Guest blog of the week: Yemen again

A friend of this blog, Judith Brown, has decided to keep us up to date with the situation in under-reported Yemen, where there has been civil war for most of the past ten years, with interference from other countries notably Saudi Arabia. The BBC has lately noticed that there is something going on in Yemen, but this blog goes straight to the centre, and it will be on a daily basis: http://yemen-news-today.org/

How Palestine art goes to public

Palestinian artists have been invited to show their work in Jordan. It's always good news when an artist gets the chance to go public, although this one will involve the inevitable waits at checkpoints and The Bridge

Source: Today in Palestine!

http://www.middleeastmonitor.com/blogs/culture/4202-palestinian-artists-invited-to-present-their-work-across-the-bridge-that-both-connects-and-separates-them-from-jordan

The only true revolution is non-violent

From film-maker Lara Lee

The present conflict in Syria is a rather ugly mutation of the Arab uprisings that erupted across the Middle East and North Africa over a year ago. As in other countries, the uprising in Syria began with peaceful demonstrations for democratic reform, only to devolve into a violence that has now brought the country to the brink of a full-blown civil war. With a regime that still exercises considerable control over the population, the prospects of such a war are grim, and the nature of the conflict is likely to be protracted, complicated, and bloody, with an equally uncertain aftermath if and when the regime falls.

What the Assad regime doesn't realize (or perhaps does understand, cynically) is that the refugee crisis occurring is only fanning the flames of conflict. The types of "extremists" he decries are born in refugee camps, and the camps I've visited across the border, in southern Turkey, are no exception. Tens of thousands of people have fled their homes with fear, sadness, and hatred in their hearts, and justifiably so: Most have witnessed unspeakable brutality; watched their friends and family killed, raped, or disappeared; and, in the face of such horrors, see no room for negotiating with the regime anymore. And so they find themselves abandoning the peaceful revolution and supporting the Free Syrian Army (FSA), a nebulous entity composed of defected soldiers, angry civilians, and, sometimes, plain criminals. The FSA began as a collection of soldiers who refused to fire on peacefully protesting civilians, who then left the army and began to form militias aimed at protecting these demonstrators. Soon, this purely defensive function gave way to small raids and ambushes of government troops, thereby fuelling the regime's claims that protestors are not peaceful, and that they cannot be dealt with peacefully.

Allowing violence to overtake the revolution would represent a wholesale descent into passion, an abandonment of strategic thought into what could be seen as miniature version of a regime itself, a regime that brutalizes, lies, and has lost its humanity altogether. Such a revolution would not bode well for a successor regime. Already there is some evidence of this taking place. Rumours abound that tell of more desperate members of the opposition mimicking their ugly opponent: creating and disseminating false videos and propaganda, staging offensive operations against government targets, and encouraging more violence, when their goal at inception was to lessen violence, not inflame it.

While most Syrians desire a complete return to the peaceful revolution that began over a year ago, the regime seems quite content with an armed opposition, and rightly so: Assad has been the recipient of billions of dollars in sophisticated Russian military hardware, the kind that no rebel group, or at least not this rebel group, could hope to match. This also makes a Libya-style NATO intervention (as some seem to desire) much more complicated, and not at all productive in bringing about a truly peaceful, free Syria. A military solution, for all practical purposes, does not exist, at least not without destroying the nation it hopes to liberate.

Amidst the violence, there are signs of hope. Women travel through checkpoints from Damascus to Homs, smuggling medicine under their abbayas; classrooms are improvised wherever they can be found so that children can continue their education despite the disruptive violence surrounding them; children write poetry and make drawings of a dictator-gone-mad who, contrary to mythology, does not stand up to the Israelis or to the Americans but uses his tanks to kill his own people. Peaceful resistance does not mean no resistance, nor does it mean simply paper banners in the street. Many refugees that I spoke to, private citizens of Syria with no interest in political power, think peaceful direct action, like general strikes, are capable of paralyzing the country and wreaking havoc on the regime. Should the revolution return to its peaceful origins, it is likely to grow in size and intensity. Bashar al-Assad enjoys very little popularity among his people, but it is the violence -- of the regime and the opposition both -- that has alienated so many into remaining silent.

