Egypt: Protesters Killed Marking Revolution

Prosecutors Should Investigate Excessive Use of Force

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(New York) – The death of at least 20 people in Egyptduring clashes with security forces surrounding the commemoration of the 2011 uprising underscores the need for an independent investigation into the authorities’ excessive use of force. Two women were killed ahead of the January 25 anniversary while participating in apparently peaceful protests, and at least 18 died on the anniversary.

Sondos Reda Abu Bakr, 17, and Shaimaa al-Sabbagh, 32, were killed on January 23 and 24 when security forces broke up protests in which the women were participating, according to eyewitnesses, media reports, videos, and photographs reviewed by Human Rights Watch. In al-Sabbagh’s case, clear evidence – including videos of the gathering before, during and after its dispersal – shows that police responded to a small, peaceful protest with excessive force, leading to al-Sabbagh’s death.

“Four years after Egypt’s revolution, police are still killing protesters on a regular basis,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director. “While President Sisi was at Davos burnishing his international image, his security forces were routinely using violence against Egyptians participating in peaceful demonstrations.”

Since former Defense Minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi came to power following a July 2013 military coup that removed former President Mohamed Morsy, Egyptian security forces have carried out widespread killings of more than 1,000 Egyptian protesters. Most of those killed were supporters of Morsy or opponents of the coup who died in Rabaa and Nahda squares in the capital on August 14, 2013 – the worst mass killings in Egypt’s modern history. In November 2013, the government put in place an anti-protest law that forbids impromptu demonstrations and gives the Interior Ministry wide authority to forcefully disperse unauthorized gatherings. On January 25, 2014, the third anniversary of the uprising, at least 64 people died across Egypt in clashes between protesters and security forces.

On January 23, in the buildup to the fourth anniversary of the uprising, police violently dispersed an anti-coup march in Alexandria, according to the Freedom and Justice Party, the Brotherhood’s political wing. Abu Bakr, a student, was participating in the march when she was shot and killed, the party said in a Facebook post. A Health Ministry official in Alexandria told the Reuters news agency that Abu Bakr was one of two people taken to hospital for gunshot wounds.

On January 24, police similarly dispersed a peaceful protest led by the Socialist Popular Alliance Party in Cairo’s downtown Talaat Harb Square, firing tear gas and birdshot, arresting at least six people and leaving al-Sabbagh dead, according to eyewitnesses and other evidence. The party had organized the march to commemorate the January 25 revolution and remember its “martyrs.”

Human Rights Watch reviewed numerous publicly available media documenting the protest, including four videos – one of which appears to show al-Sabbagh seconds after being shot – and 21 still photographs, 15 of which show the protest as it is being dispersed.

Though none of the videos or photographs show when and how she was shot, they do show that at least some of the security forces present in the square were carrying shotguns and automatic rifles. Two photos, which seem to have been taken at or around the moment al-Sabbagh fell, show armed police chasing her and others.

Hisham Abd al-Hamid, spokesman for the Justice Ministry’s Forensic Medical Authority, told the television channel Al-Hayat in a live interview that al-Sabbagh had been shot in the back and neck by birdshot from around 8 meters. Abd al-Hamid said the type of “light” birdshot that killed al-Sabbagh could have been used by police or civilians. He also said that Qasr al-Nil district prosecutors had asked him not to publish the autopsy report because the prosecutor general was issuing a publication ban on the case, according to the Aswat Masriya news service.

Osama Hammam, a photojournalist documenting the protest, wrote on Facebook that the marchers, about 30 people, carried a wreath and stood on a sidewalk after reaching the square, chanting, “bread, freedom, social justice” – a popular protest slogan. Video posted to YouTube by the quasi-official Middle East News Agency shows the protesters, also holding a large banner, marching through the street and standing and chanting peacefully near the square. Another video, which also appears to show al-Sabbagh moments after being shot, shows the crowd chanting peacefully. Police stationed in the square – where they had dispersed protesters who fired fireworks at them on January 22 – suddenly fired tear gas at the group, Hammam wrote, and the protesters began to walk away.

“Suddenly I received birdshot and began to run, not understanding anything that was happening,” Hammam wrote. “I took some pictures as I ran and when I felt the firing stop I looked and saw Shaima al-Sabbagh fall to the ground.”

Graphic videos posted to YouTube show a colleague of al-Sabbagh and another man carrying her away from the square and seeking help. Al-Sabbagh appears to be unconscious, and blood can be seen flowing from her mouth and nose.

A forensic medical report documenting al-Sabbagh’s death, a photo of which former member of parliament Ziad al-Alimi posted on Twitter, states that al-Sabbagh died after being shot in the back, causing lacerations to her lungs and heart and massive bleeding in her chest.

