SACW - 7 Jan 2014 | Bangladesh: polls and crisis/ Pakistan-India: The hiccups continue / Pakistan: IJT's campus goons / India: Modi's intimidation of activists; Khobragade Circus / Dark side to Qatar’s World Cup / I’m Lebanese. My sons aren’t / Hazards of Revolution

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 7 January 2014 - No. 2804 
[year 16]
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Contents:

1. Pakistan - India: The hiccups continue | A. G. Noorani
2. Pakistan - India: Unlikely twins | Jawed Naqvi
3. Afghanistan: How Is Hamid Karzai Still Standing? | William Dalrymple
4. Pakistan: Islamist Goons at University of Punjab - Islami Jamiat e Taliba (IJT) Act As Morality Brigade
5. India: our political elites have little respect for human life | Teesta Setalvad
6. India - Gujarat: Intimidation by foisting false cases against Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand | statements by Sabrang and CJP
7. India: BJP unlikely to win 200-220 seats in 2014 elections | Praful Bidwai
8. India: From Nirma to NaMo | Jean Dreze
9. Video: Sheldon Pollock on Hindutva and the Life and Death of Sanskrit
10. India: Status Report on Condition of Persons living in Riot Relief Camps in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli Districts of Uttar Pradesh | PUDR
11. India: Independent inquiry into Muzaffarnagar ‘Riots': Mohan Rao, Ish Mishra, Pragya Singh, Vikas Bajpai
12. India: Open Letter on Sexuality Education to the Government of India, All Political Parties and All Citizens
13. Is a Resistance Coming? In India, a Spectre is Haunting Us All | John Pilger
14. India: Resources Against Fascism
15. India: फिलहाल / Filhal Issue 1 - October 1977 [SACW Archive]
16. Having a Servant Is Not a Right - Annaya Bhattacharya | The New York Times
17. India: Three Hundred Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation Workers Arrested-Detained by Modi's Police
18. India: The silence of Muzaffarnagar | Shiv Visvanathan
19. Dark side to Qatar’s World Cup : the institutionalized exploitation of workers from South Asia
20. Selected Posts from Communalism Watch:
 - India is now in the hands of religious opinionated nuts | Gautam Benegal
 - Bangladesh: Hindus under threat - panic as Jamaat-BNP-led post-polls terror strikes 
 - Subhashini Ali: On the communal turn of events in Muzaffarnagar, UP, India
 - Salil Tripathi's satirical take on the possible future political scenario in India
 - India: Village defense committees and religious polarization in Kashmir

Full text:
21. Bangladesh - elections: The morning after - Editorial in Dhaka Tribune
22. India: The problem with AAP's mohalla sabhas | Mani Shankar Aiyer
23. The Affair of Ms Devyani Khobragade: The US/India (Un)Diplomatic Farce | Brian Cloughley
24. The global spread of naturalisation: I’m Lebanese. My sons aren’t | Warda Mohamed
25. Hazards of Revolution | Patrick Cockburn

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1. PAKISTAN - INDIA: THE HICCUPS CONTINUE
by A G Noorani
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It would be tedious to draw up a list of brief intervals of relaxation in relations between India and Pakistan and proceed to pinpoint the causes that led to their discontinuance, followed immediately thereafter by the resumption of their cold war. That has been a constant feature in their relations.
http://sacw.net/article7158.html

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2. PAKISTAN - INDIA: UNLIKELY TWINS
by Jawed Naqvi
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The way Indians assiduously imitate Pakistan, I get nightmares of Indian pilots blowing the conch shell in a religious ritual for the take-off. I have no idea who hijacked the plane’s loudhailers in Pakistan to offer recitation of religious verses on its commercial flights and why. Has that deterred air pockets and late arrivals?
http://www.sacw.net/article7184.html

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3. AFGHANISTAN: HOW IS HAMID KARZAI STILL STANDING? | William Dalrymple
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The Karzai family graveyard lies a few miles outside Kandahar, on the edge of the village of Karz. On the day I drove there, burned-out cars stood rusting by the sides of the road, children splashed through open drains and bullet holes riddled the mud walls opposite checkpoints. Amid all this, the graveyard stood out — gleaming, immaculate. Straggling bougainvillea and mulberry trees
http://sacw.net/article7170.html

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4. PAKISTAN: ISLAMIST GOONS AT UNIVERSITY OF PUNJAB - ISLAMI JAMIAT E TALIBA (IJT) ACT AS MORALITY BRIGADE (Compiled media reports)
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LAHORE: Activists of Islami Jamiat e Taliba (IJT) on Friday demonstrated yet another display of barbarism and influence at the University of Punjab when they beat a male student for sitting next to his female classmate in Vice Chancellor Office Lawn.
http://www.sacw.net/article7183.html

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5. INDIA: OUR POLITICAL ELITES HAVE LITTLE RESPECT FOR HUMAN LIFE
by Teesta Setalvad
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Modi’s statement that ‘relief camps are baby-making factories’ has become iconic of state abdication and cruelty. Uttar Pradesh chief secretary’s claim that “no one dies of cold; go check Siberia” has joined this cruel iconography.
http://www.sacw.net/article7178.html

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6. INDIA - GUJARAT: INTIMIDATION BY FOISTING FALSE CASES AGAINST TEESTA SETALVAD AND JAVED ANAND | statements by Sabrang and CJP
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In the latest round of vindictive actions against human rights defender Teesta Setalvad secretary of Citizen's for Justice and Peace the Gujarat police Crime Branch has registered a false FIR on malicious grounds of cheating etc. Javed Anand also a human rights defender has also been roped in as a co-accused in this malicious and motivated case.
http://sacw.net/article7161.html

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7. INDIA: BJP UNLIKELY TO WIN 200-220 SEATS IN 2014 ELECTIONS
by Praful Bidwai
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. . . two things are clear. Mr Modi's feigned “hurt” at the anti-Muslim pogrom convinces nobody; and his exoneration by a Gujarat court lacks credibility and legitimacy. Second, AAP's entry has introduced a new variable and enlarged the shadow of uncertainty over the BJP's “target” of reaching the 272-seat halfway-mark on its own by fielding Mr Modi.
http://sacw.net/article7160.html

