The Long Haul

They're camped out in Tahrir again.

A tent city has sprung up to house those displeased with the feet dragging of the military men running Egypt. The scene is at once festive and urgent. Acoustic performances precede chants of "The people want the fall of the Field Marshall" (Tantawi, the head of the military council). And when the government allegedly cut the electricity in Tahrir last week, memories of the Revolution's martyrs kept the square aglow until dawn.

Over the past few days, I've read many an Egyptian youth quoted in the paper saying something to the effect of: "Mubarak is gone, but his regime remains. We will not leave the square until we're satisfied."

And so a sort of rough, interactive check on power has taken place where the people occupy the square as a simple "no" vote on issues such as the pace of transition to a civilian government and Prime Minister Sharaf's new cabinet picks. It is democracy in its chaotic, physical form, the only recourse of a people without democracy in writing.

The revolution must go on. For the sake of Egyptian dignity. For the sake of casting a compass for the Arab world. For the sake of shattering all of the hypocrisy and condescension that has gone into supporting Arab strongmen at the expense of the Arabs themselves. For the sake of seeing the odious old man of Sharm el Sheikh behind bars.

The Egyptian military still carries great respect among Egyptians of all backgrounds. But for this covenant to stay in tact, the council needs to reciprocate with greater respect for civil society. Rather than censoring the press, lecturing youth leaders of the Revolution, and maneuvering to write their power into the new Constitution, the generals should remember that this was a Revolution, and not a coup.

A few analysts have connected Egypt today with Turkey 20 years ago, when the Turks were stifled by a poor economy and a meddling army. Turkey's military retains great power today, but is also a relatively healthy democracy with an average income of $13,000. The other path drawn from present-day Egypt is to Pakistan, where a civilian leadership cowers before the military and the economy runs on foreign aid.

Cultivating a strong civilian leadership starts in Tahrir, where this week the people's chanting drowned out a military spokesman who came to appeal for patience. The people still want the fall of the regime, and in its place one of their own.

Dispatch from Tahrir

6/29/11

The following is a brief account of the recent clashes between police and protesters in the streets of Cairo as I saw them. This is just a snapshot. If you want the backstory check the international media. In short, an incident Tuesday (6/28) night, in which police would not let a crowd of people into a theater to commemorate those who died during the Revolution, sparked an overnight standoff that carried through this afternoon (and perhaps even now)

I got word of the unrest while at work, a few miles down Cairo's corniche from Tahrir Square. Twitter was crackling with indignation at the police response to the protestors. "How can these pigs call us thugs?"; "A group of doctors carrying medical supplies to Tahrir have been arrested."; "Guys, if u wanna come to Tahrir, bring water, vinegar, and food, we're starving."

I asked one of my colleagues about the wisdom of going to Tahrir. He struck me as a deliberate guy, and he had warned me to approach an uneventful protest last month carefully. "You should go," he said. 'There might not be another opportunity this exciting while you are here."

And so I went. I arrived in Tahrir proper about 1:30 pm and saw smoke creeping up the street where the American University of Cairo stands. The street was strewn with rocks and charcoaled rubble. Young men with bandanas as shields from the smoke were dragging barricade fences up the street with vigor. As I walked further down the street, my eyes began to simmer and I saw passersby weeping from the tear gas. People lined the sidewalk in clusters, where they seemed to be recounting the day's action and checking for any battle wounds that they could wear proudly. One man raised a bloody hand to wipe a face full of anguish. Others posed with their bandages for grateful photojournalists. There were also several crowds forming around men who were shouting and gesturing widely at each other. My limited Arabic kept me in the dark as to their grievances.

I turned down a street that had a climactic look to it - an army truck was parked at the far end, while a small fire smoldered in the foreground. Droves of men with arms linked shouted "back to the square!" and strode past me. I came to the barricade at the end of this street. Riot police had erected a fence and were lined up across from about 50 protestors. Some youth had climbed atop the fence and were shouting slogans at the police, who would not engage with direct eye contact but instead muttered replies and stood rooted to the ground. I walked round this scene, all the while taking pictures.

Then a scowling man caught my eye. I looked back and sensed that I had triggered something unpleasant in him. He marched towards me and rapped my chest with his stubby finger.

"Where you from?"

I stuttered while saying, "Amrika."

"You sure?"

I offered my passport as proof, which he pored over much more carefully than had the immigration official who admitted me to the country. Every stamp was suspicious. Why Egypt? Why now? I simply said, "I am a student. I like Egypt."

