IR's 2011 Poetry Prize Guidelines
$1000 Honorarium and Publication
Final Judge: Marie Howe

Marie Howe’s debut volume, The Good Thief, was selected by Margaret Atwood as winner of the 1987 Open Competition of the National Poetry Series, published in 1988 by Persea Books. Since then, she has published two more collections, What the Living Do (W. W. Norton, 1998) and The Kingdom of the Ordinary (2008). Her awards include a fellowship at the Bunting Institute, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She has served on the faculty of several schools, including Tufts University and Dartmouth College. She currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence, New York University, and Columbia University in New York City, where she lives with her daughter.

POSTMARK DEADLINE: March 25, 2011
Reading Fee: $15
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• All entries considered for publication.
• Send no more than three poems per entry, 8 pages maximum.
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• Previously published works and works forthcoming elsewhere cannot be considered. Simultaneous submissions okay, but fee is non-refundable.
• Multiple entries okay, as long as a separate reading fee is included with each entry.
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Entrant’s name should appear ONLY on the entry form. If desired, include self-addressed stamped envelope for notification. Each fee entitles entrant to a one-year subscription, an extension of a current subscription, or a gift subscription. Please indicate your choice and enclose complete address information for subscriptions. International addresses, please add $12 for postage ($7 for addresses in Canada).

IR cannot consider work from anyone currently or recently affiliated with Indiana University. In addition, IR cannot consider work from anyone who is a current or former student of the prize judge. We also will not consider work from anyone who is a personal friend of the judge.

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Africa Here; Africa There Conference- The Canadian Association of African Studies (deadline: 21 February 2011)

 

York University, Toronto, Canada

 

5-7 May, 2011

 

Plenary speakers:

 

 

 

 Achille MBEMBE, Wiser Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand, Exiting from the Long Night? Cultural Forms and Institutions in Africa- Sortir de la grande nuit? Formes culturelles et institutions  en Afrique ;

 

 

 

 Imed MELLITI, Institut Supérieur des Sciences Humaines, University of Tunis el-Manar: Jeunesses maghrébines : religiosité, enjeux identitaires et enjeux de reconnaissance- Maghrebine  Youth: Religiosity, Identity and Recognition ;

 

 

 

Donald SIMPSON, Innovation Expedition, Africa - Here and There in the Sixties: A Canadian Perspective. Afrique Ici et ailleurs dans les années 1960: Une perspective canadienne.

 

  

 

Official Conference Opening / Ouverture officielle de la conférence

 

Dr. Mamdouh SHOUKRI, President and Vice-Chancellor of York University/ Recteur et Vice-chancelier de l’Université York.

 

 

 

 The Canadian Association of African Studies (CAAS) extends a special invitation to scholars and professionals working on all aspects of African Studies for its next annual conference. The conference, to be held on May 5-7, 2011, at York University - Université York, Toronto, Canada, will be hosted by the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples, York University, with the support of various internal and external sponsors. Our aim is to attract an international group of specialists at all stages in their careers to facilitate discussion and  dialogue, in both of Canada’s official languages, across disciplines and between scholars and professionals based in both the North and South.

 

 

 

 In recognition of 2011 having been proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly as the International Year for People of African Descent, the central theme of the 2011 annual conference of the Canadian Association of African Studies (CAAS) is Africa Here; Africa There. Africans have long peopled the African continent, as well as other landscapes through external migrations. During the modern era, the movement of African peoples has taken place under three major contexts: various trades in human beings, economic hardship emanating from natural and non-natural factors, and political, ethnic, religious and other types of persecution.

 

 Whether internal or external, the displacement of African peoples has always led to greater complexities within the host societies. Africans and people of African descent, free, freed or enslaved, made up a sizeable proportion of the population of Évora and Lisbon during the late 1400s and early 1500s and performed much of the most menial manual work while speaking various West and West-Central African languages and supplying characters and speech patterns to the works of contemporaneous playwrights  like Gil Vicente. The same was true of London, not to mention other places in the United Kingdom, from at least the time of Shakespeare to the early 19th century. By the mid-1800s, their presence and influence was even more pervasive in Brazil, as well as Cuba. Similarly if Africans and the descendants of Africans attempted to recreate their homelands, imagined or not, amongst host societies, as was the case of the marooned  Zanj in Iraq (869-883 A.D.), the great Bantu state of Palmares in XVIIth century Brazil, or  later the Igbo in Maryland and Virginia, Jamaica, and Barbados, the process today is no less omnipresent as exemplified by the existence of Little Angola in Rio de Janeiro, Little Nigeria in Houston, or the current attempt  to establish a Little Ethiopia in Toronto.

 

In other words, Africa has long existed within the old continent and beyond as well. This reality, far from signifying solely an African presence, points to a series of new ways of moving across and exploiting space stemming from an evolving division of world labor, distribution of resources, and production of modes of living together. Africa Here; Africa There will explore, in English and in French, the multifaceted complexities generated by these phenomena within and outside of Africa over time from the perspective of various disciplines.

 

 

 

The Canadian Association of African Studies (CAAS) contributes expertise, research, and informed debate concerning a wide range of African “matter” related to sociocultural issues, the arts, political economy, the environment and transnationalism, among others. Since 1970,CAAS has demonstrated how African issues matter to a wider range of Canadian and international publics in academic, policy-making, programming, and many other circles. The expanding recognition of African contexts and initiatives to a growing range of transnational practices (from humanitarianism to peace building; markets to social movements; climate change to food security; religious dynamism to health and education policies; sports to music, theatre and cinema; truth and reconciliation processes, migration and diasporas to the forging of the world) has meant the continent is taking on a greater prominence in the attention, imagination, and actions of more and more publics. We also encourage the submission, whether in English or in French, of research papers in these and other areas.

 

 

 

In the last forty years, like many other Northern nations, Canada has had expanding and diverse relations with Africa.

 

African immigration to Canada has increased not only through the regular immigration of professionals and others, but also, importantly, through refugees fleeing from conflicts in areas such as Uganda (1972), Somalia (since 1991), and Algeria (since 1992). In turn, a growing number of Canadians have been to Africa through an expansion of humanitarian and international development activities by Canadian governmental and non-governmental organizations, business activities, particularly in natural resources sectors, university exchanges, and tourism. Solidarity work by Canadian individuals and groups also increased during this period, from working with national liberation groups to supporting human rights agendas, from advocating for women rights to addressing health and environmental conditions.

 

Canadian governments have been preoccupied with African matters through international bodies such the Commonwealth, la Francophonie, the United Nations, and G-8 summits playing a visible part during the anti-apartheid struggle, peacekeeping and peace building activities, and supporting NEPAD (New Partnership for Africa’s Development), to name but a few.

 

The growing number of Canadians of African birth and descent have not only played important roles in such exchanges and ties but also helped to introduce or expand new consumption patterns and artistic practices in Canada(in food, clothes, music, film, literature, and the like) and new forms of religiosity and congregations. At the same time, there have been some tensions emerging in Canada-African relations such as: the tightening of visas on African visitors coming to Canada in the name of security and to limit refugee claims; a reduction in the number of Canadian peacekeepers in Africa; a recent reduction in number of African priority countries for CIDA; protests over labor practices and engagement against corrupt practices; and, limited African beneficiaries of Canadian direct foreign investment in Africa.

 

 

 

The above issues help to highlight key concerns and demonstrate why there is growing interest in Africa in Canada. However, there is a vast array  of topics of interest in African Studies beyond these issues, as well, that would be welcomed to be presented at this conference. From examining wide-reaching events such as the slave-trades, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and current conflicts to the minutia of everyday life such as schooling practices, religious invocations, and media consumption, Africa Here; Africa There will provide an opportunity for the sharing of research and debate concerning the study of these issues in both English and French.

 

 

 

CAAS, including its Canadian Journal of African Studies, have historically embodied extensive coverage of the continent and, in that spirit of attending to all African

 

matters, this conference welcomes papers on a wide range of topics concerning Africa and African peoples abroad from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches. In keeping with the bilingual nature of CAAS and the encouragement of bilingual study at York University, paper and panel proposals in French are particularly welcomed.

 

 

 

Africa Here; Africa There aims to continue the CAAS tradition that exemplifies why Africa matters to various publics in Canada and beyond. This Call for Papers intends to provide a forum for addressing and presenting academic  research and policy proposals that examine the histories, debates, policy issues, and current practices related to African matters.

 

 

 

The deadline for submitting paper, as well as panel, proposals has been extended to February 21, 2011. For information on submitting paper and panel abstracts, conference registration payment (on-line or by cheque), requests for funding for graduate students in Canada, and

 

accommodation possibilities please go to http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~caas/en/2011conference.html

 

 

 

 

Win $3,000 Gain national exposure for your book Catch the attention of prospective editors and publishers
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Deadline: April 15, 2011

Mubarak’s Last Breath

Adam Shatz reports from Egypt

You are invited to read this free essay from the London Review of Books. Subscribe now to access every article from every fortnightly issue of the London Review of Books, including the entire archive of 12,574 essays.

