Category: Tunisia

  • Turkey’s Prime Minister Hails Arab Democracy Efforts in Tunisia

    Turkey’s Prime Minister Hails Arab Democracy Efforts in Tunisia

    Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday that Islam and democracy are not contradictory.

    Tunisian Prime Minister Beji Caid Essebsi, right, shakes hands with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the prime minister office in Tunis, September 15, 2011.

    On the second leg of his North Africa tour, Erdogan spoke in Tunis where the “Arab Spring” protest movement began this year. After meeting with Tunisian prime minister Beji Caid Essebsi, Erdogan said “a Muslim can run a state very successfully.”

    Tunisians are set to vote on October 23 in assembly elections, the first since Tunisian protests helped depose longtime ruler Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

    In Turkey, Erdogan’s party has Islamist roots and its election success has served as a model for political groups spreading in the Arab world. Turkey is 99 percent Muslim.

    In comments to reporters, Erdogan also slammed Israel for saying Turkey is ready to deploy warships “at any time” if a feud with Israel over its blockade of Gaza escalates.

    Erdogan’s visit to Tunisia comes after a stop in Egypt.

    On Wednesday, Erdogan spoke with leaders of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood after receiving a hero’s welcome from Egyptians for his pro-Palestinian stand.

    Erdogan’s four-day diplomatic visit to North Africa is aimed at expanding Turkey’s growing influence in a region full of political upheaval.

    He goes next to Libya, and is expected to meet with the head of Libya’s National Transitional Council Friday.

    Some in Israel have expressed concern that Erdogan’s “Arab Spring” diplomatic tour will stoke anti-Israel tensions, as it comes while Turkish-Israeli relations have hit new lows.

    The two countries have been in a dispute over Turkey’s demand for an apology for Israel’s deadly raid on a Gaza-bound Turkish aid ship last year. Turkey recently expelled the Israeli ambassador and other top diplomats from Ankara, and has suspended military trade and cooperation with Israel.

    Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.

    via Turkey’s Prime Minister Hails Arab Democracy Efforts in Tunisia | Middle East | English.

  • This Spring won’t breed any more Turkeys

    This Spring won’t breed any more Turkeys

    The Times (UK), 5 April 2011, p. 1-19

    Norman Stone *

    A slow, draconian process of modernisation and a hostile attitude to Islam is no model for the Arab world

    Odd to think, but we are at the 100th anniversary of an event involving Libya that precipitated a world war. In October 1911, the Italians invaded the Turkish possession; the defeat of the weakened Turks encouraged the Balkan nations to attack the last outposts of the Ottoman Empire in Europe, ultimately ending in the outbreak of the First World War.

    Ten years down the line, Kemal Atatürk expelled the last occupying forces that were trying to divide up what was left of defeated Turkey, removed the Sultan and, in 1923, established the Republic of Turkey.

    Atatürk said explicitly that Turkey had to modernise. And, with leaps and lags, Turkey has largely done so.

    Democracy is well established and much of its economy has reached the levels of Mediterranean Europe, though there are large patches of backwardness in the southeast. Such is its success that outsiders now talk of the « Turkish model » as the future for Egypt and the rest of the Arab world.

    This is a far-fetched notion. Turkey has been westernising, autonomously, for nearly two centuries. But it did so, Western advocates should note, in authoritarian fashion.

    Until the 1950s, there was a single-party regime, though there were limits to the repression. (True, they put their leading poet, Nâzim Hikmet, into prison, but he did provoke it, going down to the docks to preach communism to the Navy, even after his cousin, the Interior Minister, told him privately that they would have to arrest him. He then faced an absurdly long spell in prison, where he was subjected to a most cruel punishment: his former wife was allowed to come for the weekend.) Democracy eventually did come about, but has only really worked in tandem with the steady economic progress which has occurred since the last serious military coup, in 1980. Its progress exactly matches Francis Fukuyama’s argument that you can afford democracy when your GDP per head reaches a level of around $7,500.

    Nowadays there are more than 80 million Egyptians, mostly crowded into the Nile Delta and Cairo, and there is a gigantic problem of youth unemployment throughout the Arab world. Even the strongest military regime would struggle to do more than keep order and hope vaguely that economic progress will come about.

    So what else does the Turkish model require? The most important element is state control of religion, to curb the wild men, of whom Islam generally produces a great deal too many. Religion in Turkey is strictly overseen by a central office, which even dictates the shape of mosques. Whether this would go down well in the Arab world is questionable.

    Much from the Atatürk state clashes with Islam as practised elsewhere. His republic’s symbol was the hat, introduced to replace the Ottoman fez and the Islamic turban in 1925. Last month’s cover in my Atatürk calendar has the great man opening a model farm that year with ladies in cloche hats, some maybe on their way to dancing the Charleston.

    That revolutionary step was just one of many. Arabic words were replaced or just dismissed from the dictionary; the script was made Latin, rather than Arabic, almost overnight in 1928 — a move that counted in some eyes as blasphemous, since the language and script of the Koran expressed the word of God. Similar blasphemy occurred when the ezan, the call to prayer, was read out in Turkish. Peasants were turned away if they arrived in Ankara dressed in traditional garb. A Soviet system of « people’s houses » spread in the countryside, especially to show women that they did not have to be domestic servants.

    A new version of Turkish history was taught in schools, putting the country at a distance from its Ottoman identity. Secular Turks looked on its Islamic past and the Caliphate as republican Frenchmen or Italians looked on the Catholic Church: as the enemy. Turkey was created, in other words, more or less as an express rejection of the world to east and south — something that will have been noted by Arab nations.

    The Government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s moderately Islamist Prime Minister, comes from another tradition, one in which the Caliphate counts the most. His appeal to common Islamic brotherhood is not empty, and most recently it has been used on the Palestinians’ behalf.

    But Arab-Turkish relations are never truly warm; many Turks are dismissive of the Arabs, and many Arabs would be dismissive of the so-called Turkish model. And on Israel Turkey is divided, because a great many Turks would associate Hamas with the PKK, the Kurdish separatist fighters. The much-vaunted pan-Islamic co-operation never gets anywhere.

    Necmettin Erbakan, Turkey’s first Islamist Prime Minister, who held office for a year in 1996-97, dreamt up an Islamic foreign policy and lined up with several lovelies from that world — starting with Colonel Gaddafi. But during a trip by Erbakan to Tripoli, Gaddafi spat in the soup and denounced the Turks for not treating the Kurds properly. Erbakan’s second in command then denounced Gaddafi as a « bare-arsed Beduin ». So much for religious solidarity.