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8. INDIA: FROM NIRMA TO NAMO
by Jean Dreze
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It is interesting how media reports of Narendra Modi's rallies differ from the real thing. To see the difference for myself, I attended Narendra Modi's recent rally in Ranchi.
http://sacw.net/article7108.html

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9. VIDEO: SHELDON POLLOCK ON HINDUTVA AND THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SANSKRIT
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A two part A Tehelka TV recording. Sheldon Pollock is a scholar of Sanskrit and Indian intellectual history at the University of Columbia in conversation with Pragya Tiwari.
http://sacw.net/article7157.html

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10. INDIA: STATUS REPORT ON CONDITION OF PERSONS LIVING IN RIOT RELIEF CAMPS IN MUZAFFARNAGAR AND SHAMLI DISTRICTS OF UTTAR PRADESH | PUDR
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A five member fact finding team of Peoples Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) visited the relief camps last week, between 28th and 30th December 2013, to get a firsthand account of the condition and problems faced by people living in these camps. The team visited a total of 8 camps in the districts of Shamli and Muzaffarnagar and met people from over 60 villages.
http://www.sacw.net/article7172.html

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11. INDIA: INDEPENDENT INQUIRY INTO MUZAFFARNAGAR ‘RIOTS': MOHAN RAO, ISH MISHRA, PRAGYA SINGH, VIKAS BAJPAI
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A team of independent academics and a journalist carried out an inquiry into the communal violence that shook Muzaffarnagar district in UP this past September. The report is based on the findings of the team during its visit to Muzaffarnagar district on the 9th and the 10th of November and again on the 27th November. The members of the team were:
Dr. Mohan Rao, Faculty, Centre
http://sacw.net/article7152.html

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12. INDIA: OPEN LETTER ON SEXUALITY EDUCATION TO THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA, ALL POLITICAL PARTIES AND ALL CITIZENS
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WE DEMAND the urgent revision of the AEP (Adolescent Education Programme) curriculum on sexuality education for all children to be reflective of the “best interests of the child” rather than proscribing narrow notions of morality, culture and tradition. This would be the first step in creating a comprehensive sexuality education that is gender-sensitive, age-specific and free from negative value judgements which is essential to help young people lead lives free of fear, disease and violence; and to enjoy physical and mental health and wellbeing.
http://sacw.net/article7153.html

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13. IS A RESISTANCE COMING? IN INDIA, A SPECTRE IS HAUNTING US ALL 
by John Pilger
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It is Children's Day in India. On page nine of the Times of India, a study reports that every second child is malnourished. Nearly two million children under the age of five die every year from preventable illness as common as diarrhoea. Of those who survive, half are stunted due to a lack of nutrients. The national school dropout rate is 40 per cent. Statistics like these flow like a river permanently in flood. No other country comes close.
http://sacw.net/article7147.html

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14. INDIA: RESOURCES AGAINST FASCISM
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URLs to select articles, books, Films, Websites, Posters etc on fascism in India are listed here
http://sacw.net/article7143.html

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15. FILHAL ISSUE 1 - OCTOBER 1977
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First issue of 'Filhal' a workers periodical in Hindi published from Delhi in the late seventies. It has articles by Arvind Narayan Das, Dilip [Simeon], Shobha [Sadgopan] and Pratap Singh.
http://sacw.net/article7142.html

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16. HAVING A SERVANT IS NOT A RIGHT - ANNAYA BHATTACHARYA | THE NEW YORK TIMES
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At the heart of the fracas surrounding the arrest of an Indian diplomat in New York who promised to pay her housekeeper $9.75 per hour, in compliance with United States labor rules, but instead paid her $3.31 per hour, is India's dirty secret: One segment of the Indian population routinely exploits another, and the country's labor laws allow gross mistreatment of domestic workers.
http://sacw.net/article7112.html

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17. INDIA: THREE HUNDRED AHMEDABAD MUNICIPAL CORPORATION WORKERS ARRESTED-DETAINED BY MODI'S POLICE
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Three hundred sweepers of Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation were arrested and detained by Gujarat Police to scuttle their legitimate agitation for the demand of higher wages and permanency in employment. The workers who were on a indefinite strike since 31st December, 2013, under the banner of Gujarat Mazdoor Sabha
http://sacw.net/article7133.html

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18. INDIA: THE SILENCE OF MUZAFFARNAGAR | SHIV VISVANATHAN
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From Partition to Muzaffarnagar, the history of riots has been a celebration of rape. Muzaffarnagar sounds like it's a part of the UP badlands, while pundits hair-split words like responsibility and secularism.
If you were to ask most citizens what the most exciting event of the year was, most would talk excitedly about the rule of the Aam Aadmi Party. If you were to detain them a bit further and ask what event (...) 
http://sacw.net/article7102.html

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19. DARK SIDE TO QATAR’S WORLD CUP : THE INSTITUTIONALIZED EXPLOITATION OF WORKERS FROM SOUTH ASIA
The facilities under construction are, in many cases, being built by workers who are virtual slaves. Of Qatar’s two million inhabitants, only 225,000 are nationals; the rest are migrant workers, mostly from Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan, brought in to do manual labor. There have been widespread reports that thousands of workers are being abused and hundreds have quietly perished.
http://www.sacw.net/article7185.html

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20.. SELECTED POSTS FROM COMMUNALISM WATCH:
=========================================
- India is now in the hands of religious opinionated nuts | Gautam Benegal
http://communalism.blogspot.in/2014/01/india-is-now-in-hands-of-religious.html
- Bangladesh: Hindus under threat - Hundreds leave home in panic as Jamaat-BNP-led post-polls terror strikes 
http://communalism.blogspot.in/2014/01/bangladesh-hindus-under-threat-hundreds.html
- Subhashini Ali: On the communal turn of events in Muzaffarnagar, UP, India
http://communalism.blogspot.in/2014/01/subhashini-ali-on-communal-turn-of.html
Salil Tripathi's satirical take on the possible future political scenario in India
http://communalism.blogspot.in/2014/01/salil-tripathis-satirical-take-on.html
India: How village defense committees in the name of counterinsurgency, has ensured the religious polarization in Kashmir
http://communalism.blogspot.in/2014/01/india-how-village-defense-committees-in.html

FULL TEXT
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21. BANGLADESH - ELECTIONS: THE MORNING AFTER - EDITORIAL IN DHAKA TRIBUNE
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(January 6, 2014)
We must now turn our attention back to resolving the political crisis that remains. Let us move forward and not back

The 10th parliamentary elections have been concluded. They were not ideal, but they could have been worse, and we can all breathe a sigh of relief that the nation has come through the process relatively unscathed.

