Russia Considers Biggest Population Redistribution since Stalin
The Kremlin is considering pushing ahead with the biggest geographical redistribution of its population since Josef Stalin’s forced deportations of entire nationalities in the 1940s.
Under the plans, which were leaked to the daily Vedomosti newspaper, the majority of Russia’s 141 million-strong population would be concentrated in just twenty urban centres rather than sparsely spread out over one fifth of the earth’s surface as is now the case.
At the moment, ninety per cent of Russia’s towns are relatively small with a population of 100,000 people or less, many of them in remote locations. The leaked plan said such places had “no future” and were not worth developing.
Instead, it proposed relocating people to twenty giant agglomerations where Russia’s main natural resources such as oil and gas were located.
Unlike in Stalin’s day, when people were forced to move at gunpoint on the often spurious grounds that they were ‘enemies of the people’ or Nazi collaborators, relocating would be optional and encouraged on economic grounds alone.
Much of rural Russia is dying as young people move to towns and cities anyway and entire Soviet-era settlements which were built around just one or two factories are no longer economically viable.
“There is no need to fight against the current and we need to develop big cities and urban centres,” the plan said according to the newspaper.
Saddled by an obsession for central planning, the Soviets decreed that many towns and settlements be built in areas where the climate was too harsh and where the expense of providing basic utilities was unjustifiably expensive.
Analysts said the plan, which would roll back the Soviet idea of urbanising the entire country, is likely to be heavily touted by President Dmitry Medvedev as part of his agenda to modernise Russia.
“Changing the map of the country is a necessary but not simple task which needs to be done very carefully as any overreaction could lead to a fight for urban resources,” a government official was quoted as saying.
With speculation mounting about whether Mr Medvedev or Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, will run for the Russian presidency in 2012, the plan could be a useful electoral tool for Mr Medvedev according to analysts.
The Daily Telegraph | November 16, 2010
Hezbollah’s Domestic Growing Pains
The term dahiya (suburb) is a staple of Lebanese political discourse, practically shorthand for Hezbollah, the Shi‘i Islamist party seated in its infamous headquarters just south of Beirut. Before the civil war, the suburb, or more precisely suburbs, consisted of several small towns surrounded by orchards that began where the capital ended. Today, it is a heavily congested urban sprawl replete with higher-income neighborhoods, such as Jinah, where international chains such as Burger King, BHV, Monoprix, Spinneys and the Marriott have opened since the end of the civil war in 1990. Administratively, the dahiya lies in a half-dozen municipalities, and only one of these, Haret Hreik, home to Hezbollah’s party offices, is usually the “dahiya” that politicians and pundits have in mind.
The area’s portrayal as a mini-Islamic republic under absolute Hezbollah domination is a caricature. While there is less open public consumption of alcohol than in other parts of Beirut and women tend to dress more modestly, such conservative pockets exist elsewhere in Lebanon. Most women living in the dahiya wear some sort of head covering, but many do not and none are legally compelled to do so. Moreover, the dahiya contains substantial numbers of non-Shi‘i Lebanese, non-Shi‘i Arabs (primarily Palestinians, Syrians and Egyptians) and other foreigners (mainly Africans and Asians). But it remains Hezbollah’s home turf, along with the party’s strongholds in the northern Bekaa Valley and much, but by no means all, of southern Lebanon. Hezbollah’s security presence is strict near its party offices and institutions in Haret Hreik, where its vigilant street personnel detain and question curious camera wielders or others who show up unannounced to poke around. The party’s supporters cite fears of information being gathered and funneled to Israel, while critics call it the state-within-a-state syndrome. Whatever the case, more than 160 suspected Israeli agents have been arrested in only the last 16 months, whether by Hezbollah or state police and intelligence bodies, with the southern suburbs as a key target.
Clans, Guns and Money
In late 2009, the fatal knifing of a young Christian by Shi‘i youth in the neighboring suburb of ‘Ayn al-Rummana brought the dahiya’s “beyond the law” atmosphere to a boiling point, but a bubble of crime and disorder had existed long before the incident. Confronted by state law enforcement organs or others, many thugs would falsely claim that they enjoyed political cover from the party. As one observer in the party’s orbit put it, the mere claim of “I’m Hezbollah,” brandished by a local, could deter any further questioning by a policeman. A former Hezbollah member described a situation wherein neighborhood freelancing za‘ims (leaders) exploited the chaotic dahiya environment to engage in illegalities, extorting money from residents for electricity and satellite television services, generating resentment and sometimes violence. Just after the knifing incident, on-the-ground responsibility for security and public order in the dahiya began to shift in favor of the Lebanese state. In November 2009, Hezbollah blessed a long overdue clean-up operation, as personnel from the Internal Security Forces (a centralized police force) and various intelligence bodies established a presence in the dahiya to root out the criminals. The party dubbed the campaign al-Nizam min al-Iman (“public order is a part of faith”), and it covered everything from regulating traffic and use of sidewalks to sanitation and discouraging the theft of state electricity supplies via illegal connections to the network.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah has largely washed its hands of the tuffar — outlaws in the northern Bekaa Valley involved in cannabis cultivation. The tuffar have remained aloof from both the government and Hezbollah, having retreated to the outer reaches of Lebanon, where they represent more a voice of protest than a plan of action. The popularity of their cause stems from corruption and waste in the central government, the lack of profitable alternatives to drug farming and the specter of nearly 40,000 outstanding warrants hanging over the heads of Bekaa residents. Hezbollah leader Sayyid Hasan Nasrallah has demanded an amnesty or another solution to the warrants issue.
During and after the civil war, Syrian military and intelligence officials managed the unruly clans in the northern Bekaa, whose turf battles had a propensity for violence, and since Syria’s 2005 withdrawal, Hezbollah has not filled the vacuum. While continuing to sponsor reconciliation between the area’s clans, it has not acted to end the disturbances once and for all. Hezbollah is not pulling the strings of the tuffar movement, but rather eying it warily as an offshoot of the network of Bekaa tribes it has yet to fully co-opt. Perhaps because of the charged sectarian climate of recent years, the party has not lobbied hard for the canceling of outstanding warrants — a move that would benefit the Shi‘i community. Meanwhile, Hezbollah has refused to condone the acts of violent Shi‘i clan members or criminals, or to protect the mini-industry of car theft centered in the village of Brital. Clashes between the Lebanese army and outlaws have become more frequent since Syria’s withdrawal and Hezbollah has generally offered its tacit blessing for army intervention in towns like Baalbek, where clan members have engaged in shootouts in the streets, sometimes with rocket-propelled grenades.
While Hezbollah has not used the last five years to co-opt the entirety of the Shi‘i population, it continues to cultivate its core constituency. The large-scale and usually efficient provision of social services to the public is a pillar of Hezbollah’s drive to gain the support of the majority of the Shi‘a. The party provides schools, medical facilities, agricultural assistance and support for widows and orphans. But Hezbollah has been unable to secure the Health, Education or Social Affairs Ministries in the three governments formed since Syria’s withdrawal. Such “service” portfolios would grant Hezbollah secure channels of patronage to be directed at needy urban and rural communities. Meanwhile, the July 2006 war with Israel required the party to rebuild the swathes of the southern suburbs destroyed by Israeli raids. Hezbollah established the firm Waad (Promise) alongside its long-time arm for such endeavors, Jihad al-Bina’ (Jihad Construction), to oversee reconstruction, and the results have been slow but positive; an observer said that even virulently anti-Hezbollah engineers and technicians were enthusiastically participating in the reconstruction projects, due to the professionalism of the effort. In contrast, the government’s performance can be summed up by its sole significant project in the suburbs, the airport bridge-tunnel in Ghubayri, which inches toward completion more than four years after the war. Accusations of official mismanagement of reconstruction funds, which were donated by a number of countries, abound. The likeliest explanation is that the government used part of the money to pay down the national debt, rather than channeling it to reconstruction.
In securing services and projects, Hezbollah has honed its lobbying skills as it interacts with the Lebanese state, foreign governments and local communities. A union official observed: “When Christian MPs visit a government minister, they usually ask for favors, personal things, related to prestige, like a vanity license plate for a constituent. The Hezbollah MPs are all business. They always have a request for some civil defense center or hospital in some village. They’re always asking for such things.” Critics castigate Hezbollah for relying on Iranian subsidies, but the party also obtains funding from the Shi‘i diaspora and services from state bureaucratic channels, and raises no objections to Arab Gulf countries earmarking reconstruction aid for individual villages in the south. Moreover, the money that is secured is sometimes used to create self-generating sources of revenue. The party’s showcase endeavor has been a massive open-air museum in the southern village of Malita in commemoration of Hezbollah’s operations against Israel from 1982 to 2000, when the Israeli army occupied southern Lebanon. The Malita complex, dubbed “jihad tourism” by Western media, has attracted a half-million visitors in the three months following its May opening.[1] Malita was completed less than one year after a record year of tourism in Lebanon, while the government’s efforts to promote tourism have been reactive and slow to translate funding into impact.
Politicians regularly spout the rhetoric of sustainable development, but most of Lebanon’s political class is more intent on securing patronage in the form of a payoff and then skimming off a percentage before passing it along, if it gets passed along. Hezbollah realizes the importance of both diversified funding sources and sustainable projects; it built the Malita complex itself, after encouraging private-sector supporters to build restaurants, hotels and other leisure establishments in various areas of the country, including a low-cost amusement park and paintball field in the dahiya.
‘Izz al-Din “Madoff” vs. Fnayish and Co.
Hezbollah’s standing took a hit in June 2009, when the public became acquainted with one Salah ‘Izz al-Din, a businessman, financier and confidante of Hezbollah, and reportedly an investment partner of several top party officials. ‘Izz al-Din was apparently unable to cover the huge sums he owed, thanks to a Ponzi scheme he allegedly ran to the tune of $200-400 million. ‘Izz al-Din and his partners are now before the courts and the event was seized upon, briefly, to highlight Hezbollah’s purportedly shady finances and corruption. The repercussions will likely be limited to the upper reaches of the party, however, and Nasrallah has reportedly relayed a strict internal message: Halt corrupt activities immediately.
In contrast, a more favorable reputation for the party is being built thanks to Hezbollah’s ministers in the executive branch. On regional and international policies, Nawwaf al-Musawi is Hezbollah’s leading spokesman, while on purely domestic issues, Muhammad Fnayish has been the party’s most prominent face. Fnayish, who served as energy minister, was the only one of Hezbollah’s partisans named to the 2005 cabinet, though the party also selected a minister of labor, Trad Hamada, an ex-leftist and now Islamist-oriented figure.
After a disappointing performance as labor minister, Hamada was replaced by Fnayish in the 2008 cabinet. When he assumed office, Fnayish wrested control of the labor movement file from Hezbollah’s official Labor Bureau, but declined to use the General Labor Confederation (theoretically in the party’s hip pocket) as a tool to pressure rivals in the divided cabinet. Fnayish also ended the reign of notorious middlemen who processed paperwork at the ministry by tendering the job out to Liban Post, a private firm. The majority of these several hundred middlemen were supporters of Hezbollah or its fellow Shi‘i party Amal, but under Fnayish’s reforms, people now turn in their forms at local post offices, instead of going to the Labor Ministry in the dahiya and paying a middleman to facilitate the process. During his short tenure at the Energy and Water Ministry, prior to 2008, Fnayish had instituted a nationwide addition of plastic wrapping to butane canisters, used commonly in home heating and cooking, in order to prevent rampant tampering. Such good governance initiatives are rare and often ineffective, due to opposition from powerful entrenched interests.
