Pants on Fire!

When I was in Taiwan I visited the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei, a structure worthy of a Chinese Emperor, there to see mementos of the late Generalissimo, including his car.  When I was in Tunisia I visited the Habib Bourgiba Mausoleum in Monastir, there to see mementos of the country’s first president, including his silk summer suit. 

How would you choose to be remembered, what object or personal belonging might best represent your life?  Perhaps a car, or a suit or some other item that would reflect on your dignity or your humility?  Ali Abdullah Saleh, the former president of Yemen, is memorialising his own thirty three year rule in a new museum created in his honour.  And what do you think he has chosen as the central and most personal exhibit, the thing he wants people to remember him by?  This is a man less ordinary.  He does not want anything as ordinary as a car or a suit.  He has chosen, rather, a pair of his scorched underpants.  Yes it’s true – Ali, Ali,  Pants on Fire! 

His singed white pants, along with a pair of torn trousers, is the central display in the new museum, set up in a wing of the Saleh Mosque in Sanaa, the capital.  The torn and burnt clothing is a reminder of the bomb blast that almost killed the ex-president during the 2011 rising against his autocratic rule.  Although not yet open to the public, the news of Ali Saleh’s risible narcissism has spread. 

Although still a powerful figure in Yemeni politics, he is seemingly wholly unaware just how ridiculous this makes him look, a clear comment on the blind and humourless vanity of certain politicians.  Or perhaps it’s just Arab autocrats that are at fault here.  Can you imagine Hitler, Stalin or Mao expecting the masses to be in awe of their burnt smalls? No?  I certainly can't.  

I expect you have already booked your flight to Sanaa, keen to pay your own respects to the Ali Saleh legacy.  You will be pleased to know that the museum holds a further 2000 exhibits, gifts from foreign dignitaries.  There is a Christmas card from Princess Anne that you might want to see.  Just look for the section marked “Spain, Portugal and Hungari” [sic].  I’m not sure if this means that the said card was sent from Spain, Portugal or Hungari, or if some other bizarre logic is at work.  Perhaps the curators think that Britain is located somewhere alongside Spain, Portugal or Hungari. 

Meanwhile Hamza al-Shargabi, a Yemeni blogger now based in New York, has set up a page on Facebook, “We are all going to see Ali Saleh pants on fire.”  I can’t wait.  

Stands Egypt where it did?

Two years ago exactly I wrote an article focusing on the evolving political situation in Egypt, then the high noon of the so-called Arab Spring (Reflections on the Revolution in Egypt, 6 Feb, 2011).  Of course the title was deliberate, a nod in the direction of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, his brilliant conservative dissection of an event that was still well short of its most extreme and murderous phase.  I began my piece by quoting Burke’s most pertinent observation;

The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.

Now here we are, two years on; now we see what it has pleased the present Egyptian authorities to do.  It’s just as well that, unlike some, unlike the BBC, for example, we did not offer congratulations.  We see that Mohamed Morsi, the Islamic Brotherhood President, is taking the country in the direction of a new tyranny.  Meet the new boss, pretty much the same as the old boss.  Actually, no; for all his faults Hosni Mubarak was at least a secular tyrant. 

In my frustrated Cassandra-like manner (who listens to me?) I made my own observations at the time:

What is it, I wonder, that will please the mobs, beyond the departure of President Mubarak? What is to come after Ozymandius has left nothing but footsteps in sand and time? If one tried to find answers here, if one tried to penetrate beneath the surface of transient events, one is best to ignore the reports of the BBC, unbelievably banal in their shallowness and lack of understanding. Jeremy Bowen, their Middle East editor, was heard to say of the Muslim Brotherhood, the fundamental face of Egypt, that they are a “fairly moderate force here…they don’t want to rock the boat too much.” No, let the boat keep rocking; they will be there to steady it afterwards.

Well, now we know.  Bowen’s ‘fairly moderate force’, endorsed by the Economist and all liberal idiots at the time, has been busy, like the Bolsheviks in 1917, concentrating all power in its own hands.  Alarmed by recent developments, thousands gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, protesting that the revolution had been betrayed.  Thousands more gathered outside the presidential palace, chanting ‘leave!’ ‘leave!’ in the empty hope that Morsi would really leave. 

Meanwhile, under the guidance of the Brother of the Brotherhood, Egypt slips still further into chaos.  The economy is in ruins and the vital tourist industry is in sharp decline.  I was in the country two years ago and still keep up some of the contacts and friendships I made then.  It really breaks my heart to see how bad things have become, to learn that people are being gunned down in the streets for taking the message of freedom too literally. It gives me no pleasure at all to say - see, I was right; democracy cannot be grafted on to a country with no tradition of democracy.  Now in place of freedom comes a state of emergency and a curfew.  Now in place of Mubarak comes Morsi. 

Even Egypt’s most precious treasures have come under threat.  Last year Murgen Salam al-Gohary, a jihadist who claims he has links with the Taliban, called for the destruction of the Sphinx and the Giza Pyramids.  The pyramids have laughed for thousands of years at time, but they cannot laugh at ignorant fanatics who simply pass through time. 

“God ordered Prophet Mohammed to destroy idols,” he said, according to Al Arabiya News. “When I was with the Taliban we destroyed the statue of Buddha, something the government failed to do.”

Yes, a nice reminder of a past cultural atrocity and a present warning of what Egypt’s future may bring.  The future may also bring the Salafists, the second most influential party in the country after the Muslim Brotherhood.  They have agreed with al-Gohray’s view, saying that they also want the country’s Pharonic statues covered. 

They may as well cover up what remains of Egypt’s democracy as well.  Stands Egypt where it did?

