Editorial

Revolt against flawed reform

by Yasser Akkaoui
written by Yasser Akkaoui

Since the first revolts erupted in the region, economists in Executive’s research department have been busy number crunching, running regressions and trying to find correlations between raw economic data and current events.

In doing so, an interesting observation stood out: the first serious uprisings were in many ways a response to the recent economic liberalization measures undertaken in many parts of the Middle East and North Africa. Regimes across the region began introducing policy reforms in the last decade — some to try and save themselves from the winds of change that blew in following the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions, others to show that they were in line with global trends.

Although the reforms were welcome, their implementation was a reminder that everything we learned in “Economics in developing countries 101” was correct. The people in power and their nepotistic benefactors were already rich from milking the resources of their countries and monopolizing the main productive sectors; by the time the reforms were implemented, decades of bad policy prevented the people from benefiting from the new open systems. With the absence of human development programs and resources, they were shut out from the economic growth that followed.

But one good thing happened, and it has manifested itself in recent events; with more openness came more information, especially through the Internet. People became more aware of their social and economic situation. They caught the scent of what was preventing them from achieving their potential. Entrepreneurs empowered with ambition began to chip away at the barriers of red tape, bureaucracy and corruption standing in the way of their self-realization.

This year they saw an opportunity, and they seized it.

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Economics & Policy

Singing the praises of an oft-slighted OPEC

by Roudi Baroudi
written by Roudi Baroudi

 

In September 2010, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) marked its 50th anniversary, but most of the world’s leading social, economic and environmental bodies did not join in the celebrations.

The milestone provided what should have been a fitting backdrop for recognition of the very real accomplishments of OPEC’s past and present and the role it is likely to play in the future. The organization’s resources and policies have evolved to the point where it is now an indispensable partner on multiple levels: its determination to maintain security of supply contributes to world economic stability, its dominant position in the energy industry gives it vital influence over measures to protect the environment, and closer coordination with it could help multilateral institutions to better serve human development around the globe.

Despite all that OPEC has done on these and other fronts, the organization’s contributions remain largely unheralded. The mainstream media typically dismisses the group as a crude (in both senses of the word) cartel. This unflattering assessment is broadly shared by everyone from individual consumers of oil products to the heads of states and major corporations.

OPEC’s image problems may stem from its own public relations. For far too long, the organization and its members have been both loath to accept blame for mistakes and, bizarrely, unwilling to trumpet successes. The result was a familiar one to anyone who studies the contemporary Arab world: those who refuse to define themselves are instead defined by various — often hostile — others.

An unfair reputation

OPEC was founded with the overall aim of liberating its member countries’ hydrocarbon assets from foreign domination, thereby making more of the proceeds from their sale available for promoting economic development, providing better education and healthcare for their populations and sharing the wealth with less fortunate peoples.

Admittedly, not all or even most of the organization’s member states have consistently pursued these goals with sufficient rigor. We all know the reputation of the “oil sheikh”, the spoiled prince who squanders millions on a luxurious lifestyle. For decades there was more than a grain of truth to the stereotype.

But it is not within OPEC’s purview to impose standards on the governance of sovereign member states or on the personal behavior of their rulers; its primary task, again, is to help them make more money from their primary natural resource, and in this it has succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations.

Recent years have witnessed a marked improvement in the handling of energy wealth, a fact demonstrated by the proliferation of massive development and infrastructure projects, tremendous improvements in areas such as education and healthcare, and by the gargantuan holdings accumulated by some countries’ sovereign wealth funds — Abu Dhabi’s alone, according to some estimates, is thought to control assets in the range of $1 trillion.

In addition, as the oil trade has matured, OPEC has sought to fulfill a regulatory function when possible and to ensure flows of supply and transparency in the petroleum trading system. Its efforts on these fronts flow through numerous channels, including its central role in the International Energy Forum and its support for the Joint Oil Data Initiative.

It undertakes these endeavors despite the risks attached to the heavy investments necessary to ensure the robustness and readiness of the entire supply chain. The maintenance of price levels that justify the running of such risks is a major reason why the world’s economies always have access to the fuel they need. And as OPEC frequently stresses, the sky-high rates for hydrocarbon products in many countries have little to do with its own practices.

Instead, they often stem from factors entirely outside OPEC’s control, including taxes levied in affluent consumer nations, the expansive profit margins of major oil companies based in several of the same countries, speculators who operate there and — it has to be said — the politico-military policies pursued by some Western governments in and around the world’s principal oil-producing region, the Middle East.

Despite OPEC efforts, global energy markets have suffered periodically from a lack of cooperation between the producing nations and the consuming ones, to the detriment of both, but at the same time it is OPEC who has actually done something to alleviate the repercussions of poor cooperation.