The violence that marked the election was unprecedented and abhorrent, but not as bad as had been feared might occur, and for the most part people were able to vote without hindrance.

Similarly, the strong-arm tactics employed by the ruling party in certain constituencies was deplorable and unacceptable, but these were not as widespread as might have been feared, and we can hope that the results are a fair approximation of the true vote count.

In short, we have got through January 5 without catastrophe, and, in these anxiety-ridden times, that must be counted as a good thing. A constitutional crisis has been averted, and we must now turn our attention back to resolving the political crisis that remains.

Let us move forward and not back. The elections have happened and there is nothing to be gained by relitigating the rights and the wrongs of the decision to hold them on January 5. Nor is there anything to be gained by endlessly bickering over the path that brought us here.

What is important now is for the two sides to sit down together as soon as possible and work in good faith to bring about an election that is acceptable to the Bangladeshi people and that is their democratic right.

The January 5 elections have provided a modality for the resolution of the political impasse. Let us use it to do just that. The general public expects and deserves nothing less.
- See more at: http://www.dhakatribune.com/editorial/2014/jan/06/morning-after

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22. INDIA: THE PROBLEM WITH AAP'S MOHALLA SABHAS
by Mani Shankar Aiyer
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(ndtv.com - January 05, 2014)
Stanley Baldwin, the 1930s British Prime Minister, infamously said of the UK press that they exercised "power without responsibility, the privilege of the harlot down the ages". The Aam Admi Party's mohalla sabhas are in danger of going down that path.

Don't get me wrong. I am all in favour of mohalla sabhas and entirely at one with the AAP in holding that the single biggest lacuna in our 66-year old democracy has been the failure to move from representative to participatory democracy. However, the idea is far from new. Back in 1931, when Gandhiji was asked what his "dream" was for independent India, he replied, "I shall work for" - note, not "dream for" - "an India in which the poorest will feel it is his nation" - emphasis added to draw attention to ownership as the key to empowerment - "in the making of which he has an effective voice" (emphasis again added to rub in the importance of "ownership" and "voice" as the necessary precursor of effectively controlling one's own destiny).

The overwhelming tragedy of Indian democracy has been that the ordinary people, the aam admi, do not believe themselves to have any ownership of the political process other their once-in-five years vote, and to be totally deprived of a voice, let alone an effective voice, in the running of affairs that impinge most directly on their everyday lives.

Recognizing this a quarter century ago, Rajiv Gandhi sought the transition from representative to participatory democracy as the centre-piece of the 73rd and 74th amendments that brought grassroots democracy as a Constitutional right to our villages and mohallas by founding the revolutionary new system of inclusive governance for inclusive development in Gram sabhas in rural India and "Ward sabhas" in urban India to whom the elected representative local authorities would be both responsive and responsible.

The AAP's mohallas sabhas are, however, Constitutionally, legally and technically flawed. The AAP's mohalla sabhas are a mob who have not elected their ward councillor or even their MLA. Who are they going to hold to account? It is all very well to pose a very broad question to the AAP's own supporters at mohalla level - such as whether or not to form a government in NCT Delhi with Congress support - and hold a kind of referendum in which the candidate, regulator and decision-maker are one and the same, namely, the AAP. But the minute real questions of governance arise, who is going to appear in the dock before the mohalla sabha? The ward councillor? But most ward councillors do not belong to the AAP. Indeed, as of today, none of the ward councillors belongs to the AAP - principally because there was no AAP when the last municipal elections were held!

Then, if not the ward councilor, the MLA? Does the NCT Delhi legislation endow MLAs (of the AAP or other parties) - all of whom have only legislative powers - to exercise the executive powers required to substantively redress public grievances? Will the AAP minster present himself in person before 2000 mohallas? And even if he does, does the legislation allow the NCT government to encroach on the authority devolved by law to the municipal authority?

Moreover, as no Municipal Councillor is of the AAP, and all NCT Delhi ministers are, who is going to carry the can of redressal? Why on earth should the councillor surrender his legal authority under the Constitutionally-sanctioned Municipalities legislation to a minister who, by law, has no jurisdiction in the realm of NCT Delhi's four municipal councils? Also, why would a municipal official listen to an AAP minister who has no authority over the official even as objections rain in from the Councillor who does? Whom would the Municipal Commissioner be reporting to? The BJP head of the Municipality, as required by law, or the AAP minister whom the law has not entitled to hold responsibility?

None of this is insuperable. They can all be solved. But for such a solution to be found, Arvind Kejriwal and his cohorts would have to get off their oratorical high horse and get down to the nitty-gritty. The papers say Digvijaya Singh's Secretary, Panchayat Raj, when he was Chief Minister Madhya Pradesh, is being drafted by the AAP to help them move from romantic notions of mohalla raj to real grass-root governance. I wish them luck, but make bold to suggest that they look at the five-volume, 1500-page report submitted last April by an Expert Committee I had the honour to chair. I would be delighted to present the Aam Admi Party a copy - if they would have the humility to accept that they do not have all the answers.

