The Common Ground News Service, May 11, 2005
Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity (CGNews-PiH)
May 11, 2005
The Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity (CGNews-PiH) is distributing the enclosed articles to build bridges of understanding between the West and the Arab World and countries with predominately Muslim populations. Unless otherwise noted, all copyright permissions have been obtained and the articles may be reproduced by any news outlet or publication free of charge. If publishing, please acknowledge both the original source and CGNews, and notify us at cgnewspih@sfcg.org.
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ARTICLES IN THIS EDITION:
1. "The pen can break the executioner's sword" by Ali Jaafar
Ali Jaafar, a frequent contributor to the Daily Star, considers whether art and culture has a role to play a role in democratizing and reforming societies in the Middle Eastern.
(Source: Daily Star, April 30, 2005)
2. "To Soothe Dutch-Muslim Nerves, Try a Jewish Mayor by Marlise Simons
Marlise Simons, journalist for the New York Times, looks at how Job Cohen, the Jewish mayor of Amsterdam, is tackling tensions between conservative Muslim immigrants and the city's liberal traditions following the attacks of Sept.11.
(Source: The New York Times, April 25, 2005)
3. "Education for all: For Arabs the task is arduous" by Ramzy Baroud
Ramzy Baroud, the editor in chief of PalestineChronicle.com and a program producer at Al Jazeera Satellite Television, explains how reform efforts in the Arab world overlook education and he points to some key areas for improvement.
(Source: Middle East Times, April 27, 2005)
4. "Talk to political Islamists in the Arab world" by Richard W. Murphy and Basil Eastwood
Richard Murphy, former U.S. assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, and Basil Eastwood former director of research and analysis at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and British ambassador to Syria, highlight the results of the recent Arab Human Development Report to encourage a shift in U.S. policy. They hope to persuade the G8 to open dialogue with Islamists, who they see as key players in any genuine reform efforts in the region.
(Source: The Daily Star, May 4, 2005)
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ARTICLE 1
The pen can break the executioner's sword
Ali Jaafar
LONDON - There's a funny story on how the American actor David Hasselhoff complained to museum curators in Germany after not finding his photo in a collection of memorabilia about the fall of the Berlin Wall. The former "Baywatch" star claimed he had helped reunite the country by singing his song "Looking for Freedom" among millions of German fans at the Brandenburg Gate. Leaving his ludicrous assertion aside (most East Germans couldn't understand a word he was singing), the episode brings up an interesting question: What role can culture play in democratizing and reforming societies in the Middle East?
There are some who would answer unequivocally that culture should have no such role - for example the Saudi cultural attache in Washington who was recently reported to have signed a document advising visiting Muslims not to embark on friendships with the "infidels," or even greet them in the street. The artist in Arab societies has traditionally held a position as dissenter. As such he or she has an integral role to play in democratic reform. Even in Saudi Arabia, where cinemas are forbidden, the release last year of the kingdom's first film, "The Only Way Out," was a modest sign of this. More significantly, the film's director was a woman, Haifa Mansour, and her achievement was a small victory in a land normally noted for the lack of rights it affords to its female population.
Throughout history, culture and the arts have given voice to the dispossessed and disenfranchised; but can it actually make a lasting difference? Sometimes, the answer is yes. One example was visible last year with the furor surrounding Syrian director Omar Amiralay's "A Flood in Baath Country," a documentary harshly critical of the regime of President Bashar Assad. The film premiered in Lebanon at the Cinema Days film festival last September and was scheduled to appear at the Carthage Film Festival in October. Soon, however, accusations of treason and collaboration with Israel were hurled at the filmmaker by some in the Arab media. The film was promptly withdrawn from the festival. It was only after a petition signed in Lebanon by 55 directors denounced the decision that the film was reinstated.
It is through such acts of solidarity that artists, writers and filmmakers can have the most impact. That the petition was prepared against the backdrop of UN Security Council Resolution 1559, demanding a Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon, was an indication of how politics and culture can work together, mobilizing voices of dissent and opposition, in particular youths, giving them a platform denied through more traditional political processes.
Yet there are many cases where culture can only take its lead from a given event, but also amplify it by providing it with substantial resonance. One need only look at the scenes of the hundreds of thousands of young Lebanese taking to the streets to demand their freedom in the wake of the brutal murder of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. His assassination unified the country with greater potency than any work featured on his television channel or in his newspaper. When a million Lebanese of all religions and political persuasions took to the streets in defiant solidarity and mourning, it was not a poem or a film that had moved them - but rather the loss of a man who personified the indefatigability and pride of a nation that longed for respect, not pity.