Far from being a one-trick pony concerned solely with its own commercial interests, OPEC increasingly attends to the long-term welfare of the consumer nations by, among other things, working for the development of an effective and coordinated energy framework and enabling exchanges on petroleum issues of common interest.

In the past two years, with much of the world economy suffering the after-effects of the global financial crisis, OPEC also was instrumental in limiting the damage and fueling the recovery: it raised output to keep prices reasonable, availed itself of existing spare capacity and accelerated programs for capacity expansion in order to discourage speculation and was always there to facilitate dialogue and cooperation.

After displacing the major international oil companies as the primary determinant of crude production, OPEC and its member states have become key players on the global economic stage. The organization is now a crucial interlocutor with bodies like the G8, the G20, and the European Commission, and it has begun to participate in efforts to combat poverty and environmental degradation.

Oil aid

Across the developing world, the OPEC Fund for International Development (OFID) uses its resources to provide significant financial and other resources to support social and economic projects and to ensure affordable energy prices for the poor. All told, the agency pledged more than $500 million in grants and soft loans over the past year. The scope of these funds ranges from the battle against HIV/AIDS to improving supplies of clean water to emergency humanitarian relief.

As of October 2010, OFID’s cumulative commitments to provide easy credit for public sector entities in less developed countries had reached almost $9 billion, more than $5.4 billion of which had already been disbursed.

On top of this, recent years have also seen OPEC get serious about protecting the environment. As climate change and other green issues have gained their rightful spot on the global agenda, the organization has begun to do its part.

In 2010 alone, for instance, OFID earmarked support for a variety of environmental causes, including grants for the International Conference on Food Security and Climate Change in Dry Areas in Amman, the 3rd Annual Conference of the Arab Forum for Environment and Development in Beirut, organic agriculture training in East Africa and an effort by Green Globe to train 300 campaigners tasked with raising awareness of environmental issues.

While accepting that the global energy mix will change in the coming decades, OPEC has been instrumental in supporting research aimed at reducing emissions in the here and now, especially carbon capture and sequestration technologies pioneered at the In Salah operation in central Algeria. It also has adopted active roles in multilateral groupings, including the World Bank’s Global Gas Flaring Reduction Partnership, as well as the International Energy Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Research and Development Program.

For the positive socioeconomic influences it exerts on today’s world, and for all of the prescient preparations it has begun to make for tomorrow’s — including measures to mitigate the effects of its members’ lifeblood — the group deserves some credit. Provided it gets better at explaining itself, it might even receive a few long-overdue cheers when its Diamond Anniversary rolls around in 2020.

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Spinning a revolution

by Gareth Smith
written by Gareth Smith

 

 

Early last month, the website of Mir-Hossein Musavi, co-leader of Iran’s opposition Green Movement, presented two pictures. One from Egypt showed police beating a protester, under the heading ‘heroic’. The second was a similar scene in Iran, from the 2009 anti-government protests, under the heading ‘agent of imperialism’. Musavi and his ally, Mehdi Karrubi, have compared Egypt’s elections of recent years, won by the Hosni Mubarak’ National Democratic Party, to Iran’s 2009 presidential election, after which the Greens disputed the victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. They have also highlighted the role of new means of communication used by protestors in both countries.

But the implications for Iran of events in Egypt and Tunisia are not straightforward: if the demise of presidents Hosni Mubarak and Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali has unnerved the rulers of Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen and even the West Bank, the authorities in Tehran have visibly relished the discomfort of so many Western-inclined Arab regimes.

At the outbreak of protests in Cairo and Alexandria, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, insisted that Egypt was experiencing an Islamic Revolution of its own, marking what he called the “irreparable failure for the American and the Zionist regimes [and]… an earthquake” that would undermine “arrogant governments” across the region. Addressing Friday prayers in Tehran, Ayatollah Khamenei was jubilant in noting that the Egyptians “begin their movements from Friday prayers and mosques, and they shout religious slogans, especially ‘allahu akbar.’”

The irony was not lost on the Green Movement, which adopted rooftop shouts of “allahu akbar” in 2009 when street protests were outlawed and dispersed by security forces.

The animosity of Iran’s current leaders toward the Egyptian regime stems from the friendship between former Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat and the late Shah of Iran, Mohammad Pahlavi, in the 1970s, when both embraced the United States and Israel. Diplomatic relations between the two ended after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution; after Sadat was assassinated in1981 the Iranian authorities named a central Tehran street after his assassin, Khaled Islambouli.  Since the 1979Islamic Revolution, Iran’s rulers have been more successful than Egypt’s infusing nationalism with egalitarianism, and in mobilizing the population behind goals of defense and development.

But the main prism through which Iranian leaders view the world has been their rivalry with the US and opposition to Zionism. The Green Movement rejects this, arguing that Iranian politics can no longer be shaped solely by resistance to the US and Israel. But ardent loyalists of Ayatollah Khamenei and supporters of President Ahmadinejad are more and more convinced regional developments are moving in their favor, and that a more assertive foreign policy, including the nuclear program and support for Palestinian resistance, is popular both at home and in the wider Muslim and Arab worlds.