(Mani Shankar Aiyer is a Congress MP in the Rajya Sabha)

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23. THE AFFAIR OF MS DEVYANI KHOBRAGADE: THE US/INDIA (UN)DIPLOMATIC FARCE
by Brian Cloughley
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(counterpunch.org - Weekend Edition January 3-5, 2014)
The current argument between India and America about diplomatic immunity is intriguing and it will be interesting to see how it ends.  There might possibly have been improper prosecution in New York of an Indian consular official, Ms Devyani Khobragade, for an alleged misdemeanor.  Or the allegations could be correct and her brief detention and charge of criminality could be totally justified. But the outcome will depend on who wins the present undiplomatic quarrel about her protection from prosecution on the grounds — so India claims — that she is a full-fledged diplomat and not just a consular official.

There are major status and legal differences between diplomats and consular people, but US policy on diplomatic protection has been known to alter a bit, according to circumstances.

It’s only two years since the CIA’s cowboy Raymond Davis killed two Pakistani citizens in the city of Lahore by shooting them in the back and whose claim to diplomatic immunity was upheld by President Obama.  Davis was masquerading as a consular official, but Obama declared that “We’ve got a very simple principle here that every country in the world that is party to the Vienna Convention on diplomatic relations has upheld in the past and should uphold in the future, and that is, if our diplomats are in another country, then they are not subject to that country’s local prosecution.”  Davis was no more a diplomat than Mickey Mouse.  He was a trigger-happy Cowboy Intelligence Agency amateur spook who got away with murder because Washington arranged for payment of blood money to the victims’ families.  After he killed the two young men he sent a message for rescue and a group of fellow spooks promptly barreled the wrong way along a road in an armored Land Cruiser and hit and killed a motor-cyclist and were promptly spirited out of the country in a US military aircraft to Afghanistan then back to the States.  Obama didn’t say anything about them being diplomats, of course, and the whole thing was a tragic farce.

And six months after Davis got home he was arrested for having beaten up a man in a carpark and pleaded guilty in exchange for a two year suspended sentence and a court order to attend anger management classes.  You couldn’t make it up.  But it’s unfortunate he didn’t attend such instruction before he was sent to Pakistan.

Obama’s contention that diplomats should not be subject to a host country’s prosecution is correct.  All diplomats are so exempt, no matter how appallingly they might behave, so the question seems to be definition of just who is a diplomat and who is not a diplomat, and the obvious indication of such status is that the person concerned has a diplomatic passport.  Davis didn’t.  Nor did the bunch of US hoods who killed the motor-cyclist.  And nor did Ms Devyani Khobragade who the Indian press continue to refer to as “a senior Indian diplomat”.

The Vienna Convention is precise about treatment of diplomats in that they “shall not be liable to any form of arrest or detention,” and defines a diplomat as “the head of the mission or a member of the diplomatic staff of the mission.”  Did Ms Devyani Khobragade (let’s call her ‘Ms DK’ for the sake of brevity) meet that criterion?  Of course not :  because Ms DK, like Mr Davis, was designated a consular official.  No diplomats, they (as the old Time magazine might have had it).

The Convention on consular relations “guarantees immunity from the host country’s laws only with respect to acts related to consular duties.”  But Ms DK was arrested on December 12 on a charge of falsifying documents concerning the visa application of an imported Indian domestic servant. The conditions of her detention were grim, but no more bizarre, brutal and unnecessary than those suffered by a US citizen detained on suspicion of wrongdoing.

In fact she was spared the humiliation of being handcuffed (unlike the grubby former head of the International Monetary Fund, Mr Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK), after he was arrested in New York on a sex charge and whose claim to diplomatic immunity was dismissed), but she was subjected to a strip search and disregard of any thought that the person being charged might be fragile in body or mind.  It’s a nasty experience, because if you are thought to have stepped out of line in America there’s no compassion ;  and Ms DK went through the works.  And then India went to work, and that was terrible, too.  Because the usually mature, dignified and sensible Republic of India behaved in an inexplicable fashion, lowering itself to absurdity in preposterous retaliation.

The charge against Ms DK was that in order to get an A-3 visa for a personal employee, which required attestation that the named person would receive a fair wage,  she claimed in the application for her servant that that she would pay her $4,500 a month but did not pay her that amount, and had therefore made a false declaration.  (Ms DK’s own salary is $4,200 a month.)

Her arrest and release on bail were entirely in accordance with American law.  But then in a series of immature hissy-fits the Government of India went berserk in frenzied over-reaction, closely followed by the media and, of course, lots of other politicians.

The Washington Post reported that “India revoked the identity cards of US consular personnel and their families, rescinded airport passes, froze embassy imports of liquor and other goods, and began investigating salaries paid to Indian staff members at US consulates, as well as those teaching at US schools in the country.”  Not only that, but protective barricades outside the US embassy in Delhi were removed.  (There are photographs of this in international media.)  Most actions taken to make things difficult for US officials were merely childish — pathetic playground stuff — but for a host government to permit removal of physical security protection from an embassy of any country is disgraceful to the point of criminal irresponsibility.  The claim that they were removed because they were surplus to requirements — quite coincidentally and all of a sudden, when the Ms DK affair blew up — is as pitiful as it is patronizing.

Then the Speaker of India’s parliament refused to meet a visiting US Congress delegation and the likely next prime minister, Narendra Modi, tweeted that he “refused to meet the visiting USA delegation in solidarity with our nation, protesting ill-treatment meted to our lady diplomat in USA.” One newspaper reported that  “there is also a suspicion that [the maid] might have been passing on vital information to the US,” but that particular piece of idiocy didn’t gain traction.

Then — surprise, surprise! — on 26 December, India’s Ministry of External Affairs came up with the revelation that Ms DK had all along been “accredited” to the Permanent Mission of India to the UN, located in New York and therefore had enjoyed full diplomatic immunity with effect from August 26, 2013.  How amazing that this was discovered only two weeks after her arrest.

The affair has plunged into the gutters of bizarre fantasy and farce.  India as a nation has made a fool of itself and it seems that its politicians and officials, aided by a ferociously xenophobic media, will continue to make futile efforts to defend the indefensible.