However, the role of Hariri's Future TV, along with numerous other media organs, was instrumental in bringing out the demonstrators, and creating a context for their protests. Dozens of music videos and songs were played incessantly by the channel. How ironic that only weeks earlier Jean-Claude Boulos, the Lebanese media figure who founded Lebanon's state-owned Tele-Liban in 1958, told me after launching a new Iraqi station, Al-Sumariyya, that he had chosen to transmit live footage of the Beirut marathon to remind the "Iraqi people of the center of Beirut and show them that it's still alive and has been reconstructed."
These are heady, if uncertain, times for Lebanon, but with crucial elections looming in May, it may well be the joyous images (provided by ubiquitous satellite channels) of Iraqis emerging from voting booths last January that the Lebanese will remember as, for the first time in decades, they go to the polls at the end of May. For all those seeking political and cultural modernity in the Middle East one could do worse than remember Lebanon's golden age during the 1950s and 1960s, when poets, playwrights and politicians sat side by side sipping coffee on the Corniche, at a time when Lebanon was free.
For a society to progress, the politics of democracy must accompany the culture of democracy. In the Palestinian national movement's great romantic heyday of the 1970s, its soldiers went into battle singing the songs of Mahmoud Darwish, and its politicians discussed affairs with the likes of the late Edward Said.
It is no accident that Egypt's cultural scene, once home to the world's third largest film industry, thrived when the likes of Youssef Chahine and Salah Abu Seif were allowed to make socially radical works that questioned their own societies. It is no coincidence that Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel Laureate and Egypt's greatest ever writer, was nearly fatally stabbed on the streets of the Cairo he had spent his life writing about, at a time of stagnation and moribund ideology. The recent decision that Egyptian television shows would soon have to pass religious censorship did not bode well either. The minister responsible commented that future dramas would need to "respect the values and traditions of Egyptian society. The media cannot be transformed into instruments to distil poison under the pretext of artistic license." The decision merely reaffirmed how ruling elites in the region feel threatened by culture's unifying potential.
Of course, culture on its own cannot change a thing. Look at Iran. Despite a vibrant, critically-acclaimed movie industry - directors such as Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi and Bahman Ghobadi have won every award from the Palme d'Or at Cannes to top prizes in Venice and Berlin - the society remains under clerical hegemony. Many Iranian films are banned at home, depriving them of any domestic impact.
There are signs, however, that things may be changing. Last year Iran's biggest box-office hit, "The Lizard," was a comedy that gently satirized the mullahs. It may not have driven them from power, but the film's success was an indication, at home and abroad, of just how ready Iranian audiences were to laugh at those holding the strings. In his inaugural address, U.S. President George W. Bush told the citizens of the Middle East: "Democratic reformers facing repression, prison or exile can know America sees you for what you are: the future leaders of your free country." One wonders what role some of those sitting in the cinemas of Tehran and watching "The Lizard" may come to play in their country in the years ahead.
Ultimately, will the pen prove mightier than the swords of the executioners? Will the sound of music drown out the screams of the car bombs? The answer is blowing in the wind. One can only hope it won't disappear with the wind.
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* Ali Jaafar writes frequently on culture from London for the Daily Star.
Source: The Daily Star, April 30, 2005
Visit the Daily Star at www.dailystar.com.lb
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.
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ARTICLE 2
To Soothe Dutch-Muslim Nerves, Try a Jewish Mayor
Marlise Simons
AMSTERDAM - Job Cohen is not just the mayor of Amsterdam, the brash and boisterous Dutch capital. He is also a calm, somewhat reserved Jewish intellectual who has made it his task to keep the peace between the city's Muslims and Christians.
This is not how he originally imagined his role. Since Dutch mayors are named by the government, Mr. Cohen, a former civil servant and university chancellor, did not campaign for the job. Once he took office at the start of 2001, he set about addressing the range of urban problems of this lively and crowded port city.
Then his agenda was abruptly rewritten.
The shock of the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States exposed long-simmering tensions between conservative Muslim immigrants and this city's liberal traditions. Many Dutch began complaining openly that the newcomers - from Morocco, Turkey, the Middle East - were changing their society for the worse, while the Muslims protested that they were being treated as aliens in their adopted country.
