Evin Prison

Iran is one of the more democratic states in its region. Criticisms of its regime are often made cynically by those looking for excuses to invade it. As a result, it is easy to forget what complete cockfarmers the rulers of Iran are. It is sometimes said that liberal democratic states have a self-perpetuating power elite that exercises real control despite the facade of elections. In Iran, the self-perpetuating power elite's role is written into the constitution.

With the real organs of state power largely outside the remit of the elected bits of Iran's government, it is no surprise that they behave in the most thuggish and nakedly authoritarian manner. At the moment Ms Haleh Esfandiari, a visiting academic, languishes in the terrifying Evin Prison, accused of being part of an international revolutionary syndicate led by George Soros; Iran is one of few countries where Soros' civil society organisation could be considered some kind of subversive organisation. Last year Mr Akbar Mohammadi died mysteriously in the same prison; he was serving a fifteen year jail term for organising student protests, and while in Evin he had suffered a spinal injury before allegedly dying of a heart attack. In 2005 Ms Zahra Kazemi, a Canadian photojournalist, was raped and tortured to death in Evin. These are obviously just the most famous victims of these seemingly unaccountable gangsters.

Somewhat ironically, perhaps, Evin Prison was famously used as a jail and torture centre by the Shah; the likelihood has to be that some of the regime's current stalwarts enjoyed its hospitality before the revolution. It is apparently situated next to an attractive park and tea house, both of which attract visitors to the area. If you find yourself there, be careful with any camera you have, lest you suffer the fate of Ms Kazemi (although Ms Fariba Amina seems to have got away with it; photos from her article on Payvand News of Iran)

Poland & Russia v. the homosexuals

The Polish government is currently in the hands of two eccentric twin brothers who delight in ignoring the real issues and instead prefer to engage in puerile cultural politics. Consequently it should be no surprise to learn that a senior official has ordered an investigation into whether popular TV programme The Teletubbies promotes a gay lifestyle. "I noticed he was carrying a handbag", reports the confused official, "At first I didn't realise he was a boy". The official is actually a woman, Ms Ewa Sowinska, but it is more fun to imagine the line being said by a Polish Alan Partridge.

In Russia, they take a more direct approach to these matters. In Moscow yesterday, 100% heterosexual ultra-nationalists laid into a gay pride demonstration, punching British gay rights activist Peter Tatchell's face in and dishing out similar treatment to Richard Fairbrass of Right Said Fred. The cops initially stood by, but then intervened to arrest Tatchell, Fairbrass, several members of the European Parliament, and numerous gay rights activists. Curiously, the various ultra-nationalist thugs seem to have been left alone by the forces of law and order.
The incident reminds me that it's been too long since I listened to my RSF record. The one positive aspect of this whole story is learning that they still have a career in music.

Links:
Gay Activists Beaten And Arrested In Russia
Arrests at Russian gay protests
Moscow anti-gay attack condemned

Democracy in action - the final crop

A vote for Lucan

Make the local woman your TD

Think change

Building an Ireland of equals

For a strong caring voice

Left-Wing government? NO thanks!

Ireland is an island - NOT a continent

Your vote for children

Taking action - getting results

Getting places faster

A real performer!

Ireland is a country - not a continent.

The Final Programme

I have submitted my last essay to Spy School.

Now I just have to write a thesis and then I will be a qualified Spy.

Democracy in action, part 2

It's time

Fighting for you

Ready for government

Everybody matters

Enough is enough

Putting Dublin North in safe hands

Invest in progress

Make a difference

Make the change

Democratising the Middle East

I had my last ever lecture in Spy School on Friday. It was about US attempts to democratise the Arab world. By an astonishing coincidence, the BBC ran an article on this kind of thing last week: Has the US ditched Mid-East reform?

I have already mentioned the prevalence of authoritarian rule in the Middle East. Part of the picture here is the historic fondness of the USA for friendly Arab dictators or kings. This assisted various shady Arab world leaders in the repression of their people. After 9-11, though, elements within the US administration began to wonder if this strategy had essentially failed – something designed to advance US security is hardly achieved if maniacs take to flying aircraft into New York skyscrapers. So the US regime started talking about how it was vitally important that the Arab world move towards democracy. The use of democratisation as part of the justification for invading Iraq was part of this, but the piling of pressure on US clients was another. Egypt's Hosni Mubarak had long been one of the USA's most reliable allies in the region, but suddenly he found himself being put under real pressure to introduce democratic reforms to his country.

