By James M. Dorsey
A rare wave of protests across the Arab world against widespread economic mismanagement, unemployment, corruption and lack of civil liberties as well as the probable partition of Sudan potentially set the stage for the redrawing of the political map of the Middle East and North Africa.
The protests and referendum likely to establish oil-rich southern Sudan as an independent state spotlight the failure of most Middle Eastern and North African regimes to provide economic prospects for their populations and guarantee security and equal rights for religious and ethnic minorities. A spate of recent deadly attacks targeting Christians in Iraq and Egypt has further focused attention on inflamed religious and ethnic tensions and the region’s lack of minority rights.
Middle Eastern governments fear, according to officials and Western diplomats, that an independent southern Sudan will fuel nationalist aspirations of rebels in Darfur, secessionists in southern Yemen; Shiite rebels in northern Yemen; non-Islamist controlled parts of Somalia; Kurds in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey; Berbers across North Africa and Azerbaijanis in northern Iran. The region’s military and security dominated regimes also worry that the protests will further embolden their populations to vent boiling anger and pent-up frustration with long-standing authoritarian, corrupt and incompetent rule. Last week’s warning by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) that record food prices are likely to increase even more as a result of erratic global weather patterns threatens to further tempers and tensions.
Several Arab states have moved to curb commodity prices in a bid to prevent the riots from spreading to their countries. Libya abolished taxes and custom duties on wheat-based products, rice, vegetable oil, sugar and infant milk. Morocco has begun subsidizing imports to ensure that the price of soft milling wheat does not rise in tunes with hikes on world markets.
Jordanian King Abdullah in a bid to prevent an escalation of mounting tension between Palestinians and East Bank Jordanians this week ordered his government to reduce prices of commodities, particularly rice and sugar, freeze plans to raise public transportation fees and accelerate initiation of job creation projects. The order came as Jordanian trade unions called for nationwide demonstrations on Friday to demand better living standards and the resignation of Prime Minister Samir Rifai. Jordan’s Islamist opposition said it had yet to decide whether it would support the protest, but warned that price hikes would spark “an unprecedented explosion” similar to the turmoil in Tunisia and Algeria.
“The government is seeking to contain mounting public resentment. Events in Tunisia and Algeria are forcing it to act because Jordanians have seen that protests produce results,” says Mohammed Masri, an analyst at the University of Jordan’s Center for Strategic Studies. Masri was referring to Algeria’s weekend decision to reduce commodity prices in response to sustained daily protests that left at least three people dead, the Tunisian government’s inability to quell a month of demonstrations in which so far up to 50 people are believed to have been killed and Tunisian President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali’s bid this week to meet some of the protestor’s demands by announcing that he would not again run for office when his term ends in 2014, firing his interior minister, promising to release detained demonstrators and launching an investigation into corruption. “Price hikes are certain to increase anger at the government’s policies,” said Zaki Bani Rsheid, a Jordanian Islamic Action Front spokesman.
While the demonstrations in Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt as well as recent soccer riots in Jordan and Iran and human rights-related protests in Kuwait are unlikely to immediately overturn governments, they signal a growing popular refusal across the region to continue to accept the status quo. Even in Saudi Arabia where public protests are particularly rare, unemployed teachers are publicly protesting government job creation policies. Tunisian trade unions have said they would continue their protests despite Ben Ali’s announced concessions.
The hardening of the region’s social and economic battle lines creates stark choices for both Middle Eastern and Western governments. Desperate to cling to power, Middle Eastern regimes are likely to increase repression coupled with window dressing measures that create the impression of responding to widespread discontent rather than opt for real political, economic and social reform. This week’s concessions by Ben Ali come after the president’s efforts to squash the protests by charging that the protesters were being manipulated by foreign terrorists failed. Ben Ali’s assertion contrasted starkly with the fact that Al Qaeda’s North African affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), has been conspicuously silent about the ongoing turmoil in its theater of operations and the fact that the protests were void of any Islamist tint.
Western diplomats say that the fact that a majority of the dead in Tunisia were killed by security forces after the Obama administration, the European Union and the United Nations called on Tunisia to exercise restraint in the use of force and respect fundamental freedoms point to a sense of alarm within the government that makes it less susceptible to US and European pressure. “It’s inconceivable that they are not worried that this is the beginning of the end,” one diplomat said.
On a visit to Qatar this week, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton nonetheless signaled that the United States and its European allies may be less persistent in their long-standing preference for stability in the Middle East and North Africa rather than democracy that could initially bring Islamic and more nationalist forces to power – a policy that has fueled anti-Western sentiment among large segments of the region’s population.
Addressing the Forum for the Future launched in 2004 by the G-8 group of industrial nations as a way to promote growth of nongovernmental civil group, Clinton bluntly challenged Middle Eastern leaders to open their political systems and economies and warned that "the region's foundations are sinking into the sand." Clinton said the region's governments need to share power with civic and volunteer groups to tackle issues like exploding populations, stagnant economies and declining natural resources. Pointing to unemployment rates of 20% and up, the secretary said "people have grown tired of corrupt institutions and a stagnant political order" and are demanding reforms, including eradication of corruption.
Showing posts with label Morocco. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Morocco. Show all posts
Friday, January 14, 2011
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Rap and Metal on Planet Islam
The booming voice of pent-up Middle Eastern anger
James M. Dorsey from the December 2010 issue of Reason Magazine
Nabyl Guennouni, 30, is a heavy metal singer and band manager in Morocco. He also sits on a jury that selects rising talents to perform at Casablanca’s annual L’Boulevard des Jeunes Musiciens, a six-day extravaganza in two soccer stadiums that has become North Africa’s largest underground music festival, with some 160,000 visitors each year. This marks a dramatic change for Guennouni. When he and 13 other black-shirted, baseball-capped, middle-class headbangers tried to organize a music festival seven years ago, the police dragged them from their homes and charged them with wooing young Moroccans into Satanism, with a bonus count of promoting prostitution. Morocco’s legal system allows a maximum sentence of three years for such attempts to convert Muslims to another faith.