Alas, poor country, 
Almost afraid to know itself! It cannot 
Be call'd our mother, but our grave. Where nothing, 
But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile; 
Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rend the air, 
Are made, not mark'd; where violent sorrow seems 
A modern ecstasy The dead man's knell
Is there scarce ask'd for who, and good men's lives 
Expire before the flowers in their caps, 
Dying or ere they sicken. 

Egypt through the Barrel of a Gun

No sooner had Muhammad Morsi, Egypt’s new Islamic Brotherhood president, assumed office than he showed that he was not a figure to be taken lightly.  The parliament, dominated by his Brothers and dissolved earlier this year by court order (for this read army order), had to be reinstated, he decreed.  The following day he changed his mind.  His office, he said, would respect the court’s decision “because we are a law based nation.”  In other words, he is a figure to be taken lightly. 

I have to ask what brought this epiphany in a mere twenty-four hour period.  Your guess is as good as mine and my guess is the generals  They are ever present in the omnipresent SCAF, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the guardian of all truth, justice and the Egyptian way, or the Egyptian way as they see it, which is their way. 

I have said this before and I will say it ad nauseum – in Egypt old soldiers never die; they don’t even fade away.  The other thing I will continue to say is that the so-called Arab Spring was never about freedom and democracy; it bore no relationship whatsoever to the process that ended the moribund communist gerontocracies in Eastern Europe in the late eighties and early nineties.  No; it was about power; it was a struggle over the transfer of power from one self-interested group to another self-interested group

In Egypt the generals may have let power slip in the pretence of democracy but you can be assured that they will never let power go.  Egypt is not a law-based nation; it’s a military-based nation.  Anticipating a victory for the Islamists in the presidential election, SCAF issued a constitutional decree as soon as the poll closed, stripping the potential president of many of his powers, most particularly oversight of the armed forces.  Brothers to the right of them, Brothers to the left of them, the generals were having none of this valley of uncertainty. 

So, then, the future of parliament is in the power of the courts and the courts are in the power of the army.  The only way that Morsi can achieve full constitutional legitimacy is for his Brothers to reassemble and administer the oath of office “This will go down in history as the first serious step towards a democratic transition in Egypt, said Omar Ashour, an Egyptian academic.  “The ultimate test of a democratic transition is whether civilians are in charge of the armed forces.”

In matters like these I often draw parallels with seventeenth century England.  Egypt now is a little like this country after the conclusion of the First Civil War.  Then there was uncertainty; then the outcome could not be predicted; then there were fractured sources of authority.  In the contest that followed the New Model Army came out on top, the guardians of the revolution as they interpreted it.  Political power came from the barrel of a gun; political power comes from the barrel of a gun.  Egypt is set to prove a time-worn adage.  

A Black Truth

If there is one place in the world best not to have a black face it has to be Libya.  This is a country, months after the fall and brutal murder of Colonel Gaddafi, where political power still comes from the barrel of a gun, and the guns in question belong to the numerous militia units.  Hundreds of Sub-Saharan Africans have been rounded up and held for months on no authority at all.  Why?  Simply because they are black and all black people are suspect.

Formerly people from Chad, Niger and Mali, countries to the south of Libya, were encouraged to come as a source of cheap labour.  Thousands arrived and of these thousands a few hundred were hired by Gaddafi as mercenaries.  They were among the last defenders of the regime. 

Because of this and because - as we all know - it’s impossible to tell one black face from another, all those who could not escape the mayhem of the brave new Libya were automatically assumed to be guilty.  They are being held, so the story goes, as ‘illegal immigrants’ awaiting deportation. 

Deportation, alas, is proving to be a particularly lengthy process.  Some people have been kept for months in particularly dire conditions.  Martin Fletcher, an associate editor of the Times, journeying through the country, found one such holding centre, a former police training camp, in the Sahara Desert near the town of Gharyan. 

There, in scorching heat, some 1250 black Africans are living in metal huts with no air conditioning.  Fletcher says that they have no contact at all with the outside world.  I assume this means that not even representatives of their own governments are allowed to see them. Neglect is one thing, but there is more than simple neglect here.  Many of the men, held in makeshift camps across Libya, have also been tortured, according to one western human rights official. 

Libya has a kind of government, if you can call it that, presiding over the anarchy, a particularly delicious oxymoron.  It calls itself the National Transitional Council.  So far as it is concerned there is no wrong done in the name of right.  It recently approved a law extending immunity for actions taken in ‘defence of the revolution’, just the kind of blank cheque the militia gangsters need.  Actually they probably don’t, but it’s there all the same. 

The ‘defence of the revolution’, incidentally, embraced the destruction of Mushashya.  This once prosperous community has been turned into a ghost town, inhabited only by scavenging cats and dogs.  Fletcher discovered that all of its 8000 inhabitants, men, women and children, had been driven out, denounced as “Gaddafi’s dogs.”  He neglects to say where these ‘dogs’ are now.  I’m guessing he simply does not know.  Does anyone, I wonder?

My attention was drawn recently to something G. K. Chesterton wrote.  It goes like this;

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

It’s wonderfully ambiguous.  France, after all, had a revolution without a democracy.  But the attempts thereafter to give substance to the ideals of the revolution saw a descent into the worst forms of bloodshed and terror.  Chesterton’s words push at deeper realities beyond mere politics.  The real revolution has to be in attitudes and attitudes in Libya are clearly no different now than they were in the past.  Brutality walked out of one door and in through the other.  Brutality is the true king of kings in Libya.  Here it will continue to reign, no matter the outcome of next month’s planned elections.  The black detainees could tell you as much  

Same as the old Boss

Egypt is moving forward into the past.  Yesterday and today the country has been voting in the final round of the presidential election, a sort of take it or leave it choice between two equally uninspiring candidates – Mohammed Morsy, a colourless brother of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Ahmed Safiq, a brother from the old Mubarak fraternity. 