On 6 October 1981, President Anwar al-Sadat attended a parade to mark the anniversary of the crossing of the Suez Canal in the 1973 war with Israel. It was also an occasion to display the American, British and French aircraft Egypt had recently acquired: symbols of its realignment with the West after more than two decades as a Soviet ally. Sadat wore a Prussian-style uniform but no bullet-proof vest: it would have ruined the line. Rumours of a plot were in the air, and his vice president, Hosni Mubarak, had warned him not to go. Sadat brushed this off, but when he stood to receive the salute, he was killed in a hail of grenades and bullets, fired by a group of Islamist soldiers in his own army. ‘I have killed Pharaoh, and I do not fear death,’ the lead assassin, a 24-year-old lieutenant, declared.

Only eight days later a new pharaoh rose in Egypt, and he has been in power ever since. Hosni Mubarak, who stood beside Sadat at the procession, was an improbable successor: a circumspect career soldier whose appointment to the vice presidency in 1975 had come as a shock to political observers. Born in 1928 in a small village in the Nile River Delta, the son of an inspector in the Ministry of Justice, Mubarak was little known to Egyptians, or even to his colleagues: he was a loner, with no outside interests to speak of, and no taste, or talent, for the rituals of mass politics at which both Nasser and Sadat excelled. Unlike them he had not been among the Free Officers who seized power in the 1952 coup against the monarchy. He had, however, loyally served the state and – as commander in chief of the air force – launched the surprise attack in 1973 which allowed ground forces to cross into the Sinai Peninsula. Mubarak admitted his political inexperience when he took office, pledging to ask for advice, and suggesting limited presidential terms. He is now 82, and has ruled Egypt – and presided over its decline – for 29 years. Presidential elections are scheduled for next year, but he has said he will serve ‘until the last breath in my lungs, and the last beat of my heart’. This is a promise he’s likely to keep.

Egypt has never been a democracy. The military has always dominated its political life. Even during the age of liberal nationalism after the First World War, when it had a lively parliamentary life, popular sovereignty was sharply curtailed by British power. Since the 1952 coup which brought Nasser to power, it has been ruled by military dictatorship, although the establishment of multi-party politics in the late 1970s brought a measure of cosmetic diversification. Still, autocratic though they were, both Nasser and Sadat ensured that what Egypt did mattered. Nasser’s failures were spectacular: the aborted union with Syria in the United Arab Republic; the disastrous intervention in the civil war in Yemen; the catastrophic 1967 defeat to Israel that resulted in the destruction of three-quarters of Egypt’s air force and the loss of the Sinai; the creation of a vast and inefficient public sector which the state could not afford; the suppression of dissent, indeed of politics itself. But he also carried out land reform, nationalised the Suez Canal, built the Aswan High Dam, and turned Egypt into a major force in the Non-Aligned Movement. When Nasser spoke, the Arab world listened. Sadat broke with Nasser’s pan-Arab vision, promoting an Egypt-first agenda that ultimately led the country into the arms of the US and Israel. But, like Nasser, he was a statesman of considerable flair and cunning, with a prodigious ability to seize the initiative. By leading Egypt to a partial victory in the 1973 war, he washed away some of the shame of 1967, and eventually secured the restoration of the Sinai. And though his peace with Israel infuriated the Arabs, whom Nasser had electrified, he made Egypt a player in the world. Under Mubarak, Egypt, the ‘mother of the earth’ (umm idduniya), has seen its influence plummet. Nowhere is the decline of the Sunni Arab world so acutely felt as in Cairo ‘the Victorious’, a mega-city much of which has turned into an enormous slum. The air is so thick with fumes you can hardly breathe, the atmosphere as constricted as the country’s political life.

Frustration, shame, humiliation: it does not take much for Egyptians to call up these feelings. It’s still often said that ‘what happens in Egypt affects the entire Arab world,’ but nothing much has happened there in years. Egypt has fallen behind Saudi Arabia – not to mention non-Arab countries like Turkey and Iran – in regional leadership. Even tiny Qatar has a more independent foreign policy. Egypt is by far the largest Arab country, with 80 million inhabitants, yet it’s seen by most Arabs – and by the Egyptians themselves – as a client state of the United States and Israel, who depend on Mubarak to ensure regional ‘stability’ in the struggle with the ‘resistance front’ led by Iran.

The liberalisation of Egypt’s economy – launched by Sadat’s Infitah (Open Door) policy in 1974 – has earned Mubarak praise from the World Bank. The 2007 constitution, purged of references to socialism, says that ‘the economy of the Arab Republic of Egypt is founded on the development of the spirit of enterprise.’ Yet Egypt’s market is anything but free: businesses tend to have very close, and mutually profitable, relationships with the state, in which the Mubarak family often participates and takes its cut. Hussein Salem, a hotel magnate, arms dealer and co-owner of the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Company – an Egyptian-Israeli consortium that recently secured a $2.5 billion contract to sell Egypt’s natural gas to Israel – is thought to be one of Mubarak’s frontmen; the gas began flowing in early 2008, just as Israel was tightening the siege of Gaza.

Despite the promises of the regime – and contrary to the expectations of Egypt’s sponsors in the West – economic liberalisation hasn’t led to much in the way of political liberalisation: in 1992, the year it adopted an IMF stabilisation and structural adjustment package, Egypt began sending civilians to be tried at military tribunals. The Emergency Law, in force since Sadat’s assassination and recently renewed despite Mubarak’s promise to lift it, grants the government extraordinary powers to arrest its opponents without charge and to detain them indefinitely; there are an estimated 17,000 political prisoners, most of them Islamists.

The ideology of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party has undergone marked shifts in recent years, alternating between Milton Friedman and Muhammad, as the occasion demands. Arab unity, as the novelist Sonallah Ibrahim remarks, has been reduced to the ‘unity of foreign commodities consumed by everyone’. Not inappropriately, the most popular military officer on billboards in Egypt isn’t Mubarak but Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken. The increasing globalisation of the economy, along with its 7.5 per cent growth rates, is something the NDP likes to boast about, but it is seen rather differently by the population: inflation has soared since the currency was floated in 2003, and real unemployment is 26.3 per cent. Mubarak’s reforms haven’t turned Egypt into a ‘tiger on the Nile’, as promised; the economy remains precariously dependent on the price of oil, American aid (more than $62 billion since 1977) and tourism. Egypt still imports more than half the wheat it consumes.

Foreign policy is a particularly anguished subject. While the peace with Israel reached in 1979 by Sadat may make Egypt a ‘moderate’ state in the eyes of Washington, it has left many Egyptians deeply embittered. Mubarak drew a lesson from Sadat’s fate: it was one thing to make a deal with Israel – quite another to make nice. He would honour the peace treaty, but he would not go to Tel Aviv, or engage in ostentatious displays of friendship that would offend Egyptian honour; and he would turn a blind eye to anti-Israel invective in the press, so that opponents of ‘normalisation’ with Tel Aviv could let off steam. By maintaining an appearance of froideur, Mubarak was able to repair relations with the Arab League and with the Arab states that had cut their ties with Egypt in 1979. Meanwhile, he has developed a partnership with Israel on trade and ‘security’ that is far more extensive than Sadat could have imagined. Their intelligence services work closely together, and Mubarak has supplied weapons and training to the Palestinian Authority in its war against Hamas. The government is also doing what it can to maintain the siege in Gaza, concerned that if it opens its border crossing, Israel might shut down all its crossing points and try to dump Gaza in Egypt’s lap, which would be particularly unwelcome given that the Hamas rulers in Gaza are allies both of Mubarak’s domestic opponents, the Muslim Brothers, and of his foreign adversaries, Iran and Hizbullah.

Mubarak doesn’t want to be responsible for the welfare of more than a million impoverished Palestinians, or to be blamed by Israel for every Qassam rocket fired at Tsederot. When, in January 2008, Hamas blew up part of the fence at Rafah, and tens of thousands of Gazans crossed the border, some of his fellow countrymen were persuaded by his ‘Egypt First’ argument. But more of them were outraged when he refused to open the crossing during Israel’s invasion last year. Many suspect a degree of complicity between Israel and Mubarak against Hamas: the war began less than 48 hours after Israel’s foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, visited Cairo.

As well as securing the border at Rafah, Egypt is building a wall 18 metres underground, an impenetrable barrier made of super-strength steel. It is reported to be doing this with American assistance, though the US denies it. In any case the entire plan was kept secret until recently, and the Mubarak regime isn’t keen to draw attention to what it euphemistically calls ‘engineering installations’. The official line is that it’s intended to prevent arms smuggling by Hamas, but the barrier could choke the Gazan economy, which depends on the tunnels. Mubarak, however, insists: ‘We do not accept debate on this issue with anyone.’ Like many of his least popular policies, this one comes with a fatwa from a group of pro-government clerics according to which ‘those who oppose the construction of this wall violate the sharia.’

