All posts by dvarisco

Below the Arab Spring

"Arab Spring", Development, Environment, Ethics, Mali, Mauritania


This summer the “Arab Spring” seems to be getting hot as hell, even beyond the “war-is-hell” sense. Masses of Egyptians are rallying in Tahrir Square to protest the military’s latest moves; Syria downs a Turkish fighter jet; there are increasing riots in Sudan not related to the secession of the south; and the list goes on. But below the North African countries where the jasmine-tinted winds of change first blew away dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya (with the anti-dictatorial aroma catching on in Yemen and reaching as far east as Bahrain) there is a crisis which is not being covered. The hot topic should be the Sahel, the region that cuts across Africa in a dry zone of perpetual dearth and periodic death.

In a special report on Al Jazeera, it is reported that 15 million people are affected by a severe drought combined with ineffective government assistance programs and decreasing food supply. The report provides a country-by-country breakdown of the problem. Consider the situation in Mali, for example:

Prices of millet and sorghum grain have risen significantly after harvests in 2012 were 25 per cent lower than in 2011. Political instability, following a coup in March 2012 and the breakup of Northern Mali into the self-proclaimed state of Azawad, has further hampered the ability of aid agencies to assess needs and deliver the necessary aid to this landlocked country.

The UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that more than a million children face acute malnutrition, with as many as 146,000 people displaced into Niger, Burkina Faso and Mauritania, under deteriorating circumstances.
People affected: 3-4million.

Continue reading Below the Arab Spring →

Iconclasm Again

"Arab Spring", Architecture, Sufism, Terrorism Issue, Yemen


Once again AQAP/Ansar al-Shari’a shows its mean spirit, not only destroying the lives of the living but resorting to desecrating the dead. Before pulling out of Ja’ar in southern Yemen, several of the iconclasts destroyed the shrine of al Ja’dani in Al Tareyyah, among other shrines. Ibrahim Suleiman al Rubaish, a former detainee at Guantanamo Bay and now a senior AQAP leader, issued a video taking credit for the demolition work. Here is what he is reported to have said:

“Here are the mujahideen by the grace of Allah the Great and Almighty carrying out what Allah commanded them to do and reviving their jihad in the Cause of Allah…. So, just as they fought democracy and representative councils which make laws alongside Allah, they are destroying the domes which are being worshipped other than Allah, along with the graves and mausoleums, which people try to get close to other than Allah the Great and Almighty.”

“We fight the idolatry of the palaces and the graves – both are the same.”

The idolatry he does not see is his own intolerance, as though Allah has made him a successor of the prophet. Yemen’s south is dotted with shrines, reflecting the generations of Sufis and other devout scholars who have lived in Yemen over the centuries. Rubaish, who is in fact a Saudi and not Yemeni, places himself above all these Yemenis of the past. Like the other AQAP leaders, he is not likely to last long, but the destruction he touts adds salt to the wounds of the current turmoil in Yemen. Yemen has a rich Islamic history of monuments and saints tombs. Unlike the Taliban blasting in 2001 of the Buddha images at Bamiyan, also a senseless act, Rubaish cannot even claim to be destroying an image from another religion. He thinks he is fighting “the palaces and the graves,” but he is really fighting against time and doing more to harm Islam than promote it.

Where is the salam dunk?

"Arab Spring", Arab-Israeli Conflict, Egypt, Ethics, Terrorism Issue


The epitome of Arabic greetings is salam alaykum, peace be upon you, but it seems that the Middle East harbors more harb (war) than peace these days. It can be argued that this is hardly new for a region that has seen more warfare over time than any other. Perhaps the characterization of the region as the Holy Land has as much to do with the amount of human blood spilled on its soil as for the number of prophets preaching peace. But today’s news cycle is particularly sad because nowhere does there seem to be much hope for furthering the peace that most people are dying to achieve. The violence drones on and on.

As former President Mubarak lies in a coma, many Egyptians are once again flooding Tahrir Square to contest the military’s coup-like takeover of political power, although perhaps it should be styled a makeover, since they have held de facto power all along and will continue to do so no matter who is elected. To Egypt’s south far less individuals took to the streets in Khartoum, protesting the Sudanese government. Although Somalia has been pushed out of the major news cycle, the situation there remains as volatile as ever. Crossing over into Sinai, an Israeli construction worker was killed a few days ago and in the escalating tension Hamas has fired rockets at Israel and Israel has launched air raids in Gaza. Syrian violence continues but without the pretense of powerless monitors and the repaired helicopters that were being shipped from Russia. In Iraq pilgrims continue to be targets of bombs and pay for their devotion with their lives. In Yemen the military commander of the brigade that drove Ansar al-Sharia out of their southern base was killed earlier in the week by a suicide bomber. Even in Turkey there has been recent violence from Kurdish nationalists.