Security officials denied that police had shot al-Sabbagh. Assistant Interior Minister Abd al-Fattah Othmantold the Agence France-Presse news agency that security forces had only used tear gas to disperse the protest. “It was a small protest that did not require the use of such weapons, only two tear gas canisters were fired,” he said.

Another Interior Ministry statement claimed that the protesters had used fireworks against security forces, Ahram Online reported.

Maj. Gen. Hany Abd al-Latif, spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said security forces were working to speedily bring al-Sabbagh’s killers to justice and told a privately owned television channel that a group of protesters caught on tape carrying rifles had fired the gunshots, according to Aswat Masriya. Abd al-Latif “warned” that Muslim Brotherhood members were using such gatherings to “drive a wedge between the police and the people,” the newspaper Al-Watan reported.

None of the publicly available media reviewed by Human Rights Watch showed any protester with a weapon or fireworks.

On January 25, Prosecutor General Hisham Barakat announced the opening of an “immediate and extensive” investigation into al-Sabbagh’s death and ordered members of the security forces who participated in the incident to be questioned. Barakat said he had also ordered the unit’s logbooks, which detail what kinds of weapons and ammunition they used, to be preserved, and that a team of criminal forensic experts had viewed the scene of al-Sabbagh’s death and her autopsy report. Prosecutors seized footage from three security cameras in the area and questioned five other eyewitnesses as well, according to a report in Al-Youm Al-Sabaanewspaper. They released all six of those arrested during the dispersal.

Prime Minister Ibrahim Mehleb said whoever was responsible for al-Sabbagh’s death would be punished and that “the state after [the] January 25 [, 2011 uprising] respects the law and applies it to everyone.”

International human rights treaties ratified by Egypt oblige the government to safeguard the right of peaceful assembly and to restrict it only when required by law and when necessary to achieve a greater public good. When dispersing a demonstration or responding to acts of violence, security forces should abide by the United Nations Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officers.

Governments and law enforcement agencies must ensure that there is an effective review process and independent administrative or prosecutorial authorities to exercise jurisdiction in such cases. Those affected by the use force should have access to a judicial process.

Such provisions apply to all demonstrations, and Egyptian prosecutors should ensure that the other deaths that occurred before and during the January 25 anniversary are investigated fairly and impartially.

Egypt’s successive prosecutors general have failed to hold government and law enforcement officials accountable for mass, unlawful killings since the 2011 revolution. Only three low-level officers have served prison sentences for killings in 2011. No police officer or security official has been prosecuted for the mass killings of July and August 2013. A judge convicted four police officers for the August 18, 2013 fatal tear-gassing of 37 detainees at Abu Zaabal Prison, but an appeals court has ordered them retried. The official June 30 Fact-Finding Committee, established to investigate the violence surrounding Morsy’s removal, did not recommend any prosecutions.

Human Rights Watch has called for the United Nations Human Rights Council to establish a commission of inquiry to investigate widespread killings of protesters since July 2013. 

Killing Ragheads for Jesus

A GREAT PIECE

By Chris Hedges

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“American Sniper” lionizes the most despicable aspects of U.S. society—the gun culture, the blind adoration of the military, the belief that we have an innate right as a “Christian” nation to exterminate the “lesser breeds” of the earth, a grotesque hypermasculinity that banishes compassion and pity, a denial of inconvenient facts and historical truth, and a belittling of critical thinking and artistic expression. Many Americans, especially white Americans trapped in a stagnant economy and a dysfunctional political system, yearn for the supposed moral renewal and rigid, militarized control the movie venerates. These passions, if realized, will extinguish what is left of our now-anemic open society.

The movie opens with a father and his young son hunting a deer. The boy shoots the animal, drops his rifle and runs to see his kill.

“Get back here,” his father yells. “You don’t ever leave your rifle in the dirt.”

“Yes, sir,” the boy answers.

“That was a helluva shot, son,” the father says. “You got a gift. You gonna make a fine hunter some day.”

The camera cuts to a church interior where a congregation of white Christians—blacks appear in this film as often as in a Woody Allen movie—are listening to a sermon about God’s plan for American Christians. The film’s title character, based on Chris Kyle, who would become the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history, will, it appears from the sermon, be called upon by God to use his “gift” to kill evildoers. The scene shifts to the Kyle family dining room table as the father intones in a Texas twang: “There are three types of people in this world: sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. Some people prefer to believe evil doesn’t exist in the world. And if it ever darkened their doorstep they wouldn’t know how to protect themselves. Those are the sheep. And then you got predators.”

The camera cuts to a schoolyard bully beating a smaller boy.

