Blogging the democratic revolution
Iraq the Model has a new banner; also a number of good posts, including a discussion of the recent investigation into allegations of electoral fraud in Iraq, a new security arrangement, and a whole lot more Iraqi democratic politics — check it out! While I’m writing, Academic Elephant has a pretty good blonde joke.
In a move to confuse news agencies, the Syrian government has released five activists who took part in the Damascus Spring, all the while meeting with Iran’s messianic president. Syrian authorities have released five pro-democracy activists, including two prominent former legislators, after they had served nearly four years of their five-year prison sentences. Those released Wednesday – former legislators Mamoun Homsi and Riad Saif; Fawwaz Sello, Walid al-Bunni and Habib Issa – were part of a group of nine men arrested in 2001. They had been imprisoned for 45 months. Three of the group were released earlier. Issa told The…
‘Lo everybody. I am back after a long, long hiatus from this fine blog (incidentally, I was present at the birth) and wanted to point to a subject that is near to my heart. My daughter spent this past Summer in Morocco, studying Arabic and sociology. I have to admit that I was unprepared for her return and the impressions that she brought back. In the general scheme of MENA countries, Morocco, although economically hobbled in many ways, is moving forward in the areas of political freedom, human rights (including women’s rights) and engaging in the world. I linked to…
Young Iranians defy the Islamic Republic by having fun (boys and girls mixed) skiing and chatting among each other. Many of the girls also ignore the mandatory veil! See the photos here
President Basescu’s administration believes that Romania should continue to promote its special relationship with the Arab world. In its 50 long and dark years of communism, Romania has developed friendly relations with the Arab and Muslim leaders, mainly with Yasser Arafat and Gadhafi. Nicolae Ceausescu????????s private ambition was to act as a mediator between Arafat and Israel, hoping to receive the Noble Prize and the West’s friendship. Back then, thousands of young Arabs (mainly Palestinians and Syrians, but not only) have either studied in Romania, or were militarily trained here. Nowadays, Romania has an active role as an ally of…
In an interview with Newsweek, IAEA director-general Mohamed ElBaradei has gotten out of touch with his soft side and unleashed some fightin’ words. What if the Iranians are just buying time for their bomb building? That’s why I said we are coming to the litmus test in the next few weeks. Diplomacy is not just talking. Diplomacy has to be backed by pressure and, in extreme cases, by force. We have rules. We have to do everything possible to uphold the rules through conviction. If not, then you impose them. Of course, this has to be the last resort, but…
A representative of the electoral commission in Iraq has said that it has had to throw out less than 1% of the ballot boxes due to fraud, so if the unverified preliminary results are indeed correct, this won’t affect the outcome of the election. BAGHDAD ???????? Iraqi officials Monday concluded an inquiry into allegations of widespread fraud in the Dec. 15 elections by annulling returns from fewer than 1% of the ballot boxes, and said the action was unlikely to alter the overall result. The ruling by the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq failed to placate secular and Sunni Arab…
As we all read, the European Union declared that negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) failed big time. Well, we heard this before and yet the Europeans returned to the negotiations. But I’ve to say that, personally, I’m more confident that the EU has finally realized that the Mullahs have been taking it into a ride for years. Too bad that it took Mr. Ahmadinejad’s Nazi statements for the Euros to realize what was and is a policy of the totality of the regime. First of all, let me make something clear: all the members of the Islamic…
Pack up your bags and go home everyone, the seemingly impossible has happened. The West has officially ended negotiations with Iran — or is it the other way around? — after Iran began the process of enriching uranium. The EU3 has referred Iran to the IAEA with the express intent of taking the issue to the Security Council. Britain, France and Germany tonight took the first step towards seeking international sanctions against Iran over its controversial nuclear fuel programme. Following crisis talks with his counterparts in Berlin, Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said that they had agreed to request an…
Longtime contributor Kirk H. Sowell over at Window on the Arab World, and More! sent the following to me via email with regards to my post, “Dealing with the rise of Islamist politics.” It furthers the discussion by pointing out a key flaw in the article I linked to; that, while elections would certainly lead to Islamists gaining power in the Middle East, the article makes several wrongful assumptions and mistakes because it doesn’t go into specific detail on the countries he talks about — or even goes into wrong detail. Here’s what he had to say. I’ve never had…
There’s an article by Carnegie senior associate Amr Hamzawy that I think you all will find very interesting. It contends that the slow opening of political systems in the Middle East is allowing for progressively better representation of what the population actually wants, which is why Islamists are beginning to take seats. Since the majority of people in Middle Eastern countries are actually quite conservative, these forces need to be engaged appropriately so that they will learn how to govern pragmatically and provide a valuable democratic alternative to the current secular authoritarian regimes. Here are his main conclusions: The electoral…
Iraq the Model is talking about the death, shortages, corruption, and scandals that are taking a huge toll on public opinion in the country. Omar, known pretty well for his optimism, says that, “it is a fact that it hasn????????t been this bad in Iraq ever since the 9th of April 2003.” While I’m not one to disparage what we’re doing to build a healthy democracy in the country, it’s not easy to take a romanticized view of what’s going on and what it takes to solve these problems. I wrote many times, with much alarm, about the electoral violations…
Asharq al-Awsat has run an interview with ex-Syrian vice president Khaddam, who recently accused Assad of being involved in the Hariri assassination, and is now facing charges of treason and corruption by the Syrian government. In this interview, he counters what his detractors are saying by coming up with multi-million dollar accusations of corruption against Assad and his main men. And, most interestingly, he has a plan for reform in the country. Q: What are you current priorities? Do you want to reform the regime, reform it, or topple it? A: This regime cannot be reformed so there is nothing…
Just the kind of revolutionary competition that really should be going on in the world – not of arms, not of plunder, but of which country can demonstrate it’s the most pro-free-trade? Ian Vazquez at the Cato Institute, who just got back from the Arab countries, launched this intriguing new yardstick that will be sure to incentivize free trade measures in the new emerging economies of the dynamic Middle East. It can be read here.