Long ago one of the prophets in this region said the immortal words: Blessed are the peacemakers. But how can they be blessed if they are absent? Why does the curse of the warmakers seem to outweigh efforts at peace? If Indeed we recently witnessed an “Arab Spring,” the reality is that spring is part of a seasonal cycle and not eternal. The “fall” of dictatorial regimes is still playing out, but the cold sectarian winds blowing out hopes for peace and the frosted rhetoric of intolerance do not bode well for the tender blossoming of sought freedoms. The region needs a Gandhi, not an Osama or an Assad. The region needs a salam dunk, not a harb to the right. But, if history is any gauge, there will still be no blessings to confer in tomorrow’s news cycle.

And the winner is?

"Arab Spring", Egypt, Travel


The polling is over in Egypt, but the dust has not yet settled. Given the simoon of recent political events, it is not likely to settle soon. Unofficial tallies place the Muslim Brotherhood backed candidate, Mohammed Morsi, with the lead. But the official results will not be released until June 21. Yet, it is possible to ask if there can be any real winner, since the ruling military council has ensured that it will continue to call the shots and ride oversight on any new government. The stage is now set for either a confrontation between supporters of the Brotherhood and the military or a marriage of convenience. I suspect the latter. The military is not about to lose power, not has it gambled away its prestige by engaging in ruthless slaughter as has happened in Syria.

Egypt, as most people know even if they only read their King James Bible, has a long history. Relics of the pharaohs dot the landscape; the pharaohs were gods on earth, the absolute dictators of their day, and they generally got along fine with the religious framers. When Akhenaten tried to go against the grains of the gods and call for the worship of one God, Aten, it was a short-lived moment. The rulers in the Islamic era were also not on the side of democracy. When the Mamluks, foreign mercenaries who wreaked havoc on the locals, took over in the 13th century, they played the religion game and adopted devout-sounding names, but their lust was for power and revenues and not to glorify Allah. It is tempting to view the continuing role of Egypt’s military as a Mamluk ploy, only from within. The military today is thoroughly Egyptian and has vast economic assets as well as the ability to channel politics. Continue reading And the winner is? →

Ansar al-Sharia on the Ropes?

"Arab Spring", Terrorism Issue, Yemen


The news today is that Yemeni government troops and local tribal militia have finally dislodged the ultra-conservative Ansar al-Sharia from their base in the southern towns of Ja’ar and Zinjabar. These cities had been under de facto control of the rebels for over a year, with the military weakened during the long drawn-out political turmoil that eventually led to the removal of Ali Abdullah Salih. According to al-Jazeera, “Since the offensive began, 485 people have been killed, according to an AFP tally combined from different sources. This includes 368 al-Qaeda fighters, 72 soldiers, 26 local armed men and 19 civilians.” Without question this is a major blow to a group that used foreign fighters and was increasingly at odds with local tribes. During their tenure both towns had become virtual ghost towns where a distinctively non-Yemeni form of Islamic law was mandated by force. Details thus far are rather skimpy. but it appears that the remaining individuals of Ansar al-Sharia fled east to al-Shaqra.

The question remains, of course, of whether this is a major blow to Ansar al-Sharia and its affiliated partner al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula or a skirmish. Given the massive external support now being given to the central government, I strongly suspect that this is the beginning of the end for Ansar al-Sharia as a fighting force. It has survived thus far on weapons looted from the army with almost no direct outside support apart from an influx of foreign fighters from Afghanistan and Somalia. The agenda of Ansar al-Sharia, like that of AQAP, has failed to find fertile ground among the bulk of the population with outright antagonism from most tribal leaders. It has flourished primarily due to the weakness of the government over the past year. Continue reading Ansar al-Sharia on the Ropes? →

An end to creationism?