"Ok. I thought you were from Israel. Be careful."

This accusation is making its way into the official repertoire. I won't say much other than that I hope xenophobia does not reach the levels it did during the Revolution, when government propaganda spoke ominously of a foreign hand and several journalists were attacked. This is not about to happen again. People are by and large hospitable. But the accusation of espionage against foreign nationals has been used. It is a sensitive time.

I left Tahrir today knowing that the Revolution is ongoing, that popular protest is a necessary antidote to official inertia, and that many people here are still subject to the whims of a few.

A Distant Land, A Distant Hope

"Whither Iran?....."

About a year ago, I was itching to go to Iran. I sent out a rousing and somewhat satirical email to friends who might be interested in going, boasting that the “mullahs won’t know what hit them.” To be successful, any such trip would have to be meticulously planned and executed with high caution. But I wanted to whip up support with some cavalier language. I wrote that “ideally, we would be there for the June elections when there is a palpable but distant chance that Ahmedinejad will get upset.” It is a good thing that I wasn't able to get into the country then. Foreign journalists with actual credentials were bullied, harassed, detained, or deported. But any freelancing fool, especially an American, might have it worse.

It does not get worse than Evin Prison, where so many blameless Iranians have wasted away. The dungeon sits right in Tehran, and many accounts of the abuses within have reached Western audiences. The Iranian theocracy takes much the same attitude with Evin as it does with its nuclear bomb-making: “What will you do about it?” We can at least listen to the many tortured voices that ring forth from the prison gates. One such voice is that of Roxana Saberi, an Iranian-American journalist who, in her new book, evokes the many layers of sorrow residing in that monstrous jail. By the end of Ms. Saberi’s 100-day captivity, her plight was finally in the international spotlight. But this was not before she languished for weeks without word to the outside world.

Perhaps it was Saberi’s unique ability to report to the West from Iran that so riled her captors. A comely blend of Persian and Japanese parents (she's probably sick of those preoccupied with her good looks), Saberi carries an American passport and a tongue fluid in Farsi. She arrived in Iran in 2002 to research a book she planned to write on Iranian society. While doing so, she was drawn to the people and decided to stay in the country after her press credentials were revoked. In the early pages of the book, one gets the sense that, despite being a foreigner, Saberi felt somewhat at ease in Iran and unencumbered by the authorities. There was the occasional snooping from the intelligence ministry, but nothing that signaled she was in grave danger.

And then something snapped. Her life was blindsided by self-deluding men accusing her of espionage. The game played by these thugs is frighteningly cynical: "We know you are working for the CIA. Admit this and agree to spy for us, and you will be freed. Deny it and you will stay in prison indefinitely." The "evidence" presented against Saberi was laughable. By the end of the psychological warfare waged upon her, Saberi's captors admit to knowing of her innocence all along.

Why carry out this fakery? I think it was simply an exercise in power for the Iranian secret police. They were angered by Saberi's ability to move about the country without a translator doubling as a snoop. And once they had Roxana in their clutches, they got personal. "How long do you want to be in here?" one of the agents asked her in first day of captivity. "In a couple of years, you will lose your looks." They were trying to reduce her to a pretty face, and a fleeting one at that. As the reader finds out, Saberi is no brittle belle. She forces Evin's hand with a hunger strike and instead offers nourishment to her cellmates with her stories from America. After three months of prison, she emerges a haggard reflection of her former self. Yet despite enduring the evil of Evin, and inspiring many along the way, Roxana is dogged by her conscience. What of her acquaintances and contacts whom the secret police may now take a keener interest in because of her? What of the cellmates she was leaving behind to rot while she resumes life in America? Ms. Saberi will be hard-pressed to find an antidote for her anguish, but she deserves one.

International attention was the tipping point in Saberi's case. Despite all of their suffocating methods, the authorities could not keep Saberi completely hidden from the public eye. Once, in transit between courtroom and prison, a young woman caught her eye and smiled subtly while saying, "You must be Roxana. The whole country knows about you. We are praying for you." The support of the Iranian and American people sustained Saberi, and showed that shared compassion can sometimes outmaneuver politics to good effect.

With Iran being the steel trap to Americans that it is now, I am forced to read about the country from the safety of my dust-ridden couch. Most of this reading will be rather depressing tales of persecution and suppressed talent. But I look forward to using this blog to highlight examples of a resilience that will hopefully carry the Iranians through this perilous time. No one knows when it will come to pass.

Roxana Saberi with Mohammad Khatami, Iran's president from 1997 to 2005 and a current member of the opposition movement.

Let His Name Sink In

Abdullah Abdullah stood dapper before his Upper East Side audience, one arm resting regally on the podium. But his face was grim and words measured when he told us: “He thinks you will be there forever.” The “he” was Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and the “you” the American military. Throughout his appearance at the Asia Society in Manhattan, Abdullah scarcely referred to the man who evidently stole the presidency from him by name. He chose a distant tone, as if he were speaking of an estranged relative. This solemn, sobering voice grew more evocative when it spoke of the many young Americans, and many more Afghans, who have perished in his great pasture of a country.

Abdullah Abdullah deserves a bigger stage for his message. This isn’t to call the Asia Society quaint, but to call for a greater understanding among Americans of exactly whom we are defending in Afghanistan. It is more for men like Abdullah Abdullah than for an abstraction like “freedom” that we fight. Abdullah has been resisting the tyranny of the Taliban for decades. He knows that American troops will never be able to completely drain the swamp of extremism, so we might as well acknowledge what is at stake for Afghans in this war.

“The worst thing the U.S. can do is blur the line between the friend and the enemy,” said Abdullah Twice. Discern, do not alienate, he beseeches us. Most Pashtuns (the ethnic group from which the Taliban draws most of its recruits) do not want the Taliban back in power. They want respite from the clutches of barbarism. Nor do Pashtuns want to live side-by-side with NATO soldiers the rest of their lives. This is a simple yearning for dignity. It should not have taken the American command eight years to place the utmost importance on avoiding civilian casualties. When it comes to their livelihood, people will prefer the occupiers who kill less of their children. Sadly, between drone strikes and checkpoint fiascoes, the score is closer than it should be.



Abdullah Abdullah talks with Joe Klein of Time Magazine at the Asia Society in New York. This photo was obviously not taken from press row.

Start Befriending Imams

The failed bombing of Times Square has reopened a debate in the mainstream American press about the roots of radicalization. The would-be bomber, Faisal Shahzad, was a gentrified and presumably “well-integrated” Pakistani-American living in Connecticut. His father was a high-ranking officer in the Pakistani air force. The boy attended a school in Peshawar famous for sons of the wealthy. Then he won a scholarship to study in the United States.

Shahzad did not live the life of an ascetic in his first few years as an exchange student in Connecticut. According to a New York Times profile, he stood out from the 14 other Pakistani students on the University of Bridgeport campus. Shahzad “walked with a confident air, showing off his gym-honed muscles in tight T-shirts”, “had a wider circle of friends and a fuller social calendar (than his compatriots)”, and “hit New York City’s Bengali-theme nightclubs” on the weekends. Rounding out this portrait of machismo is a quote from a former classmate saying that “(Shahzad) could drink anyone under the table.” Sounds like a good candidate for any self-respecting fraternity.

But next, of course, comes the plunge into extremism. Well, not just yet. First, Faisal marries a Pakistani-American from Colorado and has two children by her. He earns a master’s degree in business at the University of Bridgeport and grows more affluent at a new job. He barbecues and tends to his lawn. He lives American.

With Shahzad, there never really was a “plunge into extremism.” His anti-Americanism seems a long time festering. He reportedly watched the Twin Towers burn with a sense of justice. “They had it coming,” he told a friend. Who exactly are “they”, Mr. Shahzad? Do the 9/11 victims who were from Muslim countries give you any cognitive dissonance?

The last two attempted terror attacks on U.S. soil came courtesy of upper-class jihadists. (The Underwear Bomber is the son of a prominent Nigerian banker.) They are two men who sucked from the teat of Western capitalism and open societies, only to spit their privileges back out in indignation. “Can you tell me how to save the oppressed?” Shahzad wrote to a group of friends in 2006. “And a way to fight back as rockets are fired at us and Muslim blood flows?”

Some radicals are irreversible. They have chosen martyrdom and there is nothing we can do about it. But the delusion of some has been helped on less by ideological factors than by material ones. Endless poverty or the loss of a loved one might spin these impressionable youths out of society's orbit and into the arms of extremism. We must do what we can to catch these wayward souls before they ricochet back into us to devastating effect.