“They use violence to prey on people,” the father goes on. “They’re the wolves. Then there are those blessed with the gift of aggression and an overpowering need to protect the flock. They are a rare breed who live to confront the wolf. They are the sheepdog. We’re not raising any sheep in this family.”

The father lashes his belt against the dining room table.

“I will whup your ass if you turn into a wolf,” he says to his two sons. “We protect our own. If someone tries to fight you, tries to bully your little brother, you have my permission to finish it.”

There is no shortage of simpletons whose minds are warped by this belief system. We elected one of them, George W. Bush, as president. They populate the armed forces and the Christian right. They watch Fox News and believe it. They have little understanding or curiosity about the world outside their insular communities. They are proud of their ignorance and anti-intellectualism. They prefer drinking beer and watching football to reading a book. And when they get into power—they already control the Congress, the corporate world, most of the media and the war machine—their binary vision of good and evil and their myopic self-adulation cause severe trouble for their country. “American Sniper,” like the big-budget feature films pumped out in Germany during the Nazi era to exalt deformed values of militarism, racial self-glorification and state violence, is a piece of propaganda, a tawdry commercial for the crimes of empire. That it made a record-breaking $105.3 million over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday long weekend is a symptom of the United States’ dark malaise.

“The movie never asks the seminal question as to why the people of Iraq are fighting back against us in the very first place,” said Mikey Weinstein, whom I reached by phone in New Mexico. Weinstein, who worked in the Reagan White House and is a former Air Force officer, is the head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which challenges the growing Christian fundamentalism within the U.S. military. “It made me physically ill with its twisted, totally one-sided distortions of wartime combat ethics and justice woven into the fabric of Chris Kyle’s personal and primal justification mantra of ‘God-Country-Family.’ It is nothing less than an odious homage, indeed a literal horrific hagiography to wholesale slaughter.”

Weinstein noted that the embrace of extreme right-wing Christian chauvinism, or Dominionism, which calls for the creation of a theocratic “Christian” America, is especially acute among elite units such as the SEALs and the Army Special Forces.

The evildoers don’t take long to make an appearance in the film. This happens when television—the only way the movie’s characters get news—announces the 1998 truck bombings of the American embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in which hundreds of people were killed. Chris, now grown, and his brother, aspiring rodeo riders, watch the news reports with outrage. Ted Koppel talks on the screen about a “war” against the United States.

“Look what they did to us,” Chris whispers.

He heads down to the recruiter to sign up to be a Navy SEAL. We get the usual boot camp scenes of green recruits subjected to punishing ordeals to make them become real men. In a bar scene, an aspiring SEAL has painted a target on his back and comrades throw darts into his skin. What little individuality these recruits have—and they don’t appear to have much—is sucked out of them until they are part of the military mass. They are unquestioningly obedient to authority, which means, of course, they are sheep.

We get a love story too. Chris meets Taya in a bar. They do shots. The movie slips, as it often does, into clichéd dialogue.

She tells him Navy SEALs are “arrogant, self-centered pricks who think you can lie and cheat and do whatever the fuck you want. I’d never date a SEAL.”

“Why would you say I’m self-centered?” Kyle asks. “I’d lay down my life for my country.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s the greatest country on earth and I’d do everything I can to protect it,” he says.

She drinks too much. She vomits. He is gallant. He helps her home. They fall in love. Taya is later shown watching television. She yells to Chris in the next room.

“Oh, my God, Chris,” she says.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

“No!” she yells.

Then we hear the television announcer: “You see the first plane coming in at what looks like the east side. …”

Chris and Taya watch in horror. Ominous music fills the movie’s soundtrack. The evildoers have asked for it. Kyle will go to Iraq to extract vengeance. He will go to fight in a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, a country that columnist Thomas Friedman once said we attacked “because we could.” The historical record and the reality of the Middle East don’t matter. Muslims are Muslims. And Muslims are evildoers or, as Kyle calls them, “savages.” Evildoers have to be eradicated.

Chris and Taya marry. He wears his gold Navy SEAL trident on the white shirt under his tuxedo at the wedding. His SEAL comrades are at the ceremony. 

“Just got the call, boys—it’s on,” an officer says at the wedding reception.

The Navy SEALs cheer. They drink. And then we switch to Fallujah. It is Tour One. Kyle, now a sniper, is told Fallujah is “the new Wild West.” This may be the only accurate analogy in the film, given the genocide we carried out against Native Americans. He hears about an enemy sniper who can do “head shots from 500 yards out. They call him Mustafa. He was in the Olympics.”

