Reports from liberated east Libyan cities suggest an impressive level of organization on the part of the populace, with most basic urban functions up and running. One wonders if Qaddafi's ideosyncratic jamahiriyan ideology, roping people into participating in rubber-stamp "Basic People's Congresses" to create a facade of direct democracy, has in fact formed the provided the institutional template for a countrywide insurrection against him.
Robert Menard interviews Fouad Abdelmoumni (Makhzen explodes).
That Israeli calls the perfectly legal passage of warships "a provocation" would be hilarious if they weren't the ones doing the provoking with this hullabaloo.
I have this commentary in today's Guardian (page 30) — it discusses Libya and Morocco for the most part, but the principle applies elsewhere: that both outsiders and many Arabs have set too low an expectation of the desire for democracy in the region. Here I'm not excusing real anti-democratic movements and sentiments that exist in the region (as they do even in democracies) or accuse an uncaring West, the point is more to respond to something that has been troubling me ever since the beginning of the Tunisian uprising. This is the idea that a people can be "mature" for democracy — which suggests that they can also be immature and unready for it. This idea or some variant of it, such as fear of Islamists, has been too dominant for the last few decades. Anyway, here it goes (and needless to say — as some commenters on the Guardian website suggested — I am not making a comparison by Libya and Morocco, they are incomparable. I am showing the two extremes of the contemporary Arab world, and that desire for change in both of them is legitimate.)
There is a phrase coined in 2004 by Michael Gerson, a speechwriter for George W Bush best-known for having come up with "axis of evil", that I've always liked. In a speech about education, he bemoaned "the soft bigotry of lowered expectations" that he believed existed against disadvantaged children.
For several decades, there has been a soft bigotry of lowered expectations in the west and among Arab elites about the Arab world. The prevalent thinking about this region of over 300 million souls is that it offered no fertile ground for democracy, either because democracy risked bringing political forces hostile to western interests or because democracy is not a value that has much currency in the region. Many regimes understood this, and played a double game of decrying their societies' "immaturity" while encouraging anti-democratic tendencies such as populism and, at times, a reactionary social conservatism. After the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, no one will buy this any more – and nor should they about two more north African countries: Libya and Morocco.
Here's the rest.
This afternoon the US embassy held a short briefing and Q&A session by US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, William Burns, who is in Cairo for a three-day visit. Present were a small group of Egyptian print and online journalists and yours truly, representing this website, as well as Embassy officials include Ambassador Margaret Scobey, who did not speak. It's the only press availability Burns will be having, Embassy officials said.
Let me first say, for what it's worth, that I've met Burns before and I've always found him extremely affable — just one of these personalities that does not appear arrogant or abrasive, which isn't always the case in the world of high-level diplomacy. It certainly helps pass a positive message of US policy. We didn't get to ask a lot of questions, and the meeting was centered on Egypt. Naturally, Libya came up, and Burns answered a journalist's question about the impression given that the US does not care about what's happening there. Burns basically said that's not the case, pointed to Secretary Clinton's remarks yesterday, and simply noted that the matter was now in the hands of the Security Council.
The rest of the meeting was about Egypt. He noted that this was "a moment of extraordinary promise and extraordinary challenge for Egypt and Egyptians" and noted the "courage and tremendous peaceful determination of the Egyptian people." He said the "road ahead will not be easy and we know this is just the beginnning of a complicated democratic transition and know also it's a transition that can only be navigated by Egyptians themselves." He noted Obama emphasized that "Egypt's transition needs to be open and inclusive" and yield "real political change." The US is committed to the long-term partnership with Egypt, "particularly at this moment of profound change throughout the Arab world." Another strong statement was "I don't think the partnership between our two countries and our two peoples has ever been as important as it is today" — a statement indicative of support for Egypt and a continuing bilateral alliance, but also perhaps of concern?
