Mideast News & Politics

Walid Raad to Waltz with Bashir: Truth Claims, Contested Images & Lebanese Civil Wars

It is the nature of war to be messy, to be complicated, and to produce dueling—if not multiple—claims to “truth.” In a recent ABC interview, Barbara Walters accused Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad of bloody crackdowns against pro-democracy demonstrators.

Walters said, “But I saw reporters who brought back pictures.” Assad defiantly responded, “Yeah, but how did you verify those pictures? ...I cannot answer about fake pretenses, I can only talk about reality.”

The events of this year’s uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East, and the controversies over documentation of atrocities, remind us of the role art plays in portraying Truth.

In November of 2004, Lebanese installation and performance artist Walid Raad presented an audience at London’s Whitechapel Gallery with the recently discovered notebooks of an academic, containing page after page of war documentation. The lecture was conducted in association with Raad’s Atlas Group, a collective formed to document historical records of the Lebanese Civil Wars (1975-1990). The Atlas Group staged several exhibitions in which video, photographs, meticulously detailed studies, and personal narratives allowed viewers to “witness” the conflict. But nothing was quite as it seemed. It took years for the project to be fully understood for what it was: a sham. Hecklers at Raad’s talks turned out to be planted, named academics were fictions, and the Atlas Group’s historians proved merely an invention of the artist.

What’s Left for Assad?

Nine months after the uprising in Syria began, the situation in the country is coming to a head. No, there aren’t millions of protesters marching through the capital. There isn’t a rebel army about to overrun Damascus.

But the world is turning against the Assad regime, and Bashar al-Assad himself is running out of time and options. Syria is going to face a major upheaval soon, and the only question is what exactly will it look like.

How Women Formed the Backbone of the Middle East Uprisings: Accounts from Bahrain, Libya, and Iran.

2011 has been the year that change swept through the Middle East. People of all faiths and economic status united against dictators and stood up for their rights. On December 16th, The Frontline Club hosted an event in London, in association with BBC Arabic, focusing on Women of the Revolution.

Three activists joined the panel: Maryam AlKhawaja, head of foreign relations at the Bahrain Center for Human Rights; Mervat Mhani, member of The Free Generation Movement in Libya; and Sussan Tahmasebi, a women's rights and civil society activist from Iran and founding member of the One Million Signatures Campaign.

Explaining the role women played in Bahrain, AlKhawaja described how Bahraini women responded to security forces when they had entered the pearl roundabout (the Tahrir square of Bahrain) to disperse protesters. Some fearless women, waving the Bahraini flag, stood face to face with the security forces.

Despite the media’s mis-characterization of the uprising in Bahrain as a sectarian conflict, between the Shia majority and the Sunni ruling elite, the protesters were comprised of many different sects all united in the fight against oppression and indignity. The people of Bahrain were actually demanding a secular civil government, said AlKhawaja.

AlKhawaja described her sister’s latest encounter at a peaceful protest in Bahrain. Zainab AlKhawaja and a number of others staged a sit in that the country’s riot police attempted to disperse. Zainab was arrested by a female police officer who used one side of a handcuff to cuff both hands together and the other side to drag Zainab on the floor. Footage of her arrest circulated the Internet, exposing her mistreatment. She was sprayed in her eyes by an unknown substance that melted the contact lenses she was wearing at the time.

Saudi Anti-Terror Law Strikes at Basic Human Rights

In July 2011, the international human rights group Amnesty International published a draft version of an anti-terror law proposed by the government of Saudi Arabia. Marked “Secret and Urgent,” the law laid out defined offenses and proposed punishments for activities that Amnesty says would stifle peaceful dissent within the Kingdom and could lead to indefinite detention of those found in violation. The government of Saudi Arabia labeled Amnesty’s concerns as being “baseless, mere supposition and without foundation.” The Kingdom then proceeded to block access to Amnesty’s website.

Who Will Cry For Maikel Nabil?

Egypt’s most prominent internet activist gets two years in jail.

CAIRO – On Wednesday afternoon, just as millions of Egyptians were lining up around their blocks for the second round of parliamentary election voting, a military court sentenced 26-year-old Maikel Nabil Sanad, the first prisoner of conscience in post-Mubarak Egypt, to two years in prison.

Maikel was originally arrested on March 28, after he wrote a blog post titled “The army and the people wasn’t ever one hand,” a direct critique of the popular slogan to the contrary. The post catalogued events that suggested the army was not nearly as sympathetic to the revolution as was generally believed, and listed specific military attacks on activists and the revolution at large.

