A Champion For The Displaced In Israel

By JODI RUDOREN in Tel Aviv


“I don’t see emigration as something that can be happy, only a tragedy. But if I stay here, I have to fight against things being done in my name.”- Michael Sfard

UP two steaming, dingy flights in an aging Bauhaus building here, Michael Sfard imagines that his is one of the few law firms with no parking spaces. The young lawyers and interns who toil inside dressed in T-shirts and shorts always walk or bike to work, and visitors are rare.

“Our clients either aren’t allowed to come or they’re behind bars,” Mr. Sfard explained.

Mr. Sfard’s clients are mostly Palestinians who live in the West Bank and need permits to come into Israel. Suing the state generally does not ease the path to getting such a permit, which is often a big problem.

One recent afternoon, Mr. Sfard was dealing with just that reality: The mother and cousin of a protester killed by Israeli soldiers were denied a permit, although they were the key witnesses in a Supreme Court hearing scheduled the next day demanding an investigation. The government considers relatives of those killed by Israeli forces high security risks for seeking revenge.

“I have many cases where I’m alone there without my clients,” he sighed.

At 40, Mr. Sfard, the son of Polish dissidents who came to Israel in the late 1960s, has emerged as the left’s leading lawyer in Israel. He has brought scores of human rights and land-use cases challenging Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories it acquired in 1967, and represented hundreds of soldiers refusing to serve.

He sees his work as a mission to save the prospect of a two-state solution and preserve Israeli democracy. But he has at times unwittingly undermined his own agenda, when his microvictories in court prompt the right-leaning government to produce political macrovictories for his adversaries — leading to the legalization and expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

This summer, for example, 30 homes in an outpost known as Ulpana were evacuated after a Sfard petition claimed they were on private Palestinian land; Israel pledged to build 800 settler homes in exchange.

This week, Mr. Sfard’s chief adversary, the settler movement, bestowed on him honorary citizenship in “Judea and Samaria,” the biblical names for the West Bank, with a mock certificate noting that he “may have come to curse and cause damage” but had ended up “raising the morale and gladdening the hearts of those who love the Land.”

Most of his work is financed by Israel’s premier left-wing nonprofit organizations, which in turn are financed in part by European governments.

“He sees the courts as the way to force the changes that he perceives as necessary for Israel,” said Gerald Steinberg, who runs NGO Monitor, a right-leaning group that examines organizations like those that support Mr. Sfard. “But he doesn’t convince the Israeli public. In any democratic process, you can’t use just the legal system to impose an ideology.”

Mr. Sfard makes no apologies for his dual role as legal advocate and political activist. His representation of conscientious objectors came after he served 21 days in a military jail in 1998 for refusing to do reserve duty in the disputed city of Hebron. His office shelves are lined with the works and likenesses of Mohandas K. Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. His parents met during the student uprisings at the University of Warsaw in 1968.

Mr. Sfard’s maternal grandfather, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, was kicked out of the university and labeled a traitor for supporting the students. His father, Leon, spent three months in a Polish prison, and avoided trial only by leaving the country.

THIS legacy is ever-present for the younger Mr. Sfard: in his firm’s conference room hangs a large photograph he took of four Soviet-era Polish police cars that were on display in Warsaw when he went there on a trip to explore his roots two years ago. The police cars were much like the ones in which his father was taken from his home in the middle of the night.

“It reminds me time and again what am I doing, and what are the dangers of being a dissident,” Mr. Sfard said. “For him, I should be a bit more thankful that this is a democracy and I have freedom of speech and I can do what I do. For me, this is the starting point, not something that I have to appreciate every day.”

Once in Israel, his father became a high-tech consultant, his mother an education professor. They raised Michael and his younger sister in a Jerusalem neighborhood filled with journalists, who debated the issues of the day in their salon. In high school, he rallied for movie theaters to be open on the Sabbath, and for peace with the Palestinians.

He served in the army as a combat medic, mostly in Lebanon, and chose law because “I don’t have what it takes to be a politician.” A side passion is literature — especially Polish poetry — and he co-wrote “The Last Spy,” a 2007 biography of Marcus Klingberg, a Polish-Israeli client of the first lawyer he worked with, who was convicted of espionage for the Soviet Union.

Mr. Sfard and his high school sweetheart have 7-year-old and 15-month-old sons, whom they adopted for social-consciousness reasons. He spent a year studying in London, a self-imposed exile from the land with which he has a love-hate relationship, but could not stay away.

“This is my place: this culture is my culture, this language is my language,” he explained. “I don’t see emigration as something that can be happy, only a tragedy. But if I stay here, I have to fight against things being done in my name.”

Since it opened in 2004, Mr. Sfard’s firm has grown from a solo practice in one and a half rooms to a combined three apartments — his wife, a fashion designer turned social worker, did the interiors — with eight employees and two subletters.