Locke saw people as being able to live together in the state of nature under natural law, irrespective of the policies of the state. This self-sufficiency of society, outside the control of the state, was given weight by the growing power of the economic sphere which was considered part of civil society, not the state. The state is therefore constructed out of, and given legitimacy by, society, which also retains the authority to dissolve the government if it acted unjustly. Other writers continued with this distinction of civil society and government. The state kept its function of maintaining law and order that Hobbes had stressed, but was considered to be separate from society, and the relationship between the two of them was seen to be subject to laws that gained their legitimacy from society, not from the state. For example, Montesquieu saw the state as the governor and society as the governed, with civil law acting as the regulator of the relationship. The importance of law in regulating the way the state and society interacted was obvious to many writers who considered that a government that did not recognise the limitations of law would extend to become an over-reaching tyranny similar to that described by Hobbes in Leviathan.
An excellent crowd-sourced map on Google on the uprising in Libya has been created by one Arasmus, here. It's useful in trying to sort out all the various reports, to get a sense of the ebb and flow of control. Here's what seems to be happening: the eastern cities are protester-controlled, but Tripoli has at least temporarily been bludgeoned into submission and is saturated with pro-regime forces, other western and central towns are reportedly under attack by military units, and now Qaddafi is contemplating how to regain control of the east before his authority completely unravels. The regime seems to have a shortage of reliable forces, as the army is reportedly divided along tribal lines. (My very uneducated reading of a list of Qaddafa and allied officers in Mansour O. El-Kikhia's Libya's Qaddafi, pub 1997, suggests that they were then concentrated in about six or seven of the army's 45 armor and infantry battalions, although it might not be a comprehensive list).
"EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The EU is struggling to speak with one voice following a massive loss of life in Libya over the weekend and the regime's vow to fight protesters to the "to the last bullet. EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton has spoken of her "extreme concern," while Rome does not want to "disturb" strongman Moammar Gaddafi and Prague has warned of a "catastrophe" if he falls."
In occupied Palestine, Israeli soldiers strip a child and urinate on him, and then the child gets taken to court.
Here Seham provides links about the rest of the unrest in the region. For her Libya links see here.
The indefatiguable Seham has compiled a long list of links pertaining to Libya.
Gaddafi vows not to flee Libya- sources
Cairo, Asharq Al-Awsat- Libyan sources told Asharq al-Awsat that the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, will not flee the country if the situation escalates, and that he intends to die on Libyan soil.=24232
Full Text of Saif Gadaffi's TV Address
Highlights of Gaddafi son's speech
Al-Islam blamed the unrest in Libya on tribal factions and drunken or drugged Islamists acting on their own agendas.
My friend Humphrey Davies, a translator of Arabic literature (and, a while back, the translator and editor of a learned medieval treatise on flatulence in Tanta), was recently featured on one of my favorite books sites, Five Books. Cheeky Humphrey recommended some books that he translated himself, such as Alaa al-Aswany's Yacoubian Building, but that's OK since it is after the best-selling Arabic lit book worldwide in decades if not ever. I agree with his choice of Life is More Beautiful Than Paradise and Taxi too.
I should be giving my own list of Egypt books soon to FiveBooks, so stay tuned.
In reference to this.
'We Stand With You as You Stood With Us': Statement to Workers of Wisconsin by Kamal Abbas of Egypt's Centre for Trade Unions and Workers Services
About Kamal Abbas and the Centre for Trade Unions and Workers Services: Kamal Abbas is General Coordinator of the CTUWS, an umbrella advocacy organization for independent unions in Egypt. The CTUWS, which was awarded the 1999 French Republic's Human Rights Prize, suffered repeated harassment and attack by the Mubarak regime, and played a leading role in its overthrow. Abbas, who witnessed friends killed by the regime during the 1989 Helwan steel strike and was himself arrested and threatened numerous times, has received extensive international recognition for his union and civil society leadership.
That phrase precisely describes the Obama administration's claim to leadership in the Middle East. It is also the factually wrong and conceptually confused defense of its decision to veto a Security Council resolution against Israel's settlement expansion that had wide support:
The Obama administration issued its first UN Security Council veto Friday, when U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice voted alone against a resolution declaring Israeli settlement activity to be illegal.