Fortunately for Mubarak, the USA lost interest in Arab democratisation, and the Egyptian regime found itself free to throw civil rights activists and bloggers into jail without any problematic statements from the Americans. The reason for this is simple enough – democracy is a mysterious business, and you can never be sure that the guys you like will win. The Palestinian Authority elections in 2006 were a worrying reminder of what can happen when people are allowed to vote – despite the high education of Palestinians, their extensive links to a worldwide diaspora, and all the money the USA has pumped into the country, the Palestinian ingrates chose to vote for Hamas, the evil Islamist party. After that the US administration decided that actually the friendly dictators and monarchs were not so bad after all, and they have been subjected to only the most token pressures towards democracy.

You could say, therefore, that the clock has turned full circle and the USA is back to letting security concerns dictate its agenda with respect to Middle Eastern regimes. Unfortunately, the pro-democracy interlude has the effect of greatly strengthening the dictators, as they (and their opposition) can now reasonably predict that if the Americans pile on the pressure for democracy then this will simply be a short-lived fad to which they are not really committed. There is also the damage to US credibility – if you start saying that Egypt needs to democratise and then a couple of years later revert to a failed policy of boosting Mubarak then you look like a bit of an idiot, and a hypocritical one at that.

Democracy in action

The best is yet to come

Don't throw it all away

On your side

Others promise. We deliver

Working for you. Working with you

I have a dream

Help me to help you

Now, the next steps

Your voice, your issues

Delivering results consistently

Working locally… delivering locally

Your Ireland. Your future

New generation. New candidate. New Dáil.

We'll work for you.

Teamwork gets results.

Honest politics. Real results.

Scotland Votes

As does Wales and some of England. Aside from the whole "SNP - raving lunatics or the new friendly face of Scotland" debate, I was struck by how the UK was considering embracing a ridiculous voting system on the basis of their spurious modernity, a move that mirrors Ireland's failed embrace of electronic voting a couple of years ago. In particular there seem to have been plans to adopt internet and mobile telephone voting in elections, as part of an attempt to turn the choosing of people to run the country into a parody of Big Brother. This seems to have been cancelled at the last minute because of security issues with the software: Government cancelled e-vote schemes amid security fears

The whole business is very strange and says a lot about our times - the state initially thought it was a good idea to replace a perfectly functional technology with something that did not work reliably simply because it looked more shiny and modern. Even aside from the software security issues, people need to realise that internet and phone voting is fundamentally flawed and should be rejected by all democratic societies. A key feature of democracy is that a person's vote is inalienable - they must not be able to pass it on to someone else for money or other consideration. With remote electronic voting it is practically impossible to guarantee that people will not allow others to vote for them.

The Biter Bit

I have been reading about electoral systems in the Middle East. These are typically used by regimes to mimimise the amount of seats won by the opposition in elections (usually in conjunction with other measures, like throwing opposition activists or candidates in jail, banning some of the opposition parties, or straightforwardly rigging the election results). My current favourite regime manoeuvre is one used in Egypt at one point. They had a list system of proportional representation, but with a high threshold of 8% - any party getting less than that proportion of the vote got no seats in the parliament (this at a time when the opposition was rather fragmented). The stroke of genius was a ruling that any votes for parties getting less than the threshold were to be counted as votes for the goverrning party.

Turkey either is or is not in the Middle East, depending on who you talk to. They are having some interesting political stuff at the moment. The Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants to make Abdullah Gul, one of his party colleagues the country's president. As the president is chosen by the parliament, and as Erdogan's Justice & Development party has a handsome parliamentary majority, there should be no problem here... except that Justice & Development is an Islamist party, and Turkey's army does not like the idea of an Islamist president and prime minister.

Some have apparently taken to complaining that although the governing party has a massive majority in parliament, they achieved this on on something puny like only 30% of the popular vote. Amusingly, they managed this because the country has a comedic electoral system specifically designed to weaken the Islamists.