The Islamisation of Egyptian society deepened after the 1967 war; it became explicit government policy under Sadat, the self-styled ‘believer president’ who supported radical Islamists in his battles with the left, and who made the sharia ‘the principal source’ of law in 1980 – a year before his assassination by an Islamist. Under Mubarak, praying has become as popular as shopping or football and now serves a roughly similar function as a distraction from the innumerable frustrations of Egyptian life. Indeed, Islam as observed by Egyptians is increasingly an Islam that caters to consumerist needs. The popular televangelist Amr Khaled mixes Quranic citations with boosterish advice of a more general kind. This variety of Islam is no threat to the regime, but it has made life far less easy-going. ‘My neighbour used to water his plants in his pyjamas on the balcony, where he’d be joined by his wife in her nightie,’ a friend tells me. ‘They’d drink beer in the open, and then he’d go downstairs for the sunset prayers in the local mosque. Today he’d be killed for this, but at the time he would have seen no contradiction.’

The growing power of the mosques – and the considerable influence the Muslim Brothers exert in poor neighbourhoods – has made Egypt’s Coptic minority increasingly anxious, and they have developed a no less assertive piety of their own. The Copts, whose ancestors were in Egypt before the arrival of Islam in the seventh century, account for about 10 per cent of the population. Although many of them are poor – the largely Coptic zabaleen, who pick up most of Cairo’s garbage, are packed into an immense slum in the Moqattan Hills Settlement east of the capital – they are widely seen and resented as economically privileged. (Egypt’s richest family, the Sawiris, who own the enormous conglomerate Orascom and are close to Mubarak, are Copts.) They suffer various forms of discrimination: senior positions in the civil service and the professions tend to be closed to them and churches, unlike mosques, don’t receive subsidies. They find little reassurance in the rhetoric of the Muslim Brothers – whose former General Guide, Mahdi Akef, recently declared that he would prefer a Malaysian Muslim as president to a Christian Egyptian – and fear that if Egypt becomes an Islamic state they will be forced to leave. Fanatics in the Coptic diaspora, some of whom have made common cause with Christian Zionists in the US, have done little to dispel the impression among Muslims that Christians are a Trojan horse of the West.

This climate of distrust has resulted in increasingly frequent spasms of sectarian violence. On Christmas Eve last year, six worshippers in the town of Nag Hammadi were murdered outside a church in a drive-by shooting, apparently in retaliation for the rape of a Muslim girl. Anti-Muslim looting followed and the government was swift to intervene, declaring that the violence wasn’t sectarian but merely traditional score-settling between families. This fooled no one. Not long before, tens of thousands of pigs, on which the zabaleen depend for their livelihood, had been slaughtered by the state, allegedly to prevent swine flu. Many Muslims were secretly relieved, flu or no flu. But even the most secular Christians were horrified by what they saw as a state-sanctioned sectarian assault.

The 1952 revolution, once the central legitimating myth of the regime, is now criticised by most of the population as having destroyed a potentially promising experiment in parliamentary democracy, condemning Egypt to dictatorial rule. Many continue even so to pine for Nasser, with his commitment to ‘Arab socialism’ and non-alignment. Others look back to the classical age of Egyptian liberalism in the last decades of British rule, while still others pray for the return of the caliphate.

Another symptom of this retreat into nostalgia is the growing curiosity about the ethnic minorities – Jews, Greeks, Armenians, Italians – who once helped run Egypt’s economy, and made Cairo and Alexandria remarkably cosmopolitan cities, before they were put under pressure to leave in the mid-1950s. At the time, their exodus, like Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal, was seen as a great coup: evidence of Egypt’s triumph over foreign hegemony. Now it’s seen as the beginning of its economic and cultural decline.

In Heliopolis, a new film by Ahmed Abdallah, a young man doing research on ‘minorities’ in pre-revolutionary Egypt befriends an elderly Jewish woman; in a striking documentary sequence, a group of old people fondly remember a time when local shops were run by Jews and Greeks. If Egyptians long for an irretrievable past, Abdallah suggests, it’s because their future has been put on hold. He leaves little doubt as to the causes. A young couple who are drifting apart wait in one of Cairo’s interminable traffic jams, only to be told by a police officer that they will have to wait a bit longer: the road ahead has been blocked to make way for the president’s motorcade.

Mubarak’s Egypt is often compared to Iran in the last days of the Shah: a middle class squeezed by inflation; anger at the regime’s alliances with the US and Israel; a profound sense of humiliation that is increasingly expressed in Islamic fervour; near universal contempt for the country’s ruling class; a state whose legitimacy has almost entirely eroded. In 2005, the Egyptian Movement for Change – a coalition of leftists, Nasserists and Islamists better known as Kifaya (‘Enough’) – staged a series of demonstrations in downtown Cairo, where, for the first time, Egyptians dared to criticise Mubarak in public, and to call for him to step down. Since then, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians have demonstrated: leftists and Islamists calling for an end to the Emergency Law; judges denouncing constitutional amendments that strip them of their right to supervise elections; workers striking for better wages and independent trade unions; poor farmers on land redistributed under Nasser defending themselves against attempts by large landowners – often with the backing of the state, sometimes with the help of armed thugs – to ‘reclaim’ their property. The spread of these protests, on a scale not seen since the 1970s, when left-wing students mobilised against Sadat’s infitah and his alliance with the West, has led some observers to see this as Egypt’s ‘moment of change’, the subtitle of an informative new anthology on Egyptian social movements.[*]

Yet the protests have failed to coalesce into a broader movement with a clear agenda. And the regime has partly succeeded in neutralising dissent by allowing some freedoms: privately owned opposition newspapers have been legalised and public criticism of Mubarak is allowed. ‘We were given a licence to scream and vent,’ one supporter of Kifaya told me, ‘but what good did it do?’ Most Egyptians have kept their distance from the protests. Since the riots of January 1977, which began after the state raised the price of aysh al-baladi, the dry bread on which most people depend, the Egyptian masses have been silent, even as their living standards have declined. This stoicism is often explained by variations on the theme of national character, or of the pharaonic legacy. The Egyptian, one is often told, is ‘a survivor’, or ‘a flexible conformist’ who just wants a better life, and doesn’t care who is president. Revolts in modern Egypt have been few; even Nasser’s revolution was a top-down affair, a ‘passive revolution’ in which, as his left-wing critic Anouar Abdel-Malek remarked, the role of the much praised masses was merely to provide ‘manpower’.

The inertia of the Egyptian people may well have less to do with temperament, or historical tradition, than with sober calculation. About one in every four Egyptians lives in a shantytown; more than a third of Cairo’s 19 million residents live in areas known as ashwaiyyat, without clean drinking water or proper sewage systems. They are the people you see at places like the Souq al-Goma’a, or ‘Friday market’, a sprawling bazaar set up on railway tracks next to a flyover skirting the City of the Dead, where tens of thousands of Cairenes squat in family mausoleums. The working poor come here to buy household necessities. Anything and everything is for sale: old silverware, tyres, toilets, computer parts, birds, monkeys, vegetables coated in dust and dirt, and rotten fish that’s been buried underground until it gives off an unforgettable smell. There is a saying in Egypt that ‘anyone who hasn’t begged in the time of Mubarak will never beg.’ Those forced to beg tend not to attend demonstrations.

As Hani Shukrallah, an editor at Al-Shorouk, one of the new independent papers, points out, ‘the regime has pursued a deliberate policy of selective repression based on class.’ Shukrallah, a veteran of the student left of the 1970s, illustrated this by describing an aerial photograph of a Kifaya demonstration in downtown Cairo. ‘You can see three circles: the first is composed of the demonstrators, a few hundred people. Around them is a circle of several thousand police officers, and around the police is the people. The people are onlookers, spectators. The middle-class professionals in Kifaya can chant slogans like “Down with Mubarak” because they risk, at worst, a beating. But most Egyptians live in a world where anything goes, where they’re treated like barbarians who need to be conquered, and women are molested by the security forces. The average Egyptian can be dragged into a police station and tortured simply because a police officer doesn’t like his face.’ The tortures to which Egyptians are subjected in police stations have been well documented and include electric shocks to the genitals, anal rape with sticks, death threats, suspension in painful positions and ‘reception parties’, where prisoners are forced to crawl naked on the floor while guards whip them to make them move faster.