Anthropology/Sociology, Bible and Holy Land, Environment


In Monday’s Washington Post there is a report that the paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey is predicting that in another 15-3o years the evidence for evolution will be so overwhelming that creationists who believe in a literal Adam and Eve (which includes about half of the American public, according to opinion polls) will finally throw in the towel. Would that it were so, but the evidence has been overwhelming for well over a hundred years. Every aspect of scientific discovery since Darwin rests on the assumption that life, and indeed all matter, has evolved over a process that involves millions of years. There is not a shred of evidence for the old Bishop Ussher chronology that it all began in a garden called Eden with a lump of clay, a serpent, a couple of symbolic trees and a refashioned rib; not a shred. Push back that divine origin story several thousand years and there is no difference.

If I am still around in another 15-35 years I do not expect the ardent creationists to be any less active. They continue because of an ideology that refuses to accept that the Bible is myth and not the inspired science and history of a rather old and unconvincing idea of God. Creationists do not approach science with an open mind, so they will not be convinced no matter what scientific evidence there is. The theology of the creationists has not changed. Take this old “history of the world” text book I have from the early part of the 19th century (the title page is missing, but the last information is for 1815). It may very well have been one of those books that Abraham Lincoln sought as a child for his own education. I include here the first section, which takes the sacred history of Genesis as real history. This was a book used in the public schools before Darwin published his revolutionary Origin of Species, not a religious tract. Science has come a long way, notwithstanding David Hume’s contributions not long before this book came out; creationists have not and never will.






How much more blood will be spilled?

"Arab Spring", Afghanistan, Arab-Israeli Conflict, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Palestine, Syria, Tunisia


Painting of St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre by François Dubois, a Huguenot painter born circa 1529 in Amiens

Here in America summer is well on its way as most colleges have already finished their spring terms, public schools will in less than a month and the beaches start to fill up. People will complain about the high price of gas and brace themselves for an onslaught of political advertising in which billions of dollars that might have helped the poor abroad will be wasted on the media madness we foolishly think is democracy at its best. Forget the dream of “one man/woman, one vote” in a system where corporations and billionaires see if they can buy elections in our red state/blue state electorality.

In Egypt the first round of voting is over and what a choice: the Brotherhood candidate or the old regime hack. Damn those Brits for not letting Saad Zaghlul take Egypt into the 20th century. Imagine if the map drawn up after World War I on that infamous Churchillian napkin had actually given autonomy to the various ethnic groups, including the Kurds, in the region instead of mandating the old Ottoman precincts. The protests that erupted over a year ago just about everywhere have a long fuse. Yes, the last dictators have fallen in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen. But the future in all these countries is full of potholes that the IMF will not be able to pave over; nor will Saudi billions make life all that much better for the millions of people suffering economic hardship more than ever.

And the blood keeps spilling, a flood only matched by the tears of those who mourn the dead. Continue reading How much more blood will be spilled? →

Billions for Millions

Development, Saudi Arabia, Yemen


Yemen is about to be gifted with 3.25 billion dollars in aid from Saudi Arabia, according to Al Jazeera. With about 24 million people in Yemen, this is quite a hefty donation. Other donors will kick in to round it up at 4 billion. So the question now is who will benefit from all this money and how will such a vast amount actually be channeled into the public sector. There is no question that Yemen faces a severe humanitarian crisis with rising levels of malnutrition and health problems due to the insecurity and economic quagmire following the dictatorial rape of Yemen’s wealth by the late President Ali Abdullah Salih and his cronies. If the money is really funneled into health, education and needed infrastructure, this will be a valuable boost to getting the country back on track. But it is a big “if” given the continuing unrest throughout the country, the violence of Ansar al-Sharia in the south and the lack of a viable governmental civil service. How much of this aid will continue to end up in the pockets of officials, since corruption became endemic during the Salih regime?

And what are the strings to such a vast amount? Yemen has a diverse religious history with both Zaydi and Shafi’i followers who have lived in relative peace, separated by politics rather than doctrinal fighting, for centuries. But the influx of conservative Wahhabi cum Salafi views with Saudi financial backing threatens to create greater tension over religious affiliation. Do the Saudis simply want to extend their royal influence to the south or are the leaders genuinely concerned about the plight of Yemen’s population?

There is an old phrase in American English: “Don’t bite the hand that’s feeding you.” This is good advice as long as the hand is only feeding you and not at the same time grabbing you by the neck and forcing you to be something else than you want to be. It remains to be seen how the aid money will be spent, but Yemen is clearly the beneficiary of largesse that other struggling countries in the region have not received; Sudan and Somalia, for example.

But, as another American saying goes, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” even if it has a Saudi brand.