Such peaceful resistance would be doubly effective in conjunction with unanimous diplomatic force, which would require that Russia and China participate in sanctions against the Assad regime. Of course, this is where the conflict becomes bigger and more complex, as Syria is itself the unfortunate pawn in a larger power struggle. The Assad regime's affiliation with Iran, and their relationship to the two ascendant superpowers in the world (Russia and China), put them at odds with the reigning (and waning) superpower, the United States, and its chosen successor, Israel. The geopolitical context of the Syrian crisis is now causing rifts among international activists who are normally unified in their opposition to American imperialism and Israel's policies toward Palestine but now find themselves on opposite sides of the divide when it comes to Syria and the Assad regime. I find this baffling. In my mind, if you believe in a free Palestine, you must also believe in a free Syria. For all his bluster, what has Assad really done for Palestinians? The Palestinian-Syrian refugees I spoke with were as anti-Assad as any native-born Syrian, and it seems that this is because they recognize that oppression is oppression; it lacks any color, race, or religion and is its own language.

With the continued perseverance of the Syrian people, the fall of Bashar al-Assad is inevitable. But in order to ensure this outcome, they must transcend the confessional, political, economic, and ethnic boundaries that the Assad regime is so keen to use against them, and rise as a united whole. But perhaps most important of all is that they do so without resorting to the same violence that characterizes their opponent. The use of violence will represent a failure of the revolution and a victory for Bashar al-Assad and the false narrative he has created.


Iara Lee is currently in post-production on her new documentary, The Suffering Grasses, which was filmed at the Syria-Turkey border. She has already published this piece in the Huff Post.


　

　

　


　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　



　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

Yemen uprising - overview

by Judith Brown

In order for you to understand the Yemen uprising, and the uprisings in many parts of the Arab world, I would like to tell you about Amr. He is the sort of young man most parents would be very proud of. He has graduated from university with a degree in engineering. He is polite and well mannered, he always looks clean and smart. His parents are very ordinary people, his father a policeman, his mother recently made redundant from her job teaching hairdressing to refugees. Seeing that Amr needs new skills, they took on debt in order for him to take extra courses in IT and English, and he has worked hard at these courses. A year and a half after graduating, he is without work. His mother told me that he leaves home every day with his file of certificates, to visit prospective employers. He told me that he would be willing to do anything, and then he emphasised it, repeating, ANYTHING. He cannot leave home, or consider marriage, until he has an income, and he cannot see any possibility of an income at any point in the future..

In Yemen, 70% of the population is under 30, and 50% under 15. There is extremely high unemployment, especially amongst the young. Those who get jobs tend to have family or tribal connections - if you belong to a poor, unconnected family, your chances of finding employment is very low indeed.

But one way that people can get employment of a sort is by becoming a member of the balataga. These are thugs paid for by the President. They get 2,000 riyals a day (about £6), plus food and qat, the narcotic leaves that Yemenis chew. It is alleged that they are paid for out of money that US provided for anti-terrorist activity.

There can be no country in the world where the terrorist activity is over-egged as it is in Yemen. It helps the Yemeni government get aid from US, UK and the rest of the world. Despite claims that Al Qaeda in the Arab Penisular is now based in Yemen, there has been very little evidence of that except for a scatty plot over a year ago to put a bomb in a printer on a plane, and that failed. For example, there has been no large scale terrorist acts such as occurred in regularly Saudi Arabia before Al Qaeda was driven out.

Whereas the Yemeni military can be relied on to fight in places like Aden, with its separatist aims, and north of Sanaa where there is a Shia population, it cannot be relied on to fight in Sanaa, where the army is more sympathetic to the population. So the balataga has been used by the President to challenge protesters in Sanaa from the beginning of the uprising, occupying the central square, Tahreer, causing the protesters to set up camp outside the university, renamed as Al-ghreer Square, or Change Square. It is about two miles from the centre, on the ring road, and the main inconvenience was that traffic had to be diverted around their camps. Two weeks ago, the protests were virtually ignored by all, and everyone was just getting on with life. When talking to Sanaa residents, although they wanted a change, many said that Saleh was not as bad as many leaders in the Arab world. There were very few considering joining in with the protest.