More Morocco action!

There is an interesting enough article about Morocco on the Guardian website, which I think appeared in the most recent Observer: Morocco's turning tide

It does the usual PHEAR TEH ISLAMISTS thing of questioning the pro-democratic bona fides of the Morocco's largest and semi-banned Islamist party while asserting that they are seen by 'many' as "potentially very dangerous". Meanwhile, the journo gets on famously with a minister of the supposedly pro-democratic government that does not allow free elections.

The one great thing I have learned about Morocco in Spy School is that the country has really serious problems about which not much is being done, with their being a real likelihood that the country is going to blow up in the next couple of years. Deadly stuff.

Boris Yeltsin - the Judgement of History

My impression is that Boris Yeltsin will go down in history as a fun-loving boozer who loved to party, who also climbed on a tank to end Communism. I wish there were more world leaders like him (so long as they are not in charge of nuclear weapons or any country I live in or near).

Join the fight against corruption!

The World Bank has an anti-corruption hotline. The number is 1-800-831-0463. I reckon that is one of those USA numbers, so you may need to put some kind of prefix before it. Anyway, if you are aware of any senior officials engaging in corrupt behaviour, such as ordering a $60,930 tax free pay rise for their girlfriend, then give the World Bank a call.

I know all about Syria

Lately I have been reading a lot about Syria. As you know, Syria is a key country in an important region, and much is written about its relationships with its neighbours and with other countries around the world. My interest, though, is in Syrian domestic politics, and on this there is much less to read. In part this is because the Syrian regime is very repressive, making it difficult for researchers to cover what is going on there. I think, though, that Syria's importance as a player in international relations makes people concentrate on its external rather than internal affairs. I suppose this might be because the regime is far more focussed on foreign policy than most other Arab world regimes, in that it has long engaged in an attempt to achieve hegemony over one neighbour and is keen to recover territory by war or chit chat from another (and has a simmering boundary dispute with yet another, and is a player in the ongoing Kurdish conundrum). And unlike the rest of the Arab world, whatever else you might accuse the regime of, being lackeys of the West is not one of them. So, whereas with Egypt or Tunisia, say, discussion of the country is based on the regime's struggle against domestic opponents, in Syria people look at how the country plays the great game against Israel and its obstreperous neighbours in Lebanon, or whether Bush is going to invade it.

The general focus on Syrian foreign policy means that in attempting to research its domestic politics I read the same things over and over again. I will now state them, and then you will essentially know all about Syria's internal affairs.

1. Syria used to be very unstable with coups and counter-coups occurring with astonishing frequency. These coups often saw one wing of the Syrian Ba'ath party oust another.

2. Then in 1970, Hafez al-Assad, a military Ba'athist, staged a "corrective movement" (not a coup), remaining in power for the next thirty years. Assad accomplished this by crushing anyone who opposed him.

3. But Assad was a member of the Alawite sect, considered heretical by many orthodox Sunni Muslims. And his regime was actively secularist. In 1978, the Muslim Brotherhood began an insurrectionary campaign against the regime.

4. In 1982, sensing that their time had come, the Muslim Brotherhood took over the city of Hamah and declared a general uprising against the regime. But Assad reacted forcefully, deploying tanks and helicopter gunships, reducing the city to rubble. The Brothers were crushed.

5. After that nothing much happened for twenty years.

6. In June 2000, Hafez al-Assad died. His son, Bashar al-Assad, became president. Previously an ophthalmologist working in the UK, there were suggestions that Bashar intended to liberalise the regime. A "Damascus Spring" began in which Syria's intelligentsia began to engage in increasingly free-ranging discussion about the country's social and economic problems.

7. The regime decided that they weren't having that, and put a stop to it. Leading intellectuals were arrested and chucked in jail, sometimes following show trials.

And that's that. I hope my inquiries will discover more detailed information, or my next essay for Spy School could be a bit thin.

In war, there are no winners - only losers

However, according to something called the Human Security Report, there has been a marked decline in war over the last two decades, meaning there are a lot less losers out there. Apparently there are way fewer of both inter-state and civil wars than there used to be during the Cold War. The BBC have also ran an article about it.

