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Secretary of State Clinton declared Monday that the Obama administration would work with ascendant Islamist parties of the Muslim world, answering one of the central U.S. policy questions resulting from the Arab Spring.
Delivering an address at the National Democratic Institute, Clinton offered a forthright embrace of the democratic changes enveloping North Africa and the Middle East at a time when the euphoria of the successful revolutions from Egypt to Libya is giving way to the hard and unprecedented work of creating stable democracies.
After decades of partnering dictators throughout the region, her message was that the U.S. would approach the new political landscape with an open mind and the understanding that long-term support for democracy trumps any short-term advantages through alliances with authoritarian regimes.
While she reached out to the religious-rooted parties expected to gain power in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere, she said nothing about changing U.S. policies toward Hezbollah and Hamas, which have performed well in Lebanese and Palestinian elections but are considered foreign terrorist organizations by the United States.
“For years, dictators told their people they had to accept the autocrats they knew to avoid the extremists they feared,” Clinton told an audience that included former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. “Too often, we accepted that narrative ourselves.”
After almost a year of protests and crackdowns, armed rebellion and civil war, the Arab world’s upheaval has left a jumbled mosaic of liberals and Islamists, military rulers and loose coalitions of reformers. No country appears unalterably on a path toward democratic governance, and for the people of the region and the United States the stakes of long-term instability are high.
U.S. interests, including the security of oil supplies, military relations and Israel’s defense, have forced the Obama administration to engage in flexible diplomacy, with different messages for different countries.
The one-size-does-not-fit-all approach has meant U.S. support for an imperfect military stewardship over Egypt ahead of elections for a new parliament and president, and largely overlooking ally Bahrain’s rough response to protests earlier this year. Washington helped a military effort that ultimately deposed Libyan strongman Gaddafi. It also demanded that leaders in Syria and Yemen leave power, without any real means to make them do so.
“There will be times when not all of our interests align,” Clinton said. “That is just reality.”
VIA AP
This marked the first El-Adha Eid celebration after the outbreak of the January 25 revolution and the ousting of Hosni Mubarak from power.
A year ago, the press in Egypt marked Eid, as they did for thirty years, by reporting on where Mubarak performed the morning prayer and which high-level public figures stood by his side as he did so.
In fact, the ousted president celebrated the previous Eid ritual at the Police Mosque in Cairo with Field Marshall and a slew of top government ministers and National Democratic Party (NDP) officials.
Mubarak and a host of his men performed what was to be their last public prayer together just weeks before the January uprising swept them from power, and eventually sent many to prison.
On Sunday, Field Marshal Tantawi, who assumed power from Mubarak on 11 February, was the leading Muslim man in the country facing east to Mecca in order to pray to Allah, as believers do when they reconfirm their Islamic faith five times a day.
The field marshal performed the Eid prayers along with a number of generals from his ruling military council and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar at the Army mosque in Cairo.
Interestingly, both the Eid celebrations in 2010 and 2010 fell just weeks from two sets of parliamentary elections which represented milestones, though in disparate ways, in the contemporary history of Egypt.
The 2010 elections were, by independent accounts, the most rigged elections that took place during Mubarak’s 30-year dictatorship; and anger that resulted from widespread fraud that favoured his NDP played a key role in pushing public hatred of the regime to boiling point, hastening its demise in January.
Meanwhile, the 2011 contest stand to be the first in modern Egyptian history to pass without systematic and widespread fraud, vote-rigging and state sponsored violence against opposition candidates.
Last year, as Eid approached, Mubarak’s State Security Intelligence (SSI) was busy rounding up political opponents in a campaign of public intimidation. During those holy days, the SSI focused its wrath and repression, as it did time and again for most of Mubarak’s tenure, on the mass-basedMuslim Brotherhood organisation who were the largest political opposition force to his rule in the country.
Egyptians who are sympathetic to the group’s politics had to walk through government checkpoints if they wanted to pray at Eid in a mosque or a venue that was led by Brotherhood activists and preachers.
This year, the tables have turned.
Mainstream media outlets reported victory for Islamists in Tunisia’s elections. However, the Islamists won 90 out of 217 seats.