This is not entirely a matter of faith. One calculation in Tehran is that more representative Arab governments would be less hostile to Iran. American diplomatic cables leaked last year by the WikiLeaks website suggested that leaders in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE were sympathetic to US military attacks on Iran — whereas a poll by the Washington-based Brookings Institution found that only 10 percent of respondents in the general population of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon and the UAE viewed Iran as a threat.

Public officials, along with the Iranian media, have also expressed a positive view of Mohamed El Baradei, the Egyptian opposition figure who, as head of the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Agency, resisted much US pressure to condemn Iran’s nuclear program. They have also been supportive of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has had a close relationship with Iranian Islamists since as far back as the 1970s.  One Brotherhood official, Kamal al-Halbavi, warmly welcomed Ayatollah Khamenei’s Friday prayer sermon and also told the BBC Persian service he wanted Egypt to have “a good government, like the Iranian government, and a good president like Mr Ahmadinejad, who is very brave.”

Gareth Smyth is the former Tehran correspondent for the Financial Times

 

 

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Trial of the secular sentinels

by Peter Grimsditch
written by Peter Grimsditch

 

“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive.”

These famous lines, first penned by Sir Walter Scott for his soap opera poem “Marmion” in 1808, have been given new meaning by the twists and turns of Turkey’s Ergenek on trial, which grows messier by the day.

In Scott’s otherwise-largely-forgettable tale, Lord Marmion fancies a rich woman, Clara de Clare, and, with the help of his mistress, a lascivious nun, he forges documents implicating Clare’s fiancé in treason, successfully sending him into exile. In the end, Marmion’s mistress confesses to the forgery, the Lord is killed on the battlefield and Clare is reunited with her knight.

The convoluted deception and double-dealing has been mirrored in the Turkish courts — although to this point without the treacherous nuns — since a plot was discovered in 2003 to allegedly overthrow the government of the Justice and Development Party (AKP).

More than 400 people, mostly military officers and journalists, are accused in the scheme designed to sew mayhem throughout Turkey by blowing up mosques and shooting down a Turkish military aircraft — an attack that would have been blamed on Greece. Increasingly, the mass of evidence introduced in the trial is being called into question, making a tidy conclusion a la Scott’s “Marmion” seem less and less likely.

Dani Rodrik, son-in-law of retired General Cetin Dogan, supposedly the mastermind of the plot, claims that some of the information on the prosecution’s “11th CD” — one of many disks containing trial evidence — has to have been planted by authorities after Dogan’s arrest. Despite the fact that the plot was discovered in 2003, according to Rodrik there is mention of a pharmaceutical warehouse that did not operate under that name until 2008, along with references to people who were not employed in 2003 by the institutions with which they are associated on the disk.

Dogan, former commander of Turkey’s 1st Army, maintains the evidence has been distorted to depict a routine military contingency plan as a genuine plot to overthrow the government. With three coups since 1960, the claim of another military intervention in Turkey is less outrageous than it might initially sound and even Rodrik admits some questionable comments were made during a recorded meeting about the military drill. That would leave the only explanation for doctoring the “11th CD,” if true, as a clumsy attempt to guarantee Dogan’s conviction.

It is not the only example of alleged evidence tampering in the case. Police confiscated a mobile phone belonging to another of the accused, Lieutenant Mehmet Ali Celebi and added 139 new numbers to its contacts. Celebi is accused of joining Hizb ut-Tahrir, a group of mostly Salafists intent on establishing a global Islamic caliphate. Many of the newly inserted numbers belonged to members of the group, two of which were labelled in the phone’s address book as “my wife” and “my mother-in-law” to disguise their true identities. Such a ruse, whether by Celebi or the police, wasperhaps not too well thought out given that Celebi is not married. He maintain she infiltrated the group “to defend the republic and hand its members over to the justice system.”

The lieutenant surrendered to police on September 18, 2008after discovering he was being investigated in relation to the Ergenekon case. The following day, his phone was sent on to the Istanbul Police Department. According to a court-ordered telecommunications report, the mobile was switched on that night for one minute and 23 seconds, with signals coming from the same location as the police department. In response, police said the phone had been switched on for technical staff to register its data in official records. It was possible, a statement added, that the 139 numbers, identical to those on a phone belonging to a known member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, had been added “by mistake.”

The case against journalists accused of involvement in the plot has also been rife with abnormalities. Prosecutors claim that a bomb attack on the offices of Cumhuriyet newspaper in 2007 was planned by its own Editor-in-chief Ilhan Selcuk, so other murky forces could be blamed. Selcuk, however, is safe from the tangled Ergenekon web. He died of natural causes last June at 85.