Safiq, a former air force commander, is the favoured candidate of the state within a state that has governed Egypt for generations, no matter if the outward face was Nasser, Sadat or Mubarak.  We had a clear indication of the shape of things to come on Friday, when Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court, a collection of Ancien Régime stalwarts, dissolved the country’s first freely elected parliament, claiming voting irregularities.  All at once power reverted to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). 

Actually it’s all a bit of a joke; they never really lost power in the first place.  What we have seen since the fall of Hosni Mubarak last year is a game being played out at the expense of the people of Egypt, with SCAF on one side, the Brothers on the other.  In terms of popular support the Brothers appear strong, but appearance is nothing in this land of the sphinx, a land where power comes not from a popular mandate but the barrel of a gun.  Last month I concluded an article (Old Soldiers Never Die, 13 May) with the following words;

Whatever the outcome of the election nothing much is likely to change.  The state within a state will continue to govern the state.  Old soldiers never die.  In Egypt they don’t even fade away.

They certainly do not.  There is Field Marshall Tantawi, head of SCAF and Egypt’s éminence grise, who will continue to exercise power regardless of any popular vote.  There is Ahmed Shafiq, a man who previously let it slip that he was the army’s preferred candidate, not at all reluctant to praise Mubarak and criticise protesters, not at all reluctant to scare Egyptians with the prospect of an Iranian-style Islamist state if the Brotherhood wins.  He has pledged to rule with an ‘iron fist’; he has pledged to defend what he calls the ‘deep state’.  He has pledged to be, well, Hosni Mubarak. 

My, how depressingly predictable it all is.  Even before the dissolution of parliament, a coup in all but name, SCAF issued decrees granting officers the right to try civilians in military courts, a return to three decades of martial law that was allowed to lapse for a mere two weeks. 

If Shafiq wins all well and good: it will just be business as usual.  But if Morsy comes top then we shall see; we shall see how the ‘deep state’ reacts.  It will not be with equanimity, that much is certain.  I can give you one possible scenario.  Parliament has gone.  The President can only be sworn in by parliament.  Without such affirmation he is powerless.  Egypt is in a constitutional deadlock.  Into the breach comes…I think it safe to leave you to draw your own conclusion. 

It seems obvious that the dissolution of parliament on the eve of the presidential election was really a cue for the Brothers to leave the stage, withdrawing in protest, allowing Safiq to walk in to office by acclimation, a new Pharaoh.  They have not, so stage two of the counter-revolution in the revolution that was never a revolution is already in preparation.  The reintroduction of military courts is a clear preamble to a general declaration of martial law.  Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. 

I'll Tip My Hat To The New Constitution
Take A Bow For The New Revolution
Smile And Grin At The Change All Around
Pick Up My Guitar And Play
Just Like Yesterday
Then I'll Get On My Knees And Pray
We Don't Get Fooled Again
Don't Get Fooled Again
No, No!

Old Soldiers Never Die

With voting in the presidential election scheduled to begin on 23 May, Egypt is descending ever deeper into anarchy and faction.  There have been violent clashes recently with protesters in Cairo and Alexandria, during which journalists were attacked by supporters of the military, one allegedly having his ear sliced off. 

Much has changed since the fall of Mubarak.  Hopes, once high, have fallen low.  The generals seem to be playing a close game, both inciting violence and denying any responsibility for the outcome.  They have no interest in who will emerge as president, they say, no desire to cling to power after 30 June, the day they have promised to step down.  Yes, of course they will. 

There is violence, yes, but there is also an element of comic absurdity.  Hazem Abu Ismail is as orthodox as they come.  With his long white beard he was the front runner for the fundamentalist Salafi sect.  His was a populist platform of religion and revolution.  Unfortunately for him he also had an Achilles’ heel – his mother is an American!  That is to say, she took American citizenship before she died, a fact he kept quiet about and then denied altogether.  Au contraire, Mon Frère; out you go, beard and all. 

It’s all a plot, you see, all part of an American scheme to discredit the poor man, so say the Salafists, because of his anti-Western agenda, though it would seem obvious that the ‘plot’, such as it is, originated far closer to home.  To air their disapproval the beards massed in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, where they immediately clashed with Egypt’s dwindling band of liberals.  That’s one thing; clashing with the army quite another. 

The Muslim Brotherhood, the strongest force in the country’s parliament, was there too.  For long they declined to field a candidate for the presidency.  All at once the hive mind was changed.  Khairat al-Shater was put forward as their drone of choice.  All at once the electoral commission, whose edicts are not subject to judicial review, disqualified him.  Why?  Because he had been convicted in the bad old Mubarak days of being a member of a banned organisation that was no longer banned! 

There is a fallback here; there is Aboul Fotouh.  He’s well-known to the Brotherhood; he should be; he was long included in their ranks.  There is only one problem – he was expelled.  Why?  Because, contrary to the former party line, he decided to run for the presidency! 

Worried by its declining influence, the Brotherhood has now put forward Mohammed Morsy, something of a colourless nonentity.  The army, which favours nobody, either favours Amr Moussa, a former veteran of the Mubarak regime, or Ahmed Shafiq, the former commander of the air force and another Mubarak stalwart.  He has let it slip that the army, which favours nobody, actually favours him. 

The real power in the land is Field Marshall Tantawi, head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), which has governed Egypt since the fall of Mubarak.  Actually it governed Egypt long before that; it has effectively governed Egypt since the days of Nasser.  Whatever the outcome of the election nothing much is likely to change.  The state within a state will continue to govern the state.  Old soldiers never die.  In Egypt they don’t even fade away.  

My Life as a Dog

Amina Filali was a sixteen-year-old Moroccan girl. I say was because she is now dead. She killed herself last weekend in a particularly horrible manner – she swallowed rat poison. Why? Because she had suffered a double violation: she was raped by a man and then raped by the law of her land. She was forced to marry her violator.