    Now, just as the world looks to Turkey as an example for the Arabs to follow, Turkey’s own model is turning rather sour. Recently there was a huge demonstration for journalistic freedom in the centre of Istanbul, following the heavy interrogation and, in some cases, imprisonment of some 4,000 journalists.

    Visitors to the country might not recognise the problem, but secular Turks are worried at « the desecularisation of modern Turkey » because Islam has been spreading: the calls to prayer, which ought to be made by a gentle human voice, now come bullyingly over megaphones in many quarters of Istanbul.

    Understandably, the Turks wonder quite what « the Turkish model » is supposed to be now. For the educated classes it is obvious enough — the Atatürk state. Almost by definition, that state is not Muslim, let alone Arab.

    Should a a tension arise between nationalism and Islam, then in Turkey nationalism would probably win.

    Atatürk, when asked to describe the Turkish identity, just shrugged his shoulders and said, « We are similar to ourselves », and that is good enough to be going on with. The Turkish Model will stay Turkish.

    * Norman Stone’s latest book is Turkey: A Short History (Thames and Hudson)

  • Tony Blair: We can’t just be spectators in this revolution

    Tony Blair: We can’t just be spectators in this revolution

    BOP KA

    The following op-ed by Tony Blair first appeared in The Times and the Wall Street Journalon Saturday 19th March 2010

    The crisis in Libya has forced back on to the agenda all the tough choices of modern-day foreign policy. Should we intervene? Do we do so for moral reasons as well as those of national interests? How do we balance the need for a policy that is strong, assertive and well articulated with the desire not to appear overmighty and arrogant, disrespecting others and their culture?

    Two preliminary points must be made. In today’s world the distinction between moral outrage and strategic interests can be false. In a region where our strategic interests are dramatically and profoundly engaged, it is unlikely that the effect of a regime going rogue and brutalising its own people will remain isolated within its own borders. If Colonel Gaddafi were allowed to kill large numbers of Libyans to squash the hope of a different Libya, we shouldn’t be under any illusion. We could end up with a pariah government at odds with the international community — wounded but still alive and dangerous. We would send a signal of Western impotence in an area that analyses such signals keenly. We would dismay those agitating for freedom, boosting opposition factions hostile to us.

    This underlines the other preliminary point: inaction is also a decision, a policy with consequence. The wish to keep out of it all is entirely understandable; but it is every bit as much a decision as acting.

    So the decision to impose a no-fly zone and authorise all necessary measures to protect threatened civilians comes not a moment too soon. It is a shift to a policy of intervention that I welcome. Such a policy will be difficult and unpredictable. But it is surely better than watching in real time as the Libyan people’s legitimate aspiration for a better form of government and way of life is snuffed out by tanks and planes.

    Events in Libya cannot be divorced from what is happening across the Middle East. It is here that Western policy is still evolving. The implications are vast.

    Decisions taken now will define attitudes to us for a generation; they will also heavily influence the outcomes. They will have to be taken, as ever, with imperfect knowledge and the impossibility of accurate foresight.

    The key to making those decisions is to develop a strategic framework for helping to shape this revolutionary change sweeping the region. We need a policy that is clear, explicable and that marries our principles to the concerns of realpolitik. It also has to recognise that we are not spectators in what is happening. History, attitude and interests all dictate that we are players.

    First, there is no doubt that the best, most secure, most stable future for the Middle East lies in the spread of democracy, the rule of law and human rights. These are not “Western” values; they are the universal values of the human spirit. People of the Middle East are no different in that sense from the people of Europe or America.

    Second, however, getting there is a lot more complex than it was for Eastern Europeans when the Soviet Union collapsed. In that case you had hollowed-out regimes that were despised by a people eager for change and, vitally, agreed as to the type of society the change should produce. They looked over the Wall, saw the West and said: that’s what we want. By and large, that is what they now have.

    In the Middle East those protesting agree completely on removing existing regimes, but then thoroughly disagree on the future. There are two competing visions. One represents modernising elements who essentially want to share the freedom and democracy we have; the other, Islamist elements who have quite a different conception of how change should go.

    In saying this, I am not “demonising” the Muslim Brotherhood or ignoring that they too have their reformists. But there is no point, either, in being naive. Some of those wanting change want it precisely because they regard the existing regimes as not merely too oppressive but too pro-Western; and their solutions are a long way from what would provide modern and peaceful societies.

    So our policy has to be very clear: we are not just for change; we are for modern, democratic change, based on the principles and values intrinsic to democracy. That does not just mean the right to vote, but the rule of law, free speech, freedom of religion and free markets too.

    Third, working in that framework, we should differentiate when dealing with different countries. This too will require difficult decisions in instances where things are often not clean and simple, but messy and complex.

    In the case of Libya, there is no way out being offered to its people. It is status quo or nothing. When Libya changed its external policy — renouncing terrorism, co-operating against al-Qaeda, giving up its nuclear and chemical weapons programme — I believe we were right to alter our relationship with it. At the onset of the popular uprising, the Gaddafi regime could have decided to agree a proper and credible process of internal change. I urged Colonel Gaddafi to take that route out. Instead he decided to crush it by force. No credible path to a better constitution was put forward.

    By contrast, round the Gulf, countries are reforming in the right direction. The pace may need to quicken but here it is right to support such a process and to stand by our allies. Even in Bahrain, although there can be no justification for the use of violence against unarmed civilians, there is a strong case for supporting the process of negotiation led by the Crown Prince that does offer a means of peaceful transition to constitutional monarchy. This is not realpolitik over principle. It is a recognition that it is infinitely preferable to encourage reform that happens with stability than to push societies into a revolution whose motivations will be mixed and whose outcome will be uncertain.

    Fourth, in respect of Tunisia and Egypt, they now need our help. Protests don’t resolve policy questions. Demonstrations aren’t the same as governments. It is up to the emerging leaders of those nations to decide their political systems. But that is only one part of their challenge. They have young populations, often without jobs. Whatever the long-term benefits of political change, the short-term cost, in investment and the economy, will be big. This will require capital. It will also require the right policy framework, public sector reform and economic change that will sometimes be painful and controversial. Otherwise be clear: the danger is that in two or three years the political change is unmatched by economic progress and then in the disillusion that follows, extreme elements start to get traction. So talk of a Marshall Plan-type initiative is not overexcitable. It is completely to the point.