HIS signature is on many of the major cases decided in recent years by the Supreme Court: successes include the rerouting of the separation barrier around the village of Bilin, the 2005 demolition of nine settler homes in Amona, the impending move of the outpost called Migron and the recent evacuations in Ulpana.

These and others have made him an enemy of the right: last year, a settler from Kiryat Arba was indicted in connection with an Internet posting that called for his assassination and included his address. But Mr. Sfard’s court statements and legal wisdom are respected by judges and adversaries. And clients praise him for adopting their causes as his own.

“He didn’t treat me as a customer,” said Bassam Aramin, the father of a 10-year-old girl killed in a 2007 protest, whose petition forced an investigation, though not an indictment. “He treats this like his own daughter.”

David Zonshein, founder of the advocacy group Courage to Refuse, recalled Mr. Sfard’s taking him aside during the push in one case for a full military trial, which risked a long jail sentence, to say: “Don’t do it for other people. Other people will not take the consequences.”

His office walls are at once a chronicle of the movement and his personal history. There is a framed 1958 map of Israel he found at the Jaffa flea market, “the only map you can find today where there are no settlements and the Palestinian villages are all marked,” he said. There is also a framed search warrant for his files in a case concerning interviews with dissident soldiers.

In back, a small room is filled with a rainbow of three-ring binders, files of the roughly 500 cases the firm has fought over its eight years. They are, often, not legal genius, more a matter of spending the money and time to find, say, Palestinians with landownership claims. But even the victories are often bittersweet. In Bilin, the separation barrier took over half the village’s land; a fight lasting years returned about a quarter of the land.

“The process is no less important than the result,” he said. “I am addicted. It’s not a question of whether it’s depressing or not, but whether I can live without it.”

-This story was first published in The New York Times on 28/07/2012

ALAWISTAN

Bashar al-Assad may be gearing up to create an Alawite statelet along Syria's coastal mountains. And he has the means to do it.

BY TONY BADRAN



How long will President Bashar al-Assad remain in Damascus? His regime appears to be reeling: A bombing last week claimed the lives of his brother-in-law and three other senior figures of his regime, military defections continue, and rebel forces have arrived in the country's largest cities. The prevalent view in Washington and many other foreign capitals is that the question is not if Assad will lose the capital, but when.

Assad has no intention of abandoning Damascus without a fight. Since last week's bombing, the Syrian Army's Fourth Division -- led by Assad's brother Maher -- has launched an intense campaign to retake control of the capital's neighborhoods from the rebels. To secure Damascus, the regime has redeployed troops from the Golan and eastern Syria. Control of the capital is critical to Assad for maintaining the pretense that he is not merely an Alawite warlord, but the embodiment of the state.

The Syrian despot, however, is fighting a losing battle. As heavy fighting rages on in the cities of Damascus and Aleppo, the regime is losing control over the Syrian interior and the Kurdish northeast. The predominantly Sunni areas of Syria are falling from Assad's grasp, and there is no realistic way for him to reassert his authority there.

But Assad has one card left to play: The Syrian regime has been setting the stage for a retreat to Syria's coastal mountains, the traditional homeland of the Assads' Alawite sect, for months now. It is now clear that this is where the Syrian conflict is headed. Sooner or later, Assad will abandon Damascus.

The Syrian regime's recent decline in fortunes has seemingly accelerated this process. With the sectarian fault line clearly drawn, reports are emerging of internal population migration as Alawites begin moving back to the ancestral mountains -- echoing the dynamics seen during the Lebanese civil war. Shortly after the assassination of the top Syrian security officials, opposition activists and Western diplomats reported that Assad had relocated to the coastal city of Latakia. This claim has since been contested, but Assad's whereabouts remain uncertain.

Despite the fact that the Syrian regime is a family enterprise, Assad has sought to present himself throughout the conflict as the sole legitimate interlocutor with the outside world. Regrettably, the international community has played along with this conceit. All diplomatic initiatives to solve the Syrian crisis have stipulated dialogue with Assad and refrained from calling on him to hand over power.

However, it has long been apparent that Assad's bid to control the entirety of Syrian territory was hitting against demographic and geographic realities. Contrary to all early assertions regarding his military, Assad's forces are little more than a sectarian militia. This limited manpower has, from the beginning, meant that Assad would not be able to re-impose his authority on the predominantly Sunni interior and periphery.

This sectarian geography has determined the regime’s behavior. As he dug in for a long war, Assad has had to consolidate the Alawites behind him and fortify his position in the Alawite coastal mountains overlooking the Mediterranean, in the region roughly between Jisr al-Shoughour in the north, near the Turkish border, and Tal Kalakh in the south, near Lebanon.

Assad has moved to secure all natural access points leading to this Alawite redoubt. In a move somewhat reminiscent of the Lebanese precedent, he also began to clear hostile Sunni pockets within the enclave and to create a buffer zone in the plain that separates the coastal mountains from the interior. This was the calculus behind the string of mass killings in villages like al-Houla, Taldou, al-Haffeh, and Tremseh -- all Sunni population centers either inside or on the eastern frontier of the Alawite enclave in the central plain.