Under Article 475 of Morocco’s Islamic penal code, a rapist, even the rapist of a minor, can escape prosecution if he agrees to marry his victim. It’s a way, you see, of preserving the ‘honour’ of the violated woman’s family.

Amina’s attacker originally refused to marry her, only doing so to avoid a possible ten year jail sentence. She then had to endure five further months of ‘marriage’ before she killed herself. During this time she complained to her mother repeatedly that her husband was beating her. She was counselled to be patient.

There is now a campaign in Morocco to have this invidious law revoked. There is also a Facebook petition, accompanied by a perfect storm of tweets, all expressing horror at this girl’s fate. Fouzia Assouli, president of the Democratic League for Women’s Rights, said “We have been asking for years for the cancellation of Article 475 of the penal code which allows the rapist to escape justice.

Rape is always a difficult issue no matter where in the world it happens; difficult for the victims, who often carry the sole burden of proof. It’s particularly difficult in Islamic countries. Not only are women prejudged by law to be second-class citizens but if an accusation of rape is raised and not proved they risk being prosecuted for debauchery. Last year a woman in Afghanistan was jailed for ‘adultery by force’ after she was brutally raped by her husband’s cousin. She was only released by presidential pardon, after a wave of revulsion swept across the world.

There are places in the world where it is better to be born a dog than a woman.

The Price of Freedom

I’ve been keeping a close eye on political events in Egypt, an interest spurred by my visit to the country last November. Some news I get via email from people I met while I was there, people with hopes of a better future, mired ever deeper in doubt, especially now that the Islamists have come out of the parliamentary elections as the dominant force, commanding two-thirds of the representation.

A presidential election is scheduled for sometime this year but in the meantime the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) remains in control. The generals may eventually slip into the background, but I don’t think the military will ever relinquish power; I don’t think it will ever give up its role as king maker, one that it has held ever since Nasser’s coup in 1952.

On the streets, still punctuated with violent discontent, the word is that the very models of modern major generals have struck up a clandestine deal with the Islamists. In parliament the liberals, those with the confidence of the street protesters, are fighting a kind of gallant rear guard action. Legislation has been proposed that that would exclude the army from oversight of any future elections. I guess it’s unlikely to succeed, unless the Freedom and Justice Party, the main Islamist force, decide to break their links with the soldiers

The real victim here in the complex game of political poker is Egypt’s ancient but vulnerable minority of Coptic Christians. Incidents of sectarian violence, in part encouraged by the military, have been steadily increasing since the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak last year. Under attack from the extremist Salifist movement, with the army offering intermittent protection at best, the community is going through one of the most apprehensive stages of its history. There is little doubt that they are being singled out as a scapegoat. Thousands have left the country; millions have no choice but to remain.

Freedom is not for free, said one of the banners held up in Cairo’s Tahrir Square last year. How ironic it is that the secularist dictatorships, the regimes of Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak and Bashar al-Assad, the last still holding on, offered the greatest protection to the Christians of the Middle East. Now the Copts are indeed discovering that freedom is not for free. It has a price, one being negotiated at their expense.

Syrian Pawns

I visited Egypt last November, though I had originally planned to go to Syria. There are some wonderful places there, particularly the remains of Palmyra, who’s Queen Zenobia, a figure of endless fascination for me, once took on the power of Rome. There is also Krak de Chevaliers, the most magnificent Crusader castle in the whole of the East.

I didn’t go, for obvious reasons. After my initial planning last spring the political situation began to spiral downwards in successive stages. It was too volatile, I was advised, too dangerous, so best to look elsewhere. I had a marvellous time in Egypt but I still think of Syria, still hope that one day soon I will, like Saint Paul, take the road to Damascus.

I’m certainly keeping an eye on developments in the country, just as I did last year on Libya, when Sarkozy and Cameron went on muddle-headed humanitarian ‘crusade’, one that has had wholly predictable results, results that I predicted at the time. All the right sounds are being made about Syria, how awful Bashar al-Assad is, how dreadful the massacres of the people, and on and on, but so far the two twits have done nothing but tweet. So, too, has Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, fuming at Russia and China for blocking an anti-Assad resolution at the United Nations.

I despair of our politicians, our leaders, forever incapable of looking below the surface. Look below the surface in Syria and what do you see, the huddled, pro-democracy masses yearning to breathe free, perhaps? No, that’s not what I see. Oh, yes, there is plenty of footage from Homs, the scene, supposedly, of the worst outrages by the Syrian army. But the majority of the country, including the cities of Damascus and Aleppo, is peaceful and unaffected. Sorry, that’s not quite true. As Rod Liddle writes in the Spectator, there have been occasional attacks by the operatives of the so-called ‘Free Syrian Army’ on civilian targets in the capital.

Even the benighted Dame Clinton (I can just picture her in pantomime) admits that, unlike Libya, large parts of Syria are peaceful, that there is no massive anti-Assad movement as there was anti-Gaddafi. What she can’t see, seemingly, is that the opposition, encouraged by the likes of al-Qaeda, Hamas and Saudi Arabia, is dominated not by democrats but by fundamentalists. Not content with allowing the Islamists to take charge in Tripoli she also wants them in Damascus.

“Democracy and human rights” the early demonstrators against Assad chanted. Oh, no, they did not; they were heard to shout “Send the Christians to Beirut and the Alawites to coffins.” Syria has a large Christian minority going right back to the days of Queen Zenobia. It’s now the largest the Middle East, given that the previously flourishing community in Iraq has all but been destroyed by the Bush-Blair ‘crusade.’ The secular Assad regime has long protected the community, just as it has protected the moderate Alawites and other Shia minorities. Now they all face an uncertain future if the rebellion is not contained.