One splendid irony in this absurd circus is that the New York prosecutor involved in the DK case, Mr Preet Bharara, was born in Ferozepur in India.  He is a highly intelligent and dedicated public servant who successfully initiated many cases against Wall Street insider traders and others involved in “quite substantial criminality and corruption.”  He’s doing a great job in New York, although maybe he’s needed more in New Delhi, where he could inject some much-needed maturity.  But he would need to be sure of immunity before he ever dared to try to set foot in the place.

Brian Cloughley’s website is www.beecluff.com

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24. THE GLOBAL SPREAD OF NATURALISATION: I’M LEBANESE. MY SONS AREN’T
by Warda Mohamed
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(Le Monde Diplomatique, January 2014)
The patriarchal biases in many Islamic countries have long denied women married to foreigners the right to pass on their nationality to their children. There has been slow improvement in some countries, but a campaign for change continues.
by Warda Mohamed

“Guillaume is French. I met him in 1996 when he was doing his civilian service [an alternative to military service] and studying in Lebanon. We’ve been together ever since,” said Lina (1). But their relationship had complications: “I was Muslim and he was Christian, so we couldn’t get married here [in Lebanon] as civil marriage doesn’t exist. So I married him in Cyprus in 2000.” The couple informed the Lebanese and French authorities in Beirut about their marriage. Lina, 40, who is an architect, was granted French citizenship a year later, but they decided to stay on in Lebanon. Guillaume, 45, an estate agent, likes it there, even if bureaucratic restrictions get them down: he has to reapply for a residence permit every year. “All these processes are hard. It makes me feel ill.”

When their first child was born in 2004, Lina discovered that “my son, who was born in Lebanon to a Lebanese mother, needed a residence permit as though he were a foreigner.” Lebanon refuses to let mothers pass on their nationality to their children: so do Kuwait, Qatar, Syria, Oman, Sudan and Somalia. The only exception is if the father’s identity is unknown.

Lina and Guillaume now have two boys and their older son asks: “What am I? Why don’t I have a Lebanese passport?” Lina feels it’s unfair to tell him he is Lebanese “but not as Lebanese as other people.” Guillaume feels frustrated for his sons, who are not entitled to attend state school or use the health system, and will be unable to own property, set up a business or enter certain professions. This non-status will also apply to any children his sons may have.

Zeynab in the documentary All for the Nation (Carol Mansour, 2011) does not even have identity papers. She was born and raised in Lebanon, but her Egyptian father died before he could register her in Egypt. She does not officially exist in the eyes of the Lebanese state. Because Zeynab’s mother had to put her children in an orphanage, they were deprived of citizenship, rights, free education and everything else.

In the film, Adel, an Egyptian lawyer married to a Lebanese woman with whom he has two sons, tells the story of his expulsion from Lebanon. He mentions the money that Lebanon makes out of residence permit applications: though free for Guillaume (from the EU), they were not for Adel. Residency may sometimes be refused, in which case husbands and fathers are forced to leave within days.
Discrimination targets women

In the 22 member countries of the Arab League (2), citizenship issues include transmission through parents or marriage, naturalisation, dual nationality, changing nationality, and the rights of soil and blood (see Citizens by choice). Women suffer more legal discrimination than men. Although all Arab nations ratified the Convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women of 1981, most excluded certain articles, notably those on policy measures, and how nationality is passed on to children.

So organisations are still campaigning for equal rights. A man can pass on his nationality to his foreign wife and children, wherever they were born. Foreign women who marry Arabs have more rights than local women who marry non-nationals, and are subject to fewer restrictions.

Adnan Khalil, born and raised in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, met his American wife Susie in 1977 at Arizona University. They married in 1989 and had a son, Adam, who got automatic Saudi citizenship, even though he was born in the US and had never lived in Saudi Arabia. Thirty years after they met, the Khalils moved to Jeddah. Susie was entitled to apply for nationality but did not do so immediately: “The advantages it offers are things I can live without. My situation isn’t as sensitive as that of Saudi women married to non-Saudis.” She knows she is lucky, but wonders what would become of her if something happened to her husband.

After long negotiations and transnational campaigns, some legislation has changed. Because of the “My Nationality” campaign, Lebanese residence permits are now renewable every three years rather than annually, and in March 2012 the Lebanese cabinet put the nationality question on the agenda for the first time. Since 2005 and 2006 respectively, non-nationals married to Algerian and Iraqi women can acquire citizenship, as can their children. It has been possible to acquire the mother’s nationality in Morocco and Egypt since 2008, a right confirmed in the new Egyptian constitution drafted post-Morsi, which is due to be put to a referendum this month. The same has been true in Tunisia and Libya since 2010, though sometimes with conditions, such as the husband being Muslim.
Morocco’s equality spring

Amina Lotfi, acting president of the Democratic Association of Moroccan Women, described the “long process that began 20 years ago”, linked to wider reforms in justice and work, but especially to the revision of the family code (moudawana) (3). A memorandum was presented to the royal commission set up to revise the code, and from 2001 there were consultations and a large-scale campaign. Lotfi said: “Faced with conservative organisations closing ranks, our groups formed a coalition. We created an equality spring in 2002, so our spring came before the Arab one.” In 2004 there was a new family code and in 2007 the government finally revised nationality laws dating from 1958. The campaign had taken seven years.

This reform of Moroccan law changed the life of Amina, 51, a Moroccan married to a Tunisian since 2002. Their daughter, now 10, has had severe health problems since birth and has had several major operations: “We had to pay the hospital bills because she only had Tunisian nationality.” Amina worked at cleaning jobs to cover the costs, which were substantial for a poor couple on the point of splitting up. It took the court two months to deal with her case and citizenship was granted. “We’re still poor and my daughter is still ill, but at least she is also Moroccan now, so she has rights.” Women often condemn the slow speed with which the authorities process their requests, however.

Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, Mauritania and the Comoros have all modified their legislation. Since 2011 women in a mixed marriage in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have been able to pass on their nationality to their children, a first in the Gulf countries. These children must submit an application when they reach 18; the same applies in Saudi Arabia, though its system is less flexible than in the UAE. In principle, these children have the same rights from birth as other children in the UAE, but the law is not always respected. Nor are mothers always aware of the change, so the campaigning goes on.

“Problems associated with acquiring citizenship have caused the greatest mobilisations of recent years, because they affect families’ daily lives: the position of the authorities makes discrimination very tangible,” said Claire Beaugrand, a Gulf states analyst at the International Crisis Group. “The consequences of amending the legislation vary. Revising the rules governing how citizenship is passed on brings potential change in the make-up of the population. In Lebanon, where the issue is especially sensitive, worries stem from a fear of Palestinians being assimilated into the population through marriage ... especially in the Gulf, championing a restrictive form of nationality — sticking to your own kind culturally and ethnically — is a way of legitimating power. This translates into encouragement to marry fellow nationals, and that goes for men too. The threat is ultimately a political one.”

The Qur’an and other core Islamic texts are silent on citizenship: “Bringing religious precepts into it is misplaced, but it’s a very powerful inertia factor. It’s not a matter of condemning the pretext as false or incoherent so much as understanding why it strikes such a chord,” said Beaugrand. “In the Arab world, codes of personal status are religiously inspired. Questioning the system of patriarchal domination is often very hard, especially when it is male-dominated assemblies that make the laws.”

Major changes have come about because of colonisation and shifting borders, wars, then decolonisation and the fragile balance of societies in conflict over religion (Lebanon) or ethnicity (Sudan). Several countries justify their restrictive laws by arguing that offering citizenship to Palestinians would destroy Palestinians’ identity and harm their right of return and the creation of their state. But according to statistics, only 6% of Lebanese women married to foreigners have Palestinian husbands.

Will the Arab Spring have consequences for nationality? “My husband gave up a life in France for me. Granting him citizenship would be a very small thing,” said Lina. She discovered she would have to pay for her second son to have right of entry into Lebanon when she went to request his free residence permit. “My child was born here, my Lebanese blood flows in his veins, he came from my Lebanese body. Isn’t that Lebanese enough?” she asked the civil servant. “He’s a foreigner,” he replied. “He has to pay.”

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25. HAZARDS OF REVOLUTION
by Patrick Cockburn
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(London Review of Books, Vol. 36 No. 1 · 9 January 2014 | pages 25-27)

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Soon after the Libyan capital fell to the rebels in August 2011 I got to know a 32-year-old man called Ahmed Abdullah al-Ghadamsi. We met when he tried to evict me from my hotel room, which he said was needed for members of the National Transitional Council, in effect the provisional government of Libya. I wasn’t happy about being moved because the hotel, the Radisson Blu on Tripoli’s seafront, was full of journalists and there was nowhere else to stay. But Ahmed promised to find me another room, and he was as good as his word.

He was lending a hand to the provisional government, he said, because he was strongly opposed to Gaddafi – as was the rest of his family. He came from the Fornaj district of the city, and was contemptuous of the efforts of government spies to penetrate its network of extended families. He derided Gaddafi’s absurd personality cult and his fear of subversive ideas: ‘Books used to be more difficult to bring into the country than weapons. You had to leave them at the airport for two or three months so they could be checked.’ He had spent six years studying in Norway and spoke Norwegian as well as English; on returning to Libya he got a job on the staff of the Radisson Blu. One of Gaddafi’s sons, Al-Saadi, had a suite in the hotel, and he watched the ruling family and their friends doing business and enjoying themselves.

Ahmed was a self-confident man, not noticeably intimidated by the sporadic shooting which was keeping most people in Tripoli off the streets. I asked him if he would consider working for me as a guide and assistant and he agreed. Tripoli had run out of petrol but he quickly found some, along with a car and driver willing to risk the rebel checkpoints. He was adept at talking to the militiamen manning the barricades, and helped me get out of the city when the roads were blocked. After a few weeks I left Libya; I later heard that he was working for other journalists. Then in October I got a message saying that he was dead, shot through the head by a pro-Gaddafi sniper in the final round of fighting in Sirte on the coast far to the east of Tripoli. It turned out that there was a lot that Ahmed hadn’t told me.

When the protests started in Benghazi on 15 February he had been among the first to demonstrate in Fornaj, and he was arrested. His younger brother Mohammed told me that ‘he was jailed for two hours or less before his friends and the protesters broke into the police station and freed him.’ When Gaddafi’s forces regained control of Tripoli, Ahmed drove to the Nafusa Mountains a hundred miles south-west of the capital to try to join the rebels there, but they didn’t know or trust him so he had to return. He smuggled weapons and gelignite into Tripoli and became involved in a plot, never put into action, to blow up Al-Saadi Gaddafi’s suite in the Radisson. Mohammed said Ahmed felt bad that he’d spent much of the revolution making money and, despite his best efforts, had never actually fought. He went to Sirte, where Gaddafi’s forces were making a last stand, and joined a militia group from Misrata. He had no military experience, as far as I know, but he didn’t flinch during bombardments and was stoical when he was caught in an ambush and wounded by shrapnel from a mortar bomb, and the militiamen were impressed. On 8 October his commander told Ahmed to take a squad of five or six men to hunt for snipers who had killed a number of rebel fighters. He was shot dead by one of them a few hours later.

What would Ahmed think of the Libyan revolution now? An interim government is nominally in control but the streets of Tripoli and Benghazi have been full of militia checkpoints manned by some of the 225,000 registered militiamen whose loyalty is to their commanders rather than the state that pays them. When demonstrators appeared outside the headquarters of the Misrata militia in Tripoli on 15 November demanding that they go home, the militiamen opened fire with everything from Kalashnikovs to anti-aircraft guns, killing 43 protesters and wounding some four hundred others. This led to popular protests in which many militias were forced out of Tripoli, though it’s not clear whether this is permanent. Earlier the prime minister, Ali Zeidan, was kidnapped by militia gunmen without a shot being fired by his own guards to protect him. (He was released after a few hours.) Mutinying militias have closed the oil ports to exports and eastern Libya is threatening to secede. The Libyan state has collapsed, for the simple reason that the rebels were too weak to fill the vacuum left by the fall of the old regime. After all, it was Nato airstrikes, not rebel strength, that overthrew Gaddafi.