Maikel’s case is just one of over 12,000 military trials that have proceeded under the Supreme Council of the Armed Force’s transition government, more than the entire number under Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year reign.

The truth is, freeing Maikel Nabil has never been a widely popular cause aside from a flurry of activity on Twitter and Facebook following his detention in April and after Wednesday’s ruling. Like so many other acts of the Egyptian military regime, the ruling sparked a loud response from a small activist community without provoking much, if any, public outcry. Moreover, because of his statements on Israel and regional politics, Maikel has received less attention and support here than other prominent detainees, like Alaa Abd El-Fatah.

“Only a Crazy Person Would Kill his Own People”: Tightening the Noose Around Syria’s al-Asaad.

In a bold move, the Syrian government recently banned the use of iPhones in an attempt to obstruct the recording of the regime’s human rights violations against its own people after a Syrian opposition group published an app titled “Syria Wa Bass” to document the political uprising.

With heavy restrictions against journalists entering the country, the regime has made it virtually impossible to verify deaths in the country, thus making citizen reports from inside the country, whether though the Internet, mobile, or other new communication technologies, invaluable in documenting violence against protesters.

The United Nations Human Rights High Commissioner, Navi Pillay, demanded that the international community hold the Syrian regime accountable for crimes against humanity.

Turkey: What to Make of the New Superpower in the Middle East

Last month, the Los Angeles based Levantine Cultural Center hosted UCLA School of Law Professor, Aslı U. Bâli, at its most recent MENA-X lecture series. An expert in Public International Law, International Human Rights and the Laws of War, Professor Bâli provided an examination of Turkey's changing political policies toward its Mideast neighbors.

He also spoke about Turkey’s recent strife with Israel, and evaluated the value of the “Turkish Model” as a standard for democratization efforts in the Middle East.

In order to understand the present, we must understand the past, and Professor Bâli provided a brief history of the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, and the “Turkification” process in the formation of the republic.

Collapsing a Society: Economic Sanctions from Iraq to Iran

“Power shortages and lack of spare parts led to the breakdown of many modern facilities...per capita income dropped from $3510 to $450; heavily influenced by rapid currency devaluation…an estimated 500,000 excess child deaths occurred due to diseases caused by shortages of medicine and water purification supplies.”

The sanctions regime which targeted Iraq for over a decade until the 2003 attack against that country had a calculatedly devastating effect on the Iraqi civilian population even as it further entrenching the power of Saddam Hussein. In 1998, Denis Haliday, then UN Humanitarian Aid Coordinator for Baghdad, resigned from the UN after more than thirty years, citing his inability to continue administering a program which he said “satisfied the legal definition of genocide.”

Not Living Up to Its Reputation: Human Rights in Israel

American proponents of a close, even “special,” relationship with Israel often justify their support for the Jewish state on the grounds that "Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East." Indeed, a quick look at Freedom House's 2011 Map of Freedom shows a speck of "free" in a sea of "not free."

In contrast to this designation, there are many who are well aware of the controversies surrounding Israeli treatment of Palestinians. Less well known, however, and deserving equal attention, is the growing tide of anti-democratic governance within Israel itself. A number of recent developments show that freedom in Israel is not immutable and shouldn't be taken for granted.

Queer Jihad: The Truth About How American Muslims Feel about LGBT Issues

In May 2010, Intersections International, an interfaith non-profit based in New York City, opened a one-on-one dialogue about the role the LGBT community has within Islam, with about 50 Muslim theologians, religious practitioners, academics and laypeople from U.S. cities with high populations of Muslims, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Dearborn, MI.

A group of six to twelve participants, with ages ranging from 19 to 68, met at each gathering. Half of those surveyed were American and half were natives of thirteen different foreign countries. The majority considered themselves politically moderate. The participants were given a 25-question survey asking them about their views of Islam, of LGBT issues and LGBT issues in Islam. The report also included three commissioned articles from Islamic studies scholars.

Reverend Robert Chase, founding Director of Intersections International, said that the request for the survey came from the Arcus Foundation.

“We wanted to heal the rift between the Muslim and the non-Muslim world,” Chase said. “What role is there for queer Muslims in the wider Muslim world or wider American society?”

Chase explained that one of the reasons that his organization was selected to preform the survey was because they didn’t have a “sectarian axe to grind.”