Kyle’s first kill is a boy who is handed an anti-tank grenade by a young woman in a black chador. The woman, who expresses no emotion over the boy’s death, picks up the grenade after the boy is shot and moves toward U.S. Marines on patrol. Kyle kills her too. And here we have the template for the film and Kyle’s best-selling autobiography, “American Sniper.” Mothers and sisters in Iraq don’t love their sons or their brothers. Iraqi women breed to make little suicide bombers. Children are miniature Osama bin Ladens. Not one of the Muslim evildoers can be trusted—man, woman or child. They are beasts. They are shown in the film identifying U.S. positions to insurgents on their cellphones, hiding weapons under trapdoors in their floors, planting improvised explosive devices in roads or strapping explosives onto themselves in order to be suicide bombers. They are devoid of human qualities.

“There was a kid who barely had any hair on his balls,” Kyle says nonchalantly after shooting the child and the woman. He is resting on his cot with a big Texas flag behind him on the wall. “Mother gives him a grenade, sends him out there to kill Marines.”

Enter The Butcher—a fictional Iraqi character created for the film. Here we get the most evil of the evildoers. He is dressed in a long black leather jacket and dispatches his victims with an electric drill. He mutilates children—we see a child’s arm he amputated. A local sheik offers to betray The Butcher for $100,000. The Butcher kills the sheik. He murders the sheik’s small son in front of his mother with his electric drill. The Butcher shouts: “You talk to them, you die with them.”

Kyle moves on to Tour Two after time at home with Taya, whose chief role in the film is to complain through tears and expletives about her husband being away. Kyle says before he leaves: “They’re savages. Babe, they’re fuckin’ savages.”

He and his fellow platoon members spray-paint the white skull of the Punisher from Marvel Comics on their vehicles, body armor, weapons and helmets. The motto they paint in a circle around the skull reads: “Despite what your momma told you … violence does solve problems.”

“And we spray-painted it on every building and walls we could,” Kyle wrote in his memoir, “American Sniper.” “We wanted people to know, we’re here and we want to fuck with you. …You see us? We’re the people kicking your ass. Fear us because we will kill you, motherfucker.”

The book is even more disturbing than the film. In the film Kyle is a reluctant warrior, one forced to do his duty. In the book he relishes killing and war. He is consumed by hatred of all Iraqis. He is intoxicated by violence. He is credited with 160 confirmed kills, but he notes that to be confirmed a kill had to be witnessed, “so if I shot someone in the stomach and he managed to crawl around where we couldn’t see him before he bled out he didn’t count.”

Kyle insisted that every person he shot deserved to die. His inability to be self-reflective allowed him to deny the fact that during the U.S. occupation many, many innocent Iraqis were killed, including some shot by snipers. Snipers are used primarily to sow terror and fear among enemy combatants. And in his denial of reality, something former slaveholders and former Nazis perfected to an art after overseeing their own atrocities, Kyle was able to cling to childish myth rather than examine the darkness of his own soul and his contribution to the war crimes we carried out in Iraq. He justified his killing with a cloying sentimentality about his family, his Christian faith, his fellow SEALs and his nation. But sentimentality is not love. It is not empathy. It is, at its core, about self-pity and self-adulation. That the film, like the book, swings between cruelty and sentimentality is not accidental. 

“Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel,” James Baldwin reminded us. “The wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.”

“Savage, despicable evil,” Kyle wrote of those he was killing from rooftops and windows. “That’s what we were fighting in Iraq. That’s why a lot of people, myself included, called the enemy ‘savages.’… I only wish I had killed more.” At another point he writes: “I loved killing bad guys. … I loved what I did. I still do … it was fun. I had the time of my life being a SEAL.” He labels Iraqis “fanatics” and writes “they hated us because we weren’t Muslims.” He claims “the fanatics we fought valued nothing but their twisted interpretation of religion.”

“I never once fought for the Iraqis,” he wrote of our Iraqi allies. “I could give a flying fuck about them.”

He killed an Iraqi teenager he claimed was an insurgent. He watched as the boy’s mother found his body, tore her clothes and wept. He was unmoved.

He wrote: “If you loved them [the sons], you should have kept them away from the war. You should have kept them from joining the insurgency. You let them try and kill us—what did you think would happen to them?”

“People back home [in the U.S.], people who haven’t been in war, at least not that war, sometimes don’t seem to understand how the troops in Iraq acted,” he went on. “They’re surprised—shocked—to discover we often joked about death, about things we saw.”

He was investigated by the Army for killing an unarmed civilian. According to his memoir, Kyle, who viewed all Iraqis as the enemy, told an Army colonel: “I don’t shoot people with Korans. I’d like to, but I don’t.” The investigation went nowhere.