Peter Grimsditch is EXECUTIVE’s Istanbul correspondent

 

 

 

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Big Oil’s polluted profits

by Peter Speetjens
written by Peter Speetjens

 

 

The mainstream media reported it rather matter-of-factly, no questions asked: Due to the soaring oil price, the world’s leading energy firms in 2010 recorded sky-rocketing profits. Exxon-Mobil, Chevron and Shell, for example, reported annual profits of $30.5 billion, $19 billion and $18.6billion respectively.

BP would normally also rank among the big rollers, but ended the year with a $4.9 billion loss, as a result of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. The worst manmade environmental disaster in history could cost the firm a whopping $40 billion. Strangely, even though the event occurred less than a year ago, it seems largely forgotten today.

As BP magically made the oil disappear by sinking it to the ocean floor with the help of thousands of tons of chemical “dispersants,” so the accident vanished from the public eye. See no evil, hear no evil. It just illustrates how the environment remains a non-issue for big corporations and for the media reporting their results.

While the oil firms spend a small fortune on glossy commercials portraying themselves as pioneers in making the world a “greener” place, quite the opposite is true. In fact, only a fraction of their revenue goes toward developing alternative energy sources, while the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAPAF) last year showed how Big Oil and other special interest groups spent some $500 million dollars lobbying to defeat new United States legislation to promote the use of clean energy.

Meanwhile, nearly all major oil firms have so far invested some$50 billion in exploiting Canada’s tar sands, a mixture of sand, clay and petroleum. Known as the “New Kuwait,” the 3,000 square kilo meter area only a decade ago consisted entirely of a mountainous landscape of lakes and forests, yet today it lies barren, scarred by deep mines and toxic waste ponds.

“This is the dirtiest source of oil anywhere in the world and there are barely any regulations,” researcher Simon Dyer told The Guardian newspaper. Not taking into account the felling of forests and the polluting of water streams, Dyer estimates that the energy needed to extract one barrel of oil from the sands releases three times more greenhouse gasses than producing a barrel of conventional oil. The low-grade oil also needs heavy refining. Never the less, the industry is looking at expansion. Today, some 1.3 million barrels a day are mined, which is set to increase to 5 million barrels a day by2030.

Canada’s tar sands are hardly the only example of Big Oil destroying the environment and trying to get away with it. On February 14, after an 18-year legal marathon, an Ecuadorean court ordered Chevron to pay $9billion in damages for the behavior of its daughter company Texaco, which allegedly dumped 180 billion gallons of untreated wastewater into the jungle during three decades of drilling. Chevron has called the verdict “extortion,” sought and was granted an injunction in US courts and has filed a racketeering law suit against the plaintiffs’ Ecuadorean lawyers.

Another example of malfeasance is Shell’s ongoing presence in Nigeria, which accounts for an estimated 25 percent of the company’s annual revenue. Following decades of drilling, the Niger delta is an environmental disaster zone, while the native Ogoni people living there are penniless. In1994, the Head of Environmental Studies for Shell Nigeria, Bopp van Dessel, resigned because he felt his “professional and personal integrity was at stake.” Two years later he stated on British TV: “It is clear to me that Shell was devastating the area.”

Just how Shell gets away with such behaviour was illustrated in a US embassy cable issued by WikiLeaks, in which Shell’s former Vice-President for sub-Saharan Africa Ann Pickard, boasted “that Shell has seconded people to all relevant ministries [in Nigeria] and consequently had access to everything that was being done in those ministries.”

This list is hardly complete and does not aim to be. The point is that we no longer live at the start of the industrial revolution, when the sky seemed the limit. Today we know that the coin called “progress” has a flipside; it is about time that the media stop mindlessly parroting the end-of-year results and start asking how, where and at what human and environmental cost these profits were made.

PETER SPEETJENS is a Beirut-based journalist

 

 

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Saudi Arabia’s oily ambiguity

by Paul Cochrane
written by Paul Cochrane

 

 

While the cache of diplomatic cables recently released by WikiLeaks may have caused a number of international stirs, the majority have been largely ignored, causing little political, diplomatic or economic fallout. The revelations in early February that Saudi Arabia overstated crude oil reserves by up to 40 percent falls in the latter category, generating little more than newswire buzz. But should that have been the case?

With Saudi Arabia a top oil producer, the cable could have sparked a reaction on the world markets, driving the price of oil even higher and causing havoc with future oil supply projections. The kingdom itself would have had its position as the de-facto head of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) challenged, and its sovereign risk ratings would have been battered, given the country’s overwhelming dependency on hydro carbons to balance the books.

But there was no reaction on the markets, nor was there a flurry of stories in the press querying Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves and reigniting the debate about “peak oil.” The only reaction from the Saudi side was by the man who told United States diplomats in 2007 that the reserves were overstated. Sadad al-Husseini, a former vice president and head of exploration at Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s oil monopoly, said he had been “misrepresented” by the diplomats and the press and “did not question in any manner the reported reserves of Saudi Aramco.”