Egged on by conservative Islamist politicians, who six months earlier had doubled their number of seats in parliament, prosecutors produced as evidence against Guennouni fake skeletons and skulls, plaster cobras, a latex brain, T-shirts depicting the devil, and “a collection of diabolical CDs,” which they described as “un-Islamic” and “objects that breach morality.” In cross-examination, the government attorneys asked the defendants such questions as, “Why do you cut the throats of cats and drink their blood?” Al Attajdid, a conservative daily, depicted the musicians as part of a movement that “encourages all forms of delinquency, alcohol and licentiousness which are ignored by the authorities.” One of the trial judges maintained that “normal people go to concerts wearing suits and ties” and that it was “suspicious” that some of the musicians’ lyrics had been penned in English.
During the trial, some of the defendants recited sections of the Koran to prove they were good Muslims. It didn’t work. In a verdict that divided the nation, Guennouni was sentenced to one month in jail; the others received sentences ranging from six months to a year. Outside the courthouse, protesters organized concerts, waged an Internet campaign, and criticized King Muhammad VI for presiding over a travesty of justice.
Yet as dark as that moment was for Casablancan rockers, the trial was a turning point that set Morocco on a path to becoming one of the Arab world’s more liberal societies when it comes to accepting alternative lifestyles. A month after the sentencing, prosecutors, unnerved by the degree of popular support the musicians had attracted, urged an appeals court to overturn the verdicts. The appeals court acquitted 11 of the defendants and reduced the sentences of three others. The decision constituted a rare example of successful civic protest in the Arab world.
Weeks after the appeals court decision, Casablanca was rocked by a series of Islamist suicide bombings that killed 45 people. Musicians responded with a Metal Against Terrorism concert that boosted what Moroccans call Al Nayda, the Awakening, a movement for greater cultural freedom that is topped every year by the L’Boulevard festival. “We needed to channel the aspirations and frustrations of young people in Morocco,’ ” Guennouni tells me. “Al Nayda is a community of spirit,” adds Mohammed “Momo” Merhar, co-founder of the festival. “Moroccan youth was holding its breath for 40 years. A wind of freedom is blowing now, and creativity is exploding.”
Today L’Boulevard attracts metal, rap, and jazz performers from around the globe. King Muhammad donated $250,000 to the event last year. Marie Korpe, executive director of Freemuse, a Copenhagen-based organization funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency that advocates freedom of expression for musicians and composers worldwide, notes that “as musicians push the boundaries of acceptable musical performance in their countries, it is clear that, wittingly or not, they are helping to open their cultures and potentially their political systems.”
With L’Boulevard, Morocco is doing something new in a part of the world where repression and censorship are the norm. The cultural awakening nonetheless operates within a narrow band in a country where human rights groups, independent media outlets, and critical artists continue to live a precarious existence. Moroccan radio stations, acting on government instructions, recently boycotted a collection of rap songs that was appropriately titled Forbidden on the Radio. Invincible Voice (I-Voice), a Beirut-based Palestinian duo that fuses hip-hop with classical Arab music, was forced to cancel an Arab world tour when Morocco and other Arab countries denied them visas. Yasin Qasem, a 21-year-old freelance sound engineer and half of I-Voice, was subsequently denied entry to lead a sound engineering workshop in Casablanca. Qasem and his partner, TNT, a.k.a. Mohammed Turk, a 20-year-old construction foreman whose songs lament the sorry state of political, cultural, and economic affairs in the Arab world, finally obtained visas for the United Arab Emirates to finish production of their upcoming album, only to be declined entry when they landed at the Dubai airport.
Across a swath of land stretching from Morocco’s Atlantic coast to the Persian Gulf, underground musicians are playing a continuous game of cat and mouse with authorities to evade harassment and arrest. Musicians in Iran endure forced haircuts, beatings in jail, and threats to their families. Egypt bans heavy metal from radio and television. Earlier this year, Islamist police stormed a crowded auditorium in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, where the hip-hop musicians B Boy Gaza had just started performing. “The show is over,” the officers announced before confiscating equipment and arresting six musicians, who were eventually released after signing a pledge not to hold further performances without police permission. The rapping Emirati brothers Salem and Abdullah Dahman have had their music banned in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia because their lyrics contrast the Arab world’s multiple problems with the glorious Muslim past. Last summer, police in the Saudi capital Riyadh broke up a metal concert in a residential compound attended by 500 mostly Saudi fans.
Civilian and religious authorities across the Middle East and North Africa have accused heavy metal musicians of threatening public order, undermining Islam, and performing the devil’s music. Metalheads are also singled out because of their music’s highly charged and often politically, socially, and sexually suggestive lyrics. As a result, their music flourishes mostly in underground clubs, basements, and private homes, and only occasionally on stage when a regime decides that banning a public performance is not worth the political risk.
Underground musicians pose a challenge to Middle Eastern and North African regimes because they often reflect in their lyrics pent-up anger and frustration about unemployment, corruption, and police tyranny. “We play heavy metal ’cause our lives are heavy metal,” says Reda Zine, one of the founders of the Moroccan headbanger scene.
With the growing realization that the region’s authoritarian regimes and controlled economies are unable to offer opportunity to their predominantly young populations, metal and rap have been elevated as channels to express discontent. Their role is enhanced by the Internet and other technologies for mass distribution that make government control difficult and allow musicians and their fans to carve out autonomous spaces that shield them from intrusion by censors and other cultural scolds.