Mr. Cohen, known as a pragmatist with a calm manner - who often prefers to listen rather than talk - was thrown into the role of mediator.
"Islam is here to stay, in this country, in this city," he said at his official mansion along an elegant 17th-century canal. "We have to deal with Islam as a fact, not whether we like it. So the real question is how to get on with each other."
As a thriving port, this city of 750,000 has always had a cultural and racial mix, but never at today's ratio, with one in three people of non-Western descent. Last November, Amsterdam was shaken by Islamic militancy. Theo van Gogh, a well-known local filmmaker, was shot and his throat was slit. A Dutch-Moroccan man has confessed.
Since the killing, which caused much outrage and a spate of fire bombings of mosques and churches in the country, Mr. Cohen, 57, has become as much moderator as he is mayor. He takes pride in the fact that no violence or arson has occurred in Amsterdam in response to the killing, but he concedes that social peace is far from assured. So he moves around, visiting various ethnic groups, organizing debates among religious leaders, listening to them and promoting dialogue.
One recent day, he was taking a group of college students to a public housing project in the suburb of Osdorp. Two retired police officers had opened a clubhouse there for immigrant teenagers who had been in trouble with the police.
Why does the project receive city funds, the students asked. "We're better off listening to these kids than sending them to jail," Mr. Cohen said, spending the next hour listening.
On another day, he attended an awards dinner of a successful Moroccan group. Before the audience of well-suited businessmen and women in jewels and glittering long dresses, the mayor began: "These have not been easy times for you. You may even have wondered: am I wanted here?" The hall was dead silent, as Mr. Cohen continued: "Yes, we all belong here. You are much needed in this society, you are the hope of this country."
His low-key, almost casual style has earned him both admirers and detractors. Geert Mak, a well-known writer, said that after the van Gogh killing, while other politicians panicked and whipped up fear, "Cohen remained a model of calm and civic courage."
Others see him as an advocate of the soft pedal, contending that he and his Labor Party's multicultural policies are to blame for the immigrants' lack of integration. Such policies, critics say, have failed to make clear where Dutch society draws the line, and making too many concessions may have encouraged immigrants to live off the state or to become militants. During one debate, a local political columnist, Theodor Holman, told Mr. Cohen across the table, "My mayor is a weakling."
In the intense debate over the threat of terrorism, the limits of tolerance, or how to handle gangs of angry immigrant youths who roam Amsterdam neighborhoods and are blamed for much petty crime, Mr. Cohen's aides say he is far from "soft." Under his orders, the police have identified 80 gangs, issuing orders to bar some leaders from troubled neighborhoods and sending several hundred young lawbreakers to reform boot camps.
A local mosque known to spread anti-Western ideas - it also sold Saudi Arabian literature seen as offensive to women and homosexuals - has had several visits from Mr. Cohen and his aides, including Ahmed Aboutaleb, a Moroccan-born city alderman. "Closing the mosque is pointless when it's likely to be reopened by the courts," he said.
Mr. Cohen says he is not religious but holds meetings with religious groups because religion has come to play a greater role in the largely secular Netherlands. He believes Muslim clerics are a key to helping Muslims integrate into Dutch society, although the most conservative clerics oppose this.
He also promotes meetings among Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders because, he says, "there is a lot of anger against Israel" over its treatment of Palestinians. Asked if this affects his own role, he said: "It's hard to say. Undoubtedly there are people who say, well the mayor is a prejudiced Jew."
The mayor and Mr. Aboutaleb, a trusted ally, have received death threats and now have bodyguards. A letter pinned to the body of the filmmaker called Mr. Cohen an enemy because he was a Jew and called Mr. Aboutaleb a traitor to Islam.
What, if anything, makes this calm man angry? It is, he says, the new tough talk of "war" on extremism, "war" on terrorism and "clamping down" on immigrants, heard from some politicians. "I see more polarization," he said. "I don't like it, it's bad for the city, bad for the country. Security comes from a stronger sense of community, from getting closer. I worry about the hardening tone."
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* Marlise Simons is a journalists with the New York TImes
Source: The New York Times, April 25, 2005
Visit the New York Times at www.nytimes.com.
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission can be requested from the New York Times website at www.nytimes.com.
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ARTICLE 3
Education for all: For Arabs the task is arduous
Ramzy Baroud
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has a well-devised and controlled method of measuring the educational progress - or lack thereof - in any given country or region around the world.
In Dakar, Senegal, 2002, the World Education Forum called on all UN member states to formulate national plans to achieve "Education For All" (EFA) by 2015.