The Free Syrian Army, whose NATO-sponsored ‘government-in-exile’ is dominated by the most reactionary elements of the Muslim Brotherhood, is fighting a proxy war on behalf of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. President Assad describes them as ‘foreign terrorists’ with some justification, for a great many are, coming from Iraq and Libya. The weapons are supplied by Qatar and Saudi Arabia, countries that could not give a damn about the suffering of the Syrian people. No, in the bigger game of politics they just want to replace the region’s last secular ruler, all the more contemptible to them because he is an ally of Iran. In this game the ordinary people of Syria are no better than pawns.

Don’t mistake my position here; I am no friend of Assad, as unscrupulous and as bloody a dictator as they come. But a backward Wahhibi theocracy would be so much worse; worse for the majority, worse for the minorities, worse for women, worse for those who desire even a modicum of personal freedom.

It’s the hypocrisy that angers me most. Western leaders pontificate about the abuse of ‘human rights’ in Syria while conveniently ignoring those same abuses in Saudi Arabia. Britain and France intervened in Libya in support of ‘freedom’, only to see ‘freedom’ crushed in Bahrain without comment. With no appetite in the West for fresh interventions, the Saudis and Qataris are urging us to arm the rebels, a more cowardly course of action I find difficult to contemplate, one that will only prolong the suffering of the pawns of Syria into an indefinite future.

The Revolution Bare

I saw lots of political graffiti in Egypt. I can’t read Arabic but I know it was political because it was often accompanied by an illustration or even some English text. In Aswan one wall had a depiction of Mina Daniel, a Coptic Christian killed by the army in October. It was close to one of Che Guevara, a figure with whom he identified, something I found out later.

There was something else, something that puzzled me, an image of a woman who appeared to be posing naked; she was certainly wearing stockings or holdups and her shoulders were bare, but the central part of her body was covered in Arabic text. Well, she was posing naked, an Egyptian woman, and I missed the storm it caused because I was in Egypt! Oddly enough it wasn’t reported on BBC or CNN, both afraid, perhaps, of the naked truth

Anyway, her name (you may know this already) is Alia el-Mahdi, a twenty-year-old student at Cairo University, who posted a full frontal nude picture of herself on Facebook, Twitter and her personal blog as a ‘revolutionary’ gesture. It’s certainly another interesting dimension of the ferment in the Arab world. Women in Libya are taking to wearing the niqab, now that they are free from the secular pressures of Colonel Gaddafi, and a woman in Egypt has found freedom in nakedness!

This is what she wrote on her personal blog;

Put on trail the artist’s models who posed nude for art schools until the early 70s, hide the art books and destroy the nude statues of antiquity, then undress and stand before a mirror and burn your bodies that you despise top forever rid yourselves of your sexual hang-ups before you direct your humiliation and your chauvinism and dare to try to deny me my freedom of expression.

Hmm, yes; it’s certainly a gesture of a sort, a brave one, given my knowledge of Egypt and Egyptian culture, but I’m not really sure what she hopes to achieve beyond ‘freedom of expression’; it certainly did not advance the revolution, just the contrary, judging by the results of the November elections, which saw mass support for the Islamists.

Alia is in every way untypical, even, I would hazard, of the most advanced sections of Egyptian opinion. She describes herself as an atheist and lives openly in Cairo with her boyfriend, a city where some women wear the niqab just to escape unwanted sexual attention. And, believe me, it’s bad.

I’m torn here between a certain admiration for her boldness and bafflement over her folly. Life in Cairo must have been difficult enough for someone like her. Now, with such a high public profile (she’s had over a million hits on her blog), it will be impossible, especially as a group of graduates in Islamic law are taking her and her boyfriend to court for ‘violating morality’, ‘indecency’ and ‘insulting Islam.’ If convicted she could face up to eighty lashes.

The graffiti I saw was a reproduction of her nude picture. It was beside the image of another woman, head shot only, a woman wearing a headscarf. This is Samira Ibrahim. She did not pose naked, no. She alleges that she, along with seventeen other women, was forced naked by soldiers last March and subjected to some intimate probing to determine if she was a virgin or not. She is now taking the military to court over the matter. The text on the wall contrasts the way in which this outrage was ignored while Alia’s antic has caused a huge media and public fuss.

There is certainly a serious point here, a point about hypocrisy, about the hypocrisy of Egyptian culture and society. Is this the way to make it, though? I simply can’t be sure. There seems to be an awful lot of me, me, me in this, empty self-promotion, shock for the sake of shock.

Alia has been criticised for her actions not just by the conservatives but by the liberals. A spokesman for the April 6 Youth Movement denied that she or her partner were members, saying they could not possibly accept “a girl who behaves like this” into their ranks.

Predictably she has attracted support from beyond Egypt, from the arbiters of liberal opinion, and from naked Israeli women, which is certainly not going to help. There is a tiresome piece – of course – in the Guardian by one Mona Eltahawy, a woman who clearly knows next to nothing about the nature of Egypt, conservatism or revolution. I wonder what she would have said if an English woman had appeared on the pages of the down-market Sun like this. Would her nudity still be ‘a weapon of political resistance’? I rather think not. Actually, Alia’s picture is not good enough for the Sun; it’s much more readers’ wives, the kind of amateurish thing favoured by some English porn magazines.

I find myself in agreement – the horror! the horror! - with a piece written by Nelson Jones in the trendy left New Statesman, a publication I normally think of as a retirement home for intellectual and political mediocrities. He said that the gesture was curiously old-fashioned, a harking back to the days when, as he puts it, “sexual liberation and nudity were part and parcel of revolutionary politics.” (Part and parcel; what a cliché!) It's awfully old-fashioned, that's true, trendy 60s stuff; Hair, OZ and the Age of Aquarius. Hey, let the sun shine in!

Yes, things have moved on and Egypt is advancing into a counter-revolution. Alia, in her own naked way, may have made that process just a little quicker.