Major economic publications also dismissed the revelations: Petroleum Intelligence Weekly, considered “the bible” of the energy industry, called the cables a “false alarm” while a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) blog downplayed concerns because of Husseini’s apparent volte-face.

So is the cable just an example of US diplomats playing a game of what the WSJ referred to as “Chinese whispers?” Or was Husseini pressured into denying his original statements, meaning Aramco really has fiddled with the figures? It is, of course, hard to know, and that is the crux of the problem. Even if the contents of the cables are false, Aramco has not been transparent with its figures since the company was nationalized. According to a former Aramco employee, only the company’s nine-member executive committee is privy to the actual figures, despite the need of departments to have access to such information to carry out research, implement long-term plans and so on.

Like Aramco employees, the world is expected to believe what the company tells us, as they have always delivered enough oil to the market; but should we, in the same way the world took at face value the kingdom’s stated gold reserve until the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency revealed last year it had 180 tons more than it originally accounted for? After all, Aramco is still peddling the lie that it is the world’s largest producer of oil. Exporter yes, producer no. In fact, Russia became the world’s biggest producer in 2009, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2010, with an average output of 10 million barrels per day (bpd), or 12.9 percent of total production worldwide, whereas Saudi produces 9.7 million bpd.

A primary reason the cable didn’t result in a media frenzy was that the revelations were nothing particularly new. Many oil experts have queried Aramco’s figures before, noting in particular that 90 percent of all the oil that Saudi Arabia has ever produced has come from seven giant fields that are now maturing, three of which are more than 50 years old.

In the case of these US embassy cables, the debate centers around Husseini questioning Aramco figures that put Saudi Arabia’s reserves at716 billion barrels, of which 51 percent are recoverable. It is the recovery figures that are the questionable part, as the global recovery average is some 30percent, which suggests Aramco is being overly optimistic about what it will be able to extract. The real estimates need to be revealed. If Aramco’s numbers do come up short, the ramifications on the world economy of a Saudi oil shock would be devastating. Perhaps the best solution would be for the world to start moving more quickly toward alternative fuels rather than relying on debatable recovery estimates.

PAUL COCHRANE is the Middle East correspondent for International News Services

 

 

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Changing of the guard

by Jonathan Wright
written by Jonathan Wright

After the euphoria of Egypt’s revolution comes the more tedious work, and the devil is in the details. Egyptian society hovers between the yearning for stability through cobbling together the surviving fragments ofthe state and the urge to eliminate the remnants of a dilapidated autocracy riddled with corruption, brutality and incompetence.

The military council that took over from President Hosni Mubarak on February 11 stands firmly in the middle and is disputing both sides of the argument. It is appealing for people to set aside their professional and personal grievances and go back to work, while promising that it will uphold the demands of the revolution and root out corruption.

The council’s latest proposed cabinet shuffle reflects its ambiguous stance: Prime Minister Ahmed Shafik, a former air force officer and one of Mubarak’s younger protégés, will stay, as will Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit, one of Mubarak’s most loyal defenders and a diehard opponent of the revolution until defeat was inevitable. Others have not been so lucky: threeformer ministers are in detention for questioning, along with Ahmed Ezz, the steel magnate and ruling party official who oversaw the rigged parliamentary elections of 2010.

Even Hosni Mubarak is in limbo, surrounded by old retainers in comfortable retirement in the Red Sea resort of Sharm El Sheikh — an ominous reminder to some revolutionaries that their work is unfinished. Egypt’s most venerable wise man, journalist Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, says his presence in Sharm El Sheikh is a threat to the revolution.

The committee assigned to redraft the constitution, in whose hands lies the future of the Arab world’s most populous nation, also straddles the divide: Will it merely rescind the most authoritarian constitutional amendments or propose a radical overhaul to give Egypt a system of government fit to last into the 21st century? The military council says it is in a hurryto cede power to elected civilians but the most Egyptians can expect for now is a constitutional provision requiring the next elected government to make the long-term changes.

In the meantime, ambitious Egyptians are launching into the brave new world of political pluralism, forming parties and organizing in a way that was unimaginable during Mubarak’s police state and the reign of his National Democratic Party. After 15 years of fruitlessly seeking recognition under Mubarak, the Wasat Party won it through the courts eight days after Mubarak’s fall. With its recognition of Egypt’s Islamic heritage and its commitment to equality for all citizens in a civil society, Wasat has an ideology that could strike a chord with Egyptian voters in free and fair elections.

In the south of the country, reinvigorated members of the old Gama’a Al Islamiya, which waged war on the state in the 1990s, are meeting openly to plan for a future as a peaceful political party. The Muslim Brotherhood, the largest and best-organized political force in the country, has taken steps in the same direction. The young secular liberals who launched the revolution on January 25 are also jockeying for position in a new environmentof competing political ideologies, despite their distrust of hierarchy and their inexperience in conventional campaigning.