    Fifth, we ignore the importance of the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians at our peril. This absolutely must be revitalised and relaunched. I know it is said that this wasn’t the issue behind the uprisings. That is true. But we are deluding ourselves if we don’t think that its outcome matters profoundly to the region and the direction in which it develops. In any event, the change impacts immediately and directly on the parties. For Israel it makes peace all the more essential; it also sharpens acutely its security challenge. For the Palestinians it gives them a chance to be part of the democratic change sweeping the region, but only if they are on the march to statehood. If not they are highly vulnerable to their cause being hijacked yet again by extremists.

    Sixth, we should keep up pressure on the regime in Iran. We should be open and forthright in supporting change in Tehran. If there were such change, it would be possibly the single most important factor in stimulating optimism about change elsewhere. Tehran’s present influence is negative, destabilising and damaging. It needs to know what our red lines are and that we intend to enforce them.

    Finally, in the Middle East religion matters. Nothing in this region can be fully explained or understood without analysing the fundamental struggle within Islam. That struggle can only ultimately be resolved by Muslims. But how non-Muslims have a dialogue and, if possible, a partnership with Islam can influence crucially the debate between reform and reaction.

    This is a large agenda. Some will object to the very notion of our having such an agenda: “Leave them to solve their own problems.” The difficulty is that their problems swiftly become ours. That is the nature of the interdependent world we inhabit today.

    Others will say we should be careful of forming “our agenda”: it will be “resented”; we will heighten “anti-Western feeling”, “remember Iraq and Afghanistan” and so on.

    One essential part of handling this right is to liberate ourselves from a posture of apology that is not merely foolish but contrary to the long-term prospects of the region. Of course you can debate whether the decisions to go to war in Iraq or Afghanistan were right. But the idea that the prolonged nature of both battles invalidates intervention or is the “West’s” fault is not only wrong, it is at the root of why we find what is happening today not just in the Middle East but also in Pakistan and elsewhere so perplexing. The reason why Iraq was hard, Afghanistan remains hard and Pakistan, a nation with established institutions, is in difficulty, is not because the people don’t want democracy. They do. They have shown it time and again. It is because cultural and social modernisation has not taken hold in these countries, and proper religion has been perverted to breed fanatics, not democrats.

    What this means is not that we turn away from encouraging democracy; but rather that we do so with our eyes open and our minds fully aware of the need for a comprehensive agenda so the change that occurs is the change that people really want and need.

    Some years ago, under the previous US Administration, there was a concept called the Greater Middle East Initiative, about how to help to bring about change in the region. The circumstances of the time were not propitious. They are today. We should politely but firmly resist those who tell us this is not our business. It is. In dealing with it, we should show respect, but also strength, the courage of our convictions, and the self- confident belief we can achieve them.

    www.tonyblairoffice.org, Mar 18, 2011

  • Egypt’s Revolution: Creative Destruction for a ‘Greater Middle East’?

    Egypt’s Revolution: Creative Destruction for a ‘Greater Middle East’?

    F. William Engdahl, February 5, 2011
    Fast on the heels of the regime change in Tunisia came a popular-based protest movement launched on January 25 against the entrenched order of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. Contrary to the carefully-cultivated impression that the Obama Administration is trying to retain the present regime of Mubarak, Washington in fact is orchestrating the Egyptian as well as other regional regime changes from Syria to Yemen to Jordan and well beyond in a process some refer to as “creative destruction.”

    The template for such covert regime change has been developed by the Pentagon, US intelligence agencies and various think-tanks such as RAND Corporation over decades, beginning with the May 1968 destabilization of the de Gaulle presidency in France. This is the first time since the US backed regime changes in Eastern Europe some two decades back that Washington has initiated simultaneous operations in many countries in a region. It is a strategy born of a certain desperation and one not without significant risk for the Pentagon and for the long-term Wall Street agenda. What the outcome will be for the peoples of the region and for the world is as yet unclear.
    Yet while the ultimate outcome of defiant street protests in Cairo and across Egypt and the Islamic world remains unclear, the broad outlines of a US covert strategy are already clear.
    No one can dispute the genuine grievances motivating millions to take to the streets at risk of life. No one can defend atrocities of the Mubarak regime and its torture and repression of dissent. Noone can dispute the explosive rise in food prices as Chicago and Wall Street commodity speculators, and the conversion of American farmland to the insane cultivation of corn for ethanol fuel drive grain prices through the roof. Egypt is the world’s largest wheat importer, much of it from the USA. Chicago wheat futures rose by a staggering 74% between June and November 2010 leading to an Egyptian food price inflation of some 30% despite government subsidies.
    What is widely ignored in the CNN and BBC and other Western media coverage of the Egypt events is the fact that whatever his excesses at home, Egypt’s Mubarak represented a major obstacle within the region to the larger US agenda.

    To say relations between Obama and Mubarak were ice cold from the outset would be no exaggeration. Mubarak was staunchly opposed to Obama policies on Iran and how to deal with its nuclear program, on Obama policies towards the Persian Gulf states, to Syria and to Lebanon as well as to the Palestinians.1 He was a formidable thorn in the larger Washington agenda for the entire region, Washington’s Greater Middle East Project, more recently redubbed the milder sounding “New Middle East.”

    As real as the factors are that are driving millions into the streets across North Africa and the Middle East, what cannot be ignored is the fact that Washington is deciding the timing and as they see it, trying to shape the ultimate outcome of comprehensive regime change destabilizations across the Islamic world. The day of the remarkably well-coordinated popular demonstrations demanding Mubarak step down, key members of the Egyptian military command including Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Sami Hafez Enan were all in Washington as guests of the Pentagon. That conveniently neutralized the decisive force of the Army to stop the anti-Mubarak protests from growing in the critical early days.2

    The strategy had been in various State Department and Pentagon files since at least a decade or longer. After George W. Bush declared a War on Terror in 2001 it was called the Greater Middle East Project. Today it is known as the less threatening-sounding “New Middle East” project. It is a strategy to break open the states of the region from Morocco to Afghanistan, the region defined by David Rockefeller’s friend Samuel Huntington in his infamous Clash of Civilizations essay in Foreign Affairs.
    Egypt rising?

    The current Pentagon scenario for Egypt reads like a Cecil B. DeMille Hollywood spectacular, only this one with a cast of millions of Twitter-savvy well-trained youth, networks of Muslim Brotherhood operatives, working with a US-trained military. In the starring role of the new production at the moment is none other than a Nobel Peace Prize winner who conveniently appears to pull all the threads of opposition to the ancien regime into what appears as a seamless transition into a New Egypt under a self-proclaimed liberal democratic revolution.