The common denominator to all these places is their relevance to Syria's strategic and sectarian geography. The areas near Homs and al-Haffeh, for instance, are historical access routes into the coastal mountains. In addition, villages like Taldou and Tremseh mark the eastern faultline where outlying Alawite villages are sprinkled uncomfortably near Sunni ones. They also lie strategically on the north-south axis linking Damascus to Aleppo, and the rebellious governorates of Homs and Hama to Idlib.

Damascus, however, lies well outside this prospective enclave. In the capital, the regime does not possess a demographic reservoir of loyal Alawite communities with which to balance the power relationship with its rivals. The Syrian regime has responded to this problem by ringing Damascus with military bases stocked with loyal Alawite troops to control the main communication routes out of the city. As a result, French political geographer Fabrice Balanche has written, the capital has become an "encircled city." Moreover, as recent news reports have noted, the influx of mostly Sunni refugees into Damascus from other rebellious districts has further complicated the demographic equation in the capital.

It is therefore not only conceivable, but also rather likely, that these geographic and demographic factors will at some point lead Assad to abandon Damascus and fortify himself in his Alawite stronghold. As occurred in Lebanon, this could lead to a prolonged static war, where the support of external patrons -- namely Iran and Russia -- becomes increasingly critical to Assad.

Some will argue that an Alawite enclave is unviable in the long-term, but Assad has an insurance policy to protect his retreat. As the Assad regime just reminded the world, it possesses a large stockpile of chemical weapons. While most observers are worried about Assad passing these weapons along to third-party actors like Hezbollah, he is more likely to hold on tightly to them. These weapons are his last remaining and most formidable deterrent against his Sunni foes, and precious leverage to guarantee the quiescence of the outside world.

With this insurance policy, Assad could hang on as a warlord presiding over an Iranian and Russian protectorate on the Mediterranean. The past several weeks have dealt Assad a serious blow, but this is not yet the end of the Syrian conflict. It is rather the beginning of a new phase, the endgame of which is not in Damascus, but further west.

-This commentary was first published in Foreign Policy on 27/07/2012
- Tony Badran is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies

By Ceding Northeastern Syria To The Kurds, Assad Puts Turkey In A Bind

Ankara has been a key backer of Syria's rebellion, but the prospect of an Iraq-style autonomous Kurdish zone has Erdogan threatening to intervene.

By PIOTR ZALEWSKI in ISTANBUL


In this Tuesday, July 24, 2012 photo, a Syrian boy sits atop a damaged military tank at the border town of Azaz, some 20 miles (32 kilometers) north of Aleppo, Syria. Turkey sealed its border with Syria to trucks on Wednesday, July 25, 2012 cutting off a vital supply line to the embattled nation as fighting stretched into its fifth day in the commercial capital of Aleppo.

The retreat of President Bashar al-Assad’s forces from parts of northeastern Syria along the Turkish border might have been welcomed by Turkey, a key supporter of the Syrian rebellion, except for one thing: The region is predominantly Kurdish, and Ankara fears the resulting power vacuum will be a major boon to its number one enemy, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) whose three-decade separatist insurgency has seen some 40,000 people killed.

Until recently, Syria’s Kurds had been divided. A coalition of roughly a dozen Kurdish parties had tentatively backed the popular uprising against Assad, while the PKK’s Syrian ally, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), appeared to align itself with the Syrian regime, intimidating opposition activists and quashing popular protests. Others sat on the sidelines, wary of closing ranks with a Sunni Arab-dominated opposition that turned a deaf ear to Kurdish demands for new rights in a post-Assad Syria. Two weeks ago – perhaps sensing that the regime’s fall was imminent – the rival Syrian Kurdish political currents put aside their differences, under the coaching of Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani. In Irbil, capital of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish Regional Government, they signed a unity agreement that has allowed them to take control of several northeastern towns, Assad’s forces mostly retreating without a fight.

The news sparked a Turkish media and political clamor about the imminent rise of a “PKK Republic” or a “Western Kurdistan” on Turkey’s southern flank. Commentators fear that the rise of a second  Kurdish statelet, following the emergence of the one in neighboring Iraq in 2003, would embolden Turkey’s own 12-15 million Kurds to pursue their own dream of autonomy. Worse still, it could potentially provide the PKK — branded as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the U.S., and the EU — with sanctuaries from which to launch cross-border attacks.

Picking up where the media left off, Turkey’s fiery leader, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, banged the war drums. Though he and his government proclaim the Kurds a “brother nation,” Erdogan told a TV interviewer on Wednesday, a Kurdish state in northern Syria would likely become a “terrorist entity”. If need be, he warned, Turkey would not hesitate to hit the PKK inside Syria, as it has done repeatedly in northern Iraq. “If a formation that’s going to be a problem emerges, if there is a terror operation, an irritant, then intervening would be our most natural right.”

