Stateless And For Sale In The Gulf

By Pardis Mahdavi*

Stateless Kuwaiti Bedouin women hold up signs in their tent camp near the Iraqi-Kwaiti borders

Last year, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) handed Semira, 19, a passport for the Comoro Islands, one of the poorest nations on earth, and told her she had 11 months to leave. Although she had been stateless all her life, Semira was born and raised in Dubai and had fully embraced its cosmopolitan culture. She has never stepped foot on the tiny, tropical islands that were to become her homeland, nor did she want to, as she has no roots or family there. She doesn’t have much of a choice, though. Since she isn't even a citizen of the UAE, she is pretty much powerless to fight the government, which is paying the cash-strapped Comoros to take stateless people like her off its hands.

Semira became stateless as a result of the UAE’s confounding policies on birthright. As she understands it, her mother came to Dubai from India to work as household help but became pregnant after her employer raped her. He then denied paternity and turned her over to the police when she was near term. In the UAE, it is illegal to have sex out of wedlock, no matter the circumstance.

After giving birth, Semira’s mother served a one-year prison sentence, which ended with her deportation to India. But because citizenship passes through the father in both India (at the time Semira was born) and the UAE, which doesn’t recognize birthright citizenship, Semira’s mother was unable to procure a passport for Semira to bring her to India. She had to leave Semira behind.

If it were not for a prison guard whom Semira’s mother had befriended while in jail, Semira may have ended up at the local orphanage and would have faced a life of poverty. Instead, the guard suggested sending her to a family member of Zayed bin Sultan Al Nayan, the former president of the UAE. According to the director of one of the orphanages in Ras al-Khaimah, with whom I spoke, some 30 percent of children from the orphanages are raised at the royal palaces and provided education, food, housing, and support. The royals consider it an act of Islamic charity and these children are commonly called “children of the Emir.” At this time, it is unclear whether Semira’s connections shielded her from deportation. She has been unreachable for the last two months, which means she could either be laying low or already in Comoros.

In my recently published book, Crossing the Gulf, I document the stories of stateless people like Semira in the Arabian Peninsula, which includes some of the largest migrant-receiving countries in the world. In the UAE, migrant workers make up 80 percent of its population. In neighboring Kuwait, migrants outnumber citizens three to one. But most Gulf States refuse to offer citizenship rights and protection to them, even to those born within their borders. It is estimated that there are over 100,000 stateless individuals in the UAE alone and over 130,000 in neighboring Kuwait.

In the past decade, the Gulf has seen an increase in female migrants from Asia and Africa who take up jobs as domestic workers, nannies, beauticians, and service workers. Under the kefala system, used by many Gulf states to govern guest labor, workers are forbidden to engage in sexual relations for the duration of their contracts. Since pregnancy gives them away, it is often only the women who are punished for breaking Kefala rules and sharia law, which criminalizes zina or sex outside of marriage. Because most women who migrate to the Gulf do so during their most fertile years, and may spend five to ten years in their host countries, this form of contractual sterilization is impossible to abide by. And although some women find themselves in consensual relationships, others are exploited and raped by abusive employers.

As a result, it is sadly common for women such as Semira’s mother to give birth in jail and then have their babies sent to an orphanage after the women are deported. Not helping matters is that both the UAE and a number of sending countries only allow citizenship to transfer through the father. But if no father claims paternity—and this is often the case because coming forward would mean facing punishment for breaking zina—the child becomes stateless. With hundreds of thousands of migrants coming to the Gulf every year, dating back to the 1980s, from places such as Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka—countries that up until recently only permitted paternal citizenship transfer—hundreds and sometimes thousands of children are born to migrant women and left behind.

The children of migrant women are not the only ones who experience the perils of statelessness. 