In a recent report for Freemuse, Mark LeVine argues that music plays a role in the Middle East and North Africa similar to the role rock played in the velvet revolutions that toppled regimes in Eastern Europe. LeVine has a good vantage point for studying the subject: He is both a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of California at Irvine and a musician who has performed with the likes of Mick Jagger and Albert Collins. The struggle and success of underground music, he says, “reminds us of a past, and offers a model for the future, in which artists—if inadvertently at first—helped topple a seemingly impregnable system of rule.” LeVine describes underground musical communities as “avatars of change or struggles for greater social and political openness,” saying “they point out cracks in the facade of conformity that is crucial to keeping authoritarian or hierarchical and inegalitarian political systems in power.”
Nowhere is that more evident than in Iran, where all rock music is forced underground. Musicians risk harassment and imprisonment by a regime that frowns on all music and routinely tortures dissidents. In May 2009, a heavy metal concert in Shiraz was raided by an Islamist militia that arrested some 100 people on charges of consuming alcohol and worshiping the devil. Musicians are forced into exile or onto the Internet to carve out creative spaces of their own.
Coming under particular scrutiny are Iranian underground musicians who replicate American accents, indulge in obscene lyrics, and use female singers—all viewed as symbols of Western decadence by the authorities. Most CD shop owners refuse to sell underground music, fearing raids, imprisonment, and hefty fines. Concerts in private gatherings are often canceled because of threats from neighborhood vigilantes. Kalameh, an Iranian rapper, recently uploaded one of his latest songs to YouTube in response to the regime’s crackdown on the country’s reform movement: “This nation says No / Says NO to autocracy / Says NO to censorship / Says NO to sedition / Says NO to beating and killing / Says NO to injustice / Says NO to democracy / This constant pain of mine, emanates from being a human / Because one night, they stole my light of hope / If I stay silent, if I stay still / Who is gonna right? Who is gonna say? / If I leave it that way?”
Yet hip-hop’s lyrical style and heavy metal’s pounding beat may be natural fits in a world where poetry is a popular art form and praying often involves rhythm and bobbing. Some Muslim religious figures, particularly practitioners of more mystical forms of Islam, recognize an affinity with metal, even though some of the genre’s most popular forms in the region are its most extreme. “I don’t like heavy metal,” a Shiite cleric in Baghdad told LeVine. “Not because it’s irreligious or against Islam; but because I prefer other styles of music. But you know what? When we get together and pray loudly, with the drums beating fiercely, chanting and pumping our arms in the air, we’re doing heavy metal too.” Cyril Yarboudi of Lebanon’s Oath to Vanquish agrees. “You can practice your religion; you can go pray in a mosque and listen to metal,” he says. “What’s the problem?”
In a 1997 crackdown that put its stamp on much of the heavy metal scene in the Middle East and North Africa, police in Cairo arrested 100 heavy metal fans. The arrests followed publication of a photo from a metal concert allegedly showing someone carrying an upside-down cross. One newspaper reported that the house raided by the police was “filled with tattooed, devil-worshiping youths holding orgies, skinning cats, and writing their names in rats’ blood on the palace’s walls.”
Muslim and Christian clerics were up in arms. Cartoons in newspapers depicted scruffy, marijuana-smoking musicians with T-shirts emblazed with the Star of David who play guitar while being seduced by scantily dressed blond women. The musicians’ critics portrayed them as Zionist agents subverting Muslim society and blamed their emergence on a government that, in their view, was in cahoots with the Zionists in allowing Western culture to undermine Egypt’s social and religious values. Interestingly, this criticism was expressed by many in the underground music community as well. A broad segment of Egyptians, cutting across political, ideological, religious, and social fault lines, accuses the government of failing to effectively support the Palestinians, acquiescing in the Israeli control of Palestinian territories, and supporting unpopular U.S. policies in the region.
Emotions peaked when Sheikh Nasr Farid, Egypt’s mufti at the time, demanded that those arrested repent or face the death penalty for apostasy. In response, intimidated musicians and fans destroyed their guitars and shaved off their beards to avoid the worst. A decade later, many Egyptian musicians remain reluctant to publicly discuss their music or lyrics, even though government policy has become somewhat more relaxed. (The regime of President Hosni Mubarak is currently more concerned about the Muslim Brotherhood and dissident bloggers than it is about underground music.)
“You can’t get arrested for being a metalhead so easily now,” an Egyptian heavy metal fan tells me. “They can still stop you in the streets, or stop your car if you listen to very loud heavy music. But when it comes to arresting they can’t now unless you have some sort of drugs on you. It’s not that the law is more liberal now. Rather, it’s because the whole media is not so interested to know about us anymore.”
Morocco’s bow to popular pressure and Egypt’s recent shift of focus highlight a lesson most Arab regimes have yet to learn: The velvet glove is often more effective than the baton. The more mainstream underground music becomes and the less censorship it endures, the less socially and politically potent it may become.
But as long as there is discontent to be expressed, there will be musicians eager to channel it. Even if metal and hip-hop lose their bite, LeVine predicts, the “cultural avant-garde of youth culture will naturally search for other genres of music to express the anger, anxieties, and despair that originally made the music so powerful.”
James M. Dorsey from the December 2010 issue of Reason Magazine
Nabyl Guennouni, 30, is a heavy metal singer and band manager in Morocco. He also sits on a jury that selects rising talents to perform at Casablanca’s annual L’Boulevard des Jeunes Musiciens, a six-day extravaganza in two soccer stadiums that has become North Africa’s largest underground music festival, with some 160,000 visitors each year. This marks a dramatic change for Guennouni. When he and 13 other black-shirted, baseball-capped, middle-class headbangers tried to organize a music festival seven years ago, the police dragged them from their homes and charged them with wooing young Moroccans into Satanism, with a bonus count of promoting prostitution. Morocco’s legal system allows a maximum sentence of three years for such attempts to convert Muslims to another faith.
Egged on by conservative Islamist politicians, who six months earlier had doubled their number of seats in parliament, prosecutors produced as evidence against Guennouni fake skeletons and skulls, plaster cobras, a latex brain, T-shirts depicting the devil, and “a collection of diabolical CDs,” which they described as “un-Islamic” and “objects that breach morality.” In cross-examination, the government attorneys asked the defendants such questions as, “Why do you cut the throats of cats and drink their blood?” Al Attajdid, a conservative daily, depicted the musicians as part of a movement that “encourages all forms of delinquency, alcohol and licentiousness which are ignored by the authorities.” One of the trial judges maintained that “normal people go to concerts wearing suits and ties” and that it was “suspicious” that some of the musicians’ lyrics had been penned in English.
During the trial, some of the defendants recited sections of the Koran to prove they were good Muslims. It didn’t work. In a verdict that divided the nation, Guennouni was sentenced to one month in jail; the others received sentences ranging from six months to a year. Outside the courthouse, protesters organized concerts, waged an Internet campaign, and criticized King Muhammad VI for presiding over a travesty of justice.
Yet as dark as that moment was for Casablancan rockers, the trial was a turning point that set Morocco on a path to becoming one of the Arab world’s more liberal societies when it comes to accepting alternative lifestyles. A month after the sentencing, prosecutors, unnerved by the degree of popular support the musicians had attracted, urged an appeals court to overturn the verdicts. The appeals court acquitted 11 of the defendants and reduced the sentences of three others. The decision constituted a rare example of successful civic protest in the Arab world.
Weeks after the appeals court decision, Casablanca was rocked by a series of Islamist suicide bombings that killed 45 people. Musicians responded with a Metal Against Terrorism concert that boosted what Moroccans call Al Nayda, the Awakening, a movement for greater cultural freedom that is topped every year by the L’Boulevard festival. “We needed to channel the aspirations and frustrations of young people in Morocco,’ ” Guennouni tells me. “Al Nayda is a community of spirit,” adds Mohammed “Momo” Merhar, co-founder of the festival. “Moroccan youth was holding its breath for 40 years. A wind of freedom is blowing now, and creativity is exploding.”
Today L’Boulevard attracts metal, rap, and jazz performers from around the globe. King Muhammad donated $250,000 to the event last year. Marie Korpe, executive director of Freemuse, a Copenhagen-based organization funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency that advocates freedom of expression for musicians and composers worldwide, notes that “as musicians push the boundaries of acceptable musical performance in their countries, it is clear that, wittingly or not, they are helping to open their cultures and potentially their political systems.”
With L’Boulevard, Morocco is doing something new in a part of the world where repression and censorship are the norm. The cultural awakening nonetheless operates within a narrow band in a country where human rights groups, independent media outlets, and critical artists continue to live a precarious existence. Moroccan radio stations, acting on government instructions, recently boycotted a collection of rap songs that was appropriately titled Forbidden on the Radio. Invincible Voice (I-Voice), a Beirut-based Palestinian duo that fuses hip-hop with classical Arab music, was forced to cancel an Arab world tour when Morocco and other Arab countries denied them visas. Yasin Qasem, a 21-year-old freelance sound engineer and half of I-Voice, was subsequently denied entry to lead a sound engineering workshop in Casablanca. Qasem and his partner, TNT, a.k.a. Mohammed Turk, a 20-year-old construction foreman whose songs lament the sorry state of political, cultural, and economic affairs in the Arab world, finally obtained visas for the United Arab Emirates to finish production of their upcoming album, only to be declined entry when they landed at the Dubai airport.
Across a swath of land stretching from Morocco’s Atlantic coast to the Persian Gulf, underground musicians are playing a continuous game of cat and mouse with authorities to evade harassment and arrest. Musicians in Iran endure forced haircuts, beatings in jail, and threats to their families. Egypt bans heavy metal from radio and television. Earlier this year, Islamist police stormed a crowded auditorium in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, where the hip-hop musicians B Boy Gaza had just started performing. “The show is over,” the officers announced before confiscating equipment and arresting six musicians, who were eventually released after signing a pledge not to hold further performances without police permission. The rapping Emirati brothers Salem and Abdullah Dahman have had their music banned in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia because their lyrics contrast the Arab world’s multiple problems with the glorious Muslim past. Last summer, police in the Saudi capital Riyadh broke up a metal concert in a residential compound attended by 500 mostly Saudi fans.
Civilian and religious authorities across the Middle East and North Africa have accused heavy metal musicians of threatening public order, undermining Islam, and performing the devil’s music. Metalheads are also singled out because of their music’s highly charged and often politically, socially, and sexually suggestive lyrics. As a result, their music flourishes mostly in underground clubs, basements, and private homes, and only occasionally on stage when a regime decides that banning a public performance is not worth the political risk.
Underground musicians pose a challenge to Middle Eastern and North African regimes because they often reflect in their lyrics pent-up anger and frustration about unemployment, corruption, and police tyranny. “We play heavy metal ’cause our lives are heavy metal,” says Reda Zine, one of the founders of the Moroccan headbanger scene.
With the growing realization that the region’s authoritarian regimes and controlled economies are unable to offer opportunity to their predominantly young populations, metal and rap have been elevated as channels to express discontent. Their role is enhanced by the Internet and other technologies for mass distribution that make government control difficult and allow musicians and their fans to carve out autonomous spaces that shield them from intrusion by censors and other cultural scolds.
In a recent report for Freemuse, Mark LeVine argues that music plays a role in the Middle East and North Africa similar to the role rock played in the velvet revolutions that toppled regimes in Eastern Europe. LeVine has a good vantage point for studying the subject: He is both a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of California at Irvine and a musician who has performed with the likes of Mick Jagger and Albert Collins. The struggle and success of underground music, he says, “reminds us of a past, and offers a model for the future, in which artists—if inadvertently at first—helped topple a seemingly impregnable system of rule.” LeVine describes underground musical communities as “avatars of change or struggles for greater social and political openness,” saying “they point out cracks in the facade of conformity that is crucial to keeping authoritarian or hierarchical and inegalitarian political systems in power.”
Nowhere is that more evident than in Iran, where all rock music is forced underground. Musicians risk harassment and imprisonment by a regime that frowns on all music and routinely tortures dissidents. In May 2009, a heavy metal concert in Shiraz was raided by an Islamist militia that arrested some 100 people on charges of consuming alcohol and worshiping the devil. Musicians are forced into exile or onto the Internet to carve out creative spaces of their own.
Coming under particular scrutiny are Iranian underground musicians who replicate American accents, indulge in obscene lyrics, and use female singers—all viewed as symbols of Western decadence by the authorities. Most CD shop owners refuse to sell underground music, fearing raids, imprisonment, and hefty fines. Concerts in private gatherings are often canceled because of threats from neighborhood vigilantes. Kalameh, an Iranian rapper, recently uploaded one of his latest songs to YouTube in response to the regime’s crackdown on the country’s reform movement: “This nation says No / Says NO to autocracy / Says NO to censorship / Says NO to sedition / Says NO to beating and killing / Says NO to injustice / Says NO to democracy / This constant pain of mine, emanates from being a human / Because one night, they stole my light of hope / If I stay silent, if I stay still / Who is gonna right? Who is gonna say? / If I leave it that way?”
Yet hip-hop’s lyrical style and heavy metal’s pounding beat may be natural fits in a world where poetry is a popular art form and praying often involves rhythm and bobbing. Some Muslim religious figures, particularly practitioners of more mystical forms of Islam, recognize an affinity with metal, even though some of the genre’s most popular forms in the region are its most extreme. “I don’t like heavy metal,” a Shiite cleric in Baghdad told LeVine. “Not because it’s irreligious or against Islam; but because I prefer other styles of music. But you know what? When we get together and pray loudly, with the drums beating fiercely, chanting and pumping our arms in the air, we’re doing heavy metal too.” Cyril Yarboudi of Lebanon’s Oath to Vanquish agrees. “You can practice your religion; you can go pray in a mosque and listen to metal,” he says. “What’s the problem?”
In a 1997 crackdown that put its stamp on much of the heavy metal scene in the Middle East and North Africa, police in Cairo arrested 100 heavy metal fans. The arrests followed publication of a photo from a metal concert allegedly showing someone carrying an upside-down cross. One newspaper reported that the house raided by the police was “filled with tattooed, devil-worshiping youths holding orgies, skinning cats, and writing their names in rats’ blood on the palace’s walls.”
Muslim and Christian clerics were up in arms. Cartoons in newspapers depicted scruffy, marijuana-smoking musicians with T-shirts emblazed with the Star of David who play guitar while being seduced by scantily dressed blond women. The musicians’ critics portrayed them as Zionist agents subverting Muslim society and blamed their emergence on a government that, in their view, was in cahoots with the Zionists in allowing Western culture to undermine Egypt’s social and religious values. Interestingly, this criticism was expressed by many in the underground music community as well. A broad segment of Egyptians, cutting across political, ideological, religious, and social fault lines, accuses the government of failing to effectively support the Palestinians, acquiescing in the Israeli control of Palestinian territories, and supporting unpopular U.S. policies in the region.
Emotions peaked when Sheikh Nasr Farid, Egypt’s mufti at the time, demanded that those arrested repent or face the death penalty for apostasy. In response, intimidated musicians and fans destroyed their guitars and shaved off their beards to avoid the worst. A decade later, many Egyptian musicians remain reluctant to publicly discuss their music or lyrics, even though government policy has become somewhat more relaxed. (The regime of President Hosni Mubarak is currently more concerned about the Muslim Brotherhood and dissident bloggers than it is about underground music.)
“You can’t get arrested for being a metalhead so easily now,” an Egyptian heavy metal fan tells me. “They can still stop you in the streets, or stop your car if you listen to very loud heavy music. But when it comes to arresting they can’t now unless you have some sort of drugs on you. It’s not that the law is more liberal now. Rather, it’s because the whole media is not so interested to know about us anymore.”
Morocco’s bow to popular pressure and Egypt’s recent shift of focus highlight a lesson most Arab regimes have yet to learn: The velvet glove is often more effective than the baton. The more mainstream underground music becomes and the less censorship it endures, the less socially and politically potent it may become.
But as long as there is discontent to be expressed, there will be musicians eager to channel it. Even if metal and hip-hop lose their bite, LeVine predicts, the “cultural avant-garde of youth culture will naturally search for other genres of music to express the anger, anxieties, and despair that originally made the music so powerful.”
Monday, November 1, 2010
Al Qaeda Threat Heightens Need to Resolve Western Sahara
It’s hard to see the United States’ faltering efforts to resolve the seemingly intractable Israeli-Palestinian dispute as a model for conflict resolution. Yet, parallels between the Middle East conflict and the Arab world’s other seemingly intractable dispute in the Western Sahara that has soured relations between Morocco and Algeria, suggest otherwise.
Resolution of the 35-year old conflict, one of Africa’s longest festering disputes, has become more urgent with the realization that lack of cooperation between North African and Sahel nations undermines efforts to stem the rise of Al Qaida’s affiliate in the region, Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). The need to align North African nations was driven home by AQIM’s brazen kidnapping in Niger in September of seven foreigners, including five Frenchmen, that threatens France's major source of uranium. Algeria, which backs Polisario, the Sahrawi liberation movement in its dispute with Morocco, last month refused to participate in a meeting in the Malian capital Bamako organized by the G8 Counter-Terrorism Action Group to discuss AQIM because of the presence of Moroccan representatives.
While there are obvious differences between the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and the conflict in the Western Sahara, similarities between the two suggest that the most recent Middle East peacemaking experience may be applicable.
At the heart of both conflicts is annexation of territory that has displaced population groups and subjected them to occupation. The parties to both conflicts pay lip service to international peace efforts but in practice act to subvert them. Both conflicts position a Western-backed ally against a liberation movement supported by influential regional powers. The United States and Europe, despite their support for the occupying power in both conflicts, pay lip service to the rights of the dispossessed.
It is these similarities that positions Middle East peacemaking as a model for preventing the festering conflict in the Sahara from playing into AQIM’s hands. The Obama’s administration message to Israel that security can only be achieved by accommodating Palestinian national aspirations is applicable to Morocco too: regional security demands a two-state solution. Morocco and the Sahrawis need to agree on a formula that balances Moroccan claims of sovereignty with Sahrawi demands for independence.
The roadmap adopted by the Middle East Quartet, which groups the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia is equally applicable to the Western Sahara based on UN Security Council resolutions that call for a negotiated solution and recognition of the Sahrawi right to self-determination. A Saharan roadmap would allow the international community to empower former US diplomat and current UN envoy Chris Ross with the same mandate given to US Middle East peace negotiator George Mitchell: impose a one-year deadline within which the parties seriously negotiate a resolution of their seemingly intractable differences.
To provide the roadmap, the international community would have to come together as it did in the case of the Middle East rather than ignoring the dispute in the Sahara or adopting contradictory policies.In the past the United States was the only power seeking to bring the parties to the negotiating table with little support from its fellow council members. That is no longer a tenable situation with AQIM’s increasingly brazen operations and threats by Polisario, the Saharan liberation movement, to revive its armed struggle.
Resolution of the 35-year old conflict, one of Africa’s longest festering disputes, has become more urgent with the realization that lack of cooperation between North African and Sahel nations undermines efforts to stem the rise of Al Qaida’s affiliate in the region, Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). The need to align North African nations was driven home by AQIM’s brazen kidnapping in Niger in September of seven foreigners, including five Frenchmen, that threatens France's major source of uranium. Algeria, which backs Polisario, the Sahrawi liberation movement in its dispute with Morocco, last month refused to participate in a meeting in the Malian capital Bamako organized by the G8 Counter-Terrorism Action Group to discuss AQIM because of the presence of Moroccan representatives.
While there are obvious differences between the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and the conflict in the Western Sahara, similarities between the two suggest that the most recent Middle East peacemaking experience may be applicable.
At the heart of both conflicts is annexation of territory that has displaced population groups and subjected them to occupation. The parties to both conflicts pay lip service to international peace efforts but in practice act to subvert them. Both conflicts position a Western-backed ally against a liberation movement supported by influential regional powers. The United States and Europe, despite their support for the occupying power in both conflicts, pay lip service to the rights of the dispossessed.
It is these similarities that positions Middle East peacemaking as a model for preventing the festering conflict in the Sahara from playing into AQIM’s hands. The Obama’s administration message to Israel that security can only be achieved by accommodating Palestinian national aspirations is applicable to Morocco too: regional security demands a two-state solution. Morocco and the Sahrawis need to agree on a formula that balances Moroccan claims of sovereignty with Sahrawi demands for independence.
The roadmap adopted by the Middle East Quartet, which groups the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia is equally applicable to the Western Sahara based on UN Security Council resolutions that call for a negotiated solution and recognition of the Sahrawi right to self-determination. A Saharan roadmap would allow the international community to empower former US diplomat and current UN envoy Chris Ross with the same mandate given to US Middle East peace negotiator George Mitchell: impose a one-year deadline within which the parties seriously negotiate a resolution of their seemingly intractable differences.
To provide the roadmap, the international community would have to come together as it did in the case of the Middle East rather than ignoring the dispute in the Sahara or adopting contradictory policies.In the past the United States was the only power seeking to bring the parties to the negotiating table with little support from its fellow council members. That is no longer a tenable situation with AQIM’s increasingly brazen operations and threats by Polisario, the Saharan liberation movement, to revive its armed struggle.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
The War of Words
The battle for public opinion is part of any war. Ensuring that one's terminology is widely adopted is key to that battle. Nowhere is that more prevalent than in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and nowhere is the multitude of conflicting terms employed by both sides greater. The conflict in Gaza is no exception. If in the past this war of words focused at least from an Israeli perspective primarily on public opinion in the West, today it focuses at least as much if not more on perceptions in the Arab and Muslim world.
Leave aside the distinction between terrorist and resistance. The real struggle for the verbal high ground is embedded as Abu Aardvark points out in the very words Gaza and Hamas. Israeli operations are a war against the Palestinians for those who describe them as an attack on Gaza. To those who refer to the attack as an operation against Hamas, the Israeli operation is about more than simply taking sides between Israel, Hamas and the Palestinians.
Gaza means Israel versus Palestine and brings with it the demand for unconditional aid for the Palestinians and demands for an immediate stop to attacks that cause enormous suffering to a trapped civilian population. It puts Arab and Muslim government on the defensive. Significant segments of Arab media with Al Jazeera in the lead, whose coverage of the conflict stands out in the media landscape for its breadth and depth, have largely focused on the humanitarian aspect of the conflict, feeding and catering to widespread sentiment across the Arab and Muslim world.
So far defining the conflict as a war against Gaza is winning hands down against efforts to efforts to define it as a war against Hamas. For those, including Israel, the United States, the Palestine Authority, Egypt and conservative Arab states who define the conflict as one between Israel and Hamas, the issues go far beyond the Palestinian struggle to end Israeli occupation and secure a state of their own. For them, the issue is the growing strength of the Islamist movement across the region.
"Amid the carnage in Gaza, it's not immediately obvious that what is taking place has less to do with Israelis versus Palestinians than with Arabs versus Arabs, principally to define the future of the Middle East. The Gaza conflict has become part of an ongoing confrontation between regimes emerging from the Arab state system established over six decades ago, and, with one exception, new regional players vying to take their place," writes Michael Young, the conservative opinion editor of Beirut's The Daily Star. "What we see developing in the Middle East is an accelerating counterattack by non-state actors such as Hamas, Hizbullah and the Islamic Jihad, all backed by a rising Iran, against the majority of Arab states committed to a negotiated peace with Israel. Manipulating the emotions that the fate of the Palestinians invariably release among Arabs, Tehran above all, but also the militant Islamist groups, are attempting to redraw the regional balance of power through a normalization of the armed struggle against Israel and a delegitimization of Arab states opposed to this," Young adds.
The degree to which the moral and human dimension of the Gaza conflict is winning it in the court of regional public opinion is evident from a roundup by Global Voices entitled 'Morocco: We Are All Gaza' of blogger responses in Morocco, a nation 3000 miles away from Gaza. "On ideological grounds I’m not a supporter of Hamas, but like it or not, these are the people who the Palestinians chose to lead them. After all, Hamas has always been cleaner than Fatah (its main political rival) and had a much better record in respecting the democratic process in Palestine since its inception... When in the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and even during the 80’s, most of Palestinian militants were secular and mostly fighting a “conventional” war of liberation (i.e. not targeting civilians, and avoiding terror tactics -except the exceptions-), Israel responded with the same brutality and pushed the Palestinians little by little to the extreme," writes Hicham on Al Miraat.
During a visit to a hypermarket in Casablanca last year, I asked the head of sales in the computer department what keyboards sold best, Arabic or French-language ones. French, he said, and went on to say: "Relations with the West are good but they would be even better if the West would solve the conflicts in Palestine and Iraq." For a national, whose nation focuses far more on Europe and is only a stone throw away from a region where wealth is far more evenly distribute rather than on its Arab and Muslim brethren thousands of miles away, the salesman's comment was surprising. His most immediate concern was not commercial and economic improvement, it was the plight of people with whom he barely interacts. The salesman's comment goes a far way to explain why Gaza is winning the war of words and images and why Arab and Muslim anti-Hamas governments need to be seen to be expressing solidarity with the Palestinians and to be acting to achieve an immediate end to the violence and a lifting of the Israeli siege.
Mona Eltawahy, an Egyptian blogger in New York, graphically describes the war on words:
“Why aren’t you as an Arab lady writing about Gaza?
“Where are your columns about Gaza?
“Say the Israelis are wrong!
The messages started to arrive soon after Israel’s bombardment of Gaza killed close to 300 Palestinians. Implicit was the pressure to toe the party line, Hamas is good, Israel is bad. Say it, say it! Or else you’re not Arab enough, you’re not Muslim enough, you’re not enough,” Mona writes.
“But what to say about a conflict that for more than 60 years now has fed Arab and Israeli senses of victimhood and their respective demands to stop everything else we’re doing and pay attention to their fights because what’s the slaughter of anyone else – be they in Darfur, Congo or anywhere else – compared to their often avoidable bloodletting? Hasn’t it all been said before? Has nothing been learned? And then the suicide cyclist in Iraq made me snap and I had to write, not to take sides but to lament the moral bankruptcy that is born from the amnesia rife in the Middle East. On Sunday, a man on a bicycle blew himself up in the middle of an anti-Israel demonstration in the Iraqi city of Mosul. The technique legitimized and blessed by clerics throughout the Arab world as a weapon against Israel had gone haywire and was used against Arabs protesting Israel’s bombardment of Gaza,” she responds.
The war of words and images is likely to outlive the fighting on the ground. What will remain once the guns fall silent are the images of the civilian wounded and dead and a perception of who the ultimate winner is. The question is whether that will really have tangible political fallout in the region. If recent history is anything to go by, probably not. The war of words and images during and after the 2006 Israeli war against Hizbollah, the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the Israeli re-occupation of the West Bank in 2002 and the second Intifada two years earlier all had embedded perceptions that public anger could topple Arab regimes and rewrite the region's political map. Yet, nothing changed; the same Arab rulers remain in office today, often having successfully blunted demands for greater political freedoms with improved economic performance.
Analysis of the casualty figures in Gaza illustrates just how ideological the war of words and images is. From what can be derived from open sources, casualty figures have dropped substantially as the Israeli attacks drag on. In the first 24 hours civilian deaths were the highest, some 100 out of 282 dead. The total number of dead since then over a period of four days climbed much slower reaching just under 400 at the end of the fifth day of the fighting, with civilians accounting for a proximately 60 of those killed. The proportion of civilians among the 2000 wounded is less clear with medical aid workers in Gaza putting it at approximately 40 percent. Those figures could change dramatically if Israel launches a ground offensive in Gaza.
With a population of 1.5 million, Gaza is one of the world's most densely populated regions. Hamas no doubt has at least some of its military and certainly its political infrastructure embedded in heavily civilian populated areas. While Israel argues that this makes civilian casualties inevitable, Hamas' civilian neighbors even if they voted the Islamists into office had no say in whether they felt comfortable living next to potential Israeli targets and are certainly paying a heavy price. How decentralized Hamas' infrastructure across Gaza is becomes apparent on a UNOSAT map of Israeli targets in the strip so far published by the Olin Institute's Middle East Strategy At Harvard blog.
Leave aside the distinction between terrorist and resistance. The real struggle for the verbal high ground is embedded as Abu Aardvark points out in the very words Gaza and Hamas. Israeli operations are a war against the Palestinians for those who describe them as an attack on Gaza. To those who refer to the attack as an operation against Hamas, the Israeli operation is about more than simply taking sides between Israel, Hamas and the Palestinians.
Gaza means Israel versus Palestine and brings with it the demand for unconditional aid for the Palestinians and demands for an immediate stop to attacks that cause enormous suffering to a trapped civilian population. It puts Arab and Muslim government on the defensive. Significant segments of Arab media with Al Jazeera in the lead, whose coverage of the conflict stands out in the media landscape for its breadth and depth, have largely focused on the humanitarian aspect of the conflict, feeding and catering to widespread sentiment across the Arab and Muslim world.