For those it can’t afford to brutalise, the Mubarak regime has found other means of intimidation. One is the presence of state security in residential neighbourhoods and on university campuses. In Garden City, checkpoints were set up near the British and American Embassies after a demonstration against the invasion of Iraq in 2003; they are now permanent, and locals refer to the area as ‘the Green Zone’. Only a few minutes’ walk from the American Embassy – the second largest in the world, after Baghdad – is the Ministry of the Interior, a forbidding, futurist building. Very little of consequence gets done without the ministry’s agreement: the appointments of university professors, judges and journalists all require approval from the ministry’s security officers; so does anyone who wants to set up an NGO, a school or a television station. The ministry has an army of about two million informers: one Egyptian in every 40. It has become one of the state’s most powerful branches, rivalling the army, since Egypt withdrew from the struggle with Israel and shifted towards suppressing its internal enemies: leftists, human rights activists and, above all, Islamists.

Mubarak’s principal domestic adversary – and perhaps his greatest asset in selling himself to the West, and to a frightened middle class – is the Muslim Brotherhood. Founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, a schoolteacher, the Brotherhood remains the country’s largest, best organised opposition movement. There have been many strategic shifts over the years but the message hasn’t changed: social justice, clean governance based on Islamic principles, opposition to imperialism, solidarity with Palestine. Both Nasser and Sadat were fellow-travellers, if not members, in the 1940s. The Brothers initially supported the 1952 coup, but soon fell out with the new government. Denied what they felt should be their share of the spoils, they became Nasser’s fiercest critics, and in 1954 a member of the Brotherhood’s clandestine wing shot at him as he was giving a speech. Nasser famously didn’t flinch, and shortly afterwards ordered the first in a series of crackdowns, in which tens of thousands of Brothers, including the jihadi theorist Sayyid Qutb, were jailed, and often tortured in the so-called mihna, or ‘inquisition’ that followed.

Qutb responded by calling for holy war against the Egyptian state and was hanged in 1966 for plotting its overthrow. The Brotherhood took pains to distance itself from Qutb’s radicalism, and by 1970, when Sadat came to power, had renounced violence: a position it maintained throughout the 1990s, when the security services were waging a dirty war against a radical Islamist insurgency inspired by Qutb’s writings. The Brothers sought to transform Egypt more gradually, by promoting Islamic values, denouncing state corruption, and providing medical and social services to the poor. These services – virtually comprising a state within the state – have been subsidised by Brotherhood-run Islamic banks, and by donations from the pious middle class as well as Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States. If the Brotherhood continues to enjoy wide support, it is in large part because of its service to the poor.

Mubarak was never close to the Brothers, but he has had to find a way to live with them, if only because they are too deeply embedded in society – and in the mosques, no-go zones for the state – to be eliminated. Their status is often described as ‘banned yet tolerated’: ‘banned’, because they would pose a serious threat to the regime if they were allowed to participate freely; ‘tolerated’, because they allow Mubarak to present himself as Egypt’s only defence against an Islamist takeover. Thus, under American pressure to open up Egypt’s political system, Mubarak permitted the Brothers to run in the 2005 legislative elections. To the horror of the liberal opposition, and of the Bush administration, they won 88 of the 160 seats they contested, a fifth of the seats in the lower house of parliament, making them the second most powerful party after Mubarak’s NDP. Since then, the US has all but dropped its pressure on Mubarak to democratise, and the Brothers have had their wings clipped. They weren’t allowed to run in the 2007 elections for the upper house; the applications of all but two dozen of the 5000 Brothers who sought to run in the 2008 municipal elections were rejected; and thugs were sent in to attack their supporters at polling stations. Hundreds of Brothers have been arrested: high-ranking moderates who have been trying to reform the Brotherhood from within are the preferred target.

The effect has been to strengthen the hand of the hardliners led by the new General Guide, Mohammed Badie, who was imprisoned with Qutb in 1965 – Badie and his acolytes are known as the Group of 1965. They consolidated their power in January’s internal elections, in which the intellectual reformer Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh lost his seat on the Brotherhood’s Guidance Council. They are disinclined to build alliances with secular forces, frown on overtures to women and Copts, and are not especially troubled by Mubarak’s dictatorship so long as it allows them to preach. They draw their support from conservative rural members, many of whom have worked in the Gulf and been influenced by Wahabbism, with its emphasis on external signs of piety and mistrust of Western-style democracy. As they see it, the openness advocated by the reformists has left the Brotherhood vulnerable to intrusions by the state, and to the temptations of secular liberalism: secrecy is the only means by which it can survive; and survival, not governing, is the principal aim. Until the day when the state falls into their hands like a rotten fruit, they prefer to avoid confrontation with it, devoting themselves instead to Islamising society (da’wa), and defending Egyptian virtue from such threats as Beyoncé, whose concert at a Red Sea resort they were lobbying to prevent when I was in Cairo last winter. They have been encouraged in this by the state, which has expanded the role of the clerics on television and in education: as Sophie Pommier argues in Egypte, l’envers du décor (2008), it’s a mistake to see the NDP as a ‘secular party whose principles are radically opposed to those of the Muslim Brotherhood’. The result is an undeclared power-sharing arrangement between Mubarak and the Brotherhood, a cat and mouse game that masks a deeper convergence of interests: both sides, after all, have reason to portray the Brothers as the only real alternative to the regime.

A perfect example of this collusion is the experience of the new Centre Party, Hizb al-Wasat, founded in 1996 by Abul-Ela Madi, a moderate Islamist with strong links to leftists, Nasserists and liberals. Broadly sympathetic to a school of thought Bruce Rutherford describes as ‘Islamic constitutionalism’,[†] which tries to harmonise liberal views on the rule of law and individual rights with Islamic tradition, he is also close to Aboul Fotouh and the reform wing of the Brotherhood. Yet he is no longer a member of the Brotherhood, having concluded that the NDP and the Brothers are ‘the double face of our crisis’. The only way forward, as he saw it, was to create a new party which, though rooted in Islamic values, would ‘separate politics and preaching’ and welcome Copts and women – something he has succeeded in doing, despite attempts by intelligence officers to frighten his Coptic members. He has not succeeded in much else, however. His party has yet to be granted a licence to run in elections, mostly because a multi-confessional, moderately Islamic, democratic party might stand a chance of getting somewhere. The Ministry of the Interior, accusing him of being a front for the Brothers, claims that the party fails to ‘fulfil a legitimate purpose not met by an existing party’ – never mind that the ‘existing party’ in question, the Brotherhood, is officially banned. A prominent leader of the Brothers was happy to second this: the new party, he said, ‘thinks just like us’.

Having a licence, however, is no guarantee of influence. None of the two dozen registered opposition parties has a popular following, or any chance of achieving one, thanks to restrictions on freedom of assembly imposed by the Emergency Law. As Rif’at al-Said, the leader of the left-wing party Tagammu (two seats out of 454 in the lower house), put it, Egyptian parties are merely ‘groupings of individuals floating on the surface of society’. Their function is to create the illusion of democratic politics, the number of seats they gain depending less on the will of the voters than on the needs of the NDP. Mounir Fakhri Abdel-Nour is the secretary-general of the New Wafd Party (six seats in the lower house), founded in 1983, which takes its name from the party that led the movement against the British occupation after the First World War, and promotes an updated version of that party’s genteel, constitutional liberalism. Abdel-Nour, a banker from a prominent Coptic family, sighed when I asked him about his party’s activities: ‘Our experience as a party has been catastrophic. It’s true that we now have almost unlimited freedom of the press, but it’s useless because we can’t get a direct relationship to the street. The Muslim Brothers have that connection through the mosque, but we’re not even allowed to hold rallies.’

It’s hard to imagine Abdel-Nour addressing a crowd. A charming, cosmopolitan man, he recalls the era before Nasser’s revolution, when politics was the preserve of elites. He wants to open up the system, but not too much, and not too quickly. Asked whether the ban on the Brothers should be lifted, he sipped his tea and paused. ‘It’s a tricky question,’ he said, playing with a ruler on his desk. ‘Egypt is a country where two religions coexist. You can’t have the Islamic Republic of Egypt – it will never happen. We can’t accept a Muslim party that says a Copt or a woman can’t be president of the republic. And I refuse to be ruled by someone who thinks a Malaysian Muslim is closer to him than a Christian Egyptian. I know some decent people in the Brotherhood, like Abdel Moneim Abul Fotouh. You speak to them and you wonder, why aren’t you with us? But I don’t trust them.’

This distrust is shared by many middle-class Egyptians, and it is a major reason why they have been willing to tolerate the Mubarak family for so long. Whether they will accept Mubarak’s son Gamal is another matter: he may be the only person who is more widely disliked in Egypt than his father. A former investment banker who had no political experience when he was appointed to the General Secretariat of the NDP in 2000, he is a symbol of what Mubarakism has wrought: the growing influence of technocrats linked to multinationals; economic liberalisation in the absence of political liberalisation; and corrosive nepotism. The idea of dynastic succession, or tawrith al-sulta, is particularly insulting to Egypt’s national pride: the country has been a republic since Nasser’s overthrow of King Farouk, and few people are keen on its becoming a ‘republican monarchy with houmus’, in the words of the novelist Khaled Al Khamissi. Born in 1963 and known to friends as ‘Jimmy’, Gamal spent his early adult life in London, working at Bank of America and Medinvest, a private equity firm he helped found, until he was whisked back to Egypt in 1995. Since then, he has risen rapidly through the ranks of his father’s party; at the 2002 NDP congress, he was promoted to head the Policies Secretariat, a government advisory board made up of several hundred wealthy Egyptians linked to the regime or the Mubarak family, together with intellectuals who style themselves ‘liberal reformers’. Collectively they’re known as ‘Gamal’s cabinet’.