Fnayish’s dynamic but low-key approach stood out in a government riddled with under performing ministers, whether from the Western-backed March 14 coalition, so named for the date of a massive demonstration against the Syrian “presence” in Lebanon in 2005, or from among its rivals. The March 14 parties had won the May 2005 parliamentary elections after the departure of Syrian troops, but had formed a “national unity” cabinet with its opponents, including Hezbollah and Amal. While serving as energy minister, Fnayish had attempted reform but was blocked by the March 14 prime minister, Fuad Siniora; the issue finally became public when Fnayish’s successor and ally disclosed the stalemate and Siniora’s alleged bureaucratic foot dragging on revamping the mismanaged state electricity sector.
Whether or not a minister can be completely “clean” is a something of a moot question in Lebanon, where the entire range of political parties, Hezbollah included, are believed to divert money and resources from government channels or profit from illegal enterprises. The judiciary’s exposure of corruption has been extremely selective. The vast network of intertwined interests and trading of favors in national politics hints that a comprehensive revelation of who exactly is involved in illegalities would produce a very long list, meaning that everyone has an interest in keeping things relatively quiet.
A challenge now awaits at the Agriculture Ministry, to which Hezbollah official Husayn Hajj Hasan was named in the government formed by Saad al-Hariri in November 2009. The ministry lacks significant state funding and has been awash in corruption, but if anyone is under pressure to make it work, it is Hezbollah, which has long criticized the government neglect that hurts the party’s rural bases of support in the Bekaa and the south. A long-time MP for Baalbek-Hirmil, Hajj Hasan had served for years as the vocal chairman of Parliament’s Agriculture Committee; he holds a doctorate in chemistry and physics and is one of the few ministers who appears qualified for his portfolio.
Hajj Hasan’s short tenure has spread cautious optimism. While he began by repeating his predecessors’ tactic of decrying insufficient government funding, Hajj Hasan also exposed the corruption that plagues the ministry, where he says three quarters of bureaucrats are implicated in taking bribes and other illegalities, and customs declarations for wheat shipments involve rampant forgery. More recently, he has taken disciplinary action against employees allegedly responsible for allowing spoiled foodstuffs into the country and legal action against importers. Hajj Hasan’s ambitious four-year reform plan might fail to defeat the sector’s cartels of pesticide merchants and promoters of traditional, low-value crops, who inhibit dynamism and growth. But his latest achievement, in July, was to broker a first-ever soft loan program for farmers, courtesy of the country’s private banks, in an attempt to generate funding rather than merely register complaints.[2] The last two decades of Hezbollah’s service provision to rural residents, among them many farmers, appear to have had only a limited impact, despite the considerable amount of aid disbursed. On the other hand, the services might have prevented a total collapse of conditions for Shi‘i farmers.
Both Fnayish and Hajj Hasan have helped to polish Hezbollah’s domestic political aura of seriousness and anti-corruption, or at least its reputation as a party that abstains from significant official chicanery. The two ministers may not be charismatic, but they can hold forth on their respective policy domains on nightly political talk shows for several hours without causing Lebanese viewers to roll their eyes in disgust, as they do when more divisive and corrupt figures are on camera.
The National Cup
To mark the thirty-fifth anniversary of the outbreak of the civil war in 1975, Lebanese ministers and MPs gathered on a soccer pitch in the dahiya on April 13 to play a 30-minute match for civil peace. Detractors faulted the upbeat, nationally televised game for starring the very political class that many blame for sectarian unrest, political corruption and economic mismanagement. Not surprisingly, the evening was heavy with symbolism. Organized by Minister of Youth and Sports ‘Ali ‘Abdallah, from Amal, the match pitted two teams made up of a mixture of players from the March 14 forces and their political foes in the March 8 coalition, so named for the large rally “thanking” Syria on the eve of Syrian troops’ exodus from Lebanon. One team was captained by Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri and the other by Hezbollah’s ‘Ali ‘Ammar, an MP for Baadba.
One of the most divisive figures in the March 14 camp, Maten MP Sami Gemayel, a young Phalange Party official, scored both goals in the match. He put the ball in the net guarded by goalie Qasim Hashim, an MP for Marjayoun-Hasbaya and a member of the Baath Party. In attendance was President Michel Suleiman, whose status as a neutral or “consensus” head of state excused his direct participation. By state protocol, the speaker of Parliament, Amal head Nabih Berri, should have been number two in the match’s pecking order and the prime minister number three, but instead the captains were selected from the two parties commonly seen as leading each of the March 14 and March 8 camps: Hariri’s Future Movement and Hezbollah. On their flanks were more hardline types, such as the Phalange, who regularly criticize Hezbollah and its allies Syria and Iran, and the Baath, which marches in lockstep with Damascus.
The principals and their post-game comments reflected the schizophrenia that plagues the political class: On one hand, politicians say Lebanese should “forget” the sectarian conflicts of the past; on the other hand, they say, “We can’t forget,” lest the conflicts return. Referring to Hezbollah’s self-titled “national defense strategy” for confronting Israel, in large part with Hezbollah’s weapons, goal-scorer Gemayel said of his opponents, captained by ‘Ammar, “The defense strategy of Hajj ‘Ali was pretty bad,” before erupting into laughter. For his part, ‘Ammar smilingly explained his side’s loss by saying that since Hariri was the captain of the other team, and since Hezbollah was a part of the cabinet, it “didn’t want to embarrass the government.”
Forty-eight hours prior to the game, Gemayel had told a political rally that the day would come when Hezbollah’s arms would be confiscated, piled on army trucks and sent from the dahiya to the Defense Ministry in upper Baabda. The March 8 coalition also has its hardliners: A few days after giving up the goals, MP Hashim turned to the attack on the border with Israel. He rallied locals in a village and led them a few feet into disputed territory, removing Israeli barbed wire and hoisting Lebanese flags. Echoing a similar incident that took place in 1999, spontaneously led by leftist and other secular students,[3] this round of tit-for-tat on the border also saw the Israelis quickly remove the paraphernalia. The Phalange rally rhetoric and the Baath-led action were examples of political freelancing, while in an official soccer game, Hezbollah was in effect put on a par with Hariri, a situation that did not exist prior to 2005. In the “old days,” Hezbollah MPs regularly voted no confidence in governments led by Hariri’s late father, Rafiq; today Hezbollah is in the government. A decade ago, Hezbollah did not enjoy this central role in the system, whereas today it often performs the function of playing the middle rather than representing the extreme.
Managing Stalemate
Tensions in Lebanon are high as the Special Tribunal for Lebanon investigates the assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri by car bomb on February 14, 2005. Sectarian resentment also persists since the 2007 Hezbollah-led tent city protest in downtown Beirut. Much of this period saw parliamentary life in limbo and the cabinet paralyzed by the boycotts of Hezbollah and Amal ministers. In May 2008, three weeks of bloody civil strife broke out in several parts of Lebanon between the March 14 and March 8 camps, with Hezbollah providing the most efficient shock troops.
The bitterness of many people about the bloody civil strife of May 2008 continues to generate ever-ready accusations that “Hezbollah turned its guns against Lebanese.” One response by Hezbollah was to direct its public relations efforts beyond the converted, stepping up the number of guided tours of the former Israeli-occupied zone in the south for students from elite universities, in an effort to reinforce the concept of resistance to Israel. Helping Hezbollah stay afloat politically during this period was its alliance with the Free Patriotic Movement, led by the Maronite Christian Michel Aoun — a partnership that has helped to temper sentiment that only Shi‘a support Hezbollah. Rather than effortlessly dominating the national arena in the aftermath of Syria’s withdrawal, Hezbollah has focused on forging alliances, and unlike in the pre-2005 period, the party’s charismatic leader, Nasrallah, now frequently uses televised addresses, speeches and interviews to tackle domestic and foreign affairs. To mobilize public opinion against the Tribunal, he has made a series of media appearances and released what he says is sensitive information about the plot to kill Hariri, promising even more revelations to come. Nasrallah’s rhetoric might anger Hezbollah’s political rivals, but his efforts are calibrated to build support and win allies, and the boyish, 50-year old cleric appears to be using more and more colloquial Arabic in his appearances, perhaps in an attempt to cast a wider net. Hezbollah will not compromise on “security,” by which the party means its weapons, but on other matters it lobbies and repeatedly argues its case, sometimes reaching compromises. If Lebanese politics in the 2005-2010 period has been a stalemate, it has been a very fluid one.
Hezbollah’s performance has not been spotless in the eyes of its base. Ahead of the May municipal elections, the party announced an ironclad alliance with Amal, to ensure winning coalition tickets. Prior to the polls, Nasrallah was obliged to intervene, publicly telling freelancing cadres who were promoting themselves as candidates in the name of the party to get in line and fully support the officially sanctioned Hezbollah-Amal slates. In the same speech, he told the wider public that voting against the coalition candidates was in effect a vote against resistance to Israel, an argument that many apparently found excessive. The public in various Shi‘i villages and towns fought back quite loudly, trying to form counter-lists. Ultimately, only a handful of upset wins were scored, but the people had spoken: They rejected the tried-and-true Hezbollah strategy of selecting lesser known and uninspiring figures and passing them off as authentic representatives of leading families. Officially, the party maintains that it did well, but if the previous municipal election performances by Hezbollah deserved an eight out of ten, one cadre reportedly related, the most recent effort deserved a six.
The New Maestro?
Prior to Syria’s withdrawal, Hezbollah reveled in its outsider role in national politics. The late Rafiq al-Hariri consulted the party face to face on certain domestic issues, but his son Saad now coordinates at least weekly with Hezbollah officials. Hezbollah and the Future Movement have participated in the cabinets since 2005. As one of the system’s top players, Hezbollah has generally avoided any attempt to take the country’s political system in a radically different direction without a consensus across parties.
Whether or not Hezbollah prefers to engage in domestic politics is irrelevant; it is under pressure to perform from its core constituency and the system, even if matters are supposedly deadlocked. Prior to 2005, Syria’s presence could be blamed for postponing a decision on, for example, how to reform the moribund state bureaucracy, but this excuse is fading. In Saad al-Hariri’s government, the point man for drafting guidelines for the appointment of senior civil servants on the basis of merit and seniority rather than sectarian and political affiliation is none other than Hezbollah’s Fnayish, who was named minister of state for administrative reform. Fnayish’s portfolio means that he is in regular contact with diplomats from many countries. Some might belittle the scope of the evolution in Hezbollah since its official coming-out in February 1985, but back then the party certainly did not worry about its stances on privatization, pesticide use, local elections, social security and reforming the bureaucracy. Nor was it obliged to hold meetings with foreign diplomats eager to jump on a bus and talk about funding a capacity-building initiative in southern Lebanon.
For now, the party is benefiting from its expanded civil, political and state responsibilities while managing to trim one of its more odious duties, namely policing the entirety of the dahiya. It has largely ignored wide-impact socioeconomic issues, but has managed to run its ministries without becoming tarred with accusations of corruption and squandering of resources. Hezbollah’s critics contend that its military-security activities demonstrate a flagrant disregard for the Lebanese state; in the cabinet, the party’s minister is tasked with coordinating positions on launching the reform of this state, and few eyebrows are raised. Ironically, the rhetoric about Hezbollah being “outside the state” has escalated at a time when its interface with this state is becoming more routine and at least partly institutionalized. While Hezbollah retains the greatest influence over “decisions of war and peace” (outbreaks of conflict with Israel), it has informally conferred with the Lebanese Army and state security institutions since the end of the civil war — an interplay that has become even more complex following the Syrian withdrawal. There have been ups and downs in Hezbollah’s relations with the army, but these are usually limited to fluctuations in the level of cooperation or competition, and do not deteriorate into out-and-out strife.
Hezbollah is not comfortable holding too much power; it has willingly given up a number of ministerial portfolios to its allies in the parliamentary minority. The party finds itself coordinating with two principal allies, Amal and the Free Patriotic Movement. The parliamentary minority camp is not in Hezbollah’s iron grip except on matters concerning resistance to Israel. On everything else, Hezbollah might allow its partners to lead the fight against March 14, or watch them go at each other, due to the poor relationship between Berri and Michel Aoun. On some occasions, the party even sides with elements of the “enemy” camp, as it did on the issue of legislating civil and humanitarian rights for Palestinian refugees, which split MPs in the summer of 2010 along Muslim-Christian lines before a compromise was reached.
For many of Hezbollah’s rabid critics, the party’s Islamist inclination is a threat to the Lebanese state and political order. Its military and intelligence capabilities give it an edge, the argument goes, that is used to “hold the country hostage” to Iran and Syria. While Hezbollah refuses to surrender its arms until the conflict with Israel ends, and remains committed to the end of a Zionist political entity, it has been forced to compensate politically for the dramatic downturn in resistance operations against Israel. From 1990 to 2000, Hezbollah launched thousands of attacks. In the decade since, the number has dropped to several dozen, even though Hezbollah insists that slivers of Lebanese territory, the Shebaa Farms, are still under Israeli occupation. Among the attacks were one in October 2001, which eventually led to a prisoners-for-bodies swap, and one in July 2006, which ignited a devastating 34-day war. Though Nasrallah claimed a “divine victory” in the latter conflagration, he and his colleagues know that many Lebanese have scant patience for border actions that provoke the Israeli military. Amid the steep reduction in the activity of the resistance, the party’s energy has flowed into the spheres of politics, the media, tourism, agriculture, social services, reconstruction, development and governance. During local and parliamentary elections, Hezbollah behaves like a Chicago political machine, like other Lebanese parties, and not like a branch of the Revolutionary Guards.
With Syria no longer in the picture to act as mediator, there has been multifaceted bargaining among the parties of Lebanon on a wide array of issues, such as how to conduct elections, reform and privatization, and not just big-ticket items like national sovereignty and Hezbollah’s arms. The political landscape is fragmented and marred by weak state institutions. The “national unity” cabinet and the national dialogue process periodically discuss the most sensitive issues but implement little. There are also contentious debates over the legality of political guidelines: UN resolutions, Syrian-sponsored treaties and the 1990 Ta’if Agreement that defined the post-civil war political system. Syria used to regulate matters and contain the possibility of grinding stalemate or civil strife. Questions of who is now Lebanon’s maestro with Syria gone, whether a domestic player or foreign party can play the role, and whether the country requires the infamous dabit al-iqa‘ (rhythm keeper) in the first place, continue to bedevil those who follow events in Lebanon. Hezbollah might be incapable of becoming the new maestro, but its reconstruction, albeit incomplete, of the dahiya after the July 2006 war signals that the party remains ahead in the governance game compared to the woeful Lebanese state.
Endnotes
[1] Independent, August 15, 2010.
[2] Daily Star, August 26, 2010.
[3] Hassan Marwany, “Liberating Arnoun,” Middle East Report 211 (Summer 1999).
Marlin Dick, a freelance journalist based in Lebanon
Middle East Report Online | September 13, 2010
The Shiites of Saudi Arabia
Since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and the ensuing alteration of the regional balance of power in favor of Iran, Saudi Arabia has looked at the world through an Iranian and Shiite prism. This prism affects the way it views its neighbor across the Gulf, its position in the Arab and Islamic world, and its own Shiite population.
Saudi Arabia’s current regional political troubles are nearly entirely connected to the rise of Iran and the Shiites in the region. Saudi Arabian involvement in the West Bank and Gaza—and in particular in the agreement to establish a national unity government, signed on February 8, 2007 by Fatah and Hamas—was meant to lower the flames in the region in order to limit Iran’s influence. Saudi involvement in Lebanon also stems from this desire to check Iran, as do several meetings between Saudi and Israeli officials and the revival of the Saudi initiative for a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.1
As the Saudis move to restrain the rising strength of Iran and the Shiites outside the kingdom, they keep an ever-watchful eye over their own Shiite population. The ascendancy of the Shiites in Iraq and Lebanon has given rise to a feeling of empowerment amongst the Shiites of Saudi Arabia. They are proud of the accomplishments of their brethren. At the same time, they are cautious in what they hope for and how they express themselves, because much of the Wahhabi ulama in Saudi Arabia fears the rise of Shiism, and vocally opposes it. The Saudi Shiites expect the government to condemn anti-Shiite fatwas, and act as a protector, but the government has not done so.
The Saudi government, in fact, has its own concerns. Its base of support is amongst the Wahhabi, anti-Shiite majority. It is a religious state that derives its legitimacy from a form of Islam that is, almost by definition, anti-Shiite. Indeed, there is a long history of Wahhabi anti-Shiite polemics.2 The Wahhabi majority expects the Saudis, as the leaders of the Sunni world, to put the Shiites, led by Iran, in their place. The government therefore cannot be seen as trying to placate its own Shiites at this time. The Shiites of Saudi Arabia have the misfortune of outside forces—be they the Saudis of Najd or the Persians of Iran—always determining their fates. The Saudis and the Iranians have a long history of enmity, punctuated with periods of good relations. Saudi Arabia’s Shiites have often found themselves caught in the middle. They have been both the object of Saudi persecution and disdain and the subject of Iranian recruitment to subvert the Saudi regime.3 Historically, their response has moved between dissimulation, accommodation, attempted reconciliation, and terrorism.4 They reject the official narrative of Saudi history, which portrays the capture of the area where most of the Shiites live—al-Hasa—as a mythological “unification” of the Arabian Peninsula.5 For many of the Shiites, their homeland has been occupied since the capture of al-Hasa by Ibn Saud in 1913.
There are two important political elements that constantly impact the fate of Saudi Shiites. One is internal—the Wahhabi ulama and their rank-and-file followers. The other is external—Iran, Saudi Arabia’s main political and religious rival across the Gulf.
It is impossible to arrive at an exact determination of the number of Saudi Shiites. They constitute between ten and fifteen percent of the population, and about thirty-three percent of the population in the Eastern Province.6 They reside primarily in the Eastern Province, where Saudi Arabia’s oil is located, with a small number living in Medina.
While the most important Shiite centers have always been Iran and Iraq, the eastern part of Arabia has always held significant Shiite populations. Prominent historical Shiite mujtahids include Ibrahim al-Qatifi (sixteenth century), Ahmad Zayn al-Din al-Ahsai (d. 1801), and Ali al-Khunayzi (d. 1944). Until the Saudi occupation of the Eastern areas, Shiite mosques and husayniyyas (community centers) were allowed to develop. Learning centers, known as hawzas, were allowed to exist until the mid-1940s. The connection of Saudi Shiites to Iraq is a strong one. Upon the closing of Shiite learning centers in Saudi Arabia, most religious studies students went to Iraq.7
Deep in Shiite historical memory rests their persecution by the Saudis during the18th and 19th centuries. Expanding into Iraq in the early 19th century, Saudi warriors famously destroyed the tomb of Imam Husayn in Karbala and the tombs of the Prophet’s companions (the sahaba) in Mecca and Medina, demonstrating the extreme enmity the Saudi Wahhabis held towards the Shiites. For the Wahhabis, grave worship was the paramount act of shirk, or polytheism, a severe accusation, so its practice by the Shiites became a source of constant suffering.
The Shiites of Saudi Arabia do not represent a threat to the government or the state. They are too small in number and too unpopular with most Saudis. But what they do, and how the Saudi government reacts to and treats them, are important for both domestic and foreign policy.
Saudi Shiites have never felt part of the state, and the government has rarely given them reason to. There are several factors influencing the government’s treatment of the Shiites: Wahhabi ideology, pressure from and response to the Wahhabi ulama, the presence of the Shiites in the sensitive oil region, and the government’s relations with Iran. These four factors have combined to influence the fate of the Shiites in Saudi Arabia throughout their history.
Modern Saudi Arabia is the result of an 18th century alliance between the Saudi family of Najd in Central Arabia and an extremist shaykh of the Hanbali school of Islamic jurisprudence, Muhammad bin Abd al-Wahhab.Wahhabism was a powerful and fanatic ideology that served the regime well in mobilizing the disparate tribes and casting the Shiites in the role of the quintessential “Other.” Muslims who were worse than Jews or Christians. To Sunnis in general, the Shia are known as rawafid, those who reject the first three “Rightly Guided” Caliphs in favor of Ali and the Prophet’s House, known as Ahl al-Bayt. But for the Wahhabis, they are worse than rejectionists: they are associationists and polytheists (mushrikin) who associate people (such as Ahl al-Bayt) and objects with God. Many Shiite beliefs and practices stand in stark contradistinction to the Wahhabi creed, with its strong emphasis on tawhid, or the uncompromising unity of the Divine.
The Saudi ruling family’s legitimacy is religiously based. The family claims to rule in the name of Islam, as interpreted by the Wahhabi clerics. The commitment of the Saudi family to Wahhabism has often been measured by the way they treated the Shiites under their control. Throughout their history, the Shiites have paid the price of the Saudi family’s quest for religious legitimacy. And religious legitimacy has been the maidservant of political aspirations and expansion.
The modern misfortunes of the Shiite community of Saudi Arabia began in 1913, with the capture of the eastern oasis of al-Hasa by the recently resurgent Saudis. They were subject to depredations and persecutions under the rulers of the governors of al-Hasa, the Jiluwi family, relatives of the Saudi royal family. Many Shiites were killed by Ibn Saud’s Ikhwan warriors when they refused to convert.8
Religiously and socially, the Shiites were marginalized by the emerging Saudi state. Sunni merchants were encouraged to settle in al-Hasa and take over traditional Shiite commercial ventures, such as the trade in dates.9 Shiite critics would later complain that the traditional interdependence between Najd, the Hijaz, and al-Hasa had been violated by the Saudis, who made all regions dependent on Najd.10
Shiite religious practices and institutions were severely curtailed. In 1927, the Wahhabi ulama published a fatwa calling upon the Shiites to “convert” to Islam. Some Shiite notables complied, while others left the country.11 The publication and distribution of religious texts was forbidden, the Shiite call to prayer was outlawed, and centers of religious studies were dismantled. Specific Shiite customs such as grave visitation (ziyarat al-qubur) were forbidden, as were the Ashura commemorations.12 The Shiites have been vilified in textbooks, and generally have been made to feel like outcasts.
Economically as well as socially, the Shiites have rarely been treated or led to believe that they are part of a common Saudi experience. For example, in the 1950s there were labor riots in the oil fields run by Aramco, where most of the workers were Shiites. At the time, the ideologies that were gaining ground in the Arab world, such as socialism and communism, seemed attractive to many Shiites who felt discriminated against by the Saudi authorities. The Shiites felt that they were not part of the wealth that was beginning to flow to the kingdom as a result of the oil industry. 13 These riots were put down very harshly by the Saudi Arabian National Guard. In 1979 and 1980, encouraged by the success of the Iranian revolution they again rioted in demonstrations which became known as the “Intifada of the Eastern Province.” These riots were firmly crushed as well. The government did not hesitate to use helicopter gunships against the demonstrators.14 Many leaders of the Shiite community went into exile or were arrested following these protests.
Fouad Ibrahim, a Saudi Shiite scholar and former activist, relates that the main Shiite opposition body, the Organization of the Islamic Revolution (Munazzamat al-Thawra al-Islamiyya), was established by Shaykh Hasan al-Saffar, a Shiite cleric, in December 1979, following the first burst of rioting. Saffar, who participated in the uprising, was inspired by the revolutionary reading that the Iranian Ali Shariati gave to the battle of Karbala. The group functioned as a political and religious outlet for feelings of oppression and insult.15
Shaykh Saffar was echoing the thought of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini when he wrote: We are genuinely part of the realm of the downtrodden [mustadafun] while the despots of Al Saud…are genuinely part of the realm of oppressors…and colonizers. The ongoing battle is now between these two realms…. Our struggle against…tyrannical rule is a cycle of a long chain of a universal revolution which will, inevitably, lead to the collapse of imperialistic superpowers and the rise of the world of the downtrodden.16
After the uprising Saffar found asylum in Iran; his organization established offices in Tehran, London and Washington, where it was concerned primarily with the publication of al-Thawra al-Islamiyya.
During the 1990s the nature of the relations between the Saudi regime and the Shiites changed from confrontational to accommodating. The Shiite opposition turned its attention to a search for cultural authenticity, a creative and less violent way to relate to the Saudi state. This change stemmed from a realization that confrontation provided limited or no results, and that a revolutionary stance had little chance of success. They therefore tried to find another way to give expression to their Shiite identity while demanding social change. To this end, the organization changed its name to al Haraka al-Islahiyya (the Reform Movement), and in 1991 it began to publish al-Jazira al-Arabiyya in London and ArabianMonitor in Washington. The journals were moderate in tone and tended to highlight human rights abuses. They called for a progressive agenda in the kingdom and addressed non-Shiite issues. Until the Sunni Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights (CDLR) began publishing in 1994, these Shiite publications were the only overseas voice of the Saudi opposition.17
The Shiite opposition tried to open avenues of communication with some of the Sunni opposition during the 1990s, but, as could perhaps be expected, they were rebuffed. The Saudi regime noticed and welcomed the shift in Shiite tactics and apparent goals, for it faced a more radical and more threatening Sunni opposition. In the autumn of 1993, and after negotiations carried out by the Saudi ambassador to the United Kingdom, Ghazi al-Qusaybi, several members of the Shiite opposition returned to Saudi Arabia.18
For the Saudi government, accommodating the Shiite opposition seemed a relatively easy way to temper a serious conflict, even at the cost of angering radical Sunni fundamentalists at home. Saudis already owned most of the international Arab press, and for a small price they could shut down two major opposition publications. Moreover, Saffar’s group appeared to have settled for a separate deal with the Saudis, accepting commitments to improve the situation of the Eastern Province Shiites and agreeing not to press their demands for general reform and human rights domestically. Compared to the tougher and potentially more dangerous demands of groups such as the CDLR, reaching a separate modus vivendi with the Shiite opposition was a small price to pay and also prevented a temporary but potentially damaging alliance between the opposition movements.
Tawfiq al-Sayf, a leader of the Saudi Shiite opposition in exile, led a large delegation to Saudi Arabia in October 1993 to meet with King Fahd and other Saudi officials. According to the few press reports available, Fahd instructed his son, Prince Muhammad, governor of the Eastern Province, to carry out Shiite demands, which included allowing the practice of Shiite religious rites previously outlawed, returning canceled passports, allowing exiles to return, and guaranteeing that those who returned would not be arrested or questioned. As a result of these contacts, the authorities released scores of Shiite prisoners and issued travel documents previously denied to Shiite activists. In a development the Shiites perceived as highly significant, the Saudi regime reportedly reissued a school text that had referred to Shiites as one of the heterodox sects. The new edition mentioned that there were now five Islamic madhahib (schools of jurisprudence) in Saudi Arabia: four belonging to Ahl al-Sunna wal-Jamaa (Sunnis) and one belonging to the imamiyya or ithna ashariyya (Shiites). The Shiite publications al-Jazira al-Arabiyya and Arabia Monitor published their last issues in August 1993.
Both sides kept the news of the agreements fairly quiet;19 the Saudi domestic and overseas press ignored it, and opposition activists suddenly assumed a very low profile. This reaction probably resulted from a mutual understanding that too much publicity would draw the fire of radical Sunni fundamentalists, who were troublesome for both the Saudis and the Shiites.
Both the government and the Shiite opposition seemed to greatly desire some arrangement, although it appeared that the Saudi authorities emerged victorious, successfully silencing several of its major critics. There was no evidence that certain other key Shiite demands had been met, including the official recognition of Shiism as a Muslim madhhab and the right to implement Shiite law accordingly; recognition of the rights to build and to worship in Shiite holy places—husayniyyas and mosques—and to repair graves destroyed by the Saudis in the al-Baqi cemetery in Medina; freedom to hold Shiite religious celebrations; an end to discrimination against Shiites in government and in universities; and general improvements in the Eastern Province.20 Additionally, not all Shiites accepted the new accommodation with the regime, and some members of the overseas opposition did not return.
Shiite activists led by Saffar accepted the principle of engagement as the best way to achieve Shiite rights and inclusion in Saudi society. Saffar and his followers tend to accept the religious leadership of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the spiritual leader of Iraqi Shiites, but distinguish between religious and political leadership. Like Sistani, Saffar does not accept the principle of wilayat al-faqih, the rule of the jurist.21
But one organization accepted neither Saffar’s policy of engagement nor the accommodation with the Saudi regime. This was Hezbollah al-Hijaz, known also as Saudi Hezbollah and Ansar Khat al-Imam (Followers of Imam Kho meini). They follow the marjaiyya of Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader (rahbar) of Iran, and they are politically loyal to him. Unlike Saffar’s group, they accept wilayat al-faqih.22 These two remain the major trends in the Shiite population today.23 Hezbollah al-Hijaz came out strongly against the accommodation of 1993 and treated Saffar’s group like traitors, although it profited from the arrangement. “Let the cowards leave and let the people choose and pave the way, which will lead to the emergence of sincere and committed men.”24 It is this group that is usually held responsible for the bombing of the Khobar Towers complex in Dhahran in 1996, which killed 19 American servicemen. The attack was carried out with Iranian support.25
Two thousand and three was a crucial year for the Shiites of Saudi Arabia. As part of the general reform trend that swept the country after 9/11, and fearful of the extremism represented by al-Qaeda, leading Saudi Shiites joined liberal Sunni Islamist reformers in publishing a January petition entitled, “Vision for the Homeland.”26 This was a landmark event since leading Islamists had previously not agreed to sign petitions with Shiites. Several of the signatories were received by then-Crown Prince Abdallah. The petition called for an end to corruption and greater accountability, but did not call for the overthrow of the regime.
But there can be no doubt that the most significant recent event for Saudi Shiites was the downfall of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in April 2003. The Shiites felt empowered—even emboldened. Najaf, the heart of Shiism, had been liberated. Seeing millions of their Iraqi brethren freely carrying out the rituals of Ashura, they felt their time had now come within Saudi Arabia—a Shiite state in Iraq would bring Saudi Shiites their due. One Shiite religious official, who preferred to remain anonymous, told a reporter: “If a Shia state takes place in Iraq, we can be assured that there will be justice. It will be based on the religious teachings of the prophet, and after that, the Saudi Shia will be in a better situation.” In an uncharacteristically public move, Shiite leaders expressed their satisfaction with the end of the Baath regime, but followed their expression of happiness with a call to improve their own situation. The leading Shiite figure, Shaykh Hasan al-Saffar, said that now Saudi Shiites were “determined to claim some of their rights while defending the nation’s unity.”27 Saffar’s views epitomized the dilemma of the Saudi Shiites—making an effort to achieve equality while trying to avoid a backlash that could put the Shiites back many decades.
While the Shiite rise in Iraq planted hope in the hearts of Saudi Shiites, it also brought their problematic situation into focus. For this reason Saffar felt obligated to stress national loyalty in order to avoid an accusation of Shiite separatism.
Fortunately for the Shiites, then-Crown Prince Abdallah was a supporter of reconciliation. The Shiites published a memorandum signed by 450 activists, which some delivered personally to Abdallah on April 30, titled “Partners in the Homeland.” The title reflected Shaykh Saffar’s moderate tone as a loyal Saudi Arabian Shiite who was only seeking integration into Saudi society. The fact that they were received by Abdallah gave them hope. They were particularly concerned about heading off Wahhabi extremists, who might be worried about Shiite triumphalism. The memorandum demanded a public declaration of equality among all citizens, specifically including Shiites. It demanded Shiite representation in Saudi-led international Islamic forums and charities, and asked the royal family to issue and express support for dialogue between ulama of all the religious sects in the kingdom. They were at pains to emphasize their loyalty, particularly at a time when they were accused of being more loyal to Iran than to Saudi Arabia. Further demands included letting Shiites into government positions, official statements against discrimination, an end to detentions and travel bans, the right to publish Shiite material and perform Shiite rituals, and an end to the publishing of official texts that discriminate against the Shiites. The petitioners also demanded the recognition of an independent Shiite judiciary. If there was one overarching point it was to demonstrate loyalty, while demanding in return public statements by members of the royal family that the Shiites were equal citizens and that their rights should be respected.28
The signatories emphasized that the request for equality did not contradict their loyalty to the state. While aware that the royal family bases its legitimacy on being a Wahhabi state, by definition anti-Shiite, they are equally aware that the Al Saud represent their main defense against unrestricted Wahhabi fanaticism.
But as luck would have it, less than a month after the audience with Crown Prince Abdallah, Saudi Arabia was hit by a series of devastating terrorist attacks. On May 12 al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula carried out its biggest operation in over a decade, attacking simultaneously three Riyadh compounds used to house foreigners. Dozens were killed. A full-scale al-Qaeda insurgency was underway.29 It was likely that there were members of the royal family who wondered if it was the right time to begin a serous dialogue with the Shiites, who were anathema to extremist Wahhabis like al-Qaeda and its supporters.