    Some background on the actors on the ground is useful before looking at what Washington’s long term strategic plan might be for the Islamic world from North Africa to the Persian Gulf and ultimately into the Islamic populations of Central Asia, to the borders of China and Russia.
    Washington ‘soft’ revolutions

    The protests that led to the abrupt firing of the entire Egyptian government by President Mubarak on the heels of the panicked flight of Tunisia’s Ben Ali into a Saudi exile are not at all as “spontaneous” as the Obama White House, Clinton State Department or CNN, BBC and other major media in the West make them to be.

    They are being organized in a Ukrainian-style high-tech electronic fashion with large internet-linked networks of youth tied to Mohammed ElBaradei and the banned and murky secret Muslim Brotherhood, whose links to British and American intelligence and freemasonry are widely reported.3

    At this point the anti-Mubarak movement looks like anything but a threat to US influence in the region, quite the opposite. It has all the footprints of another US-backed regime change along the model of the 2003-2004 Color Revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine and the failed Green Revolution against Iran’s Ahmedinejad in 2009.

    The call for an Egyptian general strike and a January 25 Day of Anger that sparked the mass protests demanding Mubarak resign was issued by a Facebook-based organization calling itself the April 6 Movement. The protests were so substantial and well-organized that it forced Mubarak to ask his cabinet to resign and appoint a new vice president, Gen. Omar Suleiman, former Minister of Intelligence.
    April 6 is headed by one Ahmed Maher Ibrahim, a 29-year-old civil engineer, who set up the Facebook site to support a workers’ call for a strike on April 6, 2008.
    According to a New York Times account from 2009, some 800,000 Egyptians, most youth, were already then Facebook or Twitter members. In an interview with the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment, April 6 Movement head Maher stated, “Being the first youth movement in Egypt to use internet-based modes of communication like Facebook and Twitter, we aim to promote democracy by encouraging public involvement in the political process.”4

    Maher also announced that his April 6 Movement backs former UN International Atomic Energy Aagency (IAEA) head and declared Egyptian Presidential candidate, ElBaradei along with ElBaradei’s National Association for Change (NAC) coalition. The NAC includes among others George Ishak, a leader in Kefaya Movement, and Mohamed Saad El-Katatni, president of the parliamentary bloc of the controversial Ikhwan or Muslim Brotherhood.5

    Today Kefaya is at the center of the unfolding Egyptian events. Not far in the background is the more discreet Muslim Brotherhood.

    ElBaradei at this point is being projected as the central figure in a future Egyptian parliamentary democratic change. Curiously, though he has not lived in Egypt for the past thirty years, he has won the backing of every imaginable part of the Eyptian political spectrum from communists to Muslim Brotherhood to Kefaya and April 6 young activists.6 Judging from the calm demeanour ElBaradei presents these days to CNN interviewers, he also likely has the backing of leading Egyptian generals opposed to the Mubarak rule for whatever reasons as well as some very influential persons in Washington.

    Kefaya—Pentagon ‘non-violent warfare’

    Kefaya is at the heart of mobilizing the Egyptian protest demonstrations that back ElBaradei’s candidacy. The word Kefaya translates to “enough!”
    Curiously, the planners at the Washington National Endowment for Democracy (NED)7 and related color revolution NGOs apparently were bereft of creative new catchy names for their Egyptian Color Revolution. In their November 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the US-financed NGOs chose the catch word, Kmara! In order to identify the youth-based regime change movement. Kmara in Georgian also means “enough!”

    Like Kefaya, Kmara in Georgia was also built by the Washington-financed trainers from the NED and other groups such as Gene Sharp’s misleadingly-named Albert Einstein Institution which uses what Sharp once identified as “non-violence as a method of warfare.”8

    The various youth networks in Georgia as in Kefaya were carefully trained as a loose, decentralized network of cells, deliberately avoiding a central organization that could be broken and could have brought the movement to a halt. Training of activists in techniques of non-violent resistance was done at sports facilities, making it appear innocuous. Activists were also given training in political marketing, media relations, mobilization and recruiting skills.
    The formal name of Kefaya is Egyptian Movement for Change. It was founded in 2004 by select Egyptian intellectuals at the home of Abu ‘l-Ala Madi, leader of the al-Wasat party, a party reportedly created by the Muslim Brotherhood.9 Kefaya was created as a coalition movement united only by the call for an end Mubarak’s rule.

    Kefaya as part of the amorphous April 6 Movement capitalized early on new social media and digital technology as its main means of mobilization. In particular, political blogging, posting uncensored youtube shorts and photographic images were skillfully and extremely professionally used. At a rally already back in December 2009 Kefaya had announced support for the candidacy of Mohammed ElBaradei for the 2011 Egyptian elections.10

    RAND and Kefaya

    No less a US defense establishment think-tank than the RAND Corporation has conducted a detailed study of Kefaya. The Kefaya study as RAND themselves note, was “sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Unified Combatant Commands, the Department of the Navy, the Marine Corps, the defense agencies, and the defense Intelligence Community.”11

    A nicer bunch of democratically-oriented gentlemen and women could hardly be found.
    In their 2008 report to the Pentagon, the RAND researchers noted the following in relation to Egypt’s Kefaya:
    “The United States has professed an interest in greater democratization in the Arab world, particularly since the September 2001 attacks by terrorists from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Lebanon. This interest has been part of an effort to reduce destabilizing political violence and terrorism. As President George W. Bush noted in a 2003 address to the National Endowment for Democracy, “As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export” (The White House, 2003). The United States has used varying means to pursue democratization, including a military intervention that, though launched for other reasons, had the installation of a democratic government as one of its end goals.
    However, indigenous reform movements are best positioned to advance democratization in their own country.”12

    RAND researchers have spent years perfecting techniques of unconventional regime change under the name “swarming,” the method of deploying mass mobs of digitally-linked youth in hit-and-run protest formations moving like swarms of bees.13

    Washington and the stable of “human rights” and “democracy” and “non-violence” NGOs it oversees, over the past decade or more has increasingly relied on sophisticated “spontaneous” nurturing of local indigenous protest movements to create pro-Washington regime change and to advance the Pentagon agenda of global Full Spectrum Dominance. As the RAND study of Kefaya states in its concluding recommendations to the Pentagon:
    “The US government already supports reform efforts through organizations such as the US Agency for International Development and the United Nations Development Programme. Given the current negative popular standing of the United States in the region, US support for reform initiatives is best carried out through nongovernmental and nonprofit institutions.14

    The RAND 2008 study was even more concrete about future US Government support for Egyptian and other “reform” movements:
    “The US government should encourage nongovernmental organizations to offer training to reformers, including guidance on coalition building and how to deal with internal differences in pursuit of democratic reform. Academic institutions (or even nongovernmental organizations associated with US political parties, such as the International Republican Institute or the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs) could carry out such training, which would equip reform leaders to reconcile their differences peacefully and democratically.