Although both father and son deny that Gamal is being groomed for the presidency, he has been aggressively sold as the face of a new Egypt, in ‘Meet Gamal’ town-hall meetings, on billboards in Cairo, and on television. Now the third-ranking official in the NDP, Gamal has made a number of trips to Washington, fawningly covered by the state-run media, and been praised in the New York Times as an ‘intelligent, handsome policy wonk’. In Sophie Pommier’s words, he ‘preaches reform in an incantatory mode, with slogans about renovation and “new thinking”’ – mainly opening markets and selling off state industries. For the majority of Egyptians getting by on $2 a day, he has shown little understanding, declaring at the height of the financial crisis that there could be no retreat on privatisation. The need for ‘democracy’ is another favourite slogan among ‘Gamal’s boys’, but the conditions for it, they hasten to add, don’t yet exist. As one of his advisers says, ‘you can’t have democracy without democrats.’

What Gamal Mubarak doesn’t yet have is the support of the military, at least according to Osama al-Ghazali Harb, who quit the Policies Secretariat in 2006 having decided that it was merely a vehicle for the president’s son. He has since established his own party, the well-meaning, ineffectual Democratic Front, so ineffectual indeed that it was immediately given a licence. ‘Gamal’s support comes from people in the business elite,’ al-Ghazali Harb says. ‘They are plotting away, trying to mobilise the support of members of the party and the army. But if his father dies tomorrow they will shut him out. And trust me: Hosni Mubarak won’t leave his position even one hour before he dies. We’re not in the US. We don’t have vice presidents. Here you’re either in your position or you’re in your grave. And within five or six minutes of his death, you’ll see tanks in the streets.’ This isn’t a prospect that alarms him. ‘The army is the only force that can guarantee that the transition will be peaceful.’ Last year al-Ghazali Harb dared to say what many Egyptians opposed to Gamal were quietly thinking: that the army should take over as soon as Mubarak steps down or dies, so that a new constitution can be drafted, and then, after two or three years, civilian rule restored. When I asked him who would head that transitional government, he didn’t hesitate: ‘Omar Suleiman.’

Suleiman, the head of General Intelligence, is both a lieutenant general in the army and a member of Mubarak’s cabinet. He is the second most powerful man in Egypt, a key player in negotiations between Israel and Hamas and one of the most formidable spymasters in the Middle East. Born in 1935 in Upper Egypt, he belongs to the generation of poor Egyptians who saw their fortunes rise when Nasser came to power. Like Mubarak, he studied at the Frunze Military Academy in Moscow in the 1960s, and received further training at Fort Bragg in the 1980s, after Egypt shifted its alliances. He and Mubarak grew close in the mid-1990s, while fighting the radical Islamist insurgency. When a group of Islamists opened fire on Mubarak’s limousine in Addis Adaba in 1995, Suleiman was sitting beside him; they were unhurt because Suleiman had insisted on travelling in an armoured car. His success in crushing the insurgency – and the dossier he compiled on Egyptian jihadists, many of whom joined Bin Laden after their defeat in Egypt – made him a valued partner for the CIA after 9/11. (As did Egypt’s usefulness in ‘extraordinary renditions’. In the words of the CIA agent Robert Baer, ‘If you wanted to make someone disappear – never to return – you sent him to Egypt.’)

Suleiman is a redoubtable figure, but nothing he has said or done suggests a yearning for political reform. Nor is it clear that he is willing take over from Mubarak: according to one rumour, he refused the presidency in early April and the army is now promoting another Mubarak loyalist, Ahmed Shafiq, a former air force commander and current minister of civil aviation. But Al-Ghazali Harb and a growing number of dissidents continue to hope that Suleiman will be the man who saves Egypt from dynastic succession, and helps lay the foundations of civilian rule.

The announcement at the beginning of December last year that Mohamed ElBaradei might run for president as an independent has galvanised advocates of reform. Born in Cairo in 1942, ElBaradei is the son of a liberal lawyer who, as head of the Egyptian Bar Association, campaigned for an independent judiciary under both Nasser and Sadat. He has spent most of his professional life in the West; he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 for his work with the International Atomic Energy Agency (he donated the proceeds to orphanages in his hometown); and he crossed swords over the inspections in Iraq and Iran with the Bush administration, which tried to force him out of his job. All reasons to respect him. When he flew home from Vienna in February, at the end of his third term at the IAEA, he was greeted at the airport by a thousand supporters. He then met members of the opposition, from Kifaya to the Muslim Brothers, and gave a series of blistering interviews on the state of Egyptian political life. Sounding rather like Obama in 2008, he insisted that he was ‘not a saviour’, that ‘only with the help of the people could he try to change the authoritarian regime in power for the last 50 years’. It’s easy to understand why Egyptians are tempted to see him as a saviour: an outsider, untainted by compromise and unaffiliated with any of Egypt’s political parties, he is someone on whom extravagant hopes can be pinned. Apart from generalities – restoring the rule of law, ensuring social protection for the poor, providing humanitarian aid for Gaza – he has said little about what he would do as president. ‘He remains an unpolitician,’ as the reporter Issandr El Amrani put it.

Still, the unpolitician has travelled throughout Egypt, delivering public speeches in defiance of the Emergency Law. The regime has responded by arresting the publisher of an admiring biography and persuading the authorities in Kuwait to deport 17 Egyptian residents who support him. Vitriolic attacks have come from the press, which has painted him as a pawn of Washington or Tehran (‘parachuted into the country in which he was born’), and from the official opposition parties: Abdel-Nour of the Wafd, for example, recently said that his insistence on running as an independent ‘reflects the kind of fascism that has caused disasters everywhere in the world’. But ElBaradei’s international prestige affords him valuable protection. His candidacy could also make it difficult for Gamal Mubarak to run: the contrast with the ex-director of the IAEA and Nobel laureate would be embarrassing.

The Mubarak regime, however, has many ways to fend ElBaradei off. The 2007 amendments to the constitution allow the president to disband parliament, and strengthen the power of the NDP, while the tightening of eligibility requirements makes it almost impossible for an independent candidate to run: to qualify, ElBaradei would need the backing of at least 250 members of parliament and municipal councils. Even if he were to get their backing, the regime can intimidate voters or rig the results, now that judicial supervision at the polls has been eliminated. ElBaradei has said he won’t run unless the constitution is revised; he has also called for international monitoring of Egypt’s elections. But Mubarak has little incentive to give in to either demand – unless the US government pressures him to do so.

Five or six years ago, it might have. From 2003 to 2005, the Bush administration appeared to be serious about democratic reform in Egypt: the ‘freedom deficit’ was seen as a key reason for the frustration and anger of men such as Mohammed Atta and Ayman Zawahiri – both Egyptians. Condoleezza Rice called for an end to the Emergency Law at the American University of Cairo in 2005 and, in his 2005 State of the Union address, Bush declared that ‘the great and proud nation of Egypt, which showed the way toward peace in the Middle East, can now show the way toward democracy.’ While continuing to avail themselves of Egypt’s services in extraordinary renditions, Bush and Rice embarked on a ‘freedom agenda’: for the first time, Egyptian NGOs which hadn’t been approved by the authorities in Cairo received direct US grants, infuriating Mubarak. The US was chastened, however, by the Muslim Brothers’ success in the 2005 legislative elections. And that was just the beginning. With Hamas’s election in 2006, resistance and sectarian conflict in Iraq, the spread of Iranian influence, and Hizbullah’s strong performance in the 2006 war with Israel, it was clear that the ‘freedom agenda’ was backfiring in the rest of the region. Suddenly, the promotion of reform in Egypt came to seem imprudent, and Washington remembered why it had always appreciated Mubarak: his co-operation in the Israeli-Palestinian theatre and the war on terror; his hostility to Tehran; the precedence given to US warships seeking expedited passage through the Suez Canal; the willingness to allow American planes to refuel in secret at the West Cairo airbase on their way back to Iraq. By the time the 2007 constitutional amendments were passed, the Bush administration had reversed its course. The amendments, Rice said in Cairo, were ‘disappointing’ but ‘the process of reform is … going to have its ups and downs.’ Then she got to work: Palestine, Iran, Iraq. The political conditions Congress had imposed on $100 million of the $1.3 billion in military aid were waived by Rice, on the grounds that US military ships needed to be able to go through the canal at short notice.