But Crown Prince Abdallah was determined to make some progress with the Shiites, come what may, and his views carried the day. In June 2003, the first “National Dialogue” was held in Riyadh. It lasted four days, and brought together more than fifty clerics and intellectuals, both Sunni and Shiite. This was the first time that such a meeting had been held, and it involved establishment Wahhabi ulama as well as some former oppositionists who had termed the Shiites infidels. While the content of the discussions were not made public, the official Saudi Press Agency praised the gathering and quoted Abdallah as favoring such “quiet dialogue.”30
For the Shiites, the fact that the dialogue took place at all was an achievement, particularly since it was attended by both establishment Wahhabi ulama and more radical figures. After all, these ulama had met with Muslims who worshiped in ways and had beliefs that were not in accordance with Wahhabi practice. But at the same time, the Shiite leadership did not receive any direct support from ulama or royal family members for integrating them into the political and economic life of the country. It is likely that the Saudi leadership believed that while a dialogue was desirable, under the current situation overt support for the Shiites was a risk they were not willing to take. Moreover, the ongoing al-Qaeda-led Sunni insurgency had dampened the regime’s enthusiasm for any real reconciliation with the Shiites. In sum, one could say that the Shiites had gained some points in the dialogue, but remained far from any serious change in their basic situation.
There were two important events in 2005 for Saudi Arabia’s Shiites. One was the accession of Abdallah to the throne in August, following the death of King Fahd. The other was the elections held for the Saudi municipal councils. When Abdallah became King, the Shiites thought their moment had finally arrived. He was the champion of reform and religious tolerance. A busload of leaders and clerics from the Eastern Province traveled to Riyadh to pledge their loyalty, or baya. A Shiite activist was quoted as saying, “I have never seen anything like this.”31
In the spring of 2005, national elections were held for municipal councils. These were the first such elections in over forty years. Although some more radical Shiite clerics declared a boycott of the elections, Shaykh Saffar’s policy of engagement carried the day. Coming on the heels of the Shiite victory in the January 2005 Iraqi elections, Saffar pointed to Iraq as an example of the need to participate in the process. The turnout was relatively high, even higher than in the rest of the kingdom. Even though the actual positions contested were for half the seats in powerless municipal councils (the other half being appointees), the campaign itself and the very fact that their vote counted was reason for great optimism among the Shiites.They won nearly all of the seats they contested.32
While Shiite participation in elections was reason for celebration, the Shiite ascendancy, which became evident in Iraq during 2005 and into 2006, increased tension between Sunnis and Shiites in the kingdom. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s remarks in March 2005 that Shiites were more loyal to Iran than their own countries elicited a flood of protests from Saudi Shiites, particularly since no one in the Saudi government found it necessary to contradict Mubarak and attest to the loyalty of Saudi Shiites.33 But the perception on the part of Saudi Sunnis that Saudi Shiites were more loyal to Iran was very widespread, according to leading liberal Turki al-Hamad. “I’d say 90 percent of the people in Saudi Arabia don’t trust the Shiites,” he averred.34
The war in Lebanon in 2006, during which Hezbollah attacked Israeli cities and appeared triumphant, only worsened matters for Saudi Shiites. While Abdallah had been ready to meet publicly with Shiites (he was photographed with Saffar at the 2003 National Dialogue),35 Hezbollah’s popularity in the Arab world and its destabilization of the pro-Saudi government in Lebanon was more than he could bear. The government came out strongly against Hezbollah and Iran, calling Hezbollah’s kidnapping of Israeli soldiers Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser “rash adventures carried out by elements inside the state and those behind them.” At the same time, there were pro-Hezbollah demonstrations in the Eastern province.36 With this background, Abdallah was not able—or did not want—to restrain the traditional Wahhabi anti-Shiite polemics from bursting forth. At a time of Shiite ascendancy, the leading Sunni state could not be seen as coddling the Shiites.
The prominence of Hezbollah during the July 2006 war led to a discussion of the organization in particular, and by implication the Shiites in general, as well as the Shiites in Saudi Arabia. Safar al-Hawali, once of the opposition “Awakening Shaykhs,” who became popular in the 1990s and still maintained his distance from the regime, castigated Hezbollah (the Party of God) as “Hizb al-Shaytan” (the Party of the Devil), and said that it was forbidden to pray for it or to support it in any way. His former partner in the opposition of the 1990s, now closer to the regime, Salman al-Awda, exhibited a more Arab nationalist bent, saying that while there were disputes with the Shiites, “I, as a Muslim and an Arab, feel happy when Hezbollah inflicts damage on the Zionists, and we should praise the resistance in the media.”37 The dividing line between the two oppositionists was clear. Hawali had boycotted the 2003 National Dialogue with the Shiites, while Awda had attended.
Extremist Wahhabi shaykhs continued to point out the “evil nature” of the Shiites. During the Lebanon war, a fatwa appeared on the internet by leading Sunni Shaykh Abdallah bin Jibrin, a former member of the establishment Senior Ulama Council, calling on Sunnis to disavow Hezbollah as a party of rawafid that was anti-Sunni.38 Although Bin Jibrin later said this was an old fatwa that was no longer applicable to the present situation,39 his anti-Shiite views were well known, and he had even called for Shiites’ deaths in a fatwa published in 1991.40
Websites run by less established but still popular clerics published virulently anti-Shiite polemics. The Nur al-Islam website even had a special page dedicated to articles on the subject, entitled, “The Rawafid are Coming,” and illustrated with bloody graphics.41 Shiite websites castigated Bin Jibrin, warning him not to forget that he would have to face God on judgment day. The radical Hezbollah al-Hijaz issued a statement saying that Bin Jibrin had angred “all the sons of the Arabian Peninsula, not to mention the entire Islamic nation. This occurs while the Islamic nation is at the peak of its feelings of pride, dignity, and joys of victory over the sons of Zion, the victory that is recorded by the hand of the mujahidin of Lebanon’s Hezbollah.”42
The intensification of Sunni-Shiite strife in Iraq was reflected in a fatwa signed by 38 radical Sunni ulama in December 2006. Although it was addressed to the Sunnis of Iraq as a message of support, it was strongly anti-Shiite in general, complaining about their un-Islamic practices. This fatwa had been organized by Shaykh Abd al-Rahman al-Barrak, a radical cleric who still occasionally appeared on Saudi TV.43 Barrak also issued his own fatwa proclaiming the infidelity (takfir) of the Shiites and their polytheistic practices, and repeated the old accusation that the sect had been founded by a Jew.44 In January 2007, Bin Jibrin let his true colors fly, and published a fatwa on his own website giving eight reasons why the Shiites should be considered polytheists (mushrikin). He distinguished between the Shiites and “true Muslims.”45
For the Saudi Shiites who supported a model of cooperation with the regime, Shiite identification with Hezbollah proved particularly problematic. Saudi Arabia is a Sunni religious state. To identify with a Shiite movement, and, by implication, the Shiite stateof Iran, ran counter to the normative Saudi ethos. As time wore on and Shiite regional ascendancy became more apparent, the Saudi Shaykh Salman al-Awda sounded the alarm about Sunni conversion to Shiism (tashayyu), expressing his fear that Shiite victories in Lebanon and Iraq might draw Sunnis away.46 Many Saudi newspapers carried warnings from Wahhabi clerics against conversion to Shiism.47 King Abdallah him self addressed this issue in an interview with the Kuwaiti newspaper al-Siyasa in late January. The interviewer referred to a “campaign” of Shiite proselytism and asked to know what
Saudi Arabia’s position on the issue was as the source of religious authority (marja) for Sunni Muslims and protector of the law of God and His creed. Abdallah, accepting the premise of the question regarding the campaign and Saudi Arabia’s role as protector of the Sunnis, said that the Saudi leadership was following the issue, but that the Shiite campaign would fail because Sunnis held fast to their beliefs.48 The presentation of Saudi Arabia as the source of religious authority for Sunni Muslims drew a stark distinction between Shiite Iran and Sunni Wahhabi Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi regime is caught between its Wahhabi roots and wishes by some in the royal family, particularly Abdallah, to effect reconciliation with the Shiites. A graphic illustration of this dilemma is shown by examples from two websites. A Saudi Sunni rabidly anti-Shiite website, al-Furqan, published a “document” stating that according to Shiite calculations, Abdallah would be killed on December 18, 2007, which is one month before the coming of the Shiite Mahdi.49 On the other hand, the Shiite al-Rasid site published a tongue-in-cheek article entitled “King Abdallah is a Shiite” which expressed support for Abdallah, as a challenge to those who would say that they were more loyal to Iran than Saudi Arabia.50
In May 2007, Sunni activists hacked Saffar’s website and published the following message: “In the name of God, the Merciful and Compassionate: All rawafid websites will be attacked and all sites belonging to the Majus (pagan Zoroastrians—a reference to Iran) will be removed from the Internet.51
In general, over the years there has been some improvement in the lot of the Shiites of Saudi Arabia. They are allowed to hold Ashura commemorations, publish Shiite works, open Shiite mosques and Shiite schools, albeit all in a very slow and highly scrutinized manner.52 Even so, Saudi Shiites never stop worrying that their hard-won gains may evaporate one day and they do not have faith in the government. Paradoxically, the gains of their Iraqi brethren might cause them to lose what they have achieved in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Sunnis accuse Saudi Shiites of funding terrorism against Sunnis in Iraq, while Saudi Shiites accuse Saudi Sunnis of funneling funds to Sunni terrorists in Iraq. Saudi Shiites are also worried about extremists in their midst. 53 In the village of Awwamiya, some residents were reported to be carrying automatic weapons and wearing necklaces with a picture of Hezbollah Secretary General Hasan Nasrallah.54
Saudi Shiites continue to be divided between those who favor further dialogue and those who want a more confrontational approach, while all Shiites perceive a lack of momentum regarding reform. Leaders such as Ja’afar al-Shayib, Muhammad Mahfuz and Hasan al-Saffar support continued engagement with the regime and the conservative Sunni elements of Saudi society, while others, such as the cleric Nimr al-Nimr pursue a more militant line. Some leaders have even proposed the establishment of a Saudi Shiite marja al-taqlid (source of religious emulation) in order to allay Sunni fears that the Saudi Shiites are influenced by Shiite clerics in Iran and Iraq.55
Meanwhile, those Shiite activists favoring dialogue are reaching out. Saffar has traveled to the Wahhabi stronghold of Unayza to meet clerics, and has invited them to visit him in the Eastern Province.56 In April 2010, Saffar appeared on a televised debate with al-Barrak. While no progress was made, the Shiites could point to the fact that Barrak was willing to appear with Saffar as an indication that the approach of those favoring dialogue was making headway.57
In order to preserve their gains, the Shiites believe it is necessary for King Abdallah to speak out against anti-Shiite fatwas; indeed, they argue that such fatwas should be criminalized.58 Otherwise, they maintain, matters run the danger of returning to the problematic 1980s. But it is likely the Saudi Shiites will be disappointed. Relations between the regime and the Shiite population are fraught with difficulty. Given the reliance of the regime on the Sunni Wahhabi clerics, it is unlikely that they will rein them in. The situation in Iraq has made it much harder to do so. The royal family feels keenly its role as a leader of the Sunni world, and local Sunnis are pressuring the regime to support the Sunnis in Iraq. In the face of the regional Shiite ascendancy marked by Hezbollah’s performance against Israel, a possible Shiite state in Iraq, and a powerful Iran, it is likely that Saudi Shiites will continue to pay the price of being the ultimate “Other,” sacrificed on the altar of the Wahhabi legitimacy on which the regime is so dependent.
Joshua Teitelbaum is Principal Research Associate, Global Research in International Affairs Center, Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, and Visiting Scholar, Hoover Institution and Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, Stanford University
This article will appear in Volume 10 of Current Trends in Islamist Ideology published by Hudson Institute.
Notes
[1] On Saudi regional mediation efforts, see Joseph Kostiner, “Saudi Regional Strategy: The Power of Mediation,” Tel AvivNotes, March 25, 2007, online at http://www.dayan.org.