There have been some military attacks on the students at Al-ghreer in the past weeks, and allegations of the use of a nerve gas that caused convulsions on student protesters. But the main attack that came last Thursday was almost certainly the actions of the balataga, although there is no emerging evidence either way of Presidential orders. Friends who live in the area tell me they heard machine guns firing for twenty minutes. I heard that the protesters were hemmed in by the army, whilst the balataga stood on roof tops, machine-gunning those below. So far, 52 have died according to the Yemen Observer, and 200 more were injured. The massacre stopped when student protestors went to the roof-tops and caught the protagonists and handed them over to the police. Despite Yemeni people having wide access to weapons, the protesters have not been drawn into using weapons as part of their protests, to their credit.

This dreadful event has resulted in many protest resignations. The head of the army and other top military officials, some of whom are now in tanks protecting the protesters. Members of the government, including the Minister for Human Rights. Ambassadors, including those to the UN and Lebanon. The President has declared a State of Emergency, sacked the government but asked them to keep on working until he appoints a replacement. Saudi is acting as a mediator between the President and opposition groups.

So where from here?
With the military divided, could it be a civil war? Without this massacre, it was very likely that Ali Abdullah Saleh would hang on to power, particularly since the unclear outcome in the Libya uprising, but now, everything has changed.

But it stands to reason that something has to give in Yemen. Apart from horrendous youth unemployment, the country is fast running out of water, with Taiz already out of water, and the capital, Sanaa, likely to be the first capital city in the world without water by 2015. At 8000 feet above sea level, this will present a huge challenge. The country's oil reserves are dwindling, Yemen is hoping to find gas but it won't be in significant quantities, and oil is currently its only significant export. And what is more, the known oil is in South Yemen, that demands separation from the North, making the issue more complex.

Whatever happens, ordinary Yemenis are in for a tough time, especially the young. I hope that young men like Amr find a future and are able to reach their potential, or I dread to imagine what will happen to the Arab world.

Yemen update 2nd March

With the spread of political unrest throughout the Arab states, there has been a dearth of news about Yemen, a part of the world which if anything only conjures up embarrassing memories of Britain's empirical adventurism in the nineteen-fifties. We in Bristol are privileged in having a colleague, Dr Judith Brown, right there in the middle of it all. Here is her latest report:

I'm back in Sana'a which is much quieter than Aden protest-wise, although the areas around the new university and Tahreer Square are blocked to traffic. I am living way north of those areas so I don't see any action except when driving nearby.
The mood in Sana'a I think is apprehension. I think it might be difficult for us to understand their fear, but when the whole Middle East is set for a possible big change, everyone becomes aware of the financial, security, stability risks and they are scared at the prospect. They would like change but...
Just as I left Aden, I received an email from the British Ambassador suggesting that all British citizens leave Aden immediately. There are tanks on the streets apparently and it is considered that the risk of civil war has been raised. However, the demonstrations yesterday, whilst very large in Taiz and Aden, were I gather peaceful. Taiz is an interesting situation because it was in North Yemen - which is actually to the West of Yemen, but actually located in the South. So it gravitates towards the South, it is far nearer to Aden than it is to Sana'a. It also has a reputation for having respect for women's rights and is noted as a place where education is valued - even during the Imam era, it was the only town in North Yemen with educational facilities for women, and the schools were considered to be excellent. It is in Taiz where there are the biggest uprisings in the whole of Yemen. I think the people of Aden (not the youth who are protesting) see the issues of separation and change in government as too closely related, and fear the consequences. They know the president has close links with the American military because they are fighting Al Qaeda in Arabia, which is now based in Hadramaut, which is in the political South but is actually in the East. So you can perhaps see why Taiz, with no secessionist issues and no close links with Sana'a is the lead city in the protests.
But I can see that the fear and apprehension of change, once the initial excitement has passed, is a big block to movements for change. And this of course applies all over the Middle East - nothing is settled politically in Tunisia, Egypt or Libya yet and that adds to uncertainty elsewhere.

Libya: what next?

So what next in Libya? The USA will be keen to re-establish ‘stability’ first and foremost. We all know what stability means: setting up a regime that will be in every way a puppet of the ‘benign’ godlike Superstate, and which looks pretty much like the last one. That is why Eisenhower invaded Guatemala. And that is why Kennedy also invaded Guatemala. The wrong kind of democracy. As in Vietnam, Chile, Gaza.