It's almost certain that the death toll in Libya has passed 200, with thousands more wounded. Protestors are said to have taken control of some cities, others are under siege and running out of supplies. Airfields across the eastern part of the country have been sabotaged to prevent airplanes with sub-Saharan African mercenaries from landings. Major oil companies are said to be preparing an evacuation and one major oil-load port in Tobruq is said to have been shut down.
Live Blog - Libya | Al Jazeera Blogs
Excellent continuously updated page — follow it for the latest.
Libya protests: 'foreign mercenaries using heavy weapons against at demonstrators' - Telegraph
"Tanks and helicopter gunships full of foreign mercenaries are fighting gangs of demonstrators. At least one dead man had been hit by an anti-aircraft missile, while other bodies are riddled with heavy machine gun fire."
Libyan Muslim leaders tell security: stop massacre | Reuters
(Reuters) - Libyan Muslim leaders told security forces to stop killing civilians, responding to a spiraling death toll from unrest which threatens veteran leader Muammar Gaddafi's authority.
Reuters reports that one group in the Moroccan coalition that is protesting today has backed out:
(Reuters) - A Moroccan youth movement that led calls for nationwide protests on Sunday has pulled out because of a disagreement with Islamists and leftists over the role of the monarchy, one of its leaders said.
I suspect they were intimidated, because one would think they would have thought about their partners in this, who would bring out the numbers, earlier. Surely the better logic would be to have people from the mainstream center participate so that Islamists and leftists don't monopolize the day. This will make it easier for the regime to paint the protests as run by "extremists".
Update: Some of the people alleged to have pullout have issued a denial.
It is too early to say whether Egypt will make the transition to civilian rule and recover its sovereignty after 30 years as an American client state, much less whether it will ever recapture the regional leadership it enjoyed under Nasser. But it is not too early to speculate on the regional impact of Mubarak’s overthrow. As the Syrian philosopher Sadiq al-Azm has put it, ‘the regimes feel vulnerable now.’ The symptoms of this anxiety are plain to see: Mahmoud Abbas’s hasty cabinet reshuffle; the Algerian government’s mobilisation of 30,000 police officers to confront a few thousand protesters in central Algiers; the violent repression of the recent demonstrations in Iran, Libya and Bahrain. Saudi Arabia, which recommended that Mubarak crush the protests by force – and which offered to continue subsidising the army when the Obama administration briefly hinted that it might reconsider its aid package – is nervously watching developments in Cairo. So is Israel, though it has retreated into radio silence after failing to persuade Obama to continue propping up Mubarak. It’s not just the peace treaty that worries the Israeli government: The last thing it wants to see is a national, Egyptian-style campaign of non-violent resistance against the occupation, or indeed against the Jewish state’s ‘partner in peace’, the increasingly unpopular Palestinian Authority.
Israelis, you need to read this: your government has done you one more disservice with its pro-Mubarak position during Egypt's crisis. Ezzedine Shukri, who knows your country well, highlights its mistakes.
First, Egypt's revolution has been about Egyptian affairs only, with almost no reference to foreign policy. No one was chanting death to the US or to Israel. The dominant themes were related to freedom, social justice and dignity. Egyptians who took to the streets in millions were expressing their rejection of an ossified regime which ignored their concerns for decades. It is somehow miraculous that no one tried to capitalize on the ‘Palestinian cause' or ‘anti-American' sentiments. People ignored these issues; why Israeli leaders injected themselves into the story and brought undue attention upon themselves is a mystery to me.
The above video is great commentary by the French specialist on Algeria Benjamin Stora. It explains the tension between the need for change and the fear of a return to the civil war of the 1990s. He argues Algerians are "exhausted" by the last 20 years of instability.
Le Monde highlights another type dueling trends: an opposition that has collapsed upon itself and has little credibility cannot give much leadership, but on the other hand youth anger gives momentum to the protests.
AFP notes few demonstrators today in Algiers and a big police presence.
Steve Negus