Several political parties participated for the 217 seat assembly here is the election result breakdown of the top five:
1) Ennahda:
Seeks a “moderate” Islamic government.
It took 90 seats.
2) The Congress for the Republic (CPR):
Seeks a socialist-nationalist government.
It won 30 assembly seats.
3) Ettakatol:
Seeks stronger state involvement in private matters.
Ettakatol took 21 seats.
4) The Popular Petition for Justice and Development:
Party run from London with close ties to Ben-Ali.
Took 19 seats.
5) Progressive Democratic Party (PDP):
Lead by woman promises a "moderate" state of justice.
Took 17 seats.
French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said that the government of Al-Assad will fall under pressure of protests and sanctions. With a crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Syria now seven months old, Western powers including France are relying on a combination of sanctions and diplomatic pressure to weaken Assad’s hold on power. The United Nations has estimated more than 3,000 Syrians have died since the start of crackdown.
The European Union widened sanctions against Assad and the Syrian state after China and Russia blocked an attempt by Western powers to bring about a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning violence against protesters.
"It’s true that in New York (at the United Nations) we were blocked, and that is a stain on the Security Council, which said almost nothing about this barbaric repression," Juppe said on France Inter radio.
"This will end with the fall of the regime, it is nearly unavoidable, but unfortunately it could take time because the situation is complex, because there is a risk of civil war between Syrian factions, because surrounding Arab countries do not want us to intervene."
Osama bin Laden and Muammar Gaddafi dead; Hosni Mubarak and family behind bars with millions of dollars of assets frozen; President Ben Ali of Tunisia sentenced to 35 years in absentia; the Bosnian war criminal Ratko Mladic awaiting trial in the Hague. We can take a moment to recognise that sometimes things go astonishingly well – the removal of these five characters from the picture is a blessing.
Whatever doubts we have about Gaddafi’s death and the absence of due process (if you can’t even decide where to bury a man, it is a good rule not to kill him), his death is a bracing lesson for the likes of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, who is torturing young demonstrators to death, and President Saleh of Yemen and King Hamad of Bahrain, both of whom are drenched in the blood of their countrymen.
The knowledge that just 12 months ago Ben Ali, Mubarak and Gaddafi all looked untouchable must cause the goofy-looking butcher of Damascus and his fragrant missus to clutch at each other in the wee small hours.
The Nato intervention was right and I would say that now, even if it had not gone so well for the rebels in the last three months. At the time the decision was taken, I was in Tunisia, in the stunned aftermath of Ben Ali’s departure, looking up the timeline of the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995, when General Mladic separated the men from the women and young children and went on to murder 8,000 people. Benghazi, the eastern city where Gaddafi did his military training, was as vulnerable as the Bosniak enclave. His mercenaries would have created a bloodbath if they had not been driven from the outskirts as the first air strikes began.
I wasn’t optimistic – Libya seemed too vast, Gaddafi too cunning and the rebel forces hopelessly amateur. And there were doubts whether air power alone could achieve the result that it did. But after 26,000 air sorties and 9,600 strike missions, and a lot of blood spilled, the regime is no more and David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy can quietly take a bow. Both are nimble politicians, yet it is not unduly naive to believe they were influenced by the memory of what happened in Bosnia.
There is always a basic moral requirement to intervene, but any decision to act must gauge risk and the likelihood of achieving success. The seemingly pragmatic considerations also contain a moral element, because the interventionist obviously has an obligation not to inflame local opinion or create a situation worse than the one he is seeking to alleviate. These conditions were met in Libya, yet there was the additional incentive of the country’s "sweet, light" crude and the reserves of 46.4bn barrels, which have nothing to do with morality or Srebrenica.
Stage two of the Arab Spring begins today with elections in Tunisia for the Constituent Assembly, in which the Islamist party An-Nahda, led by Rachid Ghannouchi, is likely to do well. This is the first big test for the west because we have to allow the people who risked everything on the streets to develop their own politics and democratic processes.
