Armies of Liberation

An article on Yemen in a major US paper. Either Tony Blankley got sick of me pestering him or the news department figured it out on their own, but either way its spot on.

This CSM article makes the valid point that most of the reformers in the Middle East don’t like US policies and want to distance themselves from the US generally. It highlights the probable continuing antagonism toward the US after democratization. The article fails to mention the long term positive effects of democracy that are in the US’s and the world’s interests: economic development, social growth, intellectual freedom, political stability, and international integration.

Kifaya has become the name of a movement and the buzzword of what some Western commentators are calling the “Arab Spring” – the rise of democratic expression around the region. In rallies from tiny Bahrain to Egypt, demonstrators are shouting kifaya to dictators, kifaya to corruptions, and kifaya to the silence of Arabs eager for change.

There’s no question that the freedom rhetoric of the US and President Bush has helped crack the door for political activism in the Middle East. A look behind the slogan, however, reveals a complex web of secular and Islamist activists who say they share Bush’s zeal for democracy, but expect real political change will lead to a repudiation of the US.——

In Bahrain last week, the largest protests in memory saw the country’s politically disenfranchised Shiite majority saying enough to pro-American King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa’s policies. And in Cairo Wednesday the chants included “Enough to Mubarak, Enough to Bush, Enough to Blair,” along with “We will not be ruled by the CIA” and “Down with the White House.”

It was a reminder that while the US has contributed to the shift in climate in the Middle East, a real democratic opening, in the short term at least, may not serve US interests. Most in the region appear angry at America’s close relationship with Israel and its invasion of Iraq, and say that statements prodding allies to reform haven’t overcome decades of support for Arab dictators.—–

But for Ms. Shabaan and most of her colleagues in the movement, “enough” doesn’t apply to President Mubarak alone. She expects a democratic Egypt would distance itself from the US, a long-time ally, and hit out at what she calls decades of “hypocritical” US policy in the Middle East.

“If things really change here, America’s illusions that its interests in the region would be advanced by democracy will be laid bare,” she says. “A real democratic government in Egypt would be strongly against the US occupation of Iraq and regional US policies, particularly over Palestine. We are strongly against US influence.”

Despite apparently genuine sentiment, Kifaya organizers say there’s also practical reasons to make the distance from the US clear. The government has tried to paint democracy activists as foreign puppets in the past, alleging they take foreign money. “The regime are the ones taking American money. But they always accuse us of having foreign money whenever there are calls for democracy,” says Shabaan.

Attitudes like Shabaan’s point to a frequently overlooked disconnect. America’s conviction that its rhetoric will help secure its interests in the region often clash with the anti-US leanings of many of the Arab world’s democracy activists, who generally belong either to Islamist parties or to left-leaning, anti-US groups. CSM

ah, the gloom and doom. If we can deal with France, we can deal with a democratic Middle East. At least they’re honest.

This NYT article reports the UNSC has approved a peacekeepingforce of 10,000 troops for the Sudan. But don’t get your hopes up yet. Of the 3600 African Union troops already approved for Darfur, only 2000 are in place after months. These new troops are going to the South and not Darfur. The AU troops in Darfur are not an extensively trained force and arrived with the tags still on their uniforms. Worst yet, their mandate is only to report on the atrocities there, not to intervene.

Council members disagree over placing sanctions on Sudan, an idea opposed by Algeria, China and Russia.

China and Russia have the oil interests in Sudan. Maybe the left can dust off their “no blood for oil” signs and get back out in the streets of Europe. Now there’s talk about trials and they call it justice. But still squabbling on which court.

The Bush administration, which revoked the Clinton administration’s signature on the treaty creating the Hague court, opposes it out of concern that it could bring politically motivated legal actions against Americans abroad.

You think?

In Darfur “ethnic cleansing” by government-supported Arab militias has made refugees of two million villagers and cost the lives of an estimated 300,000 people.

When I first started reporting this story over a year ago, there were only 70,000 dead and 1.2 million refugees. To review, the “Islamic” government in Khartoum has been and continues to bomb, rape, and starve its own citizens. The victims are Sufi African farmers. The Janaweed, militia on horseback, are Arab Sunni herders actively supported by the government. Kharoum methodically blocks and deters all assistance to the victims. The refugees are mostly women and children, and they are slowly dying in the desert without food, shelter, or medicine. Still.