Kyle was given the nickname “Legend.” He got a tattoo of a Crusader cross on his arm. “I wanted everyone to know I was a Christian. I had it put in red, for blood. I hated the damn savages I’d been fighting,” he wrote. “I always will.” Following a day of sniping, after killing perhaps as many as six people, he would go back to his barracks to spent his time smoking Cuban Romeo y Julieta No. 3 cigars and “playing video games, watching porn and working out.” On leave, something omitted in the movie, he was frequently arrested for drunken bar fights. He dismissed politicians, hated the press and disdained superior officers, exalting only the comradeship of warriors. His memoir glorifies white, “Christian” supremacy and war. It is an angry tirade directed against anyone who questions the military’s elite, professional killers.

“For some reason, a lot of people back home—not all people—didn’t accept that we were at war,” he wrote. “They didn’t accept that war means death, violent death, most times. A lot of people, not just politicians, wanted to impose ridiculous fantasies on us, hold us to some standard of behavior that no human being could maintain.”

The enemy sniper Mustafa, portrayed in the film as if he was a serial killer, fatally wounds Kyle’s comrade Ryan “Biggles” Job.  In the movie Kyle returns to Iraq—his fourth tour—to extract revenge for Biggles’ death. This final tour, at least in the film, centered on the killing of The Butcher and the enemy sniper, also a fictional character. As it focuses on the dramatic duel between hero Kyle and villain Mustafa the movie becomes ridiculously cartoonish.

Kyle gets Mustafa in his sights and pulls the trigger. The bullet is shown leaving the rifle in slow motion. “Do it for Biggles,” someone says. The enemy sniper’s head turns into a puff of blood.

“Biggles would be proud of you,” a soldier says. “You did it, man.”

His final tour over, Kyle leaves the Navy. As a civilian he struggles with the demons of war and becomes, at least in the film, a model father and husband and works with veterans who were maimed in Iraq and Afghanistan. He trades his combat boots for cowboy boots.

The real-life Kyle, as the film was in production, was shot dead at a shooting range near Dallas on Feb. 2, 2013, along with a friend, Chad Littlefield. A former Marine, Eddie Ray Routh, who had been suffering from PTSD and severe psychological episodes, allegedly killed the two men and then stole Kyle’s pickup truck. Routh will go on trial next month. The film ends with scenes of Kyle’s funeral procession—thousands lined the roads waving flags—and the memorial service at the Dallas Cowboys’ home stadium. It shows fellow SEALs pounding their tridents into the top of his coffin, a custom for fallen comrades. Kyle was shot in the back and the back of his head.  Like so many people he dispatched, he never saw his killer when the fatal shots were fired.

The culture of war banishes the capacity for pity. It glorifies self-sacrifice and death. It sees pain, ritual humiliation and violence as part of an initiation into manhood. Brutal hazing, as Kyle noted in his book, was an integral part of becoming a Navy SEAL. New SEALs would be held down and choked by senior members of the platoon until they passed out. The culture of war idealizes only the warrior. It belittles those who do not exhibit the warrior’s “manly” virtues. It places a premium on obedience and loyalty. It punishes those who engage in independent thought and demands total conformity. It elevates cruelty and killing to a virtue. This culture, once it infects wider society, destroys all that makes the heights of human civilization and democracy possible. The capacity for empathy, the cultivation of wisdom and understanding, the tolerance and respect for difference and even love are ruthlessly crushed. The innate barbarity that war and violence breed is justified by a saccharine sentimentality about the nation, the flag and a perverted Christianity that blesses its armed crusaders. This sentimentality, as Baldwin wrote, masks a terrifying numbness. It fosters an unchecked narcissism. Facts and historical truths, when they do not fit into the mythic vision of the nation and the tribe, are discarded. Dissent becomes treason. All opponents are godless and subhuman. “American Sniper” caters to a deep sickness rippling through our society. It holds up the dangerous belief that we can recover our equilibrium and our lost glory by embracing an American fascism.

Yemen and the manufacture of sectarianism

By Azmi Bishara


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The country's disparate forces must commit to a political vision that incorporates nationalism with citizenship, or Yemen will remain divided.

Yemen has in recent years provided a live practical demonstration of the maxim that political sectarianism is manufactured, rather than inherent. It is acquired rather than natural.

Historically, Yemen was never party to the confessional conflicts between Sunni and Shia, to the extent that some considered the Zaidi tradition, which was indigenous to Yemen, shortly after it sprang up, as the Shia of the Sunni, or as the Sunni of the Shia.

According to tradition, the name al-Rafida ["the Rejectionists"] to describe those who disavow any connection with Sahaba [the Companions of the Prophet] is attributable to Imam Zaid bin Ali himself. Moreover, Yemen's system of government-by-Imam was based on tribal alliances that bolstered it, on a complex tribal structure that entailed the inclusion of both different Zaidi sects in the northern parts of Yemen and some of its central regions, and also on tribes that belonged to the Shafii school of thought.