[2] See Meir Litvak, “Worse than the Jews: The Anti-Shiite Polemics of Sunni Islamic Radicalism,” in Tamar Yegnes (ed.), Sunna and Shi’a: The Changing Balance of Power (Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center, 2008), pp. 43-57 (Hebrew).
[3] On the history of the Shiites in Saudi Arabia, see: Guido Steinberg, “The Shiites in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia al-Ahsa, 1913-1953,” in Rainer Brunner and Werner Ende (eds.), The Twelver Shia in Modern Times: Religious Culture and Political History (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2001), pp. 236-251; Fuad Ibrahim, The Shi’is of Saudi Arabia (London: Saqi, 2006). See also Werner Ende, “The Nakhawila: A Shiite Community in Medina, Past and Present,” Die Welt des Islams, Vol. 37, No. 3 (November 1997), pp. 263-348.
[4] On Shiite terrorism, see Joshua Teitelbaum, Holier Than Thou: Saudi Arabia’s Islamic Opposition (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001), chapter 6.
[5] Madawi Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 199-200.
[6] “The Shiite Question in Saudi Arabia,” International Crisis Group, September 19, 2005; Graham Fuller and Rend Rahim Franke, The Arab Shia: The Forgotten Muslims (New York: Palgrave, 1999), p. 180.
[7] The Qatif hawza was known as “little Najaf.” The authorities appear to be exercising benign neglect with two currently operating hawzas: one in Qatif and one in al-Hasa. “Shiite Question.”
[8] For more details on the implications for the Shiites of the capture of al-Hasa, see Steinberg.
[9] “Shiite Question.” Steinberg raised the possibility that until the Saudi conquest Shiites may have even formed the majority in al-Hasa.
[10] Madawi Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 199-200.
[11] Steinberg, pp. 248-249.
[12] “Shiite Question.”
[13] Ibrahim, p. 33.
[14] Toby Jones, “Rebellion on the Saudi Periphery: Modernity, Modernization, Marginalization, and the Shia Uprising of 1979,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 38, No. 2 (May 2006), pp. 213-233. While the regime was busy putting down a Shiite uprising in the Eastern province, Wahhabi radicals took over the Great Mosque in Mecca. On this incident, see Teitelbaum, Holier Than Thou, pp. 19-22, and Yaroslav Trofimov, The Siege of Mecca: The Forgotten Uprising in Islam’s Holiest Shrine and the Birth of al-Qaeda (New York: Doubleday, 2007).
[15] Ibrahim, p. 33.
[16] Hasan al-Saffar, Kalimat al-Haraka al-Islamiyya, p. 30, quoted in Ibrahim, p. 132.
[17] Teitelbaum, Holier Than Thou, pp. 49-71.
[18] Madawi Al-Rasheed, “The Shia of Saudi Arabia: A Minority in Search of Cultural Authenticity,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 25 (1998), pp. 121-138; Mamoun Fandy, “From Confrontation to Creative Resistance,” Critique (Fall 1996), pp. 1-27; Joshua Teitelbaum, “Saudi Arabia,” in Ami Ayalon, (ed.), Middle East Contemporary Survey (MECS) 1993 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1995), pp. 575–600; “What Future for the Saudi-Shiite Accord?,” Mideast Mirror Vol. 8, No. 54, March 18, 1994.
[19] See al-Diyar, October 13, 1993; Youssef M. Ibrahim, “Saudi Officials Reporting Accord with Shiite Foes,” New York Times, October 29, 1993, p. A11; al-Quds al-Arabi, November 1, 1993; al Alam, November 13, 1993; for Shiite oppositionist attacks on the Saudi regime, see various issues of al-Jazira al-Arabiyya and Arabia Monitor, as well as the article in the summer 1993 issue of Arab Review, detailing Saudi abuse of holy sites in Mecca and Medina.”
[20] See al Alam, November 13, 1993.
[21] “Shiite Question.”
[22] “Shiite Question.”
[23] “Shiite Question.”
[24] Al-Nasr, October 1993, quoted in Ibrahim, p. 196.
[25] Teitelbaum, Holier Than Thou, pp. 84-94. The most recent study of Hezbollah al-Hijaz and its clerical wing, Tajammu Ulama al-Hijaz, is Toby Matthiesen, “Hezbollah al-Hijaz: A History of The Most Radical Saudi Shi’a Opposition Group.” Middle East Journal, Vol. 64, no. 2 (Spring 2010), pp. 179-197.
[26] Quds al-Arabi, January 30, February 14, 2003; “Shiite Question.”
[27] Washington Post, April 22; AFP, 23, 24 April; arabicnews.com, April 24; al-Quds al-Arabi, May 1; Los Angeles Times, May 8, 2003.
[28] For the text of the petition, see al-Quds al-Arabi, May 1, 2003.
[29] Joshua Teitelbaum, “Terrorist Challenges to Saudi Arabian Internal Security,” Middle East Review of International Affairs, Vol. 9, No. 3 (September 2005), pp. 1-11.
[30] AFP, June 18, 21 2003; “Shiite Question.”
[31] Toby Jones, “The Iraq Effect in Saudi Arabia,” Middle East Report, No. 237 (Winter 2005).
[32] “Shiite Question;” AFP, March 3, 2005.
[33] April 10, 2006, http://www.rasid.com/artc.php?id=10664; April 12, 2006, http://www.rasid.com/artc.php?id=10698; April 17, 2006, http://www.rasid.com/artc.php?id=10771. Al-Rasid is a Saudi Shiite website.
[34] Los Angeles Times, April 26, 2006.
[35] F. Gregory Gause, “Saudi Arabia: Iraq, Iran, the Regional Power Balance, and the Sectarian Question,” Strategic Insights, Vol. 6, No. 2 (March 2007), http://www.nps.edu/Academics/centers/ccc/publications/OnlineJournal/archivebydate.html#vol6.
[36] Demonstrations with participants carrying pictures of Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah were reported to have been held in Qatif in July and August. Several arrests were made. In October, during Ramadan, the authorities arrested four more Shiites after they brandished a Hezbollah dinner at an iftar gathering. July 21, 2006, http://www.rasid.com/artc.php?id=12054; Haaretz (English edition), October 17, 2006.
[37] AP, August 4, 5, 2006.
[38] Federal Broadcast Information Service, OSC Report, August 16, 2006; Middle East Times, July 24, 2006.
[39] See the article explaining Bin Jibrin’s position on the al-Arabiyya website at http://www.alarabiya.net/Articles/2006/08/08/26443.htm.
[40] Ibrahim, p. 197; Teitelbaum, Holier Than Thou, p. 46.
[41] http://www.islamlight.net/Files/Rwafeth/.
[42] Federal Broadcast Information Service, OSC Report, August 16, 2006.
[43] December 11, 2006, http://www.islamlight.net/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=3818; Reuters, December 11, 2006.
[44] December 17, 2006,
http://albarrak.islamlight.net/index.php?option=com_ftawa&task=view&id=18080&Itemid=7, cited in Gause. See also FBIS, Saudi Clerics Roundup, 19-23 February 2007.
[45] January 21, 2007, http://www.ibn-jebreen.com/printnew.php?page=8.
[46] October 24, 2006, http://www.middle-east-online.com.
[47] Kuwait Times, November 21, 2006.
[48] Al-Siyasa, January 27, 2007.
[49] http://www.alfrqan.com/docs.phtp?docid=65, February 28, 2007.
[50] http://www.rasid.com/artc.php?id=9943, February 20, 2006.
[51] FBIS, OSC Report, May 11, 2007.
[52] AP, January 30, 2007; Los Angeles Times, April 26, 2006; New York Times, February 5, 2007; Department of State, Saudi Arabia: “Country Report on Human Rights Practices 2006,” March 6, 2007.
[53] FBIS, “OSC Report on terrorist websites,” February 12, 2007.
[54] AP, February 3, 2007.
[55] Fred Wehrey, “Shi’a Pessimistic About Reform, but Seek Reconciliation,” Arab Reform Bulletin, August 19, 2008.
[56] Wehrey, “Shi’a Pessimistic.”
[57] Al-Sharq al-Awsat, April 15, 2010.
[58] Christian Science Monitor, January 18, 2007.
Joshua Teitelbaum
Hudson Institute | August 21, 2010
The Erosion of America’s Middle Class
On the Way Down
While America’s super-rich congratulate themselves on donating billions to charity, the rest of the country is worse off than ever. Long-term unemployment is rising and millions of Americans are struggling to survive. The gap between rich and poor is wider than ever and the middle class is disappearing.
Ventura is a small city on the Pacific coast, about an hour’s drive north of Los Angeles. Luxury homes with a view of the ocean dot the hillsides, and the beaches are popular with surfers. Ventura is storybook California. “It’s a well-off place,” says Captain William Finley. “But about 20 percent of the city is what we call at risk of homelessness.” Finley heads the local branch of the Salvation Army.
Last summer Ventura launched a pilot program, managed by Finley, that allows people to sleep in their cars within city limits. This is normally illegal, both in Ventura and in the rest of the country, where local officials and residents are worried about seeing run-down vans full of Mexican migrant workers parked on residential streets.
But sometime at the beginning of last year, people in Ventura realized that the cars parked in front of their driveways at night weren’t old wrecks, but well-tended station wagons and hatchbacks. And the people sleeping in them weren’t fruit pickers or the homeless, but their former neighbors.
Finley also noticed a change. Suddenly twice as many people were taking advantage of his social service organization’s free meals program, and some were even driving up in BMWs — apparently reluctant to give up the expensive cars that reminded them of better times.
Finley calls them “the new poor.” “That is a different category of people that I think we’re seeing,” he says. “They are people who never in their wildest imaginations thought they would be homeless.” They’re people who had enough money — a lot of money, in some cases — until recently.
“The image of what is a poor person in today’s day and age doesn’t fly. When I was growing up a poor person, and we grew up fairly poor, you drove a 10-year-old car that probably had some dents in it. You know, there was one car for the family and you lived out of the food bank,” says Finley. “In the past, you got yourself out of poverty and were on your way up.”
American Way Heads in Opposite Direction
It was the American way, a path taken by millions. “Today the image is you’re getting newer late model cars that at one point cost somebody 40, 50 grand, and they’re at wits end, now they’re living out of the food banks. And for many of them it takes a lot to swallow their pride,” says Finley.
Today the American way is often headed in the opposite direction: downward.
For a while, America seemed to have emerged relatively unscathed from the worst economic crisis in decades — with renewed vigor and energy — just as it had done in the wake of past crises.
The government was announcing new economic growth figures by as early as last fall, much earlier than expected. The banks, moribund until recently, were back to earning billions. Companies nationwide are reporting strong growth, and the stock market has almost returned to it pre-crisis levels. Even the number of billionaires grew by a healthy 17 percent in 2009.
Two weeks ago, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and 40 other billionaires pledged to donate at least half of their fortunes to philanthropy, either while still alive or after death. Is America a country so blessed with affluence that it can afford to give away billions, just like that?
Growing Resentment
Gates’ move could also be interpreted as a PR campaign, in a country where the super-rich sense that although they are profiting from the crisis, as was to be expected, the number of people adversely affected has grown enormously. They also sense that there is growing resentment in American society against those at the top.