Its official.

Our efforts in bringing the petition or the weight of our combined readership may have played some part in his release. We’ll never know exactly what happened but somehow he’s out.

I am not surprised by the way you all responded. Nor am I surprised that so many stood up so strongly for the Yemeni people and Mr. al-Khaiwani. It was a beautiful thing to watch unfold.

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present again with great pleasure
The Coalition of the Willing:

Dreams into Lightning….
American Warmonger…..History’s End…..
INDC Journal…..Joe Territo…..Winds of Change…..
The Queen of All Evil…..Free Thoughts, Italy…..Dynamobuzz….
David’s Medienkritik, Germany…..Fayrouz, Iraqi…..Jack of Clubs…..
The Jawa Report…..The Bad Hair Blog…..Beautiful Atrocities…..
Robert Spencer…..My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy…..Protein Wisdom…..
Deans’s World……Politburo Diktat…..Roger L. Simon…..
The Hatemongers Quarterly…..Six Meat Buffet…..Middle East Transparent, France…..
Arthur Chrenkoff, Australia…..Day by Day Cartoon…..Michael Ledeen…..
Solomonia…..Habibee…..Ace…..
Michelle Malkin…..Tim Worstall, UK…..Diggers Realm…..
In Search of Utopia…..PseudoMagazine…..Bloggledygook…..
MythusmageOpines……Radio Cyborg…..DaouReport…..
Blogger News Network…..The Moderate Voice…..Or does it explode?…..
Little Miss Attila…..The Red Hunter…..Crack The Bell…..
Rumcrook’s Tavern…..Rambling’s Journal…..Kitkat…..
Q and O….. Ny Newz n’ Ideas…..Young Pundits…..
Editors in Pajamas…..Eternity Road…..The Dusty Attic…..
Memento Moron…..Americans for Freedom…..Tim Blair, Australia…..
The Third World View…..Demosophia…..Instapundit…..
Isaac Schrodinger…..Publis Pundit…..The Rajun Cajun…..
Lagomorphic Tendencies…..Blogs About Hosting….
and of course, the one, the only, The Cranky Neocon

Good Job People. Thank You. Rock On. Air guitars for everybody.

I have been so distraught that its possible I am now hallucinating but I got a message today that President Saleh ordered Mr. al-Khaiwani to be released. Yesterday the appeal upheld the prison sentence. Today the President ordered him set free. I thank every member of the coalition. Without the help of every single one of you, big bloggers and small bloggers alike, this effort could not have been sucessful. I am very glad President Saleh has taken upon himself to correct this injustice. The dude’s going home.

Oh yes and as my blog brothers Rusty, Gordon, and Asher have noticed, yesterday was my one year blogaversary. Now I can celebrate. Now I like blogging again. Its party time.

Update: He’s in the process of being released. This is such good news, I feel like I’m dreaming.

It is feared several hundred Yemenis to be released from Gitmo may recieve far worse treatment upon their homecoming to Yemen: YO–

Instead, however, the news (of the impending release) has been greeted with apprehension and an unwilling recognition that the prisoners are likely to suffer far more at the hands of their fellow countrymen than from their American captors.

“The Minister of Foreign Affairs didn’t say that they would be tried, he said they would be convicted,” says (their lawyer) Allaw. “The people in charge will not give them any kind of rights and they will find anything or even invent a law just to punish them.’

“There are no guarantees about their fate,” says the lawyer. “They will be treated like animals.” (Read on …)

Perhaps the most sacred and solemn power granted to a state by its citizens is the power to imprison. It is an action that needs be done with scrupulous care so as not to undermine the rights of all citizens or even one citizen.

There are fundamental requirements necessary to insure justice for the state, the accused and the citizenry at large. One is proper application of the law. Another is the right of the accused to launch a defense. A third is the existence of an impartial judiciary acting in the interest of the nation by neutrally applying the law to a given situation. Justice should be blind to all but the facts and the law.

The case of Yemeni editor Abdulkarim al-Khaiwani sharply demonstrates that the legal system in Yemen is not a mechanism of justice but rather a tool of repression. One cannot examine any aspect of this case and be left unmoved by the plight of Mr. al-Khaiwani and the Yemeni people at large. Both are trapped without recourse by the whims of a few with power.