Nor should we allow ourselves to be spooked by what happens in the Egyptian elections on 28 November, when the Muslim Brotherhood‘s well-organised political wing, the Freedom and Justice party, is expected to trounce nascent secular parties. Admittedly, this will not be the greatest outcome. Quite apart from the Islamists’ failure to reconcile their declared support for rights and civil liberties with the deeper convictions of religious authoritarianism, the generation of devout men likely to take power is hardly equipped to address, or properly understand, the problems of the young people who took to the streets Tunis and Cairo.
The thing that so few have really absorbed about the revolutions is that they were generational – the young rising against the tyranny and corruption but also the incompetence of their parents’ generation. The first demonstrations in the Arab Spring occurred in the Tunisian provincial city of Sidi Bouzid, where a young man set himself on fire because officials confiscated the fruit and vegetables he was selling without a permit. Like so many of his contemporaries, Mohamed Bouazizi, 26, could not find proper work.
Youth unemployment and the grinding lack of hope are the source of the most serious social and political problems across the Arab world. The unemployment rate among Tunisians under 25 is about 26%. Half of the 60,000 graduates released on to the jobs market every year will not find work. These are the well-educated and highly organised single young people who had nothing to lose during the uprising and have gained very little in material terms since.
To grasp what happened in Tahrir Square, you must know that 54 million of Egypt’s population of 82 million are under 30 years old and this age group makes up 90% of the country’s unemployed. The very highest rates of joblessness are among the well educated.
The UK’s median age is 40. Across the Arab world, it hovers in the mid-20s. In Egypt, it is 24.3, Libya 24.5, Tunisia 30 and Syria 21.9. Factor in regular unemployment rates in the Middle East of 25% among the young – even in the rich Gulf states – and you know that we are only at the beginning of this particular story.
The sophistication of this new generation of Arabs should not be underestimated. They require far more than sermons about prayer and clean living from middle-aged chaps to make lives for themselves in the 21st century. They will need freedom, empathy and technocratic as well as political leadership to create the jobs that will ensure stability and peace. When you talk to these educated young adults, as I did earlier this year in Tunis and Cairo, it is striking how well they appreciate that democratic change depends on job creation. Yes, they declare their faith, but it’s a given – not something they want to go on about.
If the west wants permanent change in North Africa, we have to recognise the potential of this new generation and find ways of providing stimulus and investment, even as we struggle to create jobs for our own young people. That is the only intervention open to us now and in some ways it is much more demanding.
In Libya, the guns need to be put away, a national army and police force set up and proper courts founded. The first test of the new civil society must be to give a scrupulously honest account of how the former dictator met his end. The new republic will not be served by a cover-up and by spokesmen for the National Transitional Council lying through their boots. As the graffiti that appeared in Tripoli this weekend reads: "Clean it up and keep it clean".
As the land that launched the Arab Spring heads into historic elections next week, all eyes are on the long-repressed Islamists — and whether a big victory for them will irrevocably change this North African nation and inspire similar conservative movements around the region.
Many fear that despite vows to uphold democracy, Tunisia‘s Islamist Ennahda Party is bent on imposing a theocracy that would roll back hard-won secularism and women’s rights. Others see an opportunity to bring a moderate form of political Islam into the Arab world — one styled after the successful ruling party in thriving Turkey.
The Ennahda Party was brutally crushed by overthrown dictator Ben Ali in the 1990s, a policy tacitly approved by Western powers wary of militant Islam. Now, in the Oct. 23 election, it is set to become the largest party in the assembly that will write the nation’s new constitution — largely because it is the best-organized force in the country.
Unlike many Islamist groups in the region, Ennahda has explicitly pledged to champion democratic values and women’s rights, but its secular critics warn the party has a secret agenda to impose hardline Islam.
These fears have been inflamed by the appearance of new ultraconservative groups known as Salafists that have attacked movie theaters and TV stations for showing material they say denigrates Islam.
Once in power, many warn, Ennahda would swiftly seek to put its Islamist stamp on this tourist-friendly nation of 10 million. Tunisia’s post-independence 1956 personal status code was unique in the Middle East and outlawed polygamy, mandated the woman’s approval to get married and set limits on the man’s power to divorce. It also declared men and women to be equal in terms of rights and citizenship.
In January, Tunisians stunned the world with a month long popular uprising that overthrew a seemingly entrenched dictator, inspiring similar revolutions across the Middle East.