For people in the lower income brackets, the recovery already seems to be falling apart. Experts fear that the US economy could remain weak for many years to come. And despite the many government assistance programs, the small amount of hope they engender has yet to be felt by the general public. On the contrary, for many people things are still headed dramatically downward.
According to a recent opinion poll, 70 percent of Americans believe that the recession is still in full swing. And this time it isn’t just the poor who are especially hard-hit, as they usually are during recessions.
This time the recession is also affecting well-educated people who had been earning a good living until now. These people, who see themselves as solidly middle-class, now feel more threatened than ever before in the country’s history. Four out of 10 Americans who consider themselves part of this class believe that they will be unable to maintain their social status.
Unemployment Persists
In a recent cover story titled “So long, middle class,” the New York Post presented its readers with “25 statistics that prove that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America.” Last week, the leading online columnist Arianna Huffington issued the almost apocalyptic warning that “America is in danger of becoming a Third World country.”
In fact, the United States, in the wake of a real estate, financial economic and now debt crisis, which it still hasn’t overcome, is threatened by a social Ice Age more severe than anything the country has seen since the Great Depression.
The United States is experiencing the problem of long-term unemployment for the first time since World War II. The number of the long-term unemployed is already three times as high as it was during any crisis in the past, and it is still rising.
More than a year after the official end of the recession, the overall unemployment rate remains consistently above 9.5 percent. But this is just the official figure. When adjusted to include the people who have already given up looking for work or are barely surviving on the few hundred dollars they earn with a part-time job and are using up their savings, the real unemployment figure jumps to more than 17 percent.
In its current annual report, the US Department of Agriculture notes that “food insecurity” is on the rise, and that 50 million Americans couldn’t afford to buy enough food to stay healthy at some point last year. One in eight American adults and one in four children now survive on government food stamps. These are unbelievable numbers for the world’s richest nation.
Even more unsettling is the fact that America, which has always been characterized by its unshakable belief in the American Dream, and in the conviction that anyone, even those at the very bottom, can rise to the top, is beginning to lose its famous optimism. According to recent figures, a significant minority of US citizens now believe that their children will be worse off than they are.
Many Americans are beginning to realize that for them, the American Dream has been more of a nightmare of late. They face a bitter reality of fewer and fewer jobs, decades of stagnating wages and dramatic increases in inequality. Only in recent months, as the economy has grown but jobs have not returned, as profits have returned but poverty figures have risen by the week, the country seems to have recognized that it is struggling with a deep-seated, structural crisis that has been building for years. As the Washington Post writes, the financial crisis was merely the final turning — for the worse.
Where Did All the Money Go?
The boom in stocks and real estate, the country’s wild borrowing spree and its excessive consumer spending have long masked the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans derived almost no benefit from 30 years of economic growth. In 1978, the average per capita income for men in the United States was $45,879 (about €35,570). The same figure for 2007, adjusted for inflation, was $45,113 (€35,051).
Where did all the money go? All the enormous market gains and corporate earnings, the profits from the boom in the financial markets and the 110-percent increase in the gross national product in the last 30 years? It went to those who had always had more than enough already.
While 90 percent of Americans have seen only modest gains in their incomes since 1973, incomes have almost tripled for people at the upper end of the scale. In 1979, one third of the profits the country produced went to the richest 1 percent of American society. Today it’s almost 60 percent. In 1950, the average corporate CEO earned 30 times as much as an ordinary worker. Today it’s 300 times as much. And today 1 percent of Americans own 37 percent of the total national wealth.
Income inequality in the United States is greater today than it has been since the 1920s, except that hardly anyone has minded until now.
Little Chance of the American Dream
In America, the free market is king, and people with low incomes are seen as having only themselves to blame. Those who make a lot of money are applauded — and emulated. The only problem is that Americans have long overlooked the fact that the American Dream was becoming a reality for fewer and fewer people.
Statistically, less affluent Americans stand a 4-percent chance of becoming part of the upper middle class — a number that is lower than in almost every other industrialized nation.
So far, politicians have failed to come up with solutions for the growing social crisis. Washington is still waiting for jobs that aren’t coming. President Barack Obama and his administration seem to be pinning their hopes on the notion that Americans will eventually pull themselves up by their bootstraps — preferably by doing the same thing they’ve always done: spending money. Domestic consumer spending is responsible for two-thirds of American economic output.
But even though Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke continues to pump money into the market, and even though the government deficit has now reached the dizzying level of $1.4 trillion, such efforts have remained unsuccessful.
“The lights are going out all over America,” Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman wrote last week, and described communities that couldn’t even afford to maintain their streets anymore.
The problem is that many Americans can no longer spend money on consumer products, because they have no savings. In some cases, their houses have lost half of their value. They no longer qualify for low-interest loans. They are making less money than before or they’re unemployed. This in turn reduces or eliminates their ability to pay taxes.
Turning Out the Lights
As a result, many state and local governments are faced with enormous budget deficits. In Hawaii, for example, schools are closed on some Fridays to save the state money. A county in Georgia has eliminated all public bus services. Colorado Springs, a city of 380,000 people, has shut off a third of its streetlights to save electricity.
There are many discrepancies in America in the wake of the financial crisis. On the one hand, the Fed is constantly printing fresh money, and the government spent $182 billion to bail out a single company, the insurance giant AIG. On the other hand, the lights are in fact going out in some areas, because Washington, citing the need to reduce spending, is unwilling to provide local governments with financial assistance. “America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere,” economist Krugman warns.
Chanelle Sabedra is already on that road. She and her husband have been sleeping in their car for almost three weeks now. “We never saw this coming, never ever,” says Sabedra. She starts to cry. “I’m an adult, I can take care of myself one way or another, and same with my husband, but (my kids are) too little to go through these things.” She has three children; they are nine, five and three years old.
“We had a house further south, in San Bernardino,” says Sabedra. Her husband lost his job building prefab houses in July 2009. The utility company turned off the gas. “We were boiling water on the barbeque to bathe our kids,” she says. No longer able to pay the rent, the Sabedras were evicted from their house in August.
Friends and relatives had few resources to help them. Now they live in a room at the Salvation Army homeless shelter in downtown Ventura, which is run by Captain Finley.
The sudden plunge into homelessness is a reality that’s difficult to understand, given the images of America we are accustomed to seeing in television series and films. They always depict homes with well-kept yards and two-car garages with basketball hoops attached to them. This America still exists, but it’s shrinking. And often those who are managing to keep the illusion alive can hardly afford to do so.
Americans have been struggling with a rising cost of living for the past 20 years. At the beginning of the decade, families were already paying twice as much for health insurance and their mortgages than the previous generation did.
“To cope, millions of families put a second parent into the workforce,” says Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren, who President Obama appointed to chair the congressional panel to oversee the government’s bank bailout program. According to Warren, the average family has spent all of its income and used up its savings “just to stay afloat a little while longer.”
Spiraling Debt
Because they lacked savings, Americans began borrowing money to cover all of their other expenses, including education, healthcare and consumption. American consumer debt now totals about $13.5 trillion.
Many people threaten to suffocate under the burden of their debt. Some 61 percent of Americans have no financial reserves and are living from paycheck to paycheck. As little as a single hospital bill can spell potential financial ruin.
Chanelle Sabedra’s husband has found another job, this time as a warehouse worker for a company that makes aircraft turbines. But he doesn’t earn enough to get the family out of the homeless shelter. “I haven’t got a new job yet,” says Sabedra. Her husband’s job doesn’t pay enough, and the couple has now joined the growing ranks of the working poor, for whom even two low-wage jobs are insufficient to feed their families. “We need the second income,” says Sabedra. “Just the baby alone is $600 a month for half-day care.”
In pre-recession America, she and her husband would have had two jobs each to make ends meet. They would have worked at the cash register at Wal-Mart during the day, flipped burgers at McDonald’s in the early evening and perhaps spent half the night working as a security guard or cleaning buildings. These are all low-paying jobs, hardly careers, but the combined income is usually enough to keep a family afloat. In pre-recession America, life wasn’t luxurious for Chanelle Sabedra, but it was doable if they were willing to work hard enough and sacrifice enough of their lives to stay afloat.
What kind of a job is she looking for now? “Anything right now. Mostly I’m looking for retail, or just anything to get me started, but there’s just nothing out there,” says Sabedra.
By Thomas Schulz
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
Der Spiegel | August 19, 2010
Political Islam and Kemalist laicism: a new tango on Turkey’s old battlefield
Heraklion, Crete – A few weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal published an article with the catchy title “Intrigue in Turkey’s bloodless civil war.”
It was referring to the ongoing “cold war” climate between Turkey’s Islamic-leaning ruling party — the Justice and Development Party (AKP) — and the country’s old laicist elites who describe themselves as “Kemalists” and seek to keep religion and politics entirely separate. But that’s just the latest “battle” in the “cold war” between political Islam and Turkish laicism that started nearly 100 years ago.
Understanding the history of the two sides and their relationship with one another is key to resolving Turkey’s cold war so the country can make peace with itself.
It started in 1923, when the Turkish Republic emerged out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, immediately launched his “cultural revolution.” He believed that Islam had no place in the state’s affairs and embarked upon a campaign to subordinate religion to the state: He abolished the caliphate; closed all religious schools, orders and institutions; replaced Islamic law with a Swiss-based civil law, German trade and commercial law, and Italian criminal law; replaced the Arabic script with the Latin one; introduced compulsory education and female suffrage; and banned the display of religious symbols in public institutions.
But Atatürk’s “cultural revolution” was a revolution “from above” and never reached the hearts and minds of the majority.
The first major run-in between political Islam and Turkish laicism occurred during Atatürk’s heyday with the Menemen incident of 1930, when a group of Sufis incited rebellion. The rebellion was quelled and the instigators were eventually killed or jailed by the Turkish army.
After Atatürk’s death in 1938 and the first multi-party elections in 1950, political leader and soon-to-be Prime Minister Adnan Menderes and his Democratic Party campaigned and won on the platform of incorporating Islam back into public life by legalizing Arabic and lifting the ban on the call to prayer. However, the Turkish army launched a military coup in 1960, proclaiming itself the guardian of Kemalist laicism, and arresting Menderes on charges of violating the Constitution.
Political Islam went underground again, only to re-emerge with the election of former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan and his Welfare Party (RP) in 1996. It was Erbakan who politicized the headscarf issue for the first time and also promoted closer cooperation with Muslim-majority countries. However, the RP was also pushed out of power by the army in 1997 and banned the following year.
Despite the ban, in 2001 the reformist wing of the RP created what was to become the greatest success of political Islam in Turkey to date. Current Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP won the majority of the vote in the 2002 general elections and has been governing the country ever since.
The AKP has brought Turkey to the doorstep of the European Union, politicized religion with the headscarf as its flagship issue and tacitly encouraged the conservative transformation of Turkish society through its rhetoric and policies at the top level, translating into “neighborhood pressure” to become increasingly religious at the grassroots level.
Eight years later, Turkish society is increasingly polarized. There is an ongoing struggle by the government and its supporters to take control of the media, the police and the judiciary out of the Kemalists’ hands, though a large share of the country’s media, including the Zaman newspaper, is already said to be pro-government.
At the same time, one cannot fail to notice a shift in Turkey’s foreign policy towards focusing on the so-called Muslim world and distancing itself from its traditional Western allies.