Brothers in the Wing

“There are two groups trying to undermine the transition to democracy in Egypt – the Israelis and the Saudis”, so I was told by one of the most educated and informed people I met in the country, a Muslim of impeccable liberal outlook, a man who played an active part in the events that saw the departure of Hosni Mubarak in February. Both countries, apparently, are financing Islamist extremists.

“OK”, I said, “I can understand that an Egypt committed to a new path, an Egypt committed to free elections, representative government and human rights would seriously unsettle the antediluvian gerontocracy in Saudi Arabia, but Israel, why on earth would Israel want to see the advance of forces that most threaten its security, forces that are at best lukewarm to the 1979 peace treaty and at worst actively hostile?” “Because the victory of Islamic extremists would end all support for Egypt in America and the West.”

I did not push the point because I felt that we were moving on to the quicksand of conspiracy theory, ground in which even the strongest counter-arguments are certain to sink beyond recovery. But it was perfectly obvious to me that Egypt, taking this man as an avatar, the best of the best, is facing a deeply uncertain future; that liberal opinion, such as it is, is weak and confused, uncertain of the direction to follow, apprehensive about the outcome, looking to blame forces beyond its control.

Prior to the election the demonstrators in Tahrir Square were calling for the army to step down from the commanding position it has held ever since the fall of Mubarak, but there seemed to be no real idea of what was to come in its place, no idea how order would be maintained. It’s all very well to call for civilian rule. The real question is which particular group of civilians will rule?

I left the country on the first day of the first free parliamentary election that Egypt has seen in decades. On the plane home I read that day’s edition of the Egyptian Gazette, the country’s oldest English language newspaper. “Monday November 28 2011”, the leader declared, “will indeed emerge as a watershed…”

And so it is proving. An election that was generally fair, an election with a high turnout, an election where the result was not known in advance…and an election that has seen the advance that my Egyptian friend most feared, a victory for the Islamists, a double victory, by his lights, for Israel and Saudi Arabia.

The simple truth is that the protesters of Tahrir are representative of not very much beyond themselves. There is a bigger constituency that sees things in far simpler terms. If you like they see things in black and white. Our benighted leaders, from Barack Obama to David Cameron, also saw things in black and white; that the fall of the old regimes was a preamble to democracy. But democracy is not a panacea and elections do not guarantee freedom. In Egypt one tyranny looks set to replace another, more frightful in every way – the tyranny of a majority.

Last Saturday the online version of the Egyptian Gazette reported on the early results of the ballot, showing that the Islamist parties are “sweeping to victory”, not just the ‘moderate’ Freedom and Justice Party, the political face of the Muslim Brotherhood, but the more hard-line Salafists, represented by the Al-Nur party and Al-Wassat, which calls for a strict interpretation of Islamic law. Liberal movements like the Wafd made a disappointing showing. In all Islamists won two-thirds of the votes cast and look set to dominate parliament when the whole process is finally complete. Their message was simple enough: non-Islamist candidates were ‘infidels.’ This is a black and white that a great many of the poorer Egyptians understand, those not of the educated middle-classes.

In February, right at the beginning of the Arab Spring, I wrote a piece called Reflections of the Revolution in Egypt, making the following observations;

I cannot myself say what the outcome will be, though not a stable western-style democracy, that much I will hazard. The Islamists in the Brotherhood may not be as strong as they were in Iran, but they are still a potent and organised force, in much the same manner that the Bolsheviks were a potent and organised force in Russia before their putsch in November, 1917… What do the Egyptians want themselves? For some time now polls have shown that they want democracy…but they also want sharia law, a glaring contradiction. The source of law can be God or it can be the people; it can’t be both. Will another Nasser emerge – could the country take more of the absolute misery that he inflicted on it? – or someone altogether more sinister, more brotherly?

February and November, there seems to be an unsettling historical symmetry here, Bolsheviks and Brothers. In the same article I also quoted from Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, my favourite political testament by far. “The effect of liberty to individuals”, he wrote, “is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.”

Are we now seeing what pleases Egypt, what pleases the ‘Arab street’? If so, I can only feel sympathy for the many tolerant people I met, Christian and Muslim, people like the friend I mentioned above. If he reads this I would only ask that he look more deeply at the issue, to reflect that if democracy in the sense that we understand it in the West is frustrated in Egypt it will not be the fault of the Saudis or the Israelis.

Back to the Past

Writing in the Sunday Telegraph General Richard Dannatt, former Chief of the General Staff at the time of the premiership of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, says, in the light of the murder of General Abdel Fattah Younes by Islamists in Libya, that “it should be a clear lesson that compromise will lead to Libya’s destruction as a unified nation and produce a situation that no one in the international community envisaged.”

I’m not a member of any community, certainly not one that would have the likes of this Gilbert and Sullivan officer in its ranks, but I envisaged alright, for all the good it did. I envisaged at the outset of this adventure, writing several articles. I take these words from Cassandra’s Lament, a piece I published in early March;

Consider what Cameron, Obama and Sarkozy have done, look at the possible outcomes. The Colonel’s offensive may be halted, frozen exactly where it is, leaving him in control of Tripoli and the west with the rebels holding on to Benghazi and the east. This may be a permanent state, with Libya hereafter a divided nation, a political fracture caused by tomahawks. I would hazard that the whole region will be destabilised as a result…

But it’s the ignorance of our great world leaders that perplexes me most, their complete incomprehension when it comes to the Arab world, the tribal nature of the Arab world, the tribal nature of places like Libya. The Colonel for all his lunacy at least gave the place unity, a sense of national identity. David Cameron says he does not want a failed pariah state on Europe’s southern flank, “potentially threatening our security, pushing people across the Mediterranean and creating a more dangerous and uncertain world for Britain and for our allies, as well as for the people of Libya.” But…a failed state is exactly what Libya is almost certain to become, one of constant civil war between competing tribes, Somalia on the Med.