Barack Obama, keen to break with Bush’s messianic talk about spreading democracy, has worked to rebuild trust with the Egyptian government. In his speech in Cairo in June 2009, he spoke of his belief that all people want ‘government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people’, and insisted that ‘we will support them everywhere.’ Yet he has done little more than express mild criticism of Mubarak for extending the Emergency Law, and his administration has reverted to the pre-2004 position of reserving USAID funds for NGOs approved by the Egyptians. Military aid, Robert Gates has made clear, will be provided ‘without conditions’. Egypt, the second largest recipient of US aid after Israel, recently received $260 million in ‘supplementary security assistance’, as well as $50 million for border security, which probably means reinforcing the blockade of Gaza. There is also a brisk traffic in arms: US manufacturers recently announced the sale to Cairo of 24 new F-16 fighter jets and other equipment, worth an estimated $3.2 billion. Steven Cook at the Council on Foreign Relations has published a ‘contingency planning memorandum’ in favour of continued support to the regime, which, as he describes it, ‘has helped create a regional order that makes it relatively inexpensive for the United States to exercise its power’. Less expensive at any rate than it would be in the event of an Islamist takeover that ‘would pose a far greater threat – in magnitude and degree – to US interests than the Iranian revolution’. This seems to be the Obama administration’s implicit wager, too. It’s bad news for ElBaradei and his supporters: bad news for all the Egyptians who fear that they will never know democracy because of the ‘American veto’.

We hope you enjoyed reading this free essay from the London Review of Books. Subscribe now to access every article from every fortnightly issue of the London Review of Books, including the entire archive of 12,574 essays.

[*] Egypt: The Moment of Change, edited by Rabab El-Mahdi and Philip Marfleet (Zed, 186 pp., £16.99, December 2009, 978 1 84813 021 0).

[†] Egypt after Mubarak: Liberalism, Islam and Democracy in the Arab World (Princeton, 292 pp., £24.95, December 2008, 978 0 691 13665 3).

 

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Letters

Vol. 32 No. 11 · 10 June 2010

From Augustus Richard Norton

Adam Shatz writes that Egyptians ‘fear that they will never know democracy because of the “American veto”’ (LRB, 27 May). It’s true that the US has been a less than enthusiastic backer of Egyptian political reform during the Mubarak years, but it’s still worth pointing out a few important, and indeed hopeful nuances of US policy. As Shatz notes, Mubarak managed to circumvent American pressure to democratise, thanks in part to Hamas’s victory in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, which took the wind from the sails of George W. Bush’s quixotic quest for democratic reform. After 2006, regime insiders relaxed, gloating that they ‘knew how to handle the US’. Yet Obama has proved far harder for Mubarak and his cronies to read. Gone is the two aspirins at bedtime Bush prescription for democracy, but it isn’t business as usual either. Obama has kept Mubarak at arm’s length, notably deflecting the Egyptian president’s offer to introduce him at his speech in Cairo in June 2009. When Obama spoke, he walked to the podium to the cadence of ‘Hail to the Chief’, and Mubarak was nowhere in sight – a marked contrast with his speech two months earlier in Ankara, where he addressed the Turkish parliament and was introduced by the Speaker. As many Egyptians remarked, the Cairo speech gave no comfort to Mubarak and his fellow kleptocrats. In another sign of a sterner, less tolerant US tone, Hillary Clinton has assailed the Egyptian government for its recent extension of the Emergency Law. This suggests a more skilful approach than in the Bush years, one that might help restore some vibrancy to Egypt’s dismal politics.

Augustus Richard Norton
Boston University

 

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Vol. 32 No. 12 · 24 June 2010

From Hugh Miles

In his account of Egypt’s decline under Hosni Mubarak, Adam Shatz understandably concentrates on the country’s relationship with the US and Israel (LRB, 27 May). But there is another international player with growing influence in Egypt: China.

Seventeen thousand Chinese are now officially resident in Egypt and the volume of trade between the two countries has gone from $635 million in 1999 to more than $5.86 billion in 2009. Besides granite and marble, China imports Egyptian cotton, oil, carpets and kitchen sinks. English is the main language of business, but around the Free Trade Zones, cheap manufacturing bases close to European markets with very few export restrictions, most of the road signs are in Chinese. According to Egypt’s General Authority for Investment, there are 1038 Chinese companies operating in Egypt, representing a total investment of $311 million.

‘Before the Chinese arrived everyone was leaving this neighbourhood,’ I was told recently by an estate agent in the Cairo suburb of New Maadi. ‘Nowadays you see more Chinese round here than Egyptians. They’re here for this.’ He tapped the granite counter. ‘After the first wave came all kinds of small businesses to service the community, like gyms, restaurants and shops. Then a second wave came to work for Huawei when it replaced Siemens and Alcatel as Etisalat’s main contractor in Egypt.’ Huawei Technologies is the second largest telecoms company in the world. Last November Wen Jiabao opened its $20 million new training centre in Cairo’s Smart Village. ‘We have a business relationship,’ the estate agent said. ‘They don’t care for football or religion. All they think about is business, except when they are drinking tea and playing cards. But there are no problems and we say hello to one another when we pass each other in the street.’

The Chinese Embassy has gone on a charm offensive of film festivals, photo exhibitions and, last February in Rihab City on Cairo’s eastern outskirts, a cultural week showcasing martial arts, Chinese music and tea art. Two Confucius institutes have been established and last year China Central Television launched a new Arabic-language satellite TV channel.

The love-in appears to be reciprocal. From 1999 to 2009 Egypt’s exports to China grew from $15 million to $989 million, creating thousands of new jobs. In the last six years, five Egyptian universities have opened Chinese departments and Chinese goods are a familiar part of everyday life. A new character has made an appearance in Egyptian soap operas: the Arabic-speaking Chinese saleswoman going from door to door, offering cheap consumer goods, bootleg DVDs and snappy haircuts. Egyptians joke about the quality of the imports and grumble that the Chinese never spend any money. Their fathers used to grumble about the Soviets for the same reason.

China’s relationship with the Arabs dates back to the Silk Road, but modern relations can be traced to 30 May 1956 when Nasser defied the US policy of containment to become the first Arab or African country to establish diplomatic ties with the Communist state. (Later that year Chinese newspapers celebrated the nationalisation of the Suez Canal.) Mubarak himself has been to China at least seven times. In 1999 he signed a key strategic agreement in Beijing and since then co-operation has deepened to include infrastructure building, training, energy and defence. There are goodwill politburo visits every few months and at the start of May Egypt’s Oil Ministry signed a memorandum of understanding with China National Petroleum Corp to build Egypt’s biggest ever oil refinery in a contract worth $2 billion. ‘Things are going perfectly,’ according to Zhijie Zeng, the director of the China Development Bank. ‘We are eager to deepen the co-operation. Africa and China have a win-win relationship.’

But the press has spoken of China’s ‘commercial attack’ on Egypt, and there have been accusations of Chinese products being dumped in Egypt at below cost price. In January a Chinese ship accidentally destroyed coral reefs in South Sinai. And in the second half of last year China abruptly halted trade shipments to Egypt. The official reason was to combat smuggling but the move sent the price of some commodities shooting up 40 per cent.

Hugh Miles
Cairo

 

 

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Protest’s Old Guard Falls In Behind the Young

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and MONA EL-NAGGAR

Published: January 30, 2011

Ed Ou for The New York Times

Mohammad El-Beltagy, a former member of Parliament, addressed a full crowd in Tahrir square in Cairo.

Photographs

Photos From the Protests in Egypt

Interactive Map

Locating the Protests in Cairo

Black History Month 2011 - The Association of Students of African Heritage (ASAH) Netherlands

 

The Association of Students of African Heritage (ASAH) in The Netherlands cordially invites you to the fourth edition of Black History Month on 18th and 25th February 2011.

About ASAH
ASAH was founded by and for students who can directly and indirectly distract their roots from Africa and for those who have affinity with the African continent. ASAH activities are geared on providing members with opportunities to further develop themselves on a personal, professional, social and cultural level during the course of their studies. The activities organized by ASAH include Black History Month, Movie nights, Africa Rising, Social Lounges, Excursions and ASAH’s first trip abroad to London in 2010. The Student Association is based at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam.

Black History Month 2011

Theme: “The Economics of Culture – the way we dress, eat and express ourselves from an economic perspective”

Many African and Afro-Caribbean countries are endowed with resources that could stimulate economic stability and independence. However, many of those are plight by economic inefficiencies coupled with a constant dependence on global resources. For example, “one may see a black woman elegantly clothed with traditional attire. But her cloth may be from Vlisco (the Dutch manufacturer of African prints), shoes/slippers from Italy and earrings/jewelleries from Thailand. Instead of local manufactures many prefer Hollywood movies over Nollywood/Ghallywood/Black films or even opt for Indian Basmati or American Uncle Sam rice instead of locally cultivated rice etc”.