Above the fray looms the military council, inscrutable as the Sphinx, combining the sternness and the benevolence of a patriarch. While foreigners fret over the army’s allegedly vast vested interests in the status quo, especially its network of privilege and patronage, Egyptians tend to give the military the benefit of the doubt, trusting their promises to withdraw from the scene in six months when their task is complete. In the interim, the military may be an effective deterrent to any excess, especially on the law-and-order front.

With the world watching, speculation is rife as to what the revolution will bring about. Will Egypt’s next leaders, like Hosni Mubarak, cooperate with Israel and the United States against Hamas, Iran and their other regional enemies? Will they reconsider the neoliberal economic policies that brought Egypt high growth but a widening gap between rich and poor? Most important of all, what role will Egypt play in what could well be a constellation of newly democratic Arab governments seeking, in their relations with the United States and Europe, a third way between submission and confrontation?

Jonathan Wright is managing editor of Arab Media and Society

 

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Mikati’s mire could solve itself

by Nicholas Blanford
written by Nicholas Blanford

It is popularly believed that when Najib Mikati’s new government takes office, one of its first priorities will be to separate Lebanon from the United Nations tribunal investigating the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. This, the reasoning goes, is the price Mikati will have to pay in recognition of the support he won for the premiership from Hezbollah and its allies in the former opposition. Such a move would risk a serious confrontation with the UN and Western powers, which would doubtless regard any attempt to cripple the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) as the work of Hezbollah, Syria and Iran, and would act accordingly. However, if Mikati plays his hand carefully, he might succeed in buying some time and possibly even neutralizing the tribunal altogether.

Mikati is not looking for a quarrel with the international community, and in return has been given the benefit of the doubt — for the time being — by the United States and Europe, based on his reputation as a moderate politician and an influential businessman.

The watershed moment for Hezbollah was the handing over of the first set of indictments from the tribunal’s prosecution to the pre-trial judge last month. The imminent transfer of the indictments and the evident reluctance of Saad Hariri to disavow the tribunal spurred Hezbollah’s move to topple the government.

Although speculation has centered on the release date falling some time in March, there are indications that the indictments may not appear for several months. In the meantime, Mikati could table a vote in government to re-open the debate over the protocol between Lebanon and the UN on which the tribunal was established.

The protocol was never approved by parliament nor ratified by the president because of the political deadlock in the months following the 2006 war. In the end, the tribunal was adopted by the UN Security Council under the Chapter Seven mandate, circumventing the need for formal Lebanese approval.But Mikati could argue to the international community that the tribunal is a deeply sensitive issue for the Lebanese, and given the lack of unanimity in the country on the issue, it deserves a re-examination. The government could establish a parliamentary committee to look into the protocol.

The tribunal, of course, will continue working, but Lebanon could stall a response to a release of the indictments by citing the parliamentary review. Alternatively, the Lebanese judges sitting on the tribunal may choose to resign, citing the intolerable pressure they face in such a politically charged case. It is entirely possible that the Mikati government won’t need to do anything if the judges independently tender the irresignations. Given the circumstances, who among Lebanon’s judiciary would volunteer to step into their shoes? If the judges quit and no replacements are found, or if Lebanon continues to stall or decides after a period of time to suspend its cooperation with the tribunal, eventually it will end up in the hands of the UN Security Council.

This is where the debate over the tribunal could become very interesting. If Lebanon chooses to halt cooperation with the tribunal or the Lebanese judges resign, the STL’s mandate will have to be amended from the current Lebanese-international hybrid into a purely international entity. Indeed, there has been talk that the tribunal could end up as a permanent international terrorism court. Yet, it is far from clear how many countries would support such a move.

Some may balk at extending the life of a highly controversial tribunal that owes its existence to the political interests of the US and France and was set up to investigate not acts of genocide or war crimes but essentially the murder of one man. China and Russia, in particular, must be aware that they could be setting a precedent that could backfire on them in the future if the tribunal was charged with investigating, say, human rights abuses in Tibet, or war crimes in Chechnya.

Critics within the Security Council could argue with some justification that it is impermissible to prolong such a tribunal, especially when even the Lebanese themselves appear to no longer want it. Bear in mind that UN Resolution 1757, which established the tribunal in May 2007, squeezed through by a margin of only one vote — 10 in favor and five abstentions (UN Security Council resolutions require at least nine votes for approval). You never know: if Mikati is patient, the UN Security Council may end up doing the dirty work for him.