Here we are, months later, no nearer to a solution. Cameron’s government has withdrawn the final traces of diplomatic legitimacy from the regime of Colonel Gaddafi, instead recognising the Transitional National Council in Benghazi as the rightful government of Libya, just at the point we have discovered that this body is backed by powerful and shadowy Islamist forces.

What solution does the former Leader of the Queen’s Army offer? Why, that we should start arming the rebels, the bombing not being enough. I now know for certainty why our military forces were handled with such stunning incompetence during the Iraq fiasco, why our army suffered one of the worst humiliations in its long and noble history. It had a man like Dannatt as its operational chief, a man who probably is not up even to polishing door handles.

So, as I predicted, NATO intervention in Libya has just led to a protracted war of attrition. It did not require any great skill or foresight on my part, just a little common sense, mixed with an understanding of history and politics, an understanding that our benighted leaders – and generals – so obviously lack.

I’ve been following the recent series in the Times on the so-called Arab Spring and the signs are all bad. Into the vacuum caused by the collapse of the old order the Islamists have been moving in slow but relentless degrees, from Tunisia to Egypt. Ancient Christian communities are under attack, threatened now even in Syria, where so many took refuge from the sectarian hell of Iraq. The rights enjoyed by women in the secular societies of the old regimes are threatened by the advance of reactionary obscurantism. It is not a happy picture.

The Arabs want freedom, yes, we all want freedom, that most precious commodity, the birthright of humanity, the birthright of the Facebook and Twitter generation. But I’m going to say this and say it without equivocation: the Arabs can die for freedom but they are not mature enough to live for freedom; they have no understanding of what freedom is, no tradition of freedom. Their idea of freedom is simply to replace one tyranny with another, the tyranny of a nepotistic minority with an intolerant majority, secular law with Sharia law.

That’s the idea of democracy one individual I debated with had, that it means the minority have to obey the majority. No, no, no and again no. That’s the antithesis of true democracy, which depends on respect for minorities, which depends on equality under the law, human law not God's law. Look always beneath the surface. The unrest across the Arab world is not the spring time of peoples; it's not 1989; it's not even 1848. At a deeper level it’s a kind of cultural counter-revolution, a march not into the future but back to the past.

Wormtongue and the Arab Spring

Peter Mandelson, Lord Mandelson of Foy, Business Secretary in the last Labour government, is possibly the most repellent and reptilian figure ever to have occupied high office in this country. For me this seedy and disreputable man seems to have all of the character attributes I associate with Shakespeare’s Iago or, better still, Grima Wormtongue from Lord of the Rings.

This particular Wormtongue enjoyed the company of the great and not very good. In his toadying style he enjoyed the company of Saif Gaddafi, with whom he had a jolly good time not so long ago at a private villa on the Greek island of Corfu, all chums together. But that was then, a time when he was falling over himself to do deals with Gaddafi senior. Things change; the Colonel is now the Beast of Tripoli and Lord Wormtongue welcomes the Arab Spring.

Indeed, he goes out of his way to welcome it in the latest issue of Prospect, a monthly political journal, saying that nerves over the great upheaval are misplaced, that the people want democracy, not extremism. He should know; he goes to the Middle East, he knows exactly what the people want, Colonels at one moment, freedom at the next. “I have recently made a return visit to Kuwait and, for a longer period, to Qatar”, he writes in his inflated and pompous style. Yes, democracy is what the people want; Mandelson says so.

I myself have recently not made a return visit to Tunisia, the country which saw the beginning of the end of the Arab Winter. I do keep an eye on things, though; keep an eye on press reports a lot more trustworthy than Mandelson’s musings. I read that Nouri Bouzid, the Tunisian director and prominent secularist, recently honoured at the Cannes Film Festival, was equally honoured in his own country when he was stabbed in the head by an unknown assailant. He survived, only to find that a speaker at a rally organised by Ennahda, Tunisia’s largest Islamist party, called for him to be “shot with a Kalashnikov.”

I really don’t want to rain on the Arab Spring but Tunisia is now showing every sign, as I wrote on a previous occasion, of the season turning to autumn with no summer in between. All over the country, with Ennahda on the rise, women, who previously enjoyed rights almost unparalleled elsewhere in the Arab world, are being forced to wear the veil. Forced praying and condemnation for apostasy are also on the rise. Moderate imams are being ejected from their mosques, too afraid to complain to the authorities because of the perceived weakness of the provisional government.

Hmm, a weak provisional government with a radical opposition busy organising among the grassroots, does this not remind you of something, another time and another point in history? Oh, there are all sorts of professions to ‘moderation’ and to ‘pluralism’…for the time being. As a Tunisian liberal leader said recently, there is a huge gap between what the Islamists say and what they do. February is past; the revolution heads towards October, guided there by the Bearded Bolsheviks.

You can safely disregard all that, disregard my Cassandra-like pessimism. People in the Arab world want secularism and democracy as a check on theocracy and extremism. Of course they do; Lord Wormtongue says so.

Keep out of Libya!

I’m beset with a sense of déjà vu. Speaking recently at the Women in the World conference, ex-president Bill Clinton, king of the liberal interventionists, called for the West to join in the Libyan civil war on behalf of the rebels. “I think we should support them”, he said, “We have the planes to make an appropriate contribution to this.”

Meanwhile, David Cameron, the British prime minister, a sort of political Mister Bean, has been seen trotting along the European corridors of power, trying – so far without a great deal of success – to get agreement on a no-fly zone and targeted airstrikes against Gaddafi’s forces. Europe, he believes, must do more to stop the Mad Colonel’s rampage against his own people.