How the country’s nearly 100 political parties compete in elections and then work together afterward will be key for Tunisia and other countries such as Egypt and Libya, which followed Tunisian protesters’ lead and overthrew their own dictators.
TEHRAN, Iran—In the ongoing political skirmishes among Iran’s leadership, it was the equivalent of bringing out the heavy ammunition: The country’s most powerful figure warning that the post of elected president could someday be scrapped.
Although no overhauls appear on the immediate horizon after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s comment—he spoke only vaguely about possibilities in the "distant future"—the mere mention of eliminating Iran’s highest elected office shows the severity and scope of the power struggle between Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
For months, the ruling theocracy has been piling pressure on Ahmadinejad and arresting his allies for attempts to challenge the near-absolute authority of the cleric-ruled system that has controlled Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The blunt words by Khamenei on Sunday suggest a twofold agenda: Further tightening the lid on Ahmadinejad and showing others in the wings that Iran’s rulers are ready to take drastic measures to protect what’s theirs.
"There is bad blood," said Mehrzad Boroujerdi, who follows Iranian affairs at Syracuse University. "Khamenei is trying to make it very clear that the system can only handle so much discord and that he holds the stronger cards."
It also marks one of the first clear hints of the ruling clerics’ hardball strategies for parliamentary elections in March. Khamenei and his allies are expected to use their many tools, including the ability to vet and block candidates, to try to steamroll Ahmadinejad’s backers and push the president—once Khamenei’s protege—farther into the political margins.
The ruling power structure in Iran, which includes not only hard-line clerics but also the hugely influential Revolutionary Guard, appears increasingly eager to snuff out the internal bickering. It’s seen as an unwelcome distraction as the country confronts critical issues such as whether to restart nuclear negotiations with the West, complaints about its human rights record and U.S. allegations that a special unit of the Guard was linked to a plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington.
"This is not a time when Iran wants anything that will rock the boat," said Boroujerdi.
But it’s unlikely that the political friction will cool off soon.
Hardliners still want more punishment against Ahmadinejad for actions viewed as political hubris—including a startling 10-day boycott of Cabinet meetings this spring to protest Khamenei’s choice for intelligence minister.
Dozens of Ahmadinejad’s supporters have been arrested in the backlash. So far, the crackdown has spared Ahmadinejad’s chief of staff—and in-law relation—Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, who has been denounced as the head of a "deviant current" that is perceived as questioning the system of clerical rule. Some have even claimed Mashaei employed black magic "spells" to fog Ahmadinejad’s mind.
An Iranian lawmaker says Iran’s “soft power” can be witnessed in Wall Street uprising and growing protests against corporatism and capitalism in the US. The soft power of the Islamic revolution of Iran has relocated the war fronts between the West and Islam from Iran and the Islamic bloc to the European borders and the heart of capitalism, i.e. Wall Street, Fars News Agency quoted Samad Marashi as saying on Sunday.
The US has been witnessing protests since September 17, when a group of people began rallying in New York’s financial district to protest “corporate greed” and top-level corruption in the country.
The movement has now spread to other cities, including Seattle, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Boston, as well as hundreds of communities across the nation.
The anti-capitalism contagion spread to the other side of the Atlantic on Saturday where hundreds of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets in European cities to protest corporatism, top-level corruption, and state-sponsored austerity measures with violence erupting in some cities such as Rome and London.
“It’s regrettable to see that the Western Liberal democracy is not just ruthless towards other nations, but that it also shows no mercy towards its own people and has placed suppression, arrests, and police brutality on top of its agenda,” Marashi added.
- A Wikileaks update revealed a possible motive for the terror plot. (NPR News)
“In a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh to the State Department — dated April 20, 2008, and made public earlier this year — Jubeir, who is close to Saudi King Abdullah, made reference to the king’s frequent exhortations to the U.S. to attack Iran. Then Jubeir used a particularly evocative phrase, says Alterman. Ambassador Jubeir told American officials that the king of Saudi Arabia told you to ‘cut off the head of the snake.’ That refers to a potential attack in Iran," Alterman says.”