Marina Ottaway from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace outlines in a brief policy paper what the current strategy for Iraq should be. To sum it up, the current momentum toward federalism is irreversible and the most important thing is to 1) convince Sunnis to accept it and 2) make sure that they get their fair share of the oil in their region. The U.S. can use troops withdrawals as a confidence-building measure that will eventually lead to this and, subsequently, a drop in violence. I agree that the oil distribution issue is probably the biggest issue facing the success…
Michael Totten has a really good piece in today’s Opinion Journal talking about how it is Lebanon, not Iraq, that is the Middle East’s first liberal democracy. I’m certainly inclined to agree with him. Lebanon is just about everything we could hope to strive for in Iraq over the next decade. A lot of his article focuses on the electoral system used in Lebanon, which is very strange by Western standards but guarantees people’s liberties by forcing the different groups in the country to share power. He says that, “Syria and Iraq, which also are composed of rival ethnic-religious sects,…
Former Vice President Khaddam, never a favorite character of mine, quoted Assad as having threatened Rafik Hariri before his assassination and now the Syrian government wants to try him for treason. Welcome, everyone, to another episode of “The Bold and the Syrian.” DAMASCUS (AFX) – The Syrian government will try on high treason charges former vice president Abdel Halim Khaddam, who has accused Damascus of involvement in the murder of Lebanese ex-premier Rafiq Hariri, and investigate him for corruption. The announcement came after Khaddam’s explosive allegations that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had threatened Hariri before his death, which he made…
I see problems with this on multiple levels. CAIRO, Dec. 30 – Egyptian riot police officers rushed into a crowd of unarmed Sudanese migrants early Friday morning, killing at least 23 people, including small children, after the group refused to leave a public park it had occupied for three months hoping to press United Nations officials to relocate them. The Sudanese – thousands of men, women and children – were packed into what amounted to a traffic island in an upscale neighborhood. They had fled war-torn Sudan, but the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees office in Cairo – across…
Now that I’ve fully recovered — it was so bad that it must have been bird flu — I can finally get back to what’s going on with the Iraqi election results. Only it’s already beginning to wind down. The political groups are criss-crossing with dozens of talks all over the country to work out a compromise. New elections are certainly out of the question, but it looks like some of the demands of the Sunnis and seculars will be fulfilled and the Shia-Kurdish alliance will evolve into more of a national unity government. Final results will be released in…
I woke up yesterday morning to a conference being broadcasted on C-SPAN called “The Future of the Middle East,” and since I was still sick, I sat up and watched through the whole thing in between shots of Tylenol. There were a couple of people on the panel fielding questions, but the most interesting comments tended to come from the Turkish ambassador to the United States, Faruk Logoglu, with regards to Islam and building democracy in the region. Here are three of the remarks he made that I think are worth remembering: 1) We should not be asking whether democracy…
After being released on bail in March for the presidential campaign, Ayman Nour, the liberal opposition leader who got second place in this year’s presidential election, has been convicted of “forging signatures” for his candidacy registration papers. He has been given five years of prison time. The charges are false. The judiciary is corrupt. And this is certainly not the way to build a liberal democratic society. It has completely called into question Mubarak’s dedication to reform; not that anyone truly believed in it anyhow. The U.S. government is not taking kindly to the news. An Egyptian court sentenced a…
The Sunni lists, along with ex-PM Iyad Allawi’s multi-confessional secular list and others, have joined together to contest the results of the December 15 election in order, at the least, to have the results reviewed and their complaints addressed. At the most, some members of this new coalition have called for new elections altogether. BAGHDAD, Iraq Dec 22, 2005 ???????? Dozens of Sunni Arab and secular Shiite groups threatened to boycott Iraq’s new legislature Thursday if complaints about tainted voting are not reviewed by an international body. A representative for former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi described the Dec. 15 vote…
Sunnis and secular parties are uniting in calling out the blatant fraud carried out by the Election Commission. BAGHDAD, Dec 21 (Reuters) – Iraq’s Sunni Arab and secular parties threatened on Wednesday to boycott the new parliament after alleging massive fraud in last week’s election, ramping up pressure on the triumphant Shi’ite Islamists to share power. Sunni rebels, whose informal truce helped push turnout to 70 percent as insurgents pitched for a voice in the new, full-term legislature, warned they would intensify attacks if the Shi’ite Alliance held on to the lion’s share of power. The Electoral Commission, which opposition…
All parties that are not from the religious Shia coalition or Kurdish parties are doubting the legitimacy of the Iraqi election preliminary results, and despite the title of this Washington Post article, it’s not just the Sunnis. Reading deeper, it’s independent Sunni parties, ex-PM Allawi’s multi-confessional secular list, and others. Even Moqtada al-Sadr, who allied his list with the UIA! They all have one thing in common: receiving many less seats than expected according to preliminary results. But, in fact, no preliminary results were expected as it was supposed to take two weeks to count the votes. According to this…