It’s a similar story elsewhere in the Middle East. The uprisings of the Arab Spring have so far produced anarchy in Libya, a civil war in Syria, greater autocracy in Bahrain and resumed dictatorial rule in Egypt. In Syria, the uprising began in March 2011 with demonstrations against the brutality of Assad’s regime. ‘Peace! Peace!’ protesters chanted. But ‘if there was a fair election in Syria today,’ one commentator said, ‘Assad would probably win it.’

It isn’t only the protesters and insurgents of 2011 whose aspirations are being frustrated or crushed. In March 2003 the majority of Iraqis from all sects and ethnic groups wanted to see the end of Saddam’s disastrous rule even if they didn’t necessarily support the US invasion. But the government now in power in Baghdad is as sectarian, corrupt and dysfunctional as Saddam’s ever was. There may be less state violence, but only because the state is weaker. Its methods are equally brutal: Iraqi prisons are full of people who have made false confessions under torture or the threat of it. An Iraqi intellectual who had planned to open a museum in Abu Ghraib prison so that Iraqis would never forget the barbarities of Saddam’s regime found that there was no space available because the cells were full of new inmates. Iraq is still an extraordinarily dangerous place. ‘I never imagined that ten years after the fall of Saddam you would still be able to get a man killed in Baghdad by paying $100,’ an Iraqi who’d been involved in the abortive museum project told me.

Why have oppositions in the Arab world and beyond failed so absolutely, and why have they repeated in power, or in pursuit of it, so many of the faults and crimes of the old regimes? The contrast between humanitarian principles expressed at the beginning of revolutions and the bloodbath at the end has many precedents, from the French Revolution on. But over the last twenty years in the Middle East, the Balkans and the Caucasus the rapid degradation of what started as mass uprisings has been particularly striking. I was in Moscow at the start of the second Russo-Chechen war in October 1999, and flew with a party of journalists to Chechnya to see the Chechen president, Aslan Maskhadov, in his headquarters in Grozny, where he was desperately trying – and failing – to avert the Russian assault by calling for a ceasefire. We were housed in a former barracks which seemed worryingly vulnerable to Russian air attack. But it soon became evident that the presidential guard’s greatest anxiety was that we would be abducted by Chechen kidnappers and held for ransom. The first Chechen revolt in 1994-96 was seen as a heroic popular struggle for independence. Three years later it had been succeeded by a movement that was highly sectarian, criminalised and dominated by warlords. The war became too dangerous to report and disappeared off the media map. ‘In the first Chechen war,’ one reporter told me, ‘I would have been fired by my agency if I had left Grozny. Now the risk of kidnapping is so great I would be fired for going there.’

The pattern set in Chechnya has been repeated elsewhere with depressing frequency. The extent of the failure of the uprisings of 2011 to establish better forms of governance has surprised opposition movements, their Western backers and what was once a highly sympathetic foreign media. The surprise is due, in part, to a misunderstanding of what the uprisings were about. Revolutions come into being because of an unpredictable coincidence of forces with different motives targeting a common enemy. The political, social and economic roots of the upsurges of 2011 go deep. That this wasn’t obvious to everyone at the time is partly a result of the way foreign commentators exaggerated the role of new information technology. Protesters, skilled in propaganda if nothing else, could see the advantage of presenting the uprisings to the West as unthreatening ‘velvet’ revolutions with English-speaking, well-educated bloggers and tweeters prominently in the vanguard. The purpose was to convey to Western publics that the new revolutionaries were comfortingly similar to themselves, that what was happening in the Middle East in 2011 was similar to the anti-communist and pro-Western uprisings in Eastern Europe after 1989.
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Opposition demands were all about personal freedom: social and economic inequality were rarely declared to be issues, even when they were driving popular rage against the status quo. The centre of Damascus had recently been taken over by smart shops and restaurants, but the mass of Syrians saw their salaries stagnating while prices rose: farmers ruined by four years of drought were moving into shanty towns on the outskirts of the cities; the UN said that between two and three million Syrians were living in ‘extreme poverty’; small manufacturing companies were put out of business by cheap imports from Turkey and China; economic liberalisation, lauded in foreign capitals, concentrated wealth in the hands of a politically well-connected few. Even members of the Mukhabarat, the secret police, were trying to survive on $200 a month. ‘When it first came to power, the Assad regime embodied the neglected countryside, its peasants and neglected underclass,’ an International Crisis Group report says. ‘Today’s ruling elite has forgotten its roots. It has inherited power rather than fought for it … and mimicked the ways of the urban upper class.’ The same was true of the quasi-monarchical families and their associates operating in parallel fashion in Egypt, Libya and Iraq. Confident of their police-state powers, they ignored the hardships of the rest of the population, especially the underemployed, overeducated and very numerous youth, few of whom felt that they had any chance of improving their lives.

The inability of new governments across the Middle East to end the violence can be ascribed to a simple-minded delusion that most problems would vanish once democracies had replaced the old police states. Opposition movements, persecuted at home and often living a hand to mouth existence in exile, half-believed this and it was easy to sell to foreign sponsors. A great disadvantage of this way of seeing things was that Saddam, Assad and Gaddafi were so demonised it became difficult to engineer anything approaching a compromise or a peaceful transition from the old to a new regime. In Iraq in 2003 former members of the Baath Party were sacked, thus impoverishing a large part of the population, which had no alternative but to fight. The Syrian opposition refuses to attend peace talks in Geneva if Assad is allowed to play a role, even though the areas of Syria under his control are home to most of the population. In Libya the militias insisted on an official ban on employing anyone who had worked for Gaddafi’s regime, even those who had ended their involvement thirty years before. These exclusion policies were partly a way of guaranteeing jobs for the boys. But they deepen sectarian, ethnic and tribal divisions and provide the ingredients for civil war.