It would not be easy. In northern Iraq — where the PKK has come under pressure from a Barzani government that seeks to improve ties with Ankara — the rebels remain ensconced in remote mountain  hideouts, making it easier for Turkish forces to target them with relative impunity. In Syria, the PKK-aligned PYD is an urban-based outfit. To bring the fight to them, Turkish troops would have to operate in large population centers, many of them within a stone’s throw of the common border.

Syrian Kurds are quick to counter Turkish alarmism. Ankara is overstating the PKK’s influence in Syria, Abdulhalim, a Kurdish activist in Syria, told TIME via Skype. Even if it is the strongest and best armed of the Kurdish factions in Syria, the PYD is in no position to overwhelm its local rivals. “People will not allow the PYD to control the area,” Abdulhalim insists. “All people here, Arabs, Christians, and other ethnicities, will be in control.” The radicals would also have to contend with Barzani, whose government has provided training to Kurdish defectors from Assad’s army.
But, Abdulhalim warns, nothing would unite the Kurds of Syria more than resistance to a Turkish incursion. “We are strongly refusing Erdogan talking about any invasion of Syria to protect Turkey from the PYD,” he says.

When the sabre-rattling dies down, writes Oral Calislar, a commentator for Radikal, a Turkish newspaper, Ankara will do the same with a Kurdish quasi-state in Syria as it did with the one in Iraq – learn to live with it. “We used to say we’d never tolerate an autonomous Kurdistan on our border,” Calislar writes. “It was one of our ‘red lines.’ And now we’re buddy-buddy with Barzani.”

For the time being, the most that Turkey can do to contain the fallout from Syria is to make amends with its own Kurds, says Hugh Pope, an analyst with the International Crisis Group. If Erdogan wants to ensure Turkey’s security, he adds, his government will have to do so by addressing the Turkish Kurds’ main grievances – adequate political representation, mother tongue education, some degree of devolution, and a partial amnesty for PKK members.

The situation across the border might be “alarming” for Turkey, says Pope, “but only because Turkey has not solved its own Kurdish problem.”

-This commentary was published in Time on 27/07/2012

Russia’s Opposition Challenges Putin On Syria

By Vladimir Kara-Murza



A recent piece in the New Republic, titled “In Russia, Even Putin’s Critics Are OK With His Syria Policy,” raised an important question of whether Moscow’s obstructionist stance with regard to sanctions on Assad is truly a Russian policy, or just that of Vladimir Putin’s undemocratic regime. The title of the article suggests the former—although no actual representatives of the Russian opposition are quoted.

There are indeed some among Putin opponents for whom he is not aggressive or anti-Western enough. On the first day of the 2008 Georgia war, Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov urged the Kremlin to launch “immediate” strikes against the country, while the leader of the nationalist Another Russia party, former émigré writer Eduard Limonov, called on the government to “annex Abkhazia and South Ossetia for Russia, because we need southern territories.” The same usual suspects are raising their voices on Syria. In a recent blog post, Limonov affirmed that “the principal aim of the [US] human rights war in Syria is an almost unconscious desire for world domination, for the suppression of the last dissenting states that are still not controlled by Western civilization.”

It would be wise, however, to listen to the other voices in Russia’s opposition: those who espouse a democratic future for the country, and who have been leading the recent anti-regime protests. Former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, the co-chairman of the Republican Party of Russia, called the Kremlin’s vetoes on UN sanctions against Assad a “disaster” and “against Russia’s interest,” and suggested that Putin is protecting the Syrian dictator because he believes that if Assad falls, he himself will be next. Another Republican Party co-chairman, former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, described the Kremlin’s position on Syria as “not responsible,” stressing that Putin is “defend[ing] the criminal Syrian regime that systematically used weapons against peaceful citizens.” Grigory Yavlinsky, the founder of the liberal Yabloko party, called the situation in Syria “a terrible tragedy,” expressing his regret that Moscow “has not found common ground with the international community.”

Aggressive and obstructionist foreign policy is often a function of an internally repressive regime. It is not surprising that those in Russia who share the political values of the community of democracies are also more aligned with them on the world stage.

-This commentary was published first in World Affairs on 26/07/2012

Hamas Rising

As the Palestinian Authority struggles to make payroll, the militant group is making friends and influencing leaders around the Arab world.

BY JONATHAN SCHANZER



Countries across the Middle East are opening their coffers to support the Palestinian cause -- but the funds are increasingly being diverted in a direction that portends renewed conflict with Israel.

The U.S.-supported Palestinian Authority (PA), on the one hand, is rapidly heading for the poor house. Even after a promised $100 million injection of funds from the Saudis (which has not yet been delivered), the PA will still be suffering its worst cash crunch in years. It has an estimated budget shortfall of $1 billion for 2012 and has already stopped making payroll to its government employees. Yet regional leaders seem nonplussed about their longtime client's budget woes; their pledges of support continue to go unfulfilled.