One man up to the task is Hesham Shashaa. Mr. Shashaa is an Egyptian of Palestinian extraction who makes his living as imam of the Darul Quran mosque in Munich. Imam Shashaa follows the strictest form of Islam, Salafism. Yet unlike some of his colleagues across Europe who have denounced terrorism but sympathized with the causes of Al Qaeda and Hamas, Mr. Shashaa declares these groups to be violators of Islam. He visits Muslim communities across Europe to preach the incompatibility of violence with the Muslim faith. He had the courage to go to Pakistan to inform students at a madrassa that bin Laden and Mullah Omar (the head of the Afghan Taliban) were phonies. "It must be the head of state or caliphate who announces jihad", said Mr. Shashaa, adding that jihad must also be limited to self-defense. "What they (bin Laden and Omar) do is not jihad." A man in the audience stood up in a rage and called for Shashaa's head. The globetrotting imam responded resolutely, "If you can show me in the Koran or the Sunnah that I am wrong, then I will be the first one who would take a gun and join them, but you won't be able to find something like that." Shashaa knows that scripture vindicates Islam as a religion of peace. Let him win as many doctrinal arguments with the brainwashed as he can.

We hear a lot about how Muslims are confined to the margins of European societies. The gruesome murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh and the French quest to ban the burqa are two flashpoints in post 9/11 Islamo-European relations. Because of the proximity of Europe to the “Muslim world”, a different kind of tension permeates the immigration debate across the pond. Authors like Ian Buruma write of “Eurabia”, or the coming tectonic collision between these two civilizations. But people like Imam Shashaa can help quiet the tremors. His sense of humor is a start. The man looks like Osama bin Laden and has been heckled by Westerners for it. So Shashaa shuffles through the streets of Munich wearing a sign that reads, “I am not Osama bin laden. I am Hesham Shashaa.” He also charms his onlookers by God-blessing them in the German tongue.

The German police coordinate well with Imam Shashaa. But they should not see the imam as a means to an end. For cross-cultural trust to grow we must cross these lines anytime we can, not just to gather intel. Muslims in Europe and America feel unfairly targeted by authorities. Counter-terrorism efforts have involved bugging mosques and placing agents among the congregation. This is sometimes necessary work, but it should be avoided when possible and complemented by an unclenched fist to Muslim communities. This outreach is not just about combating terrorism; it’s about realizing a brotherhood of man. Imagine it.

I am Hesham

The Iraqi Diaspora

Nick Kristof aptly referred to refugees of the Iraq War as “the new Palestinians, the 21st-century Arab diaspora that threatens the region’s stability.” America’s inadequate response to the 2 million refugees (and the additional 2 million internally displaced persons) created by its 2003 invasion of Iraq is inconsistent with both our founding ideals and martial precedent.

As Morton Abramowitz detailed several months ago in an LA Times op-ed, the contrast between America’s handling of refugees of the Vietnam War and those fleeing today’s violence in Iraq could not be starker. In the 1970’s and ‘80’s, some 2 million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians fled Southeast Asia due to war and economic strife. Impelled by guilt and pressure to regain some of its moral footing, the U.S. welcomed 1.2 million of these Indochinese refugees and sent aide to countries affected by the human efflux. Collective guilt was a powerful impetus then, but is in short supply now. You can add a “deficit of remorse” to the list of deficits accrued by the Bush Administration. Given a final chance in exit interviews to reflect on what he has bequeathed the Middle East, President Bush hasn’t changed his tune, whistling Je ne regrette rien all the way back to Dallas.

But outside the self-deception and legacy burnishing going on in the White House, countless Iraqi refugees languish in the dilapidated neighborhoods of Amman and Damascus. These Iraqis embody the “unwanted” stigma of the refugee: Jordan and Syria don’t want to provide aide out of fear of becoming permanent asylums; Iraq’s Shi'a leaders have shown little concern for the plight of the mostly Sunni refugees; and the United States is reluctant to acknowledge unintended collateral damage in its role as “liberator”. But international watchdogs and relief agencies consider the Iraqi diaspora among the world’s most daunting humanitarian challenges. Washington needs to recognize its moral obligation and, just as we did during the First Gulf War with the resettlement of Iraqi Kurds, ensure safe repatriation for refugees who wish to return to Iraq. Furthermore, post-9/11 immigration restrictions need to be amended so that the U.S. is welcoming more Iraqi refugees every year than Sweden. This falls on Congress as much as the Administration. In May of 2007, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) introduced the “Responsibility to Iraqi Refugees Act” (H.R. 2265), a commendable bill that would have increased the number of Iraqi refugees eligible for resettlement in the United States in 2007-08 by 20,000. Republicans were deplorably unsupportive of the bill, however, and it is now collecting dust in a subcommittee. If we really are to reap what we sowed in Iraq, it is up to the next administration and Congress to work in concert to ensure a safe haven for Iraq’s refugees.