    “Fourth, the United States should help reformers obtain and use information technology, perhaps by offering incentives for US companies to invest in the region’s communications infrastructure and information technology. US information technology companies could also help ensure that the Web sites of reformers can remain in operation and could invest in technologies such as anonymizers that could offer some shelter from government scrutiny. This could also be accomplished by employing technological safegaurds to prevent regimes from sabotaging the Web sites of reformers. “15

    As their Kefaya monograph states, it was prepared in 2008 by the “RAND National Security Research Division’s Alternative Strategy Initiative, sponsored by the Rapid Reaction Technology Office in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics.
    The Alternative Strategy Initiative, just to underscore the point, includes “research on creative use of the media, radicalization of youth, civic involvement to stem sectarian violence, the provision of social services to mobilize aggrieved sectors of indigenous populations, and the topic of this volume, alternative movements.16

    In May 2009 just before Obama’s Cairo trip to meet Mubarak, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hosted a number of the young Egyptian activists in Washington under the auspices of Freedom House, another “human rights” Washington-based NGO with a long history of involvement in USsponsored regime change from Serbia to Georgia to Ukraine and other Color Revolutions. Clinton and Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman met the sixteen activists at the end of a two-month “fellowship” organized by Freedom House’s New Generation program.17

    Freedom House and Washington’s government-funded regime change NGO, National Endowment for Democracy (NED) are at the heart of the uprisings now sweeping across the Islamic world. They fit the geographic context of what George W. Bush proclaimed after 2001 as his Greater Middle East Project to bring “democracy” and “liberal free market” economic reform to the Islamic countries from Afghanistan to Morocco. When Washington talks about introducing “liberal free market reform” people should watch out. It is little more than code for bringing those economies under the yoke of the dollar system and all that implies.
    Washington’s NED in a larger agenda

    If we make a list of the countries in the region which are undergoing mass-based protest movements since the Tunisian and Egyptian events and overlay them onto a map, we find an almost perfect convergence between the protest countries today and the original map of the Washington Greater Middle East Project that was first unveiled during the George W. Bush Presidency after 2001.
    Washington’s NED has been quietly engaged in preparing a wave of regime destabilizations across North Africa and the Middle East since the 2001-2003 US military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The list of where the NED is active is revealing. Its website lists Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Sudan as well, interestingly, as Israel. Coincidentally these countries are almost all today subject to “spontaneous” popular regime-change uprisings.
    The International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs mentioned by the RAND document study of Kefaya are subsidiary organizations of the Washington-based and US Congress-financed National Endowment for Democracy.
    The NED is the coordinating Washington agency for regime destabilization and change. It is active from Tibet to Ukraine, from Venezuela to Tunisia, from Kuwait to Morocco in reshaping the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union into what George H.W. Bush in a 1991 speech to Congress proclaimed triumphantly as the dawn of a New World Order.18

    As the architect and first head of the NED, Allen Weinstein told the Washington Post in 1991 that, “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA19

    The NED Board of Directors includes or has included former Defense Secretary and CIA Deputy head, Frank Carlucci of the Carlyle Group; retired General Wesley Clark of NATO; neo-conservative warhawk Zalmay Khalilzad who was architect of George W. Bush’s Afghan invasion and later ambassador to Afghanistan as well as to occupied Iraq. Another NED board member, Vin Weber, co-chaired a major independent task force on US Policy toward Reform in the Arab World with former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and was a founding member of the ultra-hawkish Project for a New American Century think-tank with Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, which advocated forced regime change in Iraq as early as 1998.20

    The NED is supposedly a private, non-government, non-profit foundation, but it receives a yearly appropriation for its international work from the US Congress. The National Endowment for Democracy is dependent on the US taxpayer for funding, but because NED is not a government agency, it is not subject to normal Congressional oversight.
    NED money is channelled into target countries through four “core foundations”—the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, linked to the Democratic Party; the International Republican Institute tied to the Republican Party; the American Center for International Labor Solidarity linked to the AFL-CIO US labor federation as well as the US State Department; and the Center for International Private Enterprise linked to the free-market US Chamber of Commerce.
    The late political analyst Barbara Conry noted that,
    “NED has taken advantage of its alleged private status to influence foreign elections, an activity that is beyond the scope of AID or USIA and would otherwise be possible only through a CIA covert operation. Such activities, it may also be worth noting, would be illegal for foreign groups operating in the United States.”21

    Significantly the NED details its various projects today in Islamic countries, including in addition to Egypt, in Tunisia, Yemen, Jordan, Algeria, Morocco, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Iran and Afghanistan. In short, most every country which is presently feeling the earthquake effects of the reform protests sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa is a target of NED.22

    In 2005 US President George W. Bush made a speech to the NED. In a long, rambling discourse which equated “Islamic radicalism” with the evils of communism as the new enemy, and using a deliberately softer term “broader Middle East” for the term Greater Middle East that had aroused much distruct in the Islamic world, Bush stated,
    “The fifth element of our strategy in the war on terror is to deny the militants future recruits by replacing hatred and resentment with democracy and hope across the broader Middle East. This is a difficult and long-term project, yet there’s no alternative to it. Our future and the future of that region are linked. If the broader Middle East is left to grow in bitterness, if countries remain in misery, while radicals stir the resentments of millions, then that part of the world will be a source of endless conflict and mounting danger, and for our generation and the next. If the peoples of that region are permitted to choose their own destiny, and advance by their own energy and by their participation as free men and women, then the extremists will be marginalized, and the flow of violent radicalism to the rest of the world will slow, and eventually end… We’re encouraging our friends in the Middle East, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to take the path of reform, to strengthen their own societies in the fight against terror by respecting the rights and choices of their own people. We’re standing with dissidents and exiles against oppressive regimes, because we know that the dissidents of today will be the democratic leaders of tomorrow…”23