What is the glue that is meant to hold these new post-revolutionary states together? Nationalism isn’t much in favour in the West, where it is seen as a mask for racism or militarism, supposedly outmoded in an era of globalisation and humanitarian intervention. But intervention in Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011 turned out to be very similar to imperial takeover in the 19th century. There was absurd talk of ‘nation-building’ to be carried out or assisted by foreign powers, who clearly have their own interests in mind just as Britain did when Lloyd George orchestrated the carve-up of the Ottoman Empire. A justification for the Arab leaders who seized power in the late 1960s was that they would create powerful states capable, finally, of giving reality to national independence. They didn’t wholly fail: Gaddafi played a crucial role in raising the price of oil in 1973 and Hafez al-Assad created a state that could hold its own in a protracted struggle with Israel for predominance in Lebanon. But to opponents of these regimes nationalism was simply a propaganda ploy on the part of ruthless dictatorships concerned to justify their hold on power. But without nationalism – even where the unity of the nation is something of a historic fiction – states lack an ideology that would enable them to compete as a focus of loyalty with religious sects or ethnic groups.

It’s easy enough to criticise the rebels and reformers in the Arab world for failing to resolve the dilemmas they faced in overturning the status quo. Their actions seem confused and ineffective when compared to the Cuban revolution or the liberation struggle in Vietnam. But the political terrain in which they have had to operate over the last twenty years has been particularly tricky. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 meant that the endorsement or tolerance of the US – and the US alone – was crucial for a successful takeover of power. Nasser was able to turn to Moscow to assert Egyptian independence in the Suez crisis of 1956, but after the Soviet collapse smaller states could no longer find a place for themselves between Moscow and Washington. Saddam said in 1990 that one of the reasons he invaded Kuwait when he did was that in future such a venture would no longer be feasible as Iraq would be faced with unopposed American power. In the event, he got his diplomatic calculations spectacularly wrong, but his forecast was otherwise realistic – at least until perceptions of American military might were downgraded by Washington’s failure to achieve its aims in Afghanistan as well as Iraq.

*

So the insurgencies in the Middle East face immense difficulties, and they have faltered, stalled, been thrown on the defensive or apparently defeated. But without the rest of the world noticing, one national revolution in the region is moving from success to success. In 1990 the Kurds, left without a state after the fall of the Ottomans, were living in their tens of millions as persecuted and divided minorities in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. Rebellion in Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88 failed disastrously, with at least 180,000 killed by poison gas or executed in the final days of the conflict. In Turkey, guerrilla action by the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), who combined Marxism-Leninism with Kurdish nationalism, began in 1974 but by the end of the 1990s it had been crushed by the Turkish army; Kurds were driven into the cities; and three thousand of their villages were destroyed. In north-east Syria, Arab settlers were moved onto Kurdish land and many Kurds denied citizenship; in Iran, the government kept a tight grip on its Kurdish provinces.

All this has now changed. In Iraq the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), though it shares power with the central government in Baghdad, is close to becoming an oil-rich independent state, militarily and diplomatically more powerful than many members of the UN. Until recently the Turks would impound any freight sent to the KRG if the word ‘Kurdistan’ appeared in the address, but in November the KRG president, Massoud Barzani, gave a speech in the Turkish Kurd capital of Dyarbakir and talked of ‘the brotherhood of Turks and Kurds’. Standing with him was the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who spoke of ‘Kurdistan’ as if he’d forgotten that a few years ago the name had been enough to land anyone who uttered it in a Turkish jail. In Syria meanwhile, the PKK’s local branch has taken control of much of the north-east corner of the country, where two and a half million Kurds live.

The rebellion in the Kurdish heartlands has been ongoing for nearly half a century. In Iraq the two main Kurdish parties, Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party and Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, were expert at manipulating foreign intelligence services – Iranian, Syrian, American and Turkish – without becoming their permanent puppets. They built up a cadre of well-educated and politically sophisticated leaders and established alliances with non-Kurdish opposition groups. They were lucky that their worst defeat was followed by Saddam’s self-destructive invasion of Kuwait, which enabled them to take control of an enclave protected by US airpower in 1991. At this point, despite having gained more independence than any previous Kurdish movement, the KDP and PUK embarked on a vicious civil war with the Iraqi state. But then they had another stroke of luck when 9/11 provided the US with the excuse to invade and overthrow Saddam. The Kurdish leaders positioned themselves carefully between the US and Iran without becoming dependent on either.

It isn’t yet clear how the bid of thirty million Kurds for some form of national self-determination will play out, but they have become too powerful to be easily suppressed. Their success has lessons for the movements of the Arab Spring, whose failure isn’t as inevitable as it may seem. The political, social and economic forces that led to the ruptures of 2011 are as powerful as ever. Had the Arab opposition movements played their cards as skilfully as the Kurds, the uprisings might not have foundered as they have done.

None of the religious parties that took power, whether in Iraq in 2005 or Egypt in 2012, has been able to consolidate its authority. Rebels everywhere look for support to the foreign enemies of the state they are trying to overthrow, but the Kurds are better at this than anyone else, having learned the lesson of 1975, when Iran betrayed them to Saddam by signing the Algiers Agreement, cutting off their supply of arms. The Syrian opposition, by contrast, can only reflect the policies and divisions of its sponsors. Resistance to the state was too rapidly militarised for opposition movements to develop an experienced national leadership and a political programme. The discrediting of nationalism and communism, combined with the need to say what the US wanted to hear, meant that they were at the mercy of events, lacking any vision of a non-authoritarian nation state capable of competing with the religious fanaticism of the Sunni militants of al-Qaida, and similar movements financed by the oil states of the Gulf. But the Middle East is entering a long period of ferment in which counter-revolution may prove as difficult to consolidate as revolution.


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