Al-Khaiwani was arrested for speaking his mind. This is perhaps the most disturbing fact of the entire twisted affair. To the extent that any legal system is a codification of accepted moral and natural rights of man, al-Khaiwani’s imprisonment is an injustice against civilization and all Yemenis.

In criticizing the government and the president himself, Mr. al-Khaiwani was performing the most fundamental task of journalism. It is a task so vital to a healthy state that the First Amendment to the US Constitution provides blanket protection for free speech and the press as a mechanism to encourage criticism. The fact that Mr. al-Khaiwani’s criticisms were leveled at the government and President Saleh is the sign of a functional press corps. The fact that President Saleh imprisoned him for it is the sign of a diseased and corrupted ruling structure. In a perversion of effective governance, the President of Yemen is also the chief judicial officer, and the prosecution has taken on the nature of a personal vendetta.

Mr. al-Khaiwani’s bizarre trial deviated from every accepted norm of legal justice. Among all the absurdities of this case, the ease with which al-Khaiwani was denied both a defense and an appeal is perhaps most worrisome. The hostile behavior of the presiding judge further startled western analysts. The use of the tools of the state as a mechanism of personal aggression is only possible in a dictatorship. This is a fact the West cannot continue to ignore in its relations with Yemen.

It is with great dismay that many western observers have come to see the true face of Yemeni “reform,” Yemeni justice, and President Saleh. On the website for the Yemeni Embassy is a lovely quotation from President Saleh’s calling democracy “the rescue ship of all regimes.” Had we been paying closer attention to Saleh’s ugly actions not his beautiful words, we would have seen that the true face of President Saleh is not the face of a democrat but instead a very frightening face indeed.

(Cross posted at BNN.)

What a good con artist Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh is. He had me fooled for quite a while. One of my earliest tip-offs came when he gave a beautiful speech about democracy being “the rescue ship of all regimes.” But he didn’t let the journalists into the democracy conference. Or the human rights groups.

The Children’s Parliament is an institution that I thought demonstrated Saleh’s commitment to educating young Yemenis about the institutions of democracy. But then I learned that the Adult Parliament has never initiated any legislation. The Parliament’s greatest accomplishment to date has been blocking a very few of Saleh’s proposed laws. The real lesson taught to children in Yemen is they have no power.

If the Transparency International report is correct in listing Yemen among the most corrupt states, then the government bureaucracy is not a meritocracy but something more like a mafia, with government jobs and positions of authority given on the basis of loyalty, nepotism and poor moral character.

I was impressed when some women were appointed to high ranking positions. Later I learned that 70% of women in Yemen are illiterate, so the appointments are not really a significant step toward the enfranchisement of my Yemeni sisters in their government.

I had thought that Yemen was voluntarily cooperating in the War on Terror. Then I found the Freedom House 2003 report which said Saleh refused to take any actions against the Cole bombers until the US threatened military action in 2002. Odd how those jihaddis seem to escape from prison so frequently.

One person in jail getting beat up regularly is Abdul Karim al-Khaiwani. He’s a newspaper editor who reported on government corruption. He was jailed for some opeds that “insulted the president.” It had been my impression that the function of the press in a democracy is to raise critical issues. But either Yemen is not a democracy or the function of the press is to praise the president.

Insulting the president takes real guts when the president is also the chief judicial officer. If al-Khaiwani’s case is any indication, if you insult the president in Yemen, you don’t get a fair trail, a defense lawyer, or an appeal. If you’re a journalist, reporting the truth is against the law because Saleh is the law.

President Saleh is opening a regional democracy center and has hosted democracy conferences. If he opened a building and called it the unicorn study center and talked frequently about unicorns, would the West believe there were unicorns in Yemen as well as democracy? Clearly both are myths.

Am I the only one who notices that President Bush never mentions Yemen? In President Bush’s truly gratifying speeches about the important of enabling and assisting the growth of democracy in the Middle East, somehow Yemen is consistently left off the list. Realpolitik meets idealism in Yemen, and it results in a democracy center where free speech is prohibited.

The truly sad part is there’s a palpable yearning for democracy in Yemen among the middle class and intellectuals. As Saleh prepares to give the presidency to his son like a used car to a good boy, the Yemeni democrats are under siege, the journalists censored, and the people imprisoned in their own country. Reforms in Yemen are no more real than unicorns but apparently just as pleasant to believe in.

Works Cited: (Read on …)