Yes, as I have said, a sense of déjà vu. It’s Kosovo all over again; it’s Clinton in the same role; it’s Cameron pathetically trying to don the mantle of Tony Blair, Britain’s home-grown war monger. Was that a success? Well, I suppose it defends on one’s definition of success. A ruthless bombing campaign directed against civilian targets in Serbia, coupled with support for the Kosovo Liberation Army, a kind of murderous mafia headed by Hashim Thaçi, Blair’s chum, which is alleged to have smuggled heroin and cocaine into Western Europe, as well as butchering Serbs to sell their organs. The outcome was an independent and semi-criminal fiefdom in the Balkans, with Thaçi as Mr. Big. Yes, as I say, it really depends on how one defines success.

How much of this kind of self-righteous interventionism can the world take, I have to ask? How many more pyrrhic ‘successes’ must we celebrate; how many more Kosovos, Afghanistans and Iraqs? But there is more here, a more pertinent question: what business is it of ours, what business is it of Europe and America, to go dashing from here to there around the Third World setting wrongs to right? What incredible arrogance, what hubris, this displays, a nineteenth century gunboat mentality with a twenty-first century gloss of canting hypocrisy.

I have no doubt at all that Gaddafi is a ‘bad man’, a dictator, one under whom I personally would not care to live. But he is still a recognised head of state, one with whom we were quite happy to do business until quite recently. Do we know anything of the rebels? Do we know anything of their politics, other than their desire to get rid of the Colonel? Have Clinton or Cameron even paused to think what a post-Gaddafi Libya may look like? Do I need to hazard answers here?

The point is, like him or not, like it or not, Gaddafi has every right to deal with insurrection in any fashion he sees fit. Throughout history governments have taken action to contain rebellion, not excluding those of England and the United States. Yet there seems to be a special condescension when it comes to places like Libya that allows pontification over what is and what is not acceptable, schoolmasters addressing homilies to naughty children.

It’s as well to remember that we once intervened in Afghanistan on behalf of the Taliban. We intervene in places like Libya at our own peril. The last thing we should expect after the event is gratitude. That much should be obvious from the fiasco that is Iraq.

The Arab Winter

Things are moving so fast in the Arab world that it’s sometimes hard to keep up with events; events, that is, after the wave has passed and the revolution over. The world’s attention is now on Libya and the beleaguered Colonel Gaddafi. There is still half an eye on Egypt, because while the old dictator may be gone the structures that brought him to power are still in place. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”, some prescient words from a song by The Who, an old British rock band.

In writing before about Egypt (Reflections on the Revolution in Egypt) I made the following related points;

Revolutions are all very well when they produce the results one approves of, but they don’t always do that, do they? If you are reading the book Egypt please don’t make the mistake of reading Eastern Europe 1989; read Iran 1979…What do the Egyptians want themselves? For some time now polls have shown that they want democracy…but they also want sharia law, a glaring contradiction. The source of law can be God or it can be the people; it can’t be both. Will another Nasser emerge – could the country take more of the absolute misery that he inflicted on it? – or someone altogether more sinister, more brotherly?

The brotherly reference is, of course, to the Muslim Brotherhood, the strongest political force in the country, poised rather like the Bolsheviks in the wings. But if one wants to look at Egypt’s possible future, and the possible future of Libya, look back, back to where the upheaval began: look back to Tunisia. Unfortunately most of the media seems blind to developments there, which is rather a pity, because things are far from good.

There the so-called Jasmine Revolution led to the fall of President Ben Ali in January. Now an interim government is in place, weak and uncertain. Ben Ali was a dictator, yes, there was corruption, yes, there was high unemployment, yes, but with all this Tunisia was one of the most advanced in the region; the wealthiest, the most secular and the most progressive.

The regime was the least brutal and the people the best educated in North Africa, a point made in a recent report I read. The veil was banned in public, polygamy was outlawed, mosques were shuttered outside prayer times and men required permission from the local police to grow beards. Sex education was mandatory in schools and pupils were taught the separation between religion and state. Radical Islamists opposed to the secular order were exiled or imprisoned.

Now what? They are back, that’s what, back in their hundreds, demanding an Islamist state. There have been widespread demonstrations calling, amongst other things, for the banning of alcohol in a country where much of the wealth came from the tourist industry. A Polish Catholic priest recently had his throat cut, the first sectarian murder in modern Tunisian history, and anti-Semitic slogans have appeared outside the main synagogue, this in a country where the persecution of Jews was previously unknown.

The agenda has been set even before elections are held; violence and intolerance is spreading, a power vacuum is being filled by people who want less democracy rather than more, who want laws supposedly made by God - meaning themselves – rather than by the people.

Actually, when I say the Islamic militants want less democracy that’s not quite true: they want democracy insofar as it offers a route to power, then we shall see. What shall we see? Why, the most awful forms of cultural totalitarianism, theocracy in the Iranian style. Returning to Egypt it’s possible to deduce what that might involve. Just before that fall of Mubarak a poll carried out by the Pew Research Centre found that a majority of people support stoning as a punishment for adultery, hand amputation for theft and death for apostasy.

I would not for a moment seek to deny ‘democracy’ as a right of all peoples, the right to chose their own destinies, even if that destiny takes them into a new dark age. Yes, I feel sorry for people who take a more tolerant view of life; I feel sorry in particular for women, some of whom have been demonstrating in Tunisia in a futile rearguard action against the onset of fundamentalism. I feel sorry that they are threatened with ‘democracy.’

The point is ‘democracy’ has become such a mantra that people seldom pause to consider that there is no single road here, no one size fits all. In Morocco free and fair elections have seen the fundamentalist Party for Justice and Development grow bit by bit, election by election, to the point where it comes ever closer to forming a majority in parliament. In Gaza democracy laboured and brought forth Hamas, an openly terrorist organisation.

I have no solutions here and I can see no way forward. My view might be dismissed as pessimistic though I would argue that it is simply realistic. This Arab spring is already showing clear signs of turning into winter, with no summer in between.