But for genuine sustainable progress, Turkey has to address its own internal cold war without polarizing the two sides as winners and losers.
After all, it takes two to tango. The country’s laicist elites have to come to terms with Turkey’s distinctive religious landscape and sensitivities and political Islamic activists have to realize that many believe Islam is a religion, not a way to run the state, and that it should stay in the private sphere.
The EU and its Copenhagen criteria for accession eligibility — which includes respect for democracy, rule of law, human and minority rights and a functioning market economy — seem like the best way to ensure Turkey’s two worlds finally meet so that the country can make peace with itself, through a socio-political framework both sides can compromise on.
For this to be achieved the EU needs to play the major peacemaking role, which involves a great deal of responsibility. Europe is the orchestra playing this tango. And in order for the dance to continue the music has to keep playing.
Leonidas Oikonomakis is a research associate at the University of Crete, as well as at the Center for European Studies of the Middle East Technical University. Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
Today’s Zaman | June 26, 2010
Saudi Public Opinion: A Rare Look
What issues are of concern to ordinary Saudis? How does the average citizen view the state of the domestic economy? What are the prevailing public attitudes toward religious extremism? As in most countries, long-term stability in Saudi Arabia is ultimately dependent — to one degree or another — on popular acceptance of the current system. Even in the short term, the Saudi government, while far from democratic, is no doubt sensitive to social crosscurrents and diverse reactions to its initiatives. As a result, understanding Saudi public opinion is an important part of gauging the country’s likely future direction. Opinion polls, however, are almost unknown in the kingdom, and anecdotal or indirect measures of these very delicate subjects are notoriously unreliable.
To help remedy this analytical deficiency, the following paragraphs present a rare data-based perspective on current political and social issues in Saudi Arabia, as viewed by that kingdom’s own citizens. This survey reveals a moderately satisfied public — but one that is also concerned about economic conditions. More surprising, it shows clearly that many Saudis are willing to express concerns about corruption and religious extremism. Most also want new political steps such as local elections — but, again contrary to some Western misconceptions, this dimension of public life is not nearly as high on their agenda as other issues.
These findings are based primarily on a unique data set obtained in November 2009 by Pechter Middle East Polls, a new, Princeton-based private research organization. The data emerged from a survey conducted by a highly qualified regional commercial firm that polled a representative sample of 1,000 Saudis in the three major urban areas of Jeddah, Riyadh, and Dammam/al-Khobar. Other findings from this survey, focusing on foreign policy issues, were previously reported in PolicyWatches #1618 (“Saudi Public Backs Iran Sanctions but Split on Military Action“) and #1614 (“Polling Saudis and Egyptians: Iran, Jihad, and the Economy“).
Mixed Views on the Economy
As of late November 2009, urban Saudis were divided about whether the kingdom was moving in the right direction (54 percent) or the wrong direction (39 percent) On economic issues, they were significantly more pessimistic about their individual situations: 40 percent said their personal economic prospects had declined over the past year, compared with 36 percent who said they had improved; 23 percent saw no change. Looking ahead, only a quarter expected economic improvement over the next year, while half predicted their situation would stay the same.
Views on personal security were similarly mixed. Just under half of the respondents said they felt “more secure” in the past year than previously, but an equal proportion disagreed (only 6 percent said they did not know or refused to answer the question).
Younger Saudis More Optimistic
On two of these bellwether questions, respondents who were 18-24 years old (a group that comprises nearly a quarter of the kingdom’s total adult population) voiced somewhat more positive views than those in the 55-and-over age bracket (around 10 percent of all adults). For example, 59 percent of the younger group said that Saudi Arabia is moving in the right direction, compared to 51 percent of the older group. Similarly, 39 percent of the younger respondents believed that their economic situation had deteriorated over the past year, compared to 46 percent of the older group.
Jeddah Residents More Disgruntled, but Not Economically
The question of Saudi Arabia’s overall direction generated significant and surprising regional differences as well. In Riyadh and Dammam/al-Khobar, solid majorities viewed the kingdom’s current course favorably. Responses from Jeddah, however, indicated more popular discontent: a narrow majority voiced a negative view of the country’s direction. But these regional differences do not correspond to economic perceptions. In fact, Jeddah residents were marginally less likely than others to say that their personal economic situation had worsened over the past year and just as likely to expect improvement in the near future.
Most See Corruption as a Serious Problem
Overall, a majority (63 percent) of the respondents said that corruption is a serious issue in Saudi Arabia. In fact, when asked in a separate, open-ended question to name the kingdom’s “most serious” problem, one-fifth cited corruption — more than the proportion who named unemployment, and not far behind those who said inflation. In Jeddah, however, fewer than half (42 percent) of the respondents saw corruption as a major problem, compared to large majorities in both Riyadh (74 percent) and Dammam/al-Khobar (85 percent).
Nevertheless, as noted above, people in the latter two cities are somewhat more likely than those in Jeddah to be satisfied with the country’s overall direction. Perhaps their citizens see some of Saudi Arabia’s problems as bad but getting better, while Jeddah residents are less concerned but also less likely to anticipate much improvement.
Concerns about Religious Extremism
Just over half (54 percent) of urban Saudis said that religious extremism is a serious problem in their country, with one-quarter subscribing “strongly” to that view. These responses should be considered in the context of another, previously reported finding from this survey: one-fifth of urban Saudis expressed some support for al-Qaeda.
Unlike other issues, opinion on religious extremism was quite uniform across the three survey areas and, more surprisingly, across different age cohorts and educational categories. Gender, however, provided an interesting demographic variation: 48 percent of male respondents believe that religious extremism is a serious problem, but among women, that figure rose modestly to 59 percent.
Resumption of Municipal Council Elections
In 2005, Saudi Arabia held its first citywide (though male-only) elections for municipal councils in the three cities polled in this survey, with membership to be evenly divided henceforth between elected and appointed officials. A second round of elections, due in 2009, was postponed. In this survey, half the urban public said that those elections should have been held on time; a third disagreed. Moreover, two-thirds said local elections should now be held by 2011.
Asked what role these municipal councils should play, most respondents cited either infrastructure or economic improvements. Half said that they would approach the council about local issues such as road repair or sanitation services.
These numbers must be put in the context of other popular priorities, however. When asked in an open-ended fashion what the top national priorities should be, none of the respondents named elections or democracy. Instead, economic and social issues, including corruption, were the overwhelming favorites. Similarly, when asked what the United States should do in the region, only 13 percent cited democracy promotion as their first or second choice — far more named economic support or action on various Arab-Israeli issues.
Perceptions of the Majlis al-Shura
Asked about their country’s Majlis al-Shura, the appointed national consultative council, 70 percent of urban Saudis said that they were aware of it. Among that group, about half said the council’s main role lies in the legal realm, with about one-quarter each citing economic or social functions. One in ten respondents who were aware of the council either did not know its function or said that it has no real role and is just a formality.
Policy Implications
These unusual yet highly credible findings suggest a manageable public opinion climate inside Saudi Arabia, even in regard to potentially volatile domestic issues. This is encouraging news, in terms of U.S. interests in Saudi stability as well as, perhaps, Riyadh’s flexibility on some controversial topics of common concern.
At the same time, the climate for internal reform appears permissive. Saudis seem generally accepting of the gradual pace of reform so far, and appear predominantly favorable toward modest measures in that direction in the years ahead. And although they want new local elections within the next few years, they are hardly clamoring for them.
One issue that stands out as potentially problematic is corruption. Regional variations notwithstanding, concern about this subject registered at relatively high levels.
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy | David Pollock | January 27, 2010
David Pollock is a senior fellow at The Washington Institute, focusing on the political dynamics of Middle Eastern countries. He is the author of the Institute’s 2008 Policy Focus Slippery Polls: Uses and Abuses of Opinion Surveys from Arab States.
La Routinisation du Mouvement des Diplômés Chômeurs au Maroc
L’analyse du mouvement des diplômés chômeurs est basée sur le témoignage de (Kamal, 34 ans) un membre du comité de direction d’un groupe de diplômés chômeurs. Le groupe de Kamal compte environ un millier d’adhérents originaires de villes différentes et qui se déplacent de façon obligatoire trois fois par semaine pour organiser des sit-in à Rabat dans un périmètre devant le siège du parlement marocain.
Les contradictions qui minent ce mouvement de l’intérieur l’empêchent d’imposer une approche intégrée du problème face au makhzen. L’autolimitation des leaders est apparemment motivée par des calculs opportunistes et politiciens. La cohabitation est laborieuse entre les militants de la gauche radicale majoritairement originaires de la ville de Fès, les jeunes islamistes du Parti de la Justice et du Développement, ceux de l’association Justice et Bienfaisance et les diplômés chômeurs originaires de Casablanca en surnombre.
La marginalisation des militants gauchistes et islamistes d’origine casablancaise en raison de leur importance numérique, révèle les contours segmentaires de la plupart de ces groupes. Le leadership et les décisions sont accaparés par les gauchistes alors que la majeure partie « des tâches de confrontation directe et spectaculaire » avec les forces de l’ordre « est injustement remplie par les jeunes casablancais ». Kamal, diplômé de la Faculté des sciences de Casablanca a subi une agression lors d’une journée de protestation, la charge des forces de l’ordre n’a pas épargné les jeunes qui essayaient de fuir et se trouvaient à plusieurs centaines de mètres du périmètre habituellement quadrillé non loin des grilles du parlement.
Les militants islamistes ont souvent tendance à noyauter ces groupes pour des calculs liés aux impératifs des démonstrations de force occasionnelles et de leur mobilisation nationale qui dépassent les considérations de la cause des diplômés chômeurs. Les militants islamistes n’hésitent pas à transgresser les comités de direction et s’en remettent directement à leurs directions nationales pour trancher les décisions, l’ampleur et les formes de mobilisation. Le nombre des jeunes islamistes originaires de Casablanca est assez limité, apparemment « en raison d’une politique réfléchie d’exclusion » lors des sélection des candidats pour les études supérieures au sein des facultés casablancaises.
Les dirigeants gauchistes sont réputés pour leur « sagesse/opportunisme politique », leur philosophie semble intégrer de façon négative « les souhaits du gouvernement marocain ». Ils refusent de façon catégorique de mener une action de contestation de grande ampleur à Casablanca par crainte de voir les événements dégénérer en émeutes accompagnées de violences urbaines semblables à celles qu’a connu la ville en 1965 et 1981.
Selon Kamal l’embauche intégrale des membres de son groupe au sein de l’administration est uniquement bloquée par les rivalités des partis politiques et les calculs politiciens de la classe dirigeante. Certains ministres préfèrent attendre le moment opportun pour monnayer les décisions d’embauche et utilisent cette carte vis-à-vis du ministère de l’Intérieur en espérant traduire « les services rendus » pour garantir la reconduction de leur mandat lors des échéances électorales et des remaniements ministériels.
Le caractère répétitif et monotone des actions de protestation conduites par ces groupes a donné lieu à un phénomène de routinisation d’une forme de contestation somme toute limitée. L’atomisation et la segmentarité de ces groupes remettent en cause l’idée « d’un makhzen pris au piège » par ce mouvement de contestation. (1)
Saïd Nassiri
Chercheur en sociologie politique
_____________________________
(1) BENNANI-CHRAÏBI (M.), « Soumis et rebelles : les jeunes au Maroc », Casablanca, Le Fennec, 1994.
Recent Comments