[I wrote this over a year ago but saved it as a draft... maybe I had a reason for not publishing it then, but I will nevertheless make it available now]

À qui le Maroc?

I am reading about Morocco at the moment, to prepare for an assignment from Spy School. In particular, I have been reading about the Justice and Charity group, a political party blocked from taking part in the country's comedic electoral process. They are an Islamist group, led by the septuagenarian Sheikh Abd Assalam Yassine, a former Sufi mystic. He seems like an interesting fellow (and has a great beard). If you want to get a sense of his ideas, you could do worse than read his Memorandum to him who is concerned, an open letter issued in 1999 to the then newly enthroned King Mohammed VI of Morocco.

If you are reading Yassine's letter and are not too familiar with Moroccan affairs, here is some context:
1. The previous king, Hassan II, was an authoritarian cockfarmer (who had Yassine confined to a lunatic asylum for writing a similar letter to him in 1974).
2. The Makhzen referred to in the letter are the cronies of Hassan II - the regime's old guard.
3. Tazmamart was a horrific jail in the desert into which Hassan dumped his regime's enemies, leaving them to rot in spectacularly horrendous conditions.
4. The government of alternance referred to is a spectacular coup of Hassan - he managed to co-opt some hitherto oppositional forces and form them into a supposedly oppositional government, though of course the king retained the right to appoint and sack key ministers and control the broad directions of state policy. Under Mohammed VI the alternance has remained in place, conveniently attracting hostility that might otherwise go towards the king.

Back to the Memorandum. Yassine skilfully attempts a reverse cooption, saying to Mohammed "You seem like a nice fellow, unlike your late cockfather. Here is what you would do if you really are as nice a fellow as you seem". Like most open letters, it is intended for general consumption as much as reading by its addressee. The implicit message is that if the king does not act as outlined, then he is in fact no more than a creature of the Makhzen or a chip off Hassan II's block.

What Yassine actually requests of Mohammed VI is the usual - sacking the Makhzen, cleansing the regime of its corruption (identified by the sheikh as a major barrier to attracting foreign investment), and instituting serious democratic change. Yassine also contrasts the enormous foreign debt with the massive personal wealth of the king (Hassan had essentially set up the crown at the centre of the state's economy, sucking its proceeds into his private coffers in a weird parody of Arab socialism). Noting that the king's personal wealth is roughly equivalent to the foreign debt, Yassine hits on a handy solution to the problem - let the king pay the debt out of his own funds!

This is perhaps the most problematic part of Yassine's programme. The king's wealth is not in the form of gold bars or on deposit with the gnomes of Zurich, but instead exists as a business empire spanning Morocco. While this wealth belongs to the king rather than the people, in practice the king's investments are the equivalent of a series of state industries. And were these enterprises sold off to raise monies to pay the debt, Morocco would doubtless find that domestic savings were completely insufficient to purchase them. Instead, foreign investors would be the only people who could afford to buy them, even at the depressed prices this kind of fire sale would command. Yassine is basically offering international finance control of the Moroccan economy in return for immediate repayment of the debt.

That aside, Yassine comes across as a serious and thoughtful figure with a rather droll sense of humour. His views on the Western Sahara seem considerably more flexible than the Moroccan establishment's mainstream. Although he is implicitly in favour of that occupied country remaining part of a radically reformed Morocco, he can countenance their leaving should the corrupt ancien regime remain in place.

Yassine leads the largest party in Morocco, albeit one blocked from participation in the official political process. As Islamists, they are easily presented as The Enemy to the governments of Europe and North America, who have difficult understanding that not all Islamists like to fly planes into buildings. While it would be naïve to expect to much of the Americans, it is still shocking that the European Union is still unable to engage with parties like Yassine's which are almost always the most popular in their countries. There is of course some dialogue between the "think-tank community" and and North African Islamists, and a former EU commissioner last week talked of the need for constructive engagement with Hamas in Palestine, but official Europe is still not interested in official communication with the Islamists. Official Europe looks likely to continue to bolster authoritarian regimes rather than support democratic elections that would put Yassine and his analogues in power. In the long run, this is probably unwise. The current Arab regimes (monarchies and republics) are so lacking in legitimacy that their rotting from within and collapsing in a 1989 style disintegration has to be seen as likely, if not inevitable. Europe could help promote democracy among its southern neighbours. Or it could have a lot of explaining to do when the ancien regimes are swept away

One final fascinating fact that I have not been able to integrate into the preceding concerns Yassine's daughter, Nadia. She is seen as likely candidate to succeed him as the Justice & Charity group's leader when he dies or steps down. She was recently arrested under some weird Moroccan state security law after she suggested that maybe the country did not have to be a monarchy in the future.