Considering the trends of commerce, “to what extent are we (Blacks) economically independent when we portray the African/(Afro-) culture”?

Programme Outline

Day 1: Friday February 18th – Culture and Entrepreneurship

The first day of BHM 2011 focuses on culture and the similarities between Blacks from the Diaspora and the African continent. It also provides an opportunity to explore the economic aspect of culture. Furthermore, day 1 serves as a window to showcase and promote Afro-businesses, as well as a means to network. The day is set up as follows:
• Through the conceptualization of culture and what constitutes the African/(Afro-) culture, a “Black Cultural Expert” will enlighten us with reference to the theme. The expert will talk about various developments in the Black culture over the years.
• Fashion show: Traditional clothing from the African continent and the Diaspora will be displayed. Two different kinds of clothing from the following areas is to be modelled:
o West Africa
o East Africa
o Southern Africa
o Former Netherlands Antilles
o Suriname
During the fashion show, information will be provided about the attires, their origins, designer etc.
• Entrepreneurs: After the fashion show, Mrs. L. Echtelt of Mariposa Import, will share her views on “Black consumerism and entrepreneurship”.
• Cultural treats/snacks: There will be cultural snacks to enjoy. Information will be provided about the ingredients used, its origin, the caterers and/or where to buy them.
• There will also be a spoken word performance by T. Martinus. The day ends with a Musical performance!

When: Friday, 18th February 2011
Venue: Surinaamse Jongeren Centrum Samen Sterk,
Zieken 103, 2515 SB Den Haag
A 3 minute walk from train station The Hague HS
Parking is available, free parking from 17:00
Doors open: at 17.30
The programme starts: at 18:00
Entrance: Free
Language: English and Dutch
Pre-Registration is appreciated, please sent a mail to info@asah-eur.nl

Day 2: Friday February 25th – Presentation and workshop entrepreneurship

The second day of BHM 2011 consists of a workshop and an interactive presentation at the Erasmus University.

• Workshop: To encourage the youth and BHM participants of African heritage to take initiative to become entrepreneurs, Ms. W. Gillis-Burleson – managing director of Legato B.V. and the best Black Business Woman 1997 – will give a workshop on empowerment and entrepreneurship. This workshop aims to equip participants with some fundamental knowledge, tools and skills essential for business for starters.
• Presentation: Mr. T. Kofi – Director of the Foundation Africa Next Door – will talk about the consumption trends of Black people and its consequences. Mr. Kofi will show the correlation between the African continent and Black communities worldwide. Participants or the audience will have an opportunity to ask questions or share their opinion. Amongst others, there will be a debate/discussion on “Does our culture inhibit us to enterprise?” during the discussion round.

When: Friday, 25th February 2011
Venue: Erasmus University Rotterdam,
C-Building, Room CB-109
Doors open: at 16.30
The programme starts: at 17:00
Entrance: Free
Language: English and Dutch
Pre-Registration is appreciated, please sent a mail to info@asah-eur.nl

We, ASAH, look forward to celebrate Black History Month 2011 with you! For further info: visit www.asah-eur.nl

Black History Month 2011 is presented in collaboration with NiNsee (Nationaal instituut Nederlands slavernijverleden en erfenis) see: www.ninsee.nl

 

 

 

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By Zena Edwards

LOVING MY JOB

Bart Scheeman & the NBE

Podium Mozaik is a really cool building. Situated close to the heart of Amsterdam , Maarten Gulickx and the Podium crew champion multi-cultural performance.  The amazing Imani Uzuri is programmed there in March.  Facebook them.
I was invited in September ’10 to celebrate the buildings 5th birthday, and to collaborate and perform with the Nederlands Blazers Ensemble I wasn’t sure what to expect when I went out there but was excited about writing poetry in collaboration with a wind orchestra. What blew me away (‘scuse the pun) was the global diversity in the the music and the inclusiveness of the musical collaboration.

Bart Scheeman is the musical director of NBE and an incredible composer in his own right. As an extremely laid back guy I wondered when the rehearsals were going to launch. I must have underestimated the chilledness of the Holland vibe. Rehearsals were in full flight and it was going over my head on day one. So I chilled and got into some photography, taking pics of the rehearsals. No one seemed to mind. Click images to enlarge them.

There was an interesting moment with a clash of cultures when the timing of Dhroeh Nankoe‘s Indian Sufi composition clashed with a restrictive count of European rhythm. But this is where the beauty occurred. As the rehearsals progressed layers of musical cultural restriction dropped away embracing a new way of being and the magic began to sparkle and spangle about the room.

Rosie Ntjam

The beautifully smooth vocals of Antillian born Izaline Calistersent goose bumps up my spine and the glamourous afro-jazz Congolese funkiness of Rosie Ntjam brought a African feminine vibe to the event that I was proud of.

The  life and soul of rehearsals had to be Vasile Nedea. During performances, his  high energy character amped up filling all corners of the room   as he took us on a vibrant multi-layered musical  journey through the Balkans  playing percussion, accordian and an instrument of his heritage – the Cymbalom. Beautiful…

Haytham

The enchanting compositions for the Middle Eastern instrument called the U’d played with a haunting spirituality by Haytham Safia almost brought tears to my eyes on both shows. We were programmed to play together straight after his solo. Had to swallow those tears back… but this only added to my performance as the emotion behind the piece came from an even more genuine place in my gut.

“The Artist is a Piece I wrote dedicated to all artists on the planet and to the dormant artist within us all. I guess it is an homage to Creativity. Myself, Haytham and Peter Prommel on percussion immersed ourselves in the piece in a way that moved me profoundly, reminding me how much I love my job.

Here is the promo video of the whole event. It was 3 days of  trans-global bliss. (Grin.)

September 22, 2010 - Posted by Zena | Uncategorized

>via: http://goodnewzee.wordpress.com/2010/09/22/loving-my-job/

 

Slave Routes: A Global Vision- A documentary

01-12-2010 - 

UNESCO has produced a documentary about the history of slavery entitled ‘Slave Routes: A Global Vision’.  As 2011 is the UN year of the African Diaspora, this documentary is highly recommended for anyone who is interested in the subject of slavery, its legacy and the history of the slave trade.

 

In ‘Slave Routes: A Global Vision’ the multifaceted history and legacy of those whose origins lie in the slave trade and slavery is presented on an international scale. It gives an overview of the massive forced migration of African populations in different sectors of the world, namely North and South America, Europe, the Indian Ocean, the Middle East and Asia.  

The DVD pays a lot of attention to the African presence on all continents. The significant contribution of the African Diaspora in societies of the `host country’ is taken into consideration in several areas (art, religion, knowledge, gastronomy, agriculture, behavior and linguistics) but also the racism and the discrimination which have been inherited from this tragic past. The guiding principle of the documentary goes deeper than the trauma of slavery and especially emphasizes the resistance of the enslaved in surviving an inhumane system.

By using means such as images, historical narratives and interviews with experts on all continents, the film shows how enslaved Africans and their ancestors have helped to form the modern world. This stands in contrast to incorrect `racial’ theories. On the site of UNESCO you can find further information (in English) and order the film.

 

Brazil: Exclusive Internet Interview

with the Founder of WikiLeaks

Translation posted 30 January 2011 · View original post [pt]

Written byPaula Góes

Translated by Melissa Mann

Countries	Brazil, U.S.A.
Topics	Freedom of Speech, Cyber-Activism, Software & Tools
Languages	Portuguese

Brazilian netizens scored an exclusive interview with Julian Assange, founder and editor of the polemical WikiLeaks. The invitation to participate in a collective interview was open to all bloggers and readers of the blog by independent journalist Natália Viana. From the 350 questions sent in, 12 were selected and answered as part of the interview. With the material republished on a number of blogs, Global Voices could not stand idly by.

At the Campus Party, held this January, participants used a mask with Assange's image. Photo from Flickr user kHovsT, published under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license.

Various - WikiLeaks worked with the mainstream media. Here in Brazil, Folha de São Paulo and Globo are seen as right wing newspapers. Not only they contribute to media concentration but they also have their own agenda. Isn’t it contradictory to work with these vehicles if WL wants to democratize access to information? Why not work with blogs and alternative media?

Due to resource constraints we are not able to yet to vet thousands of individuals so instead we have chosen to often work with groups of journalists, or groups of human rights researchers who have a significant audience. This often includes established media outlets, however, we do also work with individual journalists. Alternative media outlets and activist organisations, as the situation demands and resources permit.

One of the primary functions of the press is to hold government to account. In the case of Brasil, which has a left wing central government, we felt that a center right newspaper was necessary to properly scrutinise the left wing politicians of the central government. In other countries we have applied the reverse equation. Ideally we like to partner with a pro-government media outlet and an anti-government media outlet.

Marcelo Salles – In your opinion what is the most dangerous for democracy: the manipulation of information by governments or the manipulation of information by media oligopolies?