When Abdullah al-Sallal's republican coup, backed by Nasser's Egypt, occurred against the system of government-by-Imam, the Ahmar clan led the alliance of the Zaidi Hashed tribes against the rule of the Zaidi imams. As for Saudi Arabia, it supported the rebellion by the pro-Imam tribes.

That entire situation was a struggle over interests, influence and power. There is nothing strange about that. The struggle to gain power and the position of imam is at the root of the old Sunni-Shia sectarian schism. Those disputes were not over the best ways of drawing closer to God, rather they were concerned with retroactive religious interpretations that were used in the service of power conflicts.

Zaidi flexibility

At the time, the Zaidi community embraced the position of those who turned against the Imam. The sect accepts the concept of disavowing an unjust ruler; there is no question of the Imam having a priori infallibility. Nor does it state that the position of the Imam must be inherited. Moreover, it does not sever the relationship with the Sahaba as a reference, but recognises them as such.

No happy ending for a failed love: Read more Azmi Bishara here.

In the midst of the conflict that raged in Yemen in the 1960s, a great deal was said about the way in which tribal alliances switched sides between the Saudis and Nasserism. It was said that the tribes were republican during the day and royalist at night, or the other way round.

Social hegemony belonged to the tribe, rather than to the sect. In the case of large, geographically dispersed tribes, different sects prevailed.

The state in Yemen has to build a polity based on citizenship.

The interpretation of the Zaidi sect in a manner that emphasises the rule of the Imam and his infallibility and the status of the Mahdi as a supra-human condition required the introduction of a basic change in the sect's conceptualisation.

That change was influenced by regional political alliances with Iran on the one hand, and by reactions to an expansion of Sunni influence as a result of the alliance with Saudi Arabia on the other, and even by the establishment of Salafism within some Zaidi tribal circles after the Ahmar clan took over leadership and became partisan.

The state in Yemen has to build a polity based on citizenship which enjoys a cohesiveness deriving from cultural, national and other common denominators.

The army - which is supposed to contribute to forging a modern national identity by merging tribal and regional identities through a single military uniform and through a unified sense of allegiance to the nation - has been infiltrated by several links of allegiance.

Those who enjoy allegiance and trust in traditional society are relatives from the same tribe, region and neighbourhood. In the Arab Mashreq, those allegiances intersect with sectarian identity, although they are distinct from it. The majority that is disadvantaged by the ruling regimes tends to deal with it as a minority sect that is in control, as has occurred in both Syria and Iraq.

The shortcomings of the state

In Yemen, however, the sense of tribal belonging continued to prevail until conflict began within the tribes themselves. Which means that parties and their conflicts - for example the conflict between Ali Saleh and the Ahmar clan - have been able to split the large tribes.

The Houthis were transformed from a movement within one of the Zaidi sects in a marginal geographically limited region into a militia attempting to represent the Zaidis in general, after it had reinterpreted the community's identity in line with regional alliances opposed to other regional alliances.

Who are the New Arabs? You. And us. Read more by Azmi Bishara here.

When sectarianism spreads beyond the town and the district to the wider region, and develops into state aspirations, it develops from an authentic social communitarian sectarianism into political sectarianism that affects the unity of a people as a people, and competes with the state for political allegiance.

Yemen could have been saved by the revolution of young Yemenis, who overturned all preconceived ideas about Yemen in the squares of Taiz and Sanaa, and subsequently in all parts of Yemen during 2011.

However, the young people did not have a democratic political party. The majority of them were young democrats from the Islah (Reform) Party and the Joint Meeting Parties, while some of them did not belong to any formal group.

Not only did they call for the overthrow of Ali Abdullah Saleh, they also put forward advanced democratic demands. The divisions between them and the Houthis were obvious in the public squares where protesters congregated.

The defeat of the revolutionaries

The revolution failed for a number of reasons. It was thwarted by Saleh's continued ability to elicit tribal loyalties within the army; because of intervention by the Gulf states to protect Saleh when the political settlement was reached; because of the abandonment of support for the government and for attempts to rebuild the army so that its loyalty would be limited to the state; and because of the marginalisation of the young people who had waged the revolution. 

Those factors resulted in an expansion of the influence of the Houthis, in collusion with elements loyal to Saleh within the army, right from the start.

Transitional rule weakened the military forces supportive of the revolution and the young revolutionaries themselves, because the new central regime was able to impose its will on them since they themselves wanted it to succeed. At the same time, the Houthis colluded with Saleh - who enjoys immunity and renewed relations with some Gulf countries - to foil the experiment.

Regionally, the fact that most Gulf states - except Qatar - are at odds in their relations with the Arab revolutions and have contradictory approaches to coexisting with a pluralistic system of government in Yemen, was exploited.