 

Nicholas Blanford is the Beirut-based correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and The Times of London

 

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The pearl’s shine bloodied

by Joshua Colangelo-Bryan
written by Joshua Colangelo-Bryan

 

 

The world watched with horror as security forces in Bahrain killed at least seven peaceful protesters and wounded hundreds more. The protesters were seeking a measure of political accountability from the ruling Al Khalifa family and an end to discrimination against Shia Bahrainis.

For the past decade Bahrain has promoted itself as a liberal state in an authoritarian neighbourhood, on the basis of reforms by King Hamadal-Khalifa, who took power in 1999.  These reforms included holding elections — though for a parliament that lacked authority — and largely abolishing torture.

United States officials went out of their way to burnish Bahrain’s image. In December, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton raved, “Bahrain has demonstrated that multi-ethnic, multi-confessional societies can address their challenges through peaceful reform and representative institutions.”  Cables by US diplomats claimed that King Hamad “understands that Bahrain cannot prosper if he rules by repression.”

Such endorsement can be attributed to the fact that Bahrain hosts the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet. The Bahraini government also insinuates whenever possible that its Shia citizens, upwards of 65 percent of the population, would turn Bahrain into an Iranian client state if so allowed.

But independent observers have for several years been raising concerns about the country’s return to the dark practices of the past.

In February 2010, Human Rights Watch released a report documenting the revival of torture. A trove of reports by government doctors backed up victim accounts that security forces were again suspending detainees by their arms and legs and using electro-shock devices. In August, the government instituted a crackdown that began with arrests of opposition activists on charges of being part of a “terror network” and soon extended to the arrests of hundreds more, including children, many on vague or non-existent charges. The government dissolved the board of a human rights group that had suggested detainees should not be abused. Authorities blocked websites of opposition parties, including Al Wefaq, which won a majority of votes in the October elections.  

As for the “terror network,” the testimony of government agents regarding information allegedly provided by unnamed sources made clear that the defendants were being tried for political opinions rather than for any criminal acts. Authorities denied these defendants access to counsel or their families, and most defendants alleged that security officials abused them to elicit confessions.

The government denied these allegations, but hasn’t explained the defendants’ wounds displayed in open court, some of which I observed first hand. Several other prosecutions recently collapsed after independent evidence disproved coerced confessions. In one case, the editor of a pro-government newspaper testified that the defendants who “confessed” to assaulting him bore no resemblance to the attackers. When I interviewed one of those defendants last December, he said, “It’s better to confess before they break everything.”

This is part of the background to the protests that erupted on February 14. By all independent accounts, demonstrators peacefully demanded reforms. After riot police killed two protesters on February 14 and 15, King Hamad expressed condolences, leading many to believe that the government might honor its citizens’ right to peaceful assembly. Riot police shattered that illusion on February 17, assaulting men, women and children, many of them sleeping, in a public square, killing several and wounding hundreds. The next day, security forces opened fire on people mourning those killed. The king has again ordered these forces off the streets, but the casualties from the February 18 ambush have yet to be counted.

The government has careened between indiscriminate violence and temporary accommodation, making it impossible to predict how the crisis will resolve. But clearly the US should no longer view Bahrain with rose-tinted glasses, whether due to concerns about Iran, the Fifth Fleet or anything else. There is no evidence of Iranian involvement in the protests, or of any appetite among Bahrain’s Shia to emulate Iran’s authoritarian regime. Nor have protesters expressed antipathy toward the US or questioned the US naval presence.

Bahrain should no longer be allowed to masquerade as liberal even by local standards. Rather, Bahrain has a lot of work to do to persuade its own people, and the rest of the world, that it is anything other than a police state.

Joshua Colangelo-Bryan is a lawyer in private practice in New York and a consultant for Human Rights Watch.

 

 

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Society

Secret Affairs: a book by Mark Curtis

by Paul Cochrane
written by Paul Cochrane

 

 

Britain has played a nefarious role in the Middle East’s history. We all know that London re-drew the region’s borders after World War I as part of a “divide and rule” strategy, but few are aware of Britain’s divisive and often contradictory efforts in the region that have remained a core part of its foreign policy. Instead, the United States and Israel tend to get all the “credit” when it comes to the dark arts of Machiavellian political subterfuge.

In ‘Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam,’ author Mark Curtis uses declassified official documents and leaked reports to lay bare Britain’s policies of destabilization and the political-economic ties Britain developed to ensure energy security and financial co-dependence. What Curtis exposes is as damning to Britain as the WikiLeaks US embassy cables have been to Washington, revealing the decisions made away from public scrutiny and what really makes up official policy.

“It is clear that Britain has an interest in divide and rule in the Middle East. If it sounds conspiratorial, it is there, spelled out in the planning files,” Curtis told Executive.

Shady goings-on

‘Secret Affairs’ is an eye opening read that charts the beginnings of British collaboration with radical Islamic forces, a relationship that began during the occupation of India over 150 years ago, was used extensively post-1945 and continues to this day. Britain worked with Islamist groups, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood, and friendly authoritarian Islamic regimes in Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Bosnia, Indonesia, Pakistan and Afghanistan to ensure that communism, nationalism, pan-Arabism and anti-Western policies didn’t take hold.