So that the plan is not merely ink on paper - as is the case regarding many similar initiatives in the past - the forum presented six goals that must be achieved for the overall plan to be realized. Important examples, and ones most pertinent to Arab countries, are expanding adult literacy and ensuring gender parity.
Since then UNESCO has been active in both creating awareness of and garnering support for the initiative. It has also been consumed with monitoring the results and whether member states are indeed reaching the hardly ambitious goals set for the year 2015.
It should come as no surprise that quality education is largely a matter of economics: the poorer you get the more consumed you become with other immediate needs - survival for example. More than 12 Arab countries, therefore, are far behind the EFA goals. And some are actually regressing.
The 2005 EFA Global Monitoring Report launched in Brazil attests to this fact. Indeed, most of the statistics to which I consulted, including data offered by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the World Bank's statistics mostly highlight such a realization: poverty and quality education don't go well together.
Thus Mauritania, the poorest Arab nation, which according to a 2002 tally has a per capita annual income of $334, resides second to last on the Arab literacy rate list, with 59.8 percent of the population that cannot read or write.
Sadly, the bottom spot of the literacy rate, according to the EFA report 2003/4 was reserved for no other than Iraq, a country that was once recognized for being a Third World model of development. Along with Cuba, Iraq once offered universal education and health coverage. Now, following 15 years of crippling sanctions, unjustified and bloody war and a self-consumed and brutal occupation, only 39.3 percent of Iraqis can read.
Iraq is a unique but important case, since its anathema of poverty, unlike other countries, is man-made - a very egocentric Washington-based man, whose interest in business contracts, control of energy sources and securing his imperial domains surpasses his empathy for human life.
Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are another interesting case. Strikingly, Palestinians have fully achieved gender parity in education, a major component in the EFA initiative. And despite the fact that 60 percent of the population lives at less than $2 per day - below the universally recognized poverty level - there is an impressive determination to join and stay in school.
However, living under occupation, and a vile one at that, is no easy task. Alas, most of the statistics dealing with Palestinian education continue to focus on the number of students killed, wounded and maimed by Israeli forces; on the number of schools shelled, partially or fully destroyed; on the number of students unable to reach the classroom because of military restrictions and checkpoints; on the number of students trapped behind the illegal Israeli Wall slicing up the West Bank and completely isolating entire communities, and so on.
But poverty, security and freedom are not always the only causes of education deficits. Misguided developmental projects are an equally detrimental factor that keeps some rich Arab countries behind; at least as far as the quality education component is concerned.
Most wealthy Arab states seem to comprehend and thus measure development by the number of skyscrapers, top of the line SUVs and the hosting of world-renowned sporting events. Conversely, a well-devised national education program is almost nonexistent, save the ever-growing private school system, which communicates Western cultures to Arab students without taking into account the national identity and priorities of each country.
The end result is as simple as it is devastating: detached generations of hip-hop bad boy wannabes who have no complete command over any particular language or much commitment or even interest in the development of their own countries.
Human capital is the most fundamental prerequisite for sustainable, beneficial and long term development. A case in point is the Malaysian experience in the last 15 years. With over 20 percent of the budget spent on human development and education, the country has achieved phenomenal results in the field and continues to take significant strides, as its once run-down universities are now world-class edifices of learning.
There are other factors that must be scrutinized in order for the hampered educational progress in much of the Arab world to be fully revived and revamped. Without such understanding EFA in the Arab world shall remain confined to ineffectual workshops followed by photo-ops and fancy banquets.
EFA is a decision where governments, civil societies and nations as a whole are and ought to be active participants. Unless that decision is made - not imposed - most Arab nations should not be expected to meet the minimal standards for progress and modernity; not in 10 years, not in a hundred.
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* Ramzy Baroud is a veteran Arab-American journalist, the editor in chief
of PalestineChronicle.com and a program producer at Al Jazeera Satellite Television
Source: Middle East Times, April 27, 2005
Visit the Middle East Times at www.metimes.com.
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.
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ARTICLE 4
Talk to political Islamists in the Arab world
Richard W. Murphy and Basil Eastwood
The Arab Human Development Report issued on April 5 highlighted the contradictions within U.S. and British policy toward the Arab world. President George W. Bush is intent on bringing democracy to the Middle East, and reform is at the heart of the Group of 8's Broader Middle East Initiative, which Britain as chairman is pledged to carry forward. However, the would-be democrats of the region are viscerally opposed to American policies there, which makes it the more necessary to talk to them.
The Arab Human Development Report makes it clear that very little progress toward reform has yet been made and that democracy cannot just be imported (still less imposed). It was right for Bush to say in his inaugural address that the U.S. will "seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture." However, if it is not be counter-productive, outside pressure for democratization and reform needs to be exercised with great care and must complement the efforts of movements working for these goals within the states of the region
In the Arab world, the awkward truth is that the most significant such movements that enjoy popular support are associated with political Islam - movements which seek by peaceful means to apply their faith to their state's politics. The Muslim Brothers now demonstrating vigorously for change in Egypt, or Ibrahim Jaafari of Al-Daawa, the new prime minister of Iraq, are good examples. For the United States to "seek and support" such movements will not be a comfortable process: most Islamist movements oppose their own governments - governments whose cooperation Washington needs to combat terrorism - and they share the general views of the Arab public that violence against occupation is legitimate and that British and American policies in the region are fundamentally misguided.
We believe, however, that U.S. disagreement with Islamists, however vehement, is good reason for talking to them, not ostracizing them. For a year now we have been engaged in a dialogue with a small group of people familiar with some of the different national branches of the Muslim Brotherhood, with Hamas and with Hizbullah. They do not formally represent these movements, but we believe that they do speak with authority. Some of them have been imprisoned for their beliefs and they describe movements which are arguably more democratic than the Arab governments concerned (who habitually rig elections to ensure that such movements do not win). They deny vehemently that, once voted into office, they will hang onto power if subsequently voted out.
Consciously or not, the movements seem to be adopting the theological belief that the voice of the people is in some sense the voice of God, which made possible the emergence of Christian democracy in Western Europe less than two centuries ago.
Perhaps the best evidence in their favor is the fact that they are criticized bitterly by those Muslim extremists who do advocate violence to bring in authoritarian clerical rule. For, when it comes to politics, Muslims are no more united than Christians. Political Islam itself varies from country to country, but there are much greater differences both between political Islamists and "official Islam" on the one hand and between them and the Jihadists on the other. Even within Sunni Islam there are bitter divisions between the exponents of official Islam, the political Islamists who seek change but who do not advocate violence to overthrow regimes, and the Jihadists, the Islamic extremists who do.
A spokesman for one of the Jihadist groups recently argued on a Jihadist Web site not only that all Arab regimes and the imams who support them (in other words official Islam), together with secularists, communists and nationalists, were heretics, but also that democracy was heresy. True believers, he insisted, should have nothing to do with the Muslim Brothers (who are the mainstream of Sunni political Islam) and their "defeatist secularist democratic program." (The spokesman was even highly critical of Hamas, which he described as merely fighting for land).
It is such Jihadists, not the political Islamists, who see all Westerners as "Crusaders" and seek to throw them out of the Middle East. The popular Arab reaction to Western policies in Iraq and Palestine is strengthening the extremists at the expense of the political Islamists, but the extremists do not and probably cannot command a mass following.
The annual Arab Human Development Report is written by cosmopolitan Arab intellectuals, but the political Islamists are unanimous in believing, too, that reform in the Arab world is needed, whether there is progress toward a settlement with Israel or not. They point out that for too long corrupt regimes have used the Palestine issue as an excuse to maintain their power. Some of them are explicit in arguing that only democratically elected (and thus in their view probably Islamist) governments will have the legitimacy to make real peace with Israel. That may well be an honest view: while excluded from power and themselves under threat from extremists, the political Islamists have no reason to tackle the difficult issues that making peace with Israel will require; but it is striking that in Turkey it is an Islamist government which was able to take the difficult decisions needed to move toward Turkey's integration with the European Union.
We believe that G-8 governments must now, perhaps indirectly, enter into a dialogue with such movements and involve them in the civil society track of the Broader Middle East Initiative. It will not be easy but, if we are to avoid a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West (or, even worse, with Islam in the West), and if we are serious about reform in the Middle East, we must do business with those who are struggling to relate their faith to the world as it is - and not as it was at the time of the Prophet Mohammad.
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* Richard Murphy served as U.S. assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs in 1983-89. Basil Eastwood was director of research and analysis at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1991-96 and British ambassador to Syria in 1996-2000. They wrote this commentary for the Daily Star.
Source: The Daily Star, May 4, 2005
Visit the Daily Star at www.dailystar.com.lb.
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.
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