In addition, Iran has opened several fronts in the region since the outbreak of the Syrian crisis, while Russia ensures that the UN Security Council does not adopt basic positions with regard to Iran's allies in the region, and only adopts those resolutions that do not name the Houthis and omit any meaningful, tangible measures.

Sectarian political parties and movements spring up in countries that had previously been free of them, fostered by regional support. Not only do they spread, but the reactions to them also spread, thereby colouring everything after their own fashion.

The Houthis will not rule the whole of Yemen, because there are several social and political forces that will prevent them from doing so. If those forces commit to a political vision that incorporates nationalism with equal citizenry they will prevail.

This is an edited translation from our Arabic edition.

Greece shows what can happen when the young revolt against corrupt elites

The rise of Syriza can’t just be explained by the crisis in the eurozone: a youthful generation of professionals has had enough of tax-evading oligarchs

Paul Mason

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At Syriza’s HQ, the cigarette smoke in the cafe swirls into shapes. If those could reflect the images in the minds of the men hunched over their black coffees, they would probably be the faces of Che Guevara, or Aris Velouchiotis, the second world war Greek resistance fighter. These are veteran leftists who expected to end their days as professors of such esoteric subjects as development economics, human rights law and who killed who in the civil war. Instead, they are on the brink of power.

Black coffee and hard pretzels are all the cafe provides, together with the possibility of contracting lung cancer. But on the eve of the vote, I found its occupants confident, if bemused.

However, Syriza HQ is not the place to learn about radicalisation. The fact that a party with a “central committee” even got close to power has nothing to do with a sudden swing to Marxism in the Greek psyche. It is, instead, testimony to three things: the strategic crisis of the eurozone, the determination of the Greek elite to cling to systemic corruption, and a new way of thinking among the young.

Of these, the eurozone’s crisis is easiest to understand – because its consequences can be read so easily in the macroeconomic figures. The IMF predicted Greece would grow as the result of its aid package in 2010. Instead, the economy has shrunk by 25%. Wages are down by the same amount. Youth unemployment stands at 60% – and that is among those who are still in the country.

So the economic collapse – about which all Greeks, both right and leftwing, are bitter – is not just seen as a material collapse. It demonstrated complete myopia among the European policy elite. In all of drama and comedy there is no figure more laughable as a rich man who does not know what he is doing. For the past four years the troika – the European Commission, IMF and European Central Bank– has provided Greeks with just such a spectacle.

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As for the Greek oligarchs, their misrule long predates the crisis. These are not only the famous shipping magnates, whose industry pays no tax, but the bosses of energy and construction groups and football clubs. As one eminent Greek economist told me last week: “These guys have avoided paying tax through theMetaxas dictatorship, the Nazi occupation, a civil war and a military junta.” They had no intention of paying taxes as the troika began demanding Greece balance the books after 2010, which is why the burden fell on those Greeks trapped in the PAYE system – a workforce of 3.5 million that fell during the crisis to just 2.5 million.

The oligarchs allowed the Greek state to become a battleground of conflicting interests. As Yiannis Palaiologos, a Greek journalist, put it in his recent book on the crisis, there is “a pervasive irresponsibility, a sense that no one is in charge, no one is willing or able to act as a custodian of the common good”.

But their most corrosive impact is on the layers of society beneath them. “There goes X,” Greeks say to each other as the rich walk to their tables in trendy bars. “He is controlling Y in parliament and having an affair with Z.” It’s like a soap opera, but for real, and too many Greeks are deferentially mesmerised by it.

Over three general elections Syriza’s achievement has been to politicise the issue of the oligarchy. The Greek word for them is “the entangled” – and they were, above all, entangled in the centrist political duopoly. Because Syriza owes them nothing, its leader, Alexis Tsipras, was able to give the issue of corruption and tax evasion both rhetorical barrels – and this resonated massively among the young.

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 Alexis Tsipras of Syriza in Athens on 22 January. Photograph: AGF/Rex

And here’s why. In a functional market economy, the classic couple in a posh restaurant are young and close in age. In my travels through the eurocrisis – from Dublin to Athens – I have noticed that the classic couple in a dysfunctional economy is a grey-haired man with a twentysomething woman. It becomes a story of old men with oligarchic power flaunting their wealth and influence without opprobrium.

The youth are usurped when oligarchy, corruption and elite politics stifle meritocracy. The sudden emergence of small centrist parties led by charismatic young professionals inGreece is testimony that this generation has had enough. But by the time they got their act together, Tsipras was already there.

From outside, Greece looks like a giant negative: but what lies beneath the rise of the radical left is the emergence of positive new values – among a layer of young people much wider than Syriza’s natural support base. These are the classic values of the networked generation: self-reliance, creativity, the willingness to treat life as a social experiment, a global outlook.