Tanya Reinhart

You may not have heard of Tanya Reinhart. She was an academic linguist by profession, but probably better known as an internal critic of Israel's political establishment and its occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Together with Ilan Pappe, she was one of the leading Israeli advocates of the boycott of Israeli academia (e.g. see 'Why The World Should Boycott Israeli Academic Institutions'). Ha'aretz reports that she died on saturday in New York.

I saw Reinhart speak twice in Dublin, a couple of years ago an then again late last year. I was struck on the most recent occasion by how much older she looked, and thought that it was the stress associated with her decision to leave Israel for good.

Jean Baudrillard

You may recall that I was working through the world of International Relations theories. This process is currently in hiatus, but eventually I hope to discuss what post-modernists have to say on the subject. Jean Baudrillard was one of the leading figures in this area, and you may have noticed that he died recently. Or maybe, he has not died but ascended into a realm of pure representation, like that Barry O'Blivion guy in Cronenburg's Videodrome (I am surely not the first person to make the comparison).

Momus comments on the difference between English and French language obituaries of Baudrillard, with the francophone world engaging with his ideas and anglophone obituaries focussing on his largely misunderstood claim that the first Gulf War had not taken place and on his apparently being the inspiration for well-known film The Matrix. The latter point is particularly comedic, suggesting that Baudrillard ran around in leather coats wearing wrap around shades and forgetting the obvious point, made by Baudrillard himself, that the film is a rather facile distillation and adaptation of his views. This is life.

On the first point, about the Gulf War not happening: my recollection is that Baudrillard, like many post-modernists, reckoned that in our hypermediated age events are less significant than their representation. Therefore, the endless rolling news reportage of the war becomes what counts, not the war itself. While I see what he is getting at here, I do not quite remember what he means by saying that the War did not happen (as opposed to it being of less significance than its media portrayal). Maybe the point is intended rhetorically. It does though call to mind a very real problem with the writings of Baudrillard (and of post-modernists generally): they are by and large written in a largely impenetrable manner. Baudrillard does at least have the excuse of foreignness - he cannot answer for the opacity of his translations. Having read other English-language post-modernist writers, however, it does appear that there is a post-modern writing style, one that Baudrillard's translators have captured well.

To see what I mean, check out Baudrillard's 'The Mask Of War', a nice short piece that appeared in some book called 1000 Days of Theory. It is a while since I read it closely, but my recollection is that there is an interesting point in there somewhere, but I cannot see it now.

Milestones

Out in Spy School today, our lecturer was talking about how well-known Islamist thinker Sayyid Qutb reckoned that in the coming ideal Islamist society men and women would be equal. "But what about those countries were women aren't allowed to drive?" inquired a student.

I don't think anyone should be allowed to drive.

The Islamists - our new friends?

I posted over on the Dublin School about something I read in an online newsletter, which was relevant to both the Spy School course on Political Islam some of us are taking and also, by extension, my last post. I suspect that even less people read the Dublin School than read Hunting Monsters, so I am going to redo the post here.

Basically, I read the latest issue of the CEPS European Neighbourhood Watch newsletter, put out by the Centre for European Policy Studies. The editorial discusses an emerging dialogue between Europe and Islamists of the Middle East & North Africa. On both sides the governments are being bypassed, with oppositional Islamist groups from the Arab world talking to think tanks and policy oriented NGOs. The discussions seem interesting, partly because they are happening at all, indicating that in coming years the Arab authoritarians will find it harder to prop themselves up with European support. At the same time, it is striking how frank the parties to this dialogue are about the fundamental differences in outlook that divide them.

