes over borders, citizenship and oil revenues that have sustained diplomatic tensions and cross-border violence between the two states since the South's secession in July 2011.
Upheaval in Syria has given Kurdish groups new opportunities to advance their nationalist agendas while serving as proxies for neighboring states. In Turkey, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK has taken advantage of the rift between the regime of Bashar al-Asad and the Turkish government by turning to the former to help it launch its armed operations. In Iraq, after some delay, Kurdish elites have entered Syrian opposition politics as well, highlighting the ironies and internal tensions of their own position. The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) is keen to persuade Turkey, its key regional patron, that it can contain the PKK elements based in Iraqi territory and moderate Syrian Kurdish demands, while also assuring its Kurdish brethren that it will support their claims. And in Syria itself, Kurds have created the Kurdish National Council in parallel to the main opposition body, the Syrian National Council (SNC) — a reaction to the possibility that the SNC will morph into a successor regime led by Muslim Brothers under Turkish influence.
On September 8, 2011, just a few days before the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the intrepid rocker Patti Smith performed at Webster Hall in New York City.
The New York Times has done it again. For the second time in a month its op-ed page features an article calling for a (qualified) boycott of Israeli products. The latest installment, “To Stop Israel, Boycott the Settlements,” is from Peter Beinart, former editor of The New Republic, former senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and now senior political writer at the Daily Beast. In addition to Beinart’s impressive credentials as a left-of-center Establishment thinker, he is also a practicing Orthodox Jew and sends his children to Jewish school, as his article informs us.
War is breaking out between the Yemeni military and a group called “Ansar al-Shari‘a” in the southern province of Abyan — and it is in danger of spreading. Somewhere between 100 and 200 soldiers are being buried after battles March 5 in the provincial capital of Zinjibar, and other soldiers captured are being paraded through the streets of the forlorn neighboring town of Jaar.
Libya is commonly counted as a success story among the ongoing Arab uprisings. NATO bombing, the story goes, saved thousands of lives and allowed Libyans to overthrow the absurd and murderous Muammar Qaddafi. The intervention proves that the West has aligned its interests in the Arab world with its values — and may even be a measure of redemption for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the deeper colonial past.
Not much of this comforting tale rings true.
Syrians are approaching the one-year anniversary of what has become the most tragic, far-reaching and uncertain episode of the Arab uprisings. Since protesters first took to the streets in towns and villages across the country in March 2011, they have paid an exorbitant price in a domestic crisis that has become intertwined with a strategic struggle over the future of Syria.
Little more than a decade ago, in a brief interlude of heady optimism about the prospects of regional peace, the Israeli Supreme Court issued two landmark rulings that, it was widely assumed, heralded the advent of a new, post-Zionist era for Israel. But with two more watershed judgments handed down over the winter of 2011-2012 the same court has decisively reversed the tide.
Unusually, on February 21 the New York Times carried an op-ed by a prominent Palestinian political figure, Mustafa Barghouthi.
We at MERIP are shocked and deeply saddened by the loss of Anthony Shadid, an extraordinary reporter, wondrously talented writer, judicious analyst of Middle East affairs, warm, generous person and good friend.
In between sojourns in the Middle East, Anthony served on our editorial committee from 2000-2002. A fuller tribute will appear in the upcoming issue of Middle East Report. For now, we reproduce below the list of his writings for the magazine, including this dispatch from Iraq under UN sanctions, which demonstrates some of the reasons why his later work on that country would be nonpareil.
Our deep condolences to Anthony’s family and to his many friends and colleagues.
BBC Radio 4 broadcast a quite interesting program last Wednesday (as of now, it is still available for listening), in the run-up to the first anniversary of the Egyptian uprising that toppled Mubarak. It featured Reem Kelani, a noted Palestinian singer based in London.
During August of 2011, which corresponded with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, viewers of the state-run satellite channel Syrian TV might have stumbled upon quite a strange scene: A man watches as a crowd chants “Hurriyya, hurriyya!” This slogan — “Freedom, freedom!” — is a familiar rallying cry of the various Arab uprisings. It was heard in Syrian cities, including Damascus, when protesters first hit the streets there on March 15, 2011. But it was odd, to say the least, to hear the phrase in a Syrian government-sponsored broadcast. Until that moment, state TV had not screened any such evidence of peaceful demonstrations in Syria.
Goodness! Look at this marxisant rubbish:
Some ideas are so absurd that they reveal interesting things about the times in which we live. Take, for example, an opinion piece by Andrew Stobo Sniderman and Mark Hanis in today’s New York Times suggesting that human rights organizations employ drone aircraft to monitor brutal regimes such as in Syria. “If human rights organizations can spy on evil, they should.”
The odd, improbable Manssor Arbabsiar story is back, in prepared Congressional testimony by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper asserting that the alleged scheme “shows that some Iranian officials — probably including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — have changed their calculus and are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived US actions that threaten the regime.”
On the first anniversary of the January 25 revolution in Egypt, it is right and meet to shine light upon a figure who is shadowy and obscure in mainstream retrospectives: the striking worker.
Will he stay or will he go?
Yemenis and Yemen watchers have been wondering for nearly a year, since the mass uprising against President ‘Ali ‘Abdallah Salih began, whether he would entrench or decamp.