So far defining the conflict as a war against Gaza is winning hands down against efforts to efforts to define it as a war against Hamas. For those, including Israel, the United States, the Palestine Authority, Egypt and conservative Arab states who define the conflict as one between Israel and Hamas, the issues go far beyond the Palestinian struggle to end Israeli occupation and secure a state of their own. For them, the issue is the growing strength of the Islamist movement across the region.
"Amid the carnage in Gaza, it's not immediately obvious that what is taking place has less to do with Israelis versus Palestinians than with Arabs versus Arabs, principally to define the future of the Middle East. The Gaza conflict has become part of an ongoing confrontation between regimes emerging from the Arab state system established over six decades ago, and, with one exception, new regional players vying to take their place," writes Michael Young, the conservative opinion editor of Beirut's The Daily Star. "What we see developing in the Middle East is an accelerating counterattack by non-state actors such as Hamas, Hizbullah and the Islamic Jihad, all backed by a rising Iran, against the majority of Arab states committed to a negotiated peace with Israel. Manipulating the emotions that the fate of the Palestinians invariably release among Arabs, Tehran above all, but also the militant Islamist groups, are attempting to redraw the regional balance of power through a normalization of the armed struggle against Israel and a delegitimization of Arab states opposed to this," Young adds.
The degree to which the moral and human dimension of the Gaza conflict is winning it in the court of regional public opinion is evident from a roundup by Global Voices entitled 'Morocco: We Are All Gaza' of blogger responses in Morocco, a nation 3000 miles away from Gaza. "On ideological grounds I’m not a supporter of Hamas, but like it or not, these are the people who the Palestinians chose to lead them. After all, Hamas has always been cleaner than Fatah (its main political rival) and had a much better record in respecting the democratic process in Palestine since its inception... When in the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and even during the 80’s, most of Palestinian militants were secular and mostly fighting a “conventional” war of liberation (i.e. not targeting civilians, and avoiding terror tactics -except the exceptions-), Israel responded with the same brutality and pushed the Palestinians little by little to the extreme," writes Hicham on Al Miraat.
During a visit to a hypermarket in Casablanca last year, I asked the head of sales in the computer department what keyboards sold best, Arabic or French-language ones. French, he said, and went on to say: "Relations with the West are good but they would be even better if the West would solve the conflicts in Palestine and Iraq." For a national, whose nation focuses far more on Europe and is only a stone throw away from a region where wealth is far more evenly distribute rather than on its Arab and Muslim brethren thousands of miles away, the salesman's comment was surprising. His most immediate concern was not commercial and economic improvement, it was the plight of people with whom he barely interacts. The salesman's comment goes a far way to explain why Gaza is winning the war of words and images and why Arab and Muslim anti-Hamas governments need to be seen to be expressing solidarity with the Palestinians and to be acting to achieve an immediate end to the violence and a lifting of the Israeli siege.
Mona Eltawahy, an Egyptian blogger in New York, graphically describes the war on words:
“Why aren’t you as an Arab lady writing about Gaza?
“Where are your columns about Gaza?
“Say the Israelis are wrong!
The messages started to arrive soon after Israel’s bombardment of Gaza killed close to 300 Palestinians. Implicit was the pressure to toe the party line, Hamas is good, Israel is bad. Say it, say it! Or else you’re not Arab enough, you’re not Muslim enough, you’re not enough,” Mona writes.
“But what to say about a conflict that for more than 60 years now has fed Arab and Israeli senses of victimhood and their respective demands to stop everything else we’re doing and pay attention to their fights because what’s the slaughter of anyone else – be they in Darfur, Congo or anywhere else – compared to their often avoidable bloodletting? Hasn’t it all been said before? Has nothing been learned? And then the suicide cyclist in Iraq made me snap and I had to write, not to take sides but to lament the moral bankruptcy that is born from the amnesia rife in the Middle East. On Sunday, a man on a bicycle blew himself up in the middle of an anti-Israel demonstration in the Iraqi city of Mosul. The technique legitimized and blessed by clerics throughout the Arab world as a weapon against Israel had gone haywire and was used against Arabs protesting Israel’s bombardment of Gaza,” she responds.
The war of words and images is likely to outlive the fighting on the ground. What will remain once the guns fall silent are the images of the civilian wounded and dead and a perception of who the ultimate winner is. The question is whether that will really have tangible political fallout in the region. If recent history is anything to go by, probably not. The war of words and images during and after the 2006 Israeli war against Hizbollah, the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the Israeli re-occupation of the West Bank in 2002 and the second Intifada two years earlier all had embedded perceptions that public anger could topple Arab regimes and rewrite the region's political map. Yet, nothing changed; the same Arab rulers remain in office today, often having successfully blunted demands for greater political freedoms with improved economic performance.
Analysis of the casualty figures in Gaza illustrates just how ideological the war of words and images is. From what can be derived from open sources, casualty figures have dropped substantially as the Israeli attacks drag on. In the first 24 hours civilian deaths were the highest, some 100 out of 282 dead. The total number of dead since then over a period of four days climbed much slower reaching just under 400 at the end of the fifth day of the fighting, with civilians accounting for a proximately 60 of those killed. The proportion of civilians among the 2000 wounded is less clear with medical aid workers in Gaza putting it at approximately 40 percent. Those figures could change dramatically if Israel launches a ground offensive in Gaza.
With a population of 1.5 million, Gaza is one of the world's most densely populated regions. Hamas no doubt has at least some of its military and certainly its political infrastructure embedded in heavily civilian populated areas. While Israel argues that this makes civilian casualties inevitable, Hamas' civilian neighbors even if they voted the Islamists into office had no say in whether they felt comfortable living next to potential Israeli targets and are certainly paying a heavy price. How decentralized Hamas' infrastructure across Gaza is becomes apparent on a UNOSAT map of Israeli targets in the strip so far published by the Olin Institute's Middle East Strategy At Harvard blog.
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