    The US Project for a ‘Greater Middle East’

    The spreading regime change operations by Washington from Tunisia to Sudan, from Yemen to Egypt to Syria are best viewed in the context of a long-standing Pentagon and State Department strategy for the entire Islamic world from Kabul in Afghanistan to Rabat in Morocco.
    The rough outlines of the Washington strategy, based in part on their successful regime change operations in the former Warsaw Pact communist bloc of Eastern Europe, were drawn up by former Pentagon consultant and neo-conservative, Richard Perle and later Bush official Douglas Feith in a white paper they drew up for the then-new Israeli Likud regime of Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996.
    That policy recommendation was titled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. It was the first Washington think-tank paper to openly call for removing Saddam Hussein in Iraq, for an aggressive military stance toward the Palestinians, striking Syria and Syrian targets in Lebanon.24

    Reportedly, the Netanyahu government at that time buried the Perle-Feith report, as being far too risky. By the time of the events of September 11, 2001 and the return to Washington of the arch war hawk neoconservatives around Perle and others, the Bush Administration put highest priority on an expanded version of the Perle-Feith paper, calling it their Greater Middle East Project. Feith was named Bush’s Under Secretary of Defense.
    Greater Middle East orthographic projection

    Behind the facade of proclaiming democratic reforms of autocratic regimes in the entire region, the Greater Middle East was and is a blueprint to extend US military control and to break open the statist economies in the entire span of states from Morocco to the borders of China and Russia.

    In May 2005, before the rubble from the US bombing of Baghdad had cleared, George W. Bush, a President not remembered as a great friend of democracy, proclaimed a policy of “spreading democracy” to the entire region and explicitly noted that that meant “the establishment of a USMiddle East free trade area within a decade.” 25

    Prior to the June 2004 G8 Summit on Sea Island, Georgia, Washington issued a working paper, “G8-Greater Middle East Partnership.” Under the section titled Economic Opportunities was Washington’s dramatic call for “an economic transformation similar in magnitude to that undertaken by the formerly communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe.”

    The US paper said that the key to this would be the strengthening of the private sector as the way to prosperity and democracy. It misleadingly claimed it would be done via the miracle of microfinance where as the paper put it, “a mere $100 million a year for five years will lift 1.2 million entrepreneurs (750,000 of them women) out of poverty, through $400 loans to each.” 26

    The US plan envisioned takeover of regional banking and financial affairs by new institutions ostensibly international but, like World Bank and IMF, de facto controlled by Washington, including WTO. The goal of Washington’s long-term project is to completely control the oil, to completely control the oil revenue flows, to completely control the entire economies of the region, from Morocco to the borders of China and all in between. It is a project as bold as it is desperate.

    Once the G8 US paper was leaked in 2004 in the Arabic Al-Hayat, opposition to it spread widely across the region, with a major protest to the US definition of the Greater Middle East. As an article in the French Le Monde Diplomatique in April 2004 noted, “besides the Arab countries, it covers Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey and Israel, whose only common denominator is that they lie in the zone where hostility to the US is strongest, in which Islamic fundamentalism in its anti-Western form is most rife.27 It should be noted that the NED is also active inside Israel with a number of programs.

    Notably, in 2004 it was vehement opposition from two Middle East leaders—Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and the King of Saudi Arabia—that forced the ideological zealots of the Bush Administration to temporarily put the Project for the Greater Middle East on a back burner.

    Will it work?

    At this writing it is unclear what the ultimate upshot of the latest US-led destabilizations across the Islamic world will bring. It is not clear what will result for Washington and the advocates of a USdominated New World Order. Their agenda is clearly one of creating a Greater Middle East under firm US grip as a major control of the capital flows and energy flows of a future China, Russia and a European Union that might one day entertain thoughts of drifting away from that American order.

    It has huge potential implications for the future of Israel as well. As one US commentator put it, “The Israeli calculation today is that if ‘Mubarak goes’ (which is usually stated as ‘If America lets Mubarak go’), Egypt goes. If Tunisia goes (same elaboration), Morocco and Algeria go. Turkey has already gone (for which the Israelis have only themselves to blame). Syria is gone (in part because Israel wanted to cut it off from Sea of Galilee water access). Gaza has gone to Hamas, and the Palestine Authority might soon be gone too (to Hamas?). That leaves Israel amid the ruins of a policy of military domination of the region.28

    The Washington strategy of “creative destruction” is clearly causing sleepless nights not only in the Islamic world but also reportedly in Tel Aviv, and ultimately by now also in Beijing and Moscow and across Central Asia.

    1 DEBKA, Mubarak believes a US-backed Egyptian military faction plotted his ouster, February 4, 2011, accessed in www.debka.com/weekly/480/. DEBKA is open about its good ties to Israeli intelligence and security agencies. While its writings must be read with that in mind, certain reports they publish often contain interesting leads for further investigation.

    2 Ibid.

    3 The Center for Grassroots Oversight, 1954-1970: CIA and the Muslim Brotherhood ally to oppose Egyptian President Nasser, www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=western_support_for_islamic_militancy_202700&scale=0. According to the late Miles Copeland, a CIA official stationed in Egypt during the Nasser era, the CIA allied with the Muslim Brotherhood which was opposed to Nasser’s secular regime as well as his nationalist opposition to brotherhood pan-Islamic ideology.

    4 Jijo Jacob, What is Egypt’s April 6 Movement?, February 1, 2011, accessed in http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/107387/20110201/what-is-egypt-s-april-6-movement.htm

    5 Ibid.

    6 Janine Zacharia, Opposition groups rally around Mohamed ElBaradei, Washington Post, January 31, 2011, accessed in .

    7 National Endowment for Democracy, Middle East and North Africa Program Highlights 2009, accessed in http://www.ned.org/where-we-work/middle-east-and-northern-africa/middle-east-and-north-africahighlights.

    8 Amitabh Pal, Gene Sharp: The Progressive Interview, The Progressive, March 1, 2007.

    9 Emmanuel Sivan, Why Radical Muslims Aren’t Taking over Governments, Middle East Quarterly, December 1997, pp. 3-9

    10 Carnegie Endowment, The Egyptian Movement for Change (Kifaya), accessed in http://egyptelections.carnegieendowment.org/2010/09/22/the-egyptian-movement-for-change-kifaya

    11 Nadia Oweidat, et al, The Kefaya Movement: A Case Study of a Grassroots Reform Initiative, Prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Santa Monica, Ca., RAND_778.pdf, 2008, p. iv.