- Obama said the plot came directly from high-ranking members of the Islamic Republic of Iran specifically Iran’s Qud’s Force. (Reuters)
- Saudi Arabia has accused Iran of seeking international influence through "murder and mayhem," after the US revealed an alleged plot. (VOA)
- Saudi Arabia and US have said that the plot violatesInternational Law and vowed to bring it before the U.N. reported Int. Times.
- Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei told a crowd of supporters on state television that U.S. and Saudi accusations are ‘meaningless and absurd’ He made the comment in a speech broadcast on state television from the town of Gilangharb (Global IRS)
- Reuters reports that some US analysts are questioning the plot due to the amateur and low-level layout.
- Reuters reported that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was not aware of this plot but Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei likely gave approval, but Reuters gives little credit to its theory.
- Gulf news daily reported that one of the Iranian operatives met with a jailed Bahraini opposition leader last year. Gholam Shakuri, an Al Quds Force officer who helped organize protests in Bahrain earlier this year, was among the Iranians who met Hasan Mushaima during a stopover in Beirut last February, when Mushaima was on his way back to Bahrain, The Washington Post reported quoting a senior Saudi security official. The article also accused Iran of being behind an assassination plot in Pakistan.
- US Senators are proposing stiff economic sanctions against Iran, however, few countries will back the aforementioned.
- Officials from Saudi Arabia have warned of a stiff response to Iran’s alleged terror plot.
- An official at Iran’s UN mission denied on Friday that Tehran had been in direct contact with the United States over allegations it was behind a plot to kill the Saudi ambassador on US soil, the semi-official Mehr news agency.
- Barack Obama has vowed to push for what he called the ”toughest sanctions” to punish Iranian officials reported the White House.
- US Vice-President Joe Biden says "nothing has been taken off the table" in retaliating against Iran for its alleged involvement in an assassination plot in Washington reported the White House.
- America’s allies said Thursday that US evidence of an Iranian plot to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in Washington is convincing, but Russia and China reacted cautiously.
- "Multiple" sources have corroborated the report about an alleged plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, a scheme the administration is alleging is tied to Iran’s military, a US official said. (CNN)
- Saudi officials advised Argentina four months ago of an alleged Iran-backed plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington and possibly attack the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Buenos Aires. (Reuters)
- An Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States, thwarted earlier this week, also involved an attack the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Buenos Aires reports the JTA.
- The United States is considering sanctions against Iran’s Central Bank reports Reuters.
- The US Department of Treasury on Wednesday imposed sanctions on an Iranian commercial airline for its alleged support for Iran’s elite force and the Hezbollah militant group reports China Daily.
- The informant at the center of an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador marks the latest example of how the US government’s war on drugs has expanded into the war on terrorism reports the Wall Street Journal.
Saudi Arabia has asked UN chief Ban Ki-moon to inform the Security Council of the “heinous conspiracy” to kill its envoy to Washington, in an alleged Iranian plot, SPA state news agency said on Saturday.
“The Saudi permanent mission to the United Nations in New York has …formally requested the UN secretary general to inform the Security Council of the heinous conspiracy to assassinate the Saudi ambassador,” it said.
“All those involved in this odious attempt should face justice,” it added, quoting a statement by the mission.
The United States on Wednesday sought UN Security Council support for action to hold Iran “accountable” for the alleged plot, with Britain and France already strongly on board, according to diplomats.
US ambassador Susan Rice, joined by the Saudi envoy to the UN, Abdallah al-Mouallimi, held separate meetings with envoys on the 15-nation council, US officials and diplomats said.
The US Justice Department on Tuesday charged two men with conspiring with Iranian officials to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir.
Iran, which faces four rounds of Security Council sanctions over its nuclear programme, called the US allegations part of an “evil plot” against the Islamic Republic.
In a letter of protest to the Security Council, it accused Washington of “warmongering.”
Tehran hardened its denials on Saturday, with the country’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei dismissing the accusations as “meaningless and absurd”.
Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal has said his country “will find a suitable response” against Iran for the alleged plot.
But Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said: “We hope the Saudis will deal with this issue with caution.”
He accused the United States of trying to create divisions in the Middle East but said the Saudis were “too wise to get involved in this political game.”
VIA Khaleej Times