When Golden Dawn emerged as a frightening, violent neo-Nazi force, with – at one point – 14% support, what struck the networked youth was how many of the political elite pandered to it. People who had read its history could see a replay of late Weimar flickering before their eyes: delusional Nazis feted by big businessmen craving for order.

I’ve reported the Greek crisis since it began, and what changed in 2015 was this: Syriza had already won the solid support of about 25% of voters on the issues ofEurope and economics. But now a further portion of the Greek electorate, above all the young, are signalling they’ve had enough of corruption and elites.

Greece, though an outlier, has always been a signifier, too: this is what happens when modern capitalism fails. For there are inept bureaucrats and corrupt elites everywhere: only the trillions of dollars created and pumped into their nations’ economies to avoid collapse shields them from the scrutiny they have received in Greece.

We face two years of electoral uncertainty in Europe, with the far left or the hard right now vying for power in Spain, France and the Netherlands. Some are proclaiming this “the end of neoliberalism”.

I’m not sure of that. All that’s certain is that Greece shows how it could end.

Paul Mason is economics editor at Channel 4 News. Follow him @paulmasonnews

حديث الثورة- ماذا بقي من ثورة يناير؟

This is What Real Democracy Looks Like

WHEN WILL THE ARABS REACH THIS STAGE OF POLITICAL AWARENESS??

NOT IN MY LIFETIME!

They despise your revolution, Egyptians.

By: Wael Kandil

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The regime in Egypt has now brazenly taken the country backward to a worse state to the one that ignited the spark that lit the 25 January Revolution.

The release of former President Hosni Mubarak's two sons hours before the anniversary of the glorious revolution against them can only mean Mubarak's heirs are currently in power, and that revolutionary consciousness is in a coma.

Furthermore, the current rulers are sure their brazen challenge to Egyptians and their undermining of Egyptians' ability to defend their revolution will not wake Egyptians' revolutionary consciousness.

The current scene in Egypt is exactly what is was before 25 January 2011. Cairo is once again a location for making deals and a backdrop for international conspiracies against any form of resistance to the Zionist project, in alliance with regressive and subordinate Arab regimes. The current regime's foreign policy is based on the idea that the Egyptian regime should not aspire to be more than a broker for negotiations and an advocate of normalising relations with Israel, extending its hand to whoever offers it conditional assistance.

Egypt is a strategic asset to the Israeli state, a venue that hosts negotiations to kill or cripple the Palestinian liberation project and projects for international enrichment through the war on terror. Egypt has reverted back to what it was under Mubarak, echoing the language he used at the World Economic Forum at Davos yesterday.

The legacy of Mubarak is the attempt to put a false Arab nationalist mask on a regime born murderous and raised in an Israeli nursery.

The speech of the new general now ruling Egypt at the Davos forum focused on two main points.

The first was basically marketing, that is marketing himself as a bridge to the US-international war on terror, presenting himself as an obedient subordinate that western powers can rely on. He promoted himself as a supporter of the western agenda, and even drew parallels between the counter-revolution that brought him to power a year and a half ago and the demonstrations in Paris against the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

The second focus of his speech was selling the same service Mubarak sold in return for US and Israeli approval for his position and power. He utilised the Palestinian cause to defend the right of the Israeli occupier to enjoy security and life above Palestinian bodies. This is the legacy of Mubarak I described last April as being "an attempt to put a false Arab nationalist mask on a regime born murderous and raised in an Israeli nursery."

Internally, the regime does not hide its wish to implement the orders of the forces of capitalism that funded its coup against the January revolution. The regime has announced its intention to stop subsidising essential items, keeping in mind the connection between privatisation and the normalisation of relations with Israel since the reign of Anwar al-Sadat.

Will Egypt rise again?

The current picture in Egypt tells us that the underlying causes of the 2011 revolution are still there and are even more severe, so what makes the regime so sure the people will not rise again?

On the eve of the 2011 revolution, I remember a heated debate that took place in a seminar to discuss a book by Jalal al-Amin, between youths who were adamant to go out and protest the next morning and Jalal al-Amin. The author laughed at the youths and told the audience not to expect a revolution tomorrow. However, Tahrir square showed books and their authors how little they knew.

Today's attempts to scare and terrorise people are exactly the same as those of four years ago, and as I told a friend of mine, no revolution can be completely predicted and rehearsed. My message to the youth is to rebel against all attempts to scare them and divide them. They should go out as they did the first time, put their faith in God, open the book of January and fly towards their destiny.

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the original author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of al-Araby al-Jadeed, its editorial board or staff.

This is an edited translation from our Arabic website.