Meanwhile in the Gaza Strip, Hamas -- the Islamist faction that violently wrested control of the area from the PA in 2007 -- is riding high on the beneficence of its new allies. After a rocky period during which Iran's largesse to Hamas dried up, and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's ongoing slaughter in Syria forced the group's external leaders to flee from their headquarters in Damascus, the group has regained its footing.

Hamas has two of the Middle East's emerging Sunni powerhouses to thank for its change of fortunes.
Qatar, despite an uneasy alliance with Washington that hinges on hosting a key U.S. airbase and now a new missile-defense station, has quietly become one of the Palestinian Islamist party's most generous new benefactors. In February, Hamas officials announced they had signed a $250 million deal with the Qatari government for reconstruction projects in Hamas-controlled Gaza. Doha is also providing funds for sports and housing projects in the Gaza Strip, according to other media reports.

Perhaps the greatest beneficiary of Qatari support is Khaled Meshal, the head of Hamas' external operations. As Assad's crackdown on Syria's predominantly Sunni opposition grew ever bloodier, Asharq al-Awsat reported in February that Meshal would leave Hamas headquarters in Damascus permanently and carry out his work from Qatar. Indeed, Qatar appears to be the new global headquarters of the Hamas politburo: A June 2012 Congressional Research Service report confirmed Meshal's relocation to Doha, noting that the Gulf emirate is the place where he "conducts his regular engagement with regional figures."

The Qataris also appear to be helping Hamas reintegrate into the Sunni fold. That's a tall order, considering that Hamas had long been on the Iranian dole -- the party is best known as an ally of the mullahs that has unleashed rocket attacks and suicide bombings across Israel, killing hundreds. But while the Iranian weapons pipeline still appears to be robust, known Iranian economic assistance has dwindled to small building projects -- and Qatar is exploiting this window of opportunity. In late January, for example, Qatari Crown Prince Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani accompanied a Hamas delegation to Jordan, the first time the group had made an official visit to Amman since Jordan's King Abdullah expelled it in 1999.

Turkey's Islamist government has also embraced Hamas, both economically and diplomatically. In December, the International Middle East Media Center, run out of the West Bank town of Beit Sahour, cited Turkish sources claiming that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had "instructed the Ministry of Finance to allocate $300 million to be sent to Hamas' government in Gaza." Hamas denied this, but Reuters and the Israeli newspaper of record, Haaretz, published subsequent reports, citing different sources, confirming this financial relationship.

It is in Ankara's interest to keep direct assistance shrouded in secrecy -- after all, it has a reputation to uphold among its NATO allies, who designated Hamas for its terrorist activity. But other Turkish assistance to Gaza is easier to document. In January, for instance, the Turkish daily Hurriyet reported that the country would "help Palestinians in the Gaza Strip repair mosques," while its competitor, Zaman, quoted Turkish officials confirming that the country is "engaged in projects to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza," including the construction of a $40 million hospital.

Turkey, like Qatar, has also been an advocate of Hamas in the diplomatic arena for several years now. The ill-fated Turkish-led flotilla of 2010, after all, was designed to draw attention to the Israeli siege of Gaza and received government sponsorship. And Erdogan famously told an American television audience last year, "I don't see Hamas as a terror organization. Hamas is a political party."

Erdogan is not alone in his sentiments. The political tide across the Middle East is also highly favorable to Hamas. Most obviously, the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsy in Egypt's presidential elections has energized Hamas. Following the Brotherhood's victory, Haniyeh expressed confidence that "the revolution led by Morsy will not take any part in blocking Gaza" -- a reference to the blockade enforced by fallen dictator Hosni Mubarak.

The Palestinian Islamist group also enjoyed a red-carpet welcome in Tunisia, where the Islamist al-Nahda party has taken the reins of power. This was a particularly galling development for the rival West Bank government, given that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the Palestinian nationalist organization that Yasser Arafat founded and Abbas now heads, had previously used Tunis as its headquarters in exile.

With Islamist movements gaining strength across the region, Hamas's political rival has simply lost its mojo. The Palestinian Authority, created 18 years ago to midwife a two-state solution with Israel that has yet to materialize, is sorely lacking in popular appeal. It doesn't help that the PA earned a reputation for being corrupt and ossified -- two qualities that brought several Arab autocracies to their ends.

The PA's Western allies, meanwhile, are becoming less willing to underwrite its activities. Despite a denial issued by the PLO to Foreign Policy, Saudi, Palestinian, and Israeli sources have reported that the White House is indeed threatening to cut aid if Abbas attempts to pursue recognition of Palestinian statehood again at the United Nations this year.

Hamas, unlike the PA, has never needed Western handouts. Since its inception in 1987, the group has operated entirely on regional cash. And despite its recent fallout with Iran and Syria, its platform of resistance to Israel enjoys wide appeal in the new Sunni regional order.

Washington once had the clout to deter countries like Qatar, Turkey, and Egypt from backing a designated terrorist group. But after the great regional tectonic shifts of the past two years, U.S. consternation has become a secondary consideration for these new governments.

True, Hamas's new donors could moderate its politics. This is certainly the line that Turkey and Qatar will take. But more likely, the increased cash flow to Hamas will herald a new wave of rejectionism and -- given Hamas's track record -- possibly a new wave of violence in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

-This commentary was published in Foreign Policy on 25/07/2012
-Jonathan Schanzer is vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and author of Hamas vs Fatah: The Struggle for Palestine

Taint Of Baathist Ideology Has Poisoned Syria For Too Long

By Hassan Hassan



In 2003, on my way from Damascus to my hometown in eastern Syria, near the Iraq border, my driver offered to drop me off at a border point where Syrian fighters were taken to join the Iraqi insurgency. I couldn't believe that Syria's secular, Baathist regime was allowing fighters to cross the border to engage in the Iraqi "jihad" against the US-led invasion.

My driver insisted this was the case, and thus the offer to show me the border crossing. He said there was a fleet of drivers who made a living by picking up young men in the Syrian city of Al Bukamal and taking them to the city of Al Qaim, which lies directly across the border with Iraq. It was unclear, my driver said, who handled these young aspiring fighters after that point.

I remained sceptical until I reached home. There, I learnt that two of my distant relatives had already left for Iraq to join the insurgency.

"The government is encouraging it," my driver told me, with excitement, during that ride in 2003. In Syria, at least before the uprising broke out last year, taxi drivers were widely believed to work for the regime's intelligence services.

He proved to be correct. At the time, young men from across Syria were travelling east across the border. Those who crossed using public transport, mainly from Al Bukamal, were usually sent back. Others who travelled with experienced smugglers later said that they had made it all the way to Fallujah.

The issue of the Syrian regime's involvement in terrorist activities in Iraq after 2003 has been raised again by Nawaf Al Fares, the former Syrian ambassador to Baghdad who recently defected. In the past two weeks, Mr Al Fares has said Damascus encouraged young men to join Al Qaeda in Iraq. Given the situation now in Syria, the issue merits another look.

After the invasion of Iraq, the Damascus University campus was flooded with whispers suggesting that Baghdad might soon fall, and that many Syrians would go to fight the Americans. The rumours went viral. No one knew who planted the idea, but it quickly spread among the students. In retrospect, it showed the power of the regime to render youth enthusiasm into an ingredient of terrorism.

The Baath party was founded in Syria in 1947 on a pan-Arabist platform with the stated goals of unity, freedom and socialism. "Freedom" in this sense, it is important to note, meant freedom from colonialism, not personal liberty. But the definition lost its meaning as the regimes in Syria, starting in 1963, and Iraq, 1968 to 2003, solidified into strongarm dictatorships.

The poison of the modern-day Baathist regime is not only its willingness to torture and kill its own population. It is far more insidious. There is an ideology that breeds violence and extremism, a tendency that has not been sufficiently examined. In examining Middle East militancy and terrorism, academics have focused on religious extremism and often overlooked other ideologies.

There was a striking commonality among many young Syrians who went to join the insurgency in Iraq. Accounts from men who went to fight, or from their friends and families, often told that they were not particularly religious. That was true for my two relatives (incidentally, both had been involved in petty crime). Yet they had gone to fight - one of them later claimed he had taken part in the so-called "airport battle" in Baghdad, in which it was widely believed that Saddam Hussein had led the fight against the Americans in the early days of the war.

Neither of my relatives has joined the armed resistance in the current uprising against the Syrian regime, although FSA-affiliated groups operate in their town. Another man from Deraa who had fought in Iraq, and was recently killed during anti-regime protests, had - tellingly - chosen to protest peacefully and also had declined to join the Free Syrian Army. His cousin, who had accompanied him to Iraq, has to date also limited himself to peaceful protests. Other former fighters in Iraq have joined the armed resistance, but many have not.

Obviously, not all of the men who joined the insurgency in Iraq were religious extremists. If they were, they would presumably be fighting the secular regime in Damascus. Many of those who have chosen to pick up arms against the Syrian regime did so because they or their families have directly suffered at the hands of the regime.

In 2006, I saw another example of the pervasive influence of the ideology's incitement to violence. Crowds of Syrians burnt the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus in 2006 after the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. One of the mob leaders related the event to me later - but I knew this man. He was a "lifestyle liberal", in the sense that he was not a practising Muslim, drank alcohol and had sex outside of marriage. He spoke in the language of the regime, almost certainly acting on his own but inspired by the Baathist ideology. (The Syrian regime was later accused of orchestrating the embassy arsons in Damascus and Beirut.)

There are many religious extremists who choose not to fight; others who choose to fight are not religious. The Baathist ideology has exploited sentiments - cultural, economic, social and sometimes religious - to incite violence for political gain. As a radical ideology that requires complete social, political and cultural transformation, there is an inevitable propensity for violence.

Despite the Baathist regime's brutality in Syria, some intellectuals still argue that these acts of violence are anomalies. Is it chance that the Baathist rulers - Saddam Hussain, Hafez Al Assad and his son - all shelled cities, terrorised, tortured and killed their people? This ideology needs to be understood if its legacy is to be rejected. It is not enough for the regime to fall.

-This commentary was first published in The National on 26/07/2012

Qaddafi's Spawn

What The Dictator's Demise Unleashed In The Middle East

The Libyan leader's ouster dispersed masses of guns and refugees across the region. Already, Algeria has seen attacks by AQIM militants armed with Libyan weapons, Mali has been rocked by a coup led by armed nomads returning from Libya, Niger is struggling to cope with waves of refugees from Libya and Mali, and Tunisia's economy has been shattered by the loss of its most important trading partner.

By Yahia H. Zoubir



The military campaign against Muammar al-Qaddafi's regime has been hailed a success. In March, Permanent U.S. Representative to NATO Ivo Daalder and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe James Stavridis wrote in Foreign Affairs that, faced with the humanitarian disaster in Libya, NATO "succeeded in protecting those civilians and, ultimately, in providing the time and space necessary for local forces to overthrow Muammar al-Qaddafi." But all the celebration has covered up a worrying trend. The unrest surrounding Qaddafi's last months is now reverberating throughout North Africa and the Sahel -- a phenomenon that might be called Qaddafi's spawn.

First, there are the weapons: The neighborhood, especially Algeria, Mauritania, and Niger, was always uneasy about Libya's civil war. Many feared that it would pry the lid off Tripoli's sizeable weapons cache and lead to the dispersal of arms across the region. It turns out that they were right to be worried. Then, there is the money: Locating Libya's financial assets after the war has been another complicated matter. Members of Qaddafi's inner circle who know where the money is stashed are missing or unidentifiable. Basically, billions of dollars might wind up in the hands of individuals who could use the cash to sponsor terrorism or otherwise destabilize Libya. And finally, there are the refugees: Tens of thousands of Africans, no longer welcome in Libya, returned home this year. Besides the fact that many of them are ripe for jihadi infiltration, they will further strain the region's weak economies. Already, food security is becoming a major issue and famine looms.

The weapons bonanza, disappearing money, and wave of refugees have played out differently across the country. In Libya, militias, which amassed vast quantities of weapons during the war, are refusing to relinquish them to the interim government. Some groups, including the one that conquered Tripoli, are comprised of jihadists. Meanwhile, other groups -- tribes and private citizens -- are building their own arsenals against a background of resurgent tribalism and regionalism. The Misratans and the Zintanis, for example, have established domination over resource-rich areas. Some in Cyrenaica, which boasts most of the country's oil reserves, are threatening to secede from Libya. Meanwhile, the Toubou tribe is fighting the Zwei in Kufra and Sebha, near the borders with Niger and Chad; the Toubou have also threatened to secede. The Amazigh tribe is taking on the Arabs in the west, near the Tunisian border. And Libyan Tuaregs are locked in battle with Zintans in Ghat, near the Algerian border. Any of these conflicts could spill over soon.

Additionally, whether Libya will ever be able to recover the estimated $150 billion that the Qaddafi government hoarded or deposited in the West ($37 billion alone is thought to be in the United States), the Middle East, and Africa is doubtful. For example, with the mysterious death of Shukri Ghanem, a close ally of Saif al-Islam Qaddafi who served as prime minister and later as head of the national oil company, finding and unfreezing those assets becomes uncertain.

For its part, the U.S. Treasury promised in October 2011 to return to Libya the $37 billion that Qaddafi and his loyalists stashed in the United States, although a few congressional leaders suggested that some of it be used as payment for the NATO operations that toppled Qaddafi. Without that money, Libya's fragile economy could shatter. The International Monetary Fund is already reporting that Libya's deficit is unsustainable in the long run: "The present value of financial assets and future oil extraction indicates that from 2012, public spending will exceed the sustainable, long-term level by over 10 percent of GDP." If Qaddafi's gold is not recovered, Libya's outlook will look even worse.

Turning to Algeria, since the fall of Tripoli in August 2011, Libyan man-portable air-defense systems (or, Manpads), rocket-propelled grenades, SAM-7 missiles, and other sophisticated weaponry have made their way into the hands of al Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM), which is based on the Algerian border in northern Mali. In February 2012, Algerian authorities unearthed 15 Libyan Manpads and 28 SAM-7s in the southern city of In Amenas. Suspicions fell on three groups: weapons traffickers, AQIM, and the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, a new jihadist group that has launched numerous attacks against Algerian military targets and kidnapped European aid workers in Sahrawi refugee camps in southwestern Algeria. In September 2011, terrorists launched rocket attacks against military helicopters parked in the airfield of Jijel, in eastern Algeria. So far, no one has claimed responsibility, and it is unclear whether the weapons came from Libya, but the incident might be part of a broader AQIM campaign to destabilize the country and the region.