There are over 100,000 stateless persons known as bidoon in Kuwait, who do not have citizenship either because of bureaucratic hiccups when Kuwait became a nation state in 1961 (a portion of them failed to register as citizens) or long-standing discrimination against those who were once nationals of neighboring countries but were absorbed by Kuwait after the borders changed. As far as she knows, Rania, 21, who is a bidoon, was born in Kuwait City to a domestic worker from Ethiopia who may have been deported shortly after giving birth. She has spent her entire life living in an orphanage in the city's outskirts, but as a stateless person, she has been unable to find a job or rent an apartment. Still, Rania sees Kuwait as her home. And she was devasted when she received a Comoro Islands passport last month and was told to settle there within a year.

“This is the ultimate in unfair,” Rania told me. “I couldn’t go with my mom to her home, and now I can’t stay in the place I call home? Why don’t people even ask me what I want?”

Semira and Rania are part of deals that UAE and Kuwait signed with Comoros in 2008 and 2016. In exchange for building roads and providing development aid to the poverty-stricken island nation, Emiratis and Kuwaitis are “buying” citizenships for their undocumented residents. Initially, these deals involved only issuing new passports without requirements for holders to physically move out of the Gulf. In recent months, however, it became clear that a growing number of them will have to move to Comoros. Although the official policy remains unclear, some officials say that Comoros began asking that these new "Comorians" move to the islands, while others believe that the Gulf countries are simply trying to get rid of their stateless population.

Regardless, activists have condemned the practice, likening it to slavery—the selling of a person and the economizing of what is a human right. As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says, “[e]veryone has the right to a nationality” and “[n]o one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.” Comorians have protested, too, feeling that the government is essentially selling their nation’s soul, while populations in the Gulf argue that this is a solution that fails to resolve the thorny issues of statelessness or citizen transfer.

On the other hand, the Philippines, from which a number of people move to the Gulf for work, has come up with alternative laws to prevent statelessness. In 1987, its government passed a law allowing Philippine citizenship to pass through both the mother and father. That allows most of the Filipina women I interviewed in the Gulf to take their children home with them if and when they have to leave. The Philippine embassy in both Kuwait and the UAE also offer shelter to children whose mothers are incarcerated or are on trial for zina and they make sure to provide passports for these new citizens.

Instead of shipping their problems off to Comoros, Gulf countries could at the very least negotiate citizen transfers with sending nations or encourage them to follow the example of the Philippines, as a start. After all, their tactic of offshoring their stateless population is unsustainable in the long run. Comoros will realize at some point that this is a bad bargain. There are nearly one million stateless people in the Gulf and the population of Comoros is only 730,000 (and the island nation is about the size of Rhode Island). It is ill equipped to deal with dramatic increases to its population and in a few years time, the Gulf countries may find themselves back to square one.

* PARDIS MAHDAVI is Associate Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Pomona College. She is the author of Passionate Uprisings: Iran's Sexual Revolution and Gridlock: Labor, Migration, and Human Trafficking in Dubai.

- This article was published first by Foreign Affairs on 30 June 2016

Economic Implications of Brexit

By Ben S. Bernanke*

After several days of market upset, a few reflections on last week’s momentous vote in Great Britain.

Even more obvious now than before the vote is that the biggest losers, economically speaking, will be the British themselves. The vote ushers in what will be several years of tremendous uncertainty—about the rules that will govern the U.K.’s trade with its continental neighbors, about the fates of foreign workers in Britain and British workers abroad, and about the country’s political direction, including perhaps where its borders will ultimately lie. Such fundamental uncertainty will depress business formation, capital investment, and hiring; indeed, it had begun to do so even before the vote. The U.K. economic slowdown to come will be exacerbated by falling asset values (houses, commercial real estate, stocks) and damaged confidence on the part of households and businesses. Ironically, the sharp decline in the value of the pound may be a bit of a buffer here as, all else equal, it will make British exports more competitive.

In the longer run, the uncertainty will dissipate, but the economic costs to the U.K. still will exceed the benefits. Financial services and other globally oriented industries, which depend on unfettered access to European markets and exchanges, will come under pