Informed Comment

I am watching Aljazeera Arabic, which is calling people in Tripoli on the telephone and asking them what is going on in the capital. The replies are poignant in their raw emotion, bordering on hysteria. The residents are alleging that the Qaddafi regime has scrambled fighter jets to strafe civilian crowds, has deployed heavy artillery against them, and has occupied the streets with armored vehicles and strategically-placed snipers. One man is shouting that “the gates of Hell have opened” in the capital and that “this is Halabja!” (where Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein ordered helicopter gunships to hit a Kurdish city with sarin gas, killing 5000 in 1988).

Two defecting Libyan pilots who flew to Malta confirmed the orders to strafe the crowds from the air and said that they declined to obey the order. Other pilots appear to have been more loyal.

YouTube video shows buildings on fire or burned out in the capital, or with holes in the walls, evidence of violence through the night and into the morning. There are reports of a massacre of protesters in the central Green Square of Tripoli, with “too many bodies to count.”

Aljazeera English has some video:

Qaddafi’s strategy is an Iraq 1991 gambit, where Saddam Hussein remained in power after the Gulf War by deploying his Republican Guards tank corps and helicopter gunships against civilian crowds in Najaf, Basra and elsewhere. In Iraq, this strategy was successful in part because the Sunni officers knew that if the protest movement succeeded, the Shiite religious parties would come to power and subject the Sunni Arabs. The Iraqi armor and helicopter pilots therefore remained loyal to Saddam, and succeeded in their repression.

Qaddafi does not have a similar ethnic divide to help shore up the loyalty of his officer corps, though of course he has advantaged some tribes and groups more than others. His massacre on Monday seems to have created a split in the Libyan elite around him, with key diplomatic personnel resigning and some military men defecting.

For more on his style of governing see [pdf] Mohamed Berween, “The Political Belief System of Qaddafi” The Journal of Libyan Studies, vol. 4, no. 1 (Summer 2003).

The cries of the Tripoli residents witnessing the massacre around them may be the death knell of the Qaddafi regime.

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After the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi fell to the protest movement on Sunday, clashes broke out in the Libyan capital of Tripoli late that afternoon, the first time that city saw substantial demonstrations. The events shook the rule of Muammar Qaddafi to the core, eliciting from one of his sons Saif al-Islam Qaddafi a haughty jeremiad about the protesters endangering the future of the country.

Because Libya is an oil state that exports 1.7 million barrels a day, its fate has more immediate implications for the international economy than unrest in non-oil states such as Tunisia. On Sunday, the eastern Zuwayya tribe threatened to halt petroleum exports in protest of the brutality of the regime in Benghazi, a city of over 600,000.

Petroleum accounts for much of Libya’s $77 bn. a year gross domestic product, the 62nd in the world, which affords Libyans a per capita income on paper of over $12,000 a year, more than that of Brazilians, Chileans or Poles and the highest in Africa. In fact, the oil income is not equitably distributed, so that a third of Libyans live below the poverty line and 30% of workers are unemployed. The regime favors the west of the country with oil money largesse, neglecting the east.

Libya

This outbreak of clashes in the capital of Tripoli is important because governments are always most vulnerable in their own capitals, and because most of the 6 million Libyans live in the west of the country, where the capital is also located. Tripoli is a city of a little over a million. About 3 million Libyans, or half the country, live in the historic region of Tripolitania, including the capital and its environs. Populations along the North African coast hug the rainfall rich areas near the Mediterranean where agriculture is possible and there is potable water.

In a highly significant development, the leadership of the large and powerful Warfala tribe announced that it was now siding with the opposition against Qaddafi. About a million Libyans belong to this extended kinship group. Since cultivating tribal loyalties was one of the ways Qaddafi had remained in power, this major tribal defection underlines his loss of authority. It was further underlined when Arab Warfala leaders managed to convince their Berber counterparts in the southern Tuareg tribe, who are 500,000 strong, to join in opposing Qaddafi.

Tens of thousands of young people had come out to rally in Benghazi on Sunday. The regime initially tried to bully and intimidate the crowds, using live fire against them and in some instances even firing rocket propelled grenades at them. Dozens were killed. The state security forces are accused of deploying African and other expatriate laborers against the Libyan crowds, angering them on nationalist grounds. At length, some military units went over to the crowd, while one stayed loyal. The two engaged in firefights with one another. Lt. Gen. Sulaiman Mahmoud, formerly commander of the eastern region (historic Cyrenaica) eventually went over to the protesters.

All of these developments– the falling of Benghazi, the split in the military there, the defection of major tribes, and the outbreak of protests and violence in the capital– point to a revolutionary situation. Central to such a situation is dual sovereignty, the development of two distinct camps with authority in the same country.

Aljazeera English has a recent overview.

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5. Dear right wing blogosphere and also Bill Maher: You can’t generalize about women’s position in Muslim countries based on a reprehensible mob attack on CBS reporter Lara Logan. Generalizing about a whole group of people based on a single incident is called “bigotry.” It is also a logical fallacy (for wingnuts challenged by six syllables in a row, that means, ‘when your brain doesn’t work right’) known as the ‘Hasty Generalization.’ Nobody seems to note that allegedly helpless Egyptian women were the ones who saved Logan, or that Anderson Cooper was also attacked.

Some other examples of reporters or celebrities being assaulted by crowds are here and here. Wingnuts, and also Bill Maher, who do not immediately make generalizations on these bases about large groups of Westerners are wusses.

Note to Muslim-hater Bill Maher, who should know better: It is not true that women cannot vote in 20 Muslim countries, and please stop generalizing about 1.5 billion Muslims based on the 22 million people in Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, the only place where women cannot drive and where men can vote (in municipal elections) but women cannot. It would be like generalizing from the Amish in Pennsylvania to all people of Christian heritage and wondering what is with Christianity and its fascination with horses and buggies.