Britain would cultivate relationships on both sides of the political fence, showing a willingness to work with essentially anyone, whether the Mahaz-i-Milli Islam (National Islamic Front of Afghanistan), the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group or the ayatollahs in Iran, to achieve short-term goals, irrespective of the longer-term implications, in order to maintain a balance of power.

“In [my] analysis of British foreign policy, it is not all down to economics,” said Curtis. “The collaboration with Islamist groups in the Middle East has been about power status, to not be relegated to a bit player on the fringes. It has seen those groups as essential allies in a region where Britain has often lacked dependable allies. In a lot of the episodes where Britain collaborated with Islamic groups, it was essentially to do the dirty work that the US couldn’t do due to Congressional oversight and the fear of being found out.”

The dirty deeds include assassination attempts – for example on Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Libya’s Muammar al-Qadhafi, and Lebanon’s late Ayatollah Mohammad Fadlallah – military assistance and the dissemination of propaganda tools, such as Korans and Islamic literature. British operatives also orchestrated “false flag” operations, such as the one in Iran in 1953 when mosques and public figures were attacked by agents and paid supporters appearing to be members of the communist Tudeh Party. British intelligence also worked in collaboration with Ayatollah Kashani, the mentor of Ayatollah Khomeini, to stir up sentiment against nationalist Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadiq.

Alongside maintaining its power status and ensuring energy security, Britain also worked to make sure oil-producing countries invested their petro-dollars in London to shore up the city’s global financial position. To do so, Britain needed to maintain its status as a power broker and to curry favor with regimes, regardless of the means. One example of this is the “fabricated invasion” of Kuwait by Iraq in 1958, during which Britain intervened to protect its newly-independent former colony against a threat that they had themselves concocted, as British files explicitly show. “Britain wanted to exaggerate the threat to Kuwait so [Britain] would continue its protection and Kuwait would keep investing revenues in the British banking system,” said Curtis.

Blow back

Such covert operations — all documented in ‘Secret Affairs’— have been just one part of Britain’s foreign policy that has gone against London’s purported democratic ideals. The backing of Islamist forces, and its hidden alliance with two chief state sponsors of radical Islam, Saudi Arabia —which has spent more than $50 billion to spread the Wahhabi brand of Islam around the world and is a major sponsor of Islamist groups — and Pakistan, have also had major negative repercussions.

By preventing independent and secular governments from coming to power in much of the Islamic world, Britain’s policies have nurtured the current socio-political malaise and resulted in what the late Chalmers Johnson famously termed “blow back,” when the very forces the West aided and abetted came back to bite the hand that once fed them. Curtis shows how Britain in the 1990s allowed Islamist groups to operate out of London, which they believed could be used to destabilize governments in, among other places, Syria, Iraq and Libya. This was possible through a ‘covenant of security’ between radical Islamists and the security services.

A former Cabinet Office intelligence analyst explained: “The long-standing British habit of providing refuge and welfare to Islamist extremists is on the unspoken assumption that if we give them a safe haven here they will not attack us on these shores.”

This pact meant Britain could keep tabs on such groups’ memberships and finances, and enabled British intelligence access to groups linked to militancy from Afghanistan to Yemen. Even Al Qaeda had an office, the Advice and Reformation Committee, in London until 1998.

Alongside the US and Saudi Arabia, Britain equipped and bankrolled Islamist groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bosnia that were later involved in the September 11 attacks in the United States, terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia, and the July 7, 2005 bombings in London. Indeed, as Curtis’s research shows, the history of the ongoing “war on terror” is rooted in covert support for the Afghani Mujahedin in its fight against the Soviets and for the terrorism infrastructure co-established with Pakistan’s notorious Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), which trained fighters for operations in Central Asia, India, Bosnia, the Middle East and elsewhere.

It also goes further back in time, to the British-backed partition of India in 1947, which led to the creation of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the current imbroglio in Kashmir. Curtis quotes former Indian Ambassador Narendra Sarila as saying, “Many of the roots of Islamic terrorism sweeping the world today lie buried in the partition of India.”

More than 60 years later, Britain is still using divide and rule as a strategy and is contending with the repercussions of what in many ways its foreign policy has created. “There is still this resort to rely on particular Islamist forces to achieve objectives, whether in Southern Iraq[post-2003], where Britain worked with Islamist forces and now [has] a de-facto working arrangement with the Taliban, in the sense that Britain is reliant on them for an honorable exit from Afghanistan,” said Curtis. In a previous book, Curtis called Britain’s foreign policy a “web of deceit.” In his latest, he has further shown how that web was spun and, crucially, how British foreign policy has anurtured global terrorism and instability.

 

 

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