    12 Ibid.

    13 For a more detailed discussion of the RAND “swarming” techniques see F. William Engdahl, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order, edition.engdahl, 2009, pp. 34-41.

    14 Nadia Oweidat et al, op. cit., p. 48.

    15 Ibid., p. 50.

    16 Ibid., p. iii.

    17 Michel Chossudovsky, The Protest Movement in Egypt: “Dictators” do not Dictate, They Obey Orders, January 29, 2011, accessed in https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-protest-movement-in-egypt-dictators-do-not-dictate-they-obey-orders/22993

    18 George Herbert Walker Bush, State of the Union Address to Congress, 29 January 1991. In the speech Bush at one point declared in a triumphant air of celebration of the collapse of the Sovoiet Union, “What is at stake is more than one small country, it is a big idea—a new world order…”

    19 Allen Weinstein, quoted in David Ignatius, Openness is the Secret to Democracy, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 30 September 1991, pp. 24-25.

    20 National Endowment for Democracy, Board of Directors, accessed in

    21 Barbara Conry, Loose Cannon: The National Endowment for Democracy, Cato Foreign Policy Briefing No. 27, November 8, 1993, accessed in .

    22 National Endowment for Democracy, 2009 Annual Report, Middle East and North Africa, accessed in http://www.ned.org/publications/annual-reports/2009-annual-report.

    23 George W. Bush, Speech at the National Endowment for Democracy, Washington, DC, October 6, 2005,accessed in http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/speeches/10.06.05.html.

    24 Richard Perle, Douglas Feith et al, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, 1996, Washington and Tel Aviv, The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, accessed in www.iasps.org/strat1.htm

    25 George W. Bush, Remarks by the President in Commencement Address at the University of South Carolina, White House, 9 May 2003.

    26 Gilbert Achcar, Fantasy of a Region that Doesn’t Exist: Greater Middle East, the US plan, Le Monde Diplomatique, April 4, 2004, accessed in https://mondediplo.com/2004/04/04world

    27 Ibid.

    28 William Pfaff, American-Israel Policy Tested by Arab Uprisings, accessed in http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/american-israeli_policy_tested_by_arab_uprisings_20110201/

    http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/print/Creative%20Destruction%20Washington%20Style.pdf

  • The Egyptian revolt is coming home

    The Egyptian revolt is coming home

    Egypt’s uprising discredits every western stereotype about Arabs*

    John Pilger

    Revolt
    An Egyptian protester waves a national flag as he sits on an electricity pole during demonstrations by thousands of anti-government supporters. Photograph: Getty Images.

    Western leaders should be quaking in their boots.

    The uprising in Egypt is our theatre of the possible. It is what people across the world have struggled for and their thought controllers have feared. Western commentators invariably misuse “we” and “us” to speak on behalf of those with power who see the rest of humanity as useful or expendable. The “we” and “us” are universal now. Tunisia came first, but the spectacle always promised to be Egyptian.

    As a reporter, I have felt this over the years. At Tahrir (“liberation”) Square in Cairo in 1970, the coffin of the great nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser bobbed on an ocean of people who, under him, had glimpsed freedom. One of them, a teacher, described the disgraced past as “grown men chasing cricket balls for the British at the Cairo Club”. The parable was for all Arabs and much of the world. Three years later, the Egyptian Third Army crossed the Suez Canal and overran Israel’s fortresses in Sinai. Returning from this battlefield to Cairo, I joined a million others in Liberation Square. Their restored respect was like a presence – until the United States rearmed the Israelis and beckoned defeat.

    Thereafter, President Anwar Sadat became America’s man through the usual billion-dollar bribery and, for this, he was assassinated in 1981. Under his successor, Hosni Mubarak, dissenters came to Liberation Square at their peril. The latest US-Israeli project of Mubarak, routinely enriched by Washington’s bagmen, is the building of an underground wall behind which the Palestinians of Gaza are to be imprisoned for ever.

    The grisly peacemaker

    Today, the problem for the people in Liberation Square lies not in Egypt. On 5 February, the New York Times reported: “The Obama administration formally threw its weight behind a gradual transition in Egypt, backing attempts by the country’s vice-president, General Omar Suleiman, to broker a compromise with opposition groups . . . Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said it was important to support Mr Sulei­man as he seeks to defuse street protests . . .”

    Having rescued him from would-be assassins, Suleiman is, in effect, Mubarak’s bodyguard. His other distinction, documented in Jane Mayer’s investigative bookThe Dark Side, is as supervisor of US “rendition flights” to Egypt, where people are tortured by order of the CIA. When President Obama was asked in 2009 if he regarded Mubarak as authoritarian, his swift reply was “no”. He called him a peacemaker, echoing that other great liberal tribune, Tony Blair, to whom Mubarak is “a force for good”.

    The grisly Suleiman is now the peacemaker and force for good, the man of “compromise” who will oversee the “gradual transition” and “diffuse the protests”. This attempt to suffocate the Egyptian revolt will depend on a substantial number of people, from businessmen to journalists to petty officials, who have provided the dictatorship’s apparatus. In one sense, they mirror those in the western liberal class who backed Obama’s “change you can believe in” and Blair’s equally bogus “political Cinema­scope” (Henry Porter in the Guardian, 1995). No matter how different they appear, both groups are the domesticated backers and beneficiaries of the status quo.

    In Britain, the BBC’s Today programme is their voice. Here, serious diversions from the status quo are known as “Lord knows what”. On 28 January the Washington correspondent Paul Adams declared, “The Americans are in a very difficult situation. They do want to see some kind of democratic reform but they are also conscious that they need strong leaders capable of making decisions. They regard President Mubarak as an absolute bulwark, a key strategic ally in the region.

    “Egypt is the country, along with Israel, on which American Middle East diplomacy abso­lutely hinges. They don’t want to see anything that smacks of a chaotic handover to frankly Lord knows what.”

    Fear of Lord-knows-what requires that the historical truth of US and British “diplomacy” as largely responsible for the suffering in the Middle East be suppressed or reversed. Forget the Balfour Declaration, which led to the im­position of expansionist Israel. Forget the secret Anglo-American sponsorship of jihadists as a “bulwark” against democratic control of oil. Forget the overthrow of democracy in Iran and the installation of the tyrant shah, and the slaughter and destruction in Iraq. Forget the US fighter jets, cluster bombs, white phosphorus and depleted uranium that are performance-tested on children in Gaza. And now, in the cause of preventing “chaos”, forget the denial of almost every basic civil liberty in Omar Sulei­man’s contrite “new” regime in Cairo.