The manipulation of information by media is most dangerous for when a government manipulates information to the public detriment, but the media is strong, this manipulation can not hold for long. But when the media itself has become debased of its critical role then not only can government not be held to account but the pernicious interests or affiliations of the media or its owners can sway or permit government to engage in new abuses. The clearest example of this in recent times is the US mainstream media-led war on Iraq in 2003.

Eduardo dos Anjos – I’ve been following the recent leaks and didn’t find anything relevant, it sounds like too much noise for nothing. Why should we trust you and WikiLeaks?

WikiLeaks has a four year publishing history. During that time, to our knowledge, we have never described a false document as true. Additionally, neither has any other organisation claimed otherwise. While we currently have a perfect record in judging true documents from false we are, of course, only humans and will someday possibly make a mistake. But at present we have the best record in the business and wish to try hard to keep this good reputation.

Unlike other media organisations that have no public standard of what they will accept and what they will discard, WikiLeaks has a clear and precise definition to give potential sources confidence about whether we will use their material or not.

We take disclosures of diplomatic, ethical or historical significance that are official documents and that are classified or suppressed under some form of legal injunction.

Various – What concrete changes can happen as a consequence of WL in terms of balance of powers between governments, business and the public?

James Madison the framer of the US bill of Rights said that knowledge will forever rule ignorance. So a people who mean to be their own masters must have the power that knowledge brings. This philosophy of Madison's which combines the realm of knowledge with the realm of the distribution of power points to the changes that occur when knowledge is democratised.

States and giant corporations maintain their power over the individual through keeping knowledge from individuals. It is the gap in knowledge which delineates who is inside the most powerful parts of the state and who is inside the powerful parts of a corporation.

The free-flow of knowledge from powerful groups to less powerful groups or individuals is also a flow of power and hence an equalising and democratising force in society.

Marcelo Träsel - After Cablegate, Wikileaks got very powerful. Julian’s declarations about future leaks influence markets and government policies. While it becomes a power, shouldn’t WL create a mechanism of accountability by the public opinion?

WikiLeaks is one of the most responsive global organisations in existence.

It is significantly more accountable to the public than national governments and here is why: The fruits of all our labours are public. We are a publishing organisation. There is nothing that we do that does not end up contributing towards putting knowledge in the hands of the public.

WikiLeaks is funded by the public on a week by week basis. The public votes for us each week with its' wallets.

Potential sources supply documents to WikiLeaks because they believe that we will protect them and that we will achieve the maximum possible impact for their efforts. Should at any moment sources believe this to not be true, or that we are acting unethically, such contributions will stop.

WikiLeaks is supported and defended by many thousands of generous people who volunteer their time, skills and assets to be used in our endevours directly or indirectly in our defence. These people ‘vote' for us every day in this manner.

December 2010 – Demonstrators rally to free WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at a demonstration in front of the British Consulate in São Paulo. Photo from Panoptico, under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.

Daniel Ikenaga – Which information should be secret in your definition?

We often hear this type of question. However, it is better to rephrase it as follows: “who should be forced by the state into keeping information of a particular type from the rest of the population?”

The answer to this question is clearly not everyone in the world and nor should it be, we believe, all persons in a particular state. Rather, say, your doctor is responsible for keeping your medical records secret under most (but not all) circumstances.

Various – In a recent interview to Estado de São Paulo you said WikiLeaks intended to use Brazil as a base for its work. What are the plans? Would accept political asylum in here if it was offered?

I would, of course, be flattered if Brazil offered my staff and I political asylum, we have strong support by the Brazilian people and based on that and the independent character of Brazil from other countries we have decided to expand our presence in the country. Unfortunately I, at this time, am under house arrest in the cold dark winter of Norfolk, England and can not make a home in beautiful, warm Brazil.

Various – Are you afraid of being killed? Is there any mechanism of protection in place for you? In case you get murdered, what will happen to WikiLeaks?

We are determined to continue despite the various threats against us. We have a strong faith in our mission and have not and will not be cowed by the forces against us.

My greatest protection is the futility of any attempt against me. For instance, when I was recently imprisoned for some ten days our publications proceeded unimpeded.

Similarly, we have distributed backups of all our pending publications across the world It is not possible to destroy WikiLeaks' upcoming publications by attacks on its staff.

Helena Vieira - In your opinion, what was the most important revelation of Cablegate? Did your world vision, your opinion, change in any aspect after reading the documents?

Cablegate covers almost every major event, public and private, and every country in the world so there are many most important revelations depending on where you live. And the majority of these have still yet to appear.

If we must refer to a single most interesting cable in a global context then out of the small fraction that I have read so far (keeping in mind that there are 250,000 cables) it is the cable tasking US diplomats to collect from an extremely wide range of organisations including the United Nations, encryption keys, DNA, credit card numbers, frequent flight numbers etc.

This cable is a tasking order by the CIA and National Security Agency on US diplomats and other embassy personnel. It reveals a shadow of the vast secret US intelligence collection apparatus.

Tarcísio Mender and Maiko Rafael Spiess - Besides Wiki having shaken international relations, what do you think about Time magazine electing Mark Zuckerberg man of the year? Do you see a paradox in the fact that he is praised while you are the “criminal of the year”?

Time Magazine can, of course, choose to award this title to whomever they like. However, for me it what was more important is that the people of the world chose to vote for me twenty times more than the Times editors choice. I won the people's vote, but not the a multi-national media companies vote. That seems correct to me. I also quite liked Saturday Night Live's take on the situation:

“I give you private information on corporations for free and I'm a villain. Mark Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money and he's ‘Man of the Year.'”
Behind the scenes of course, things were more interesting, with a pro-Assange faction inside Time magazine being placated by a really quite impressive Assange cover on the December 13 issue, paving the way for the conservative choice of Zuckerberg a few weeks later.

Vinícius Juberte – Do you consider yourself a man of the left?

I see that there are good people in both sides of politics and definitely bad people in both sides of politics and it is my habit to seek out these good and just people and work with them in common cause.

Politicians, after election gradually become captured by the very government agencies they are meant to control. This is true regardless of their political flavour.

In so far as a power in equality exists between the people and their rulers, we are on the side of the people that phenomena is broadly associated with the rhetoric of the left which gives rise to a view that we are an organisation exclusively of the left. This is not correct. We are an organisation exclusively of truth and justice and we find those in many places.

Demonstrators rally to free WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at a demonstration in front of the British Consulate in São Paulo. Photo from Panoptico, under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.

Ariely Barata – Hollywood will produce a film about your life. What is your opinion about that?

Hollywood may produce many movies on WikiLeaks, as there are nearly a dozen books scheduled to be published. I am currently not involved in any film productions.

However, if we sell the film rights I shall demand to be played by Will Smith. Kristinn Hrafnsson (WikiLeaks' spokeperson) will be played by Samuel L Jackson, and my beautiful assistant will be played by Halle Berry. We will call it “WikiLeaks Film Noire”.

Written by Paula Góes · Translated by Melissa Mann
Translation posted 30 January 2011

Haiti opens door for return of ex-president Aristide

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Former Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide, exiled in South Africa, attends a news briefing in Johannesburg, January 15, 2010.

Credit: Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko

 

By Joseph Guyler Delva

PORT-AU-PRINCE | Mon Jan 31, 2011 5:31pm EST

 

PORT-AU-PRINCE

(Reuters) - Haiti's government is ready to issue a diplomatic passport to ousted former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, opening the way for his possible return home from exile in South Africa, a senior official said on Monday.  

"The Council of Ministers, under the leadership of President Rene Preval, decided that a diplomatic passport be issued to President Aristide, if he asks for it," Fritz Longchamp, general secretary for the presidency, told Reuters.

 

Aristide, a firebrand leftist ex-Roman Catholic priest who became Haiti's first freely elected president in 1990 before his later ouster, said earlier this month he was ready to return to his homeland "today, tomorrow, at any time."

 

Major western aid donors to Haiti like the United States have been wary about his possible return to the poor, earthquake-battered and volatile Caribbean nation.

 

He remains very popular at home and some fear he could mobilise supporters who could disrupt an already confused ongoing presidential and legislative elections process. Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas party was banned from taking part.

 

His Miami-based lawyer, Ira J. Kurzban, on Monday formally requested the diplomatic passport in a letter sent to Haiti's Minister of Foreign Affairs Marie-Michele Rey and Minister of the Interior Paul Antoine Bien-Aime.

 

Aristide's plans to return home follows the controversial return to Haiti on January 16 of former dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier. Duvalier, 59, now faces charges in Haiti of corruption, theft and crimes against humanity.

 

(Writing by Pascal Fletcher, Editing by Eric Walsh)

 

__________________________

Haiti Agrees to Issue Passport for Aristide, Lawyer Says

By GINGER THOMPSON

Published: January 31, 2011