The article also reproduces a piece by Dr. Saad el-Deen al-Katany, the parliamentary leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, in which he sets forth the need for dialogue between Islamists and the West. I found this interesting because Dr. Al-Katany is attempting to drive a wedge between the West and the Arab world dictators it backs, calling on us prove we are not lying when we say we love democracy. Again, it looks like the Islamists are seeing the advantages of talking our language back to us.

There is also a reprinted interview with Belarus President, Alexander Lukashenko, one of the world's great scary leaders.

You can download the newsletter or subscribe to updates here: CEPS European Neighbourhood Watch

Arab World Despotism

So these days I am taking this course on Political Islam, with the course focussing on Islamist movements in the Middle East and North Africa, an arc stretching from Morocco to Iran*. Thus far it seems quite interesting. I am doing it more because I am interested in the politics of the Arab World rather than in Islamism as such.

One thing that came up in the last class was the subject of how undemocratic the regimes in the region are. If you look at the area covered, almost all of the countries are places where ultimate political power resides with unaccountable elites. This is in contrast with the world generally, where democratic politics of some sort or another is considerably more common. In the world generally there is an association between rising national income levels and democratic regimes, but the Middle East and North Africa is far less democratic than its income levels would predict, with the richest countries in the region being as comedically undemocratic as the poorest.

There are, of course, a couple of regimes with democratic elements. The Palestinian Authority seems to run elections that meet the highest international standards and see turnover of office holding, but it is not a state and its elected leaders do not actually rule anything of substance. Lebanon has elections all the time, but its consociational setup means that the same clique of family bosses are always in power. Turkey in many ways looks like it has democratic politics, though there is the unfortunate question of Kurdish oppression and the fact that the army still sees itself as having the right to sack the government, even if it has not chose to do so for a while. Israel has a lot of the features one expects for a democratic regime - parties, elections, free press, robust political argument, etc. - but it has its own democratic problems: firstly, the country rules over a huge subject population to whom it gives no political rights, and secondly, within its own citizenry those not from the dominant ethnic-religious group are subject to degrees of discrimination and marginalisation.

It is interesting to consider why the Middle East and North Africa seem so prone to authoritarian rule. One has to be careful of lazy explanations, particularly when you consider the differences between the countries (oil rich Qatar with its tiny population, oil poor Egypt with its teeming masses) and the different regimes that rule the countries. One possible cause can be discounted - there does not seem to be in practice a general Muslim problem with democracy. If you exclude the Middle East and North Africa the countries of the Islamic world are apparently more democratic than their income levels would suggest.

So, what has kept the authoritarian regimes in power, in a world where since 1989 there has been considerable pressure to move to democracy? Our lecturer suggests that the regimes have maintained themselves by playing their opponents off against each other. Some oppositional figures are simply bought off with plush government jobs or hard cash, but more subtly the regimes can throw minor concessions to their more old-school liberal-secular-nationalist opponents as a way of turning them into allies against the Islamists. Meanwhile, with the Islamists the main opposition forces, the regimes can always face down Western pressure to democratise by scaring the West with the prospect of democratic elections leading to mad bearded clerics occupying the Presidential palace and organising the country for Jihad against Israel, Europe, the USA, and anyone they take a dislike to.

I find this theory interesting, as it suggests that it is Western disdain for the region's main oppositional force that keeps the authoritarians in power. Certainly, when the generals in Algeria annulled their country's last free election and banned the party that won it, the world community somehow managed to see the election winners, and not the generals, as the enemies of democracy.

I am curious as to how this kind of thing will progress in the future. Maybe the mainstream Islamists will try to create a new friendly image for themselves and to cultivate alliances with the secular opposition while trying to reassure the West that they are not maniacs. Or maybe they will continue to grow their popularity in society at large to such an extent that the authoritarian regimes simply cannot sustain themselves any longer and collapse in a manner reminiscent of the Shah's. Or maybe the current situation is indefinitely sustainable. Time will tell.

*as you and I know, Arab countries do not make up all of those in the Middle East and North Africa. Iran is not an Arab country (though it has a small Arab minority). Neither is Turkey. Israel and the territory it rules has a large Arab population but a (declining) non-Arab majority.