    Overtaken by events

    The uprising in Egypt has discredited every western media stereotype about the Arabs. The courage, determination, eloquence and grace of those in Liberation Square contrast with “our” specious fear-mongering, with its al-Qaeda and Iran bogeys and iron-clad assumptions of the “moral leadership of the west”. It is not surprising that the recent source of truth about the imperial abuse of the Middle East, WikiLeaks, is itself subjected to craven and petty abuse in those self-congratulating newspapers that set the limits of elite liberal debate on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps they are worried. Public awareness is rising and bypassing them.

    In Washington and London, the regimes are fragile and barely democratic. Having long burned down societies abroad, they are now doing something similar at home, with lies and without a mandate. To their victims, the resistance in Liberation Square must seem an inspiration. “We won’t stop,” said a young Egyptian woman on TV. “We won’t go home.” Try kettling a million people in the centre of London, bent on civil disobedience, and try imagining it could not happen.

    * Title of the Print edition

    John Pilger, renowned investigative journalist and documentary film-maker, is one of only two to have twice won British journalism’s top award; his documentaries have won academy awards in both the UK and the US. In a New Statesman survey of the 50 heroes of our time, Pilger came fourth behind Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela. “John Pilger,” wrote Harold Pinter, “unearths, with steely attention facts, the filthy truth. I salute him.”

    www.newstatesman.com, 10 February 2011

  • Spirit of Egypt protest spreads to Yemen, Algeria and Syria

    Spirit of Egypt protest spreads to Yemen, Algeria and Syria

    Demonstrators gather on streets of Sana’a as Algeria aims to defuse tensions by lifting 19-year state of emergency

    Tom Finn in Sana’a and Mark Tran

    Protesters in Yemen
    Opposition demonstrators wave Yemeni flags as they take part in a ‘day of rage’ in Sana’a. Photograph: Hani Mohammed/AP

    Reverberations from the mass protests in Tunisia and Egypt continued to be felt around the Arab world as demonstrators gathered on the streets of Yemen for a “day of rage” and Algeria became the latest country to try to defuse tensions by lifting its 19-year state of emergency.

    More protests are expected across the region following Friday prayers, including in Syria, where activists have used Facebook to organise demonstrations in front of parliament in the capital, Damascus, and at Syrian embassies across the world.

    Major demonstrations both against and in support of President Ali Abdullah Saleh took place in Yemen within a few miles of each other in a battle for hearts and minds in the capital, Sana’a.

    Around 20,000 protesters, most of them young men, occupied three major roads around Sana’a University in some of the biggest anti-government protests Saleh has faced in his 32-year rule. Large-scale demonstrations also took place in other cities, including Ibb and Taiz. The nationwide demonstrations went ahead in defiance of a plea from Saleh to call off all planned protests, rallies and sit-ins.

    Police opened fire and used tear gas to break up one of the marches, witnesses said, and security officials confirmed that one demonstrator was critically wounded by police fire. Two others were also reported to have been hurt in the eastern town of Mukalla.

    “Together we fight against poverty, corruption and injustice,” the protesters at Sana’a University chanted, between intermittent bursts of music and speeches delivered by opposition politicians from Yemen’s Islamist, socialist and Nasserite parties.

    In Sana’a, soldiers watched from rooftops as students wearing pink bandannas – a reference to the uprising in Tunisia – formed a human wall around the protesters to see off potential clashes.

    “Saleh needs to form a new government,” said Mohammed al-Ashwal, the director of political affairs for Yemen’s Islamic party, Islah. “We’ve had enough of being left on the sidelines. Let the Yemeni people decide who will rule them in clean, fair elections.”

    Echoing protesters in Egypt, Yemen’s opposition had planned to hold their demonstrations in Tahreer, or Liberation Square, in the heart of the capital. Government authorities beat them to it, however, filling it with marquees and sending hundreds of tribesmen to camp out there overnight.

    By this morning the square was filled with thousands of middle-aged Yemeni men. Placards bearing pictures of the president were handed out to supporters and groups of men shouting pro-Saleh slogans were set off at regular intervals to parade through the streets.

    “Saleh keeps this country from collapse,” said a 70-year-old man from the southern city of Taiz cloaked in a tattered Yemeni flag.

    In a last-ditch attempt to appease the protesters, Saleh announced on Wednesday that he would step down in 2013 and that his son Ahmed would not succeed him. “No extension, no inheritance, no resetting the clock,” Saleh said, referring to ruling party proposals to abolish term limits that would have allowed him to run again.

    Saleh, however, reneged on a similar pledge before Yemen’s last round of presidential elections in 2006. “You are tired of me and I of you. It is time for change,” Saleh told parliament in July 2005. Shortly afterwards, thousands of Yemenis protested in Sana’a, demanding the president change his mind, which he did.

    In Algeria, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika was quoted by official media as saying that the state of emergency would end in the “very near future” after he met ministers. The 72-year-old leader, who was first elected in 1999, also said the government should adopt new measures to promote job creation and that state-controlled television and radio should give airtime to all political parties, the official APS news agency reported.

    Bouteflika said protest marches, banned under the state of emergency, would be permitted everywhere except in the capital. The concessions followed protests last month, when several people sought to copy the fatal self-immolation of a 26-year-old unemployed university graduate, Mohamed Bouazizi, in Tunisia.

    The president’s announcement came ahead of a planned march by opposition leaders, human rights groups, unions, students and unemployed workers for February 12 in Algiers. A repeal of the state of emergency and an end to a ban on new political parties were among the demands of the opposition.

    The call for today’s protests in Syria has been orchestrated through Facebook, particularly on the Syrian Revolution page, “liked” by over 13,000 people.

    President Bashar al-Assad has played down any prospect of contagion from Tunisia and Egypt. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal this week, the media-savvy Syrian leader said his country was stable because the government was more in tune with its people.

    “We have more difficult circumstances than most of the Arab countries, but in spite of that, Syria is stable,” he said. “Why? Because you have to be very closely linked to the beliefs of the people. This is the core issue. When there is divergence between your policy and the people’s beliefs and interests, you will have this vacuum that creates disturbance.”

    But mindful of the economic hardships that triggered the collapse of the Tunisian government, the Syrian government announced late last month that it had increased the heating oil allowance for public workers.

    www.guardian.co.uk, 3 February 2011