4. That the unrest in Bahrain is significantly caused by Iran is false. It is an indigenous protest of Arab Shiites who are treated like second class citizens in their own country. On Saturday night,
the protesting crowds camped out in Pearl Square downtown, as their leaders consulted in preparation for talks with the government. Wikileaks cables show that the US government consistently discounted fear-mongering about Iran by the Sunni monarchy in Bahrain.

3. Yusuf Qaradawi, the 84-year-old preacher whose roots are in the old Muslim Brotherhood before the latter turned to parliamentary politics, is nevertheless no Ayatollah Khomeini. Qaradawi addressed thousands in Tahrir Square in Cairo on Friday. Qaradawi called for Muslims to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda alongside US troops in 2001. On Friday he praised the Coptic Christian role in the Egyptian revolution and said that the age of sectarianism is dead. Qaradawi is a reactionary on many issues, but he is not a radical and there is no reason to think that either the Youth or Workers’ Movements that chased Hosni Mubarak out of the country is interested in having Qaradawi tell them what to do.

2. Looking to the Tunisian and Egyptian futures, it is not true, as dreary anti-Muslim Israeli propagandist Barry Rubin alleged, that Muslim fundamentalist parties always win free and fair elections in Muslim-majority countries. This frankly stupid allegation is disproved by the Pakistan elections of 2008, the Albanian elections of 2009, the Kurdistan elections in post-2003 Iraq, and all of the Indonesian elections.

1. Despite the importance of Facebook and Twitter as communication and networking tools, Labor unions and factory workers have been more important in the Arab uprisings than social media. In Libya, the regime’s attack on internet service did not forestall a major uprising on Saturday in Benghazi, which the regime met with deadly force.

AP reviews Saturday’s rallies throughout the region:

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Breaking News: Bahrain security forces appear to have run out of ammunition at the downtown Pearl Roundabout, as thousands of Shiite protesters flooded in Saturday morning. The demonstrators took the square and a festive mood settled in. The Wifaq Party, which had represented the majority Shiites in parliament until its members resigned en masse on Thursday, had announced that it would not enter talks with the Sunni monarchy as long as police were attacking peaceful protesters.

In Bahrain, Friday began with funerals for three protesters killed by security police during earlier demonstrations. The funerals turned into protest rallies. Some 50,000 Bahrainis took part, about 10% of the population.

Shiite Friday prayers sermons were full of calls for ‘ a real constitutional monarchy’ or even for the overthrow of the Sunni Al Khalifa monarchy.

Ayatollah Sheikh Isa Qasim said in his Friday Prayers sermon at the Diraz Mosque that Thursday’s massacre at the Pearl Roundabout was “a premeditated massacre intended to kill and shed blood, not simply to disperse the crowd.” He wondered, “Why this despotic killing?” The congregation began chanting “Bahrain, Free, Free!” and “Sunnis and Shiites are Brethren– We will not sell out our Country!” Sheikh Isa replied, “We will not accept this humiliation!” again and again. He said that the Bahrain government was now the chief threat to the security of Bahrain citizens. He added that the world needed to shoulder the responsibility of rescuing the Bahraini people. He called on Bahrainis to cling steadfastly to national unity, saying, “Do not kill yourselves with sectarianism.”

In contrast, at the Grand Mosque, Sunni Bahrainis and Sunni Pakistanis and Indian Muslims showed support for the embattled king. Although Shiites are 70 percent of the citizen population, over half of Bahrain’s 1.2 million residents are expatriate guest workers, and most of them are Sunni Muslim.

Then in late afternoon, a small crowd walked toward the Pearl Roundabout downtown, from which protesters had been driven by force on Thursday morning. As they approached, security forces opened fire on them, killing one and wounding another 50 or so. The local hospital was overwhelmed with arrivals.

ABC has video

On Friday evening, Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa called for calm and a dialogue between the government and the demonstrators. The erratic behavior of the Bahrain government, with its oscillations between calls for talks by the king and his son and brutal repression by the security forces caused long time Gulf watcher Gary Sick to wonder if there is a split between the palace and the officer corps, with the latter far more militant and more than a little insubordinate. Me, I think the palace is probably both calling for dialogue and ordering that troops fire into the crowds of protesters.

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Members of parliament from the Shiite Wifaq Party, which had 18 of 40 seats in the lower house of the Bahrain legislature, have resigned en masse from their positions. They were objecting thereby to the deaths so far of 5 protesters and the brutal crackdown on peaceful demonstrators early on Thursday morning by government security forces.

Streets were empty late Thursday in Manama, in the wake of the clearing of the downtown Pearl roundabout of demonstrators by security police, who took down their tents.

Euronews in Arabic reports that the Bahrain army stationed tanks in downtown Manama and then announced a ‘Communique No. 1′ in which they pledged (or threatened) to use decisive force to establish ‘order’ in the country (i.e. no more big demonstrations will be tolerated).

In the meantime, physicians and nurses demonstrated at having been prevented from treating in the field the hundreds of injured after the crackdown on Thursday morning.

Friday morning, a small group of 200 mourners came out for the funeral in a village of protesters killed by security police on Thursday. They chanted slogans calling for the overthrow of the Sunni monarchy.

Both the withdrawal of Wifaq from the government and the turn of chanting to anti-monarchy slogans are very bad signs for national cohesion. The Shiites of Bahrain, about 70% of the citizen population, have now largely withdrawn from the body politic, remaining only as disenfranchised and sullen subjects of a monarchy many can no longer abide. Many Shiites are saying that the government, by attacking peaceful protesters, has lost all credibility.

Aljazeera English has video on Thursday’s violent crackdown:

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