And we can look at Iraq for an example of perfidious US/UK politics. Saddam was our man until he went into business for himself; then suddenly he became Evil Personified - and the fact that his chemical weaponry was sold to him by the US and UK was brushed aside repeatedly. Similarly, Gaddafi morphed from terrorist supporter to Friend of the West, which then ignored his internal repressions. Libya is regarded as a favoured customer, with the UK boasting the largest pavilion at the last Libyan arms fair. Thus it was with the Thatcher Government and Indonesia.

In January 2009, Nick Clegg wrote in The Guardian that Britain should stop selling arms to Israel following its bombardment of Gaza. He made a broader point: the UK should not supply weapons to countries involved in external aggression or internal repression.
He has been conspicuously silent on this subject since he became deputy prime minister.

Interviewed on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme, Tuesday 1st March, John Major exposed the Establishment position on this for once and for all. He claimed, with some bitterness, that the people who were complaining about arms sales would be the same ones who would be out on the street demonstrating against job cuts when the arms industry suffers.

Now Iraq has ‘stability’: a new, stand-in dictatorship, hotwired to Washington as before. And all those deaths? Just numbers, as Harry Lime would say. But our government and supine news media - the Mail, Sun, Telegraph etc will have it that we ‘won’ the war and liberated the Iraqis while saving ourselves from the threat of WMD.

It does look now as if the UN could be readying itself for intervention. Our very own David Owen has been calling for a degree of UN-sanctioned interference. Or America could just stick to tradition and start pouring bombs all over the parts of Libya that it suspects contains the people who least represent its interests.

In a recent blog, Susil Gupta said,
Should the crisis continue, the Guardian argues, “intervention on the ground would have to be considered. The Egyptian army has the means, other Arab countries could contribute, and western forces could help.” Yes, and it would all be over by Christmas.

It is obvious that these war-enthusiasts have not thought this through – but then they would not be doing any of the fighting. The plain fact is that there are no feasible military interventions even if the major powers could agree on an intervention plan, which is very far from being the case. Consider the options.

Imposing a no fly zone. This would require extensive air patrols by foreign air forces. They would have little effect since air power is not key to Gadhafi’s strategy. It would, however, create an atmosphere of major war and give Gadhafi a propaganda boost.

Creating a military barrier or cordon sanitaire around eastern Libya to protect rebel positions. Likewise this would crystallise the situation into a two-sided war, which could only play into Gadhafi’s hands. It is to the advantage of those that want to topple Gadhafi to avoid a war of entrenchment fixed positions, preventing them from permeating every level of society and undermine further his crumbing power base. In any case such Western intervention would be impossible to implement. No Western commander is going to deploy troops at short notice into a theatre unknown to his troops but well-known to an enemy who, in any case, cannot be easily distinguished from friendly forces. It is a recipe for disaster.

Sending in a ‘peace keeping’ African Union force to separate the parties. One way to unite every Libyan behind Gadhafi, given the reputation of such forces in the past.

Sending in a ‘peace keeping’ force made up of troops from Arab countries as The Guardian recommends. One way to unite every Libyan behind Gadhafi and infect and inflame the whole of the Middle East with the vicissitudes of a Libyan civil war.

...
I would say that any kind of outside involvement would most likely unite the Libyans against the invaders if it did not break up the country into a protracted civil war. The good news is that America is seriously in hock after a century of overspending and colonial overstretching, so that it is unlikely to be as gung-ho as it used to be over this kind of scenario. And sanctions? Remember the sanctions in Iraq: how effective they were in hastening the deaths of the very young, the very old and the seriously ill. But in any case Libya is a different kind of country entirely - its edges are very ‘porous’ and it is probably as far removed from a self-contained walled-in state as you could get.

But whatever form any interference might take, it would certainly not be aimed at consolidating the democratic revolution by the People. It will be for re-establishing the pipelines of oil and money. Stability.


The Guardian has published some excellent letters on this subject including ones from friends Tony Greenstein and Peter Downey:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/01/liberal-intervention-in-arab-world?INTCMP=SRCH