Qaddafi's fall also shook the (until recently) fairly steady democracy in Mali. When it became apparent last year that the Libyan rebels were winning the war against Qaddafi loyalists, armed nomadic Tuareg detachments that had served alongside Qaddafi's troops began leaving Libya for homes in Mali and Niger. Niger disarmed the returning Tuaregs, but Mali failed to do so. As a result, by October 2011, 3,000 heavily armed men with 600 all-terrain vehicles had amassed in Mali's northern Azawad region. In November, they founded the separatist National Liberation Movement for the Azawad (MNLA). And on January 17, 2012, the MNLA began its conquest of Azawad.

Mali's ill-equipped, poorly trained government soldiers were no match for the battle-hardened Tuareg. A mutiny within the armed forces, and the subsequent military coup on March 22, weakened Mali further. The MNLA quickly seized three major cities in northern Mali -- Gao, Kidal, and historic Timbuktu -- and then proclaimed the independence of the Azawad on April 6. (It reversed that decision in July 2012, demanding autonomy instead.) Of course, the MNLA is not the only militarized group in town: The Ansar al-Din, a Tuareg jihadist faction led by the Salafi Iyad Ag Ghaly, Mali's former consul in Saudi Arabia, is intent on imposing sharia in several northern cities, including Timbuktu, which he conquered with the assistance of AQIM and newly acquired weapons from Libya. His troops defeated the MNLA in June, and Ansar al-Din and the jihadists established control over MNLA-held territories.

For its part, Niger is particularly worried that it will face a repeat of what happened in Mali. Its own Taureg population is large and restive. Now, it has been joined by thousands fleeing Libya. What is more, the country has had to cope with refugees fleeing Mali as well. By May of this year, 284,000 Malians had fled northern Mali: 56,664 found refuge in Burkina Faso, 61,000 in Mauritania, 39,388 in Niger, and about 15,000 in Algeria. The new refugees are a heavy burden on countries that can barely sustain their own populations, which are suffering from drought and hunger.

Qaddafi's fall has had particularly troubling repercussions on post-revolutionary Tunisia. Before the war in Libya, Tunisia and Libya had the highest volume of trade between any two North African countries, and the total was growing at an average of nine percent every year between 2000 and 2009. For its part, Libya absorbed 6.9 percent of Tunisia's exports, making it Tunisia's second-biggest export market after the European Union.

With the uprising in Libya, all that stopped. In the first quarter of 2011, Tunisia's exports to Libya dropped by 34 percent and imports fell by an amazing 95 percent; according to the African Development Bank, the downturns were direct consequences of the civil war in Libya. In addition, more than half of the 100,000 Tunisian workers who had been in Libya returned home. The remittances they sent to their families, an estimated 125 million Tunisian dinars ($76 million) before the war, virtually disappeared. Meanwhile, Tunisia's unemployment skyrocketed from 15 percent in 2010 to 18.9 percent by the end of 2011, undoubtedly thanks in part to the returning expatriates. Libyans, who had previously come to Tunisia in droves, stayed at home. After an annual average of 1.5 million tourists, Tunisia saw only 815,000 Libyan guests in the year ending May 2012 -- all bad news for an economy that depends on visitors. (Tourism makes up 11 percent of GDP and 14 percent of employment.)

Insecurity on Libya's borders has generated at least one positive outcome. It prompted the Maghreb states to resuscitate the Arab Maghreb Union (UMA), which was first created to establish a political and economic alliance in 1989 but went dormant in 1994. Despite lingering suspicions between Algeria and Morocco and Algeria and Libya, all three and Tunisia and Mauritania have expressed the need for cooperation on security and economic matters. In November 2011, Morocco's King Mohammed VI called for a "new Maghreb" that would be an "engine for Arab unity" capable of ensuring the "stability and security in the Sahel-Sahara region." Algeria's foreign minister, Mourad Medelci, stressed in January 2012 that "the changes we witnessed in the Arab countries, in the Maghreb, cannot but encourage us to move faster in the construction of the Arab Maghreb Union." Libya's transitional government and Tunisia signed a land border agreement on April 8 this year against organized crime, terrorism, and trafficking. And rapprochement between Algeria and Morocco in recent months might put the UMA back on track.

The major challenge for the region will be preserving the territorial integrity of every country and the safeguarding of its borders. The major challenge for Libya and Mali, meanwhile, is avoiding partition, as happened in Sudan -- or worse, "Somalization," where the state cannot control the various militias that impose their own laws on their respective territories. Regional and international actors will also have to address the socioeconomic and political grievances of their populations and undermine the appeal of extremist forces now holding sophisticated weapons. Compelling studies have demonstrated that nonviolent uprisings, such as the one in Tunisia, are more likely to succeed in making a transition to a democratic polity than violent ones. It is therefore doubtful that NATO's celebrated "successful operation" will bring prosperity to the new Libya and stability to the region. 

-This commentary was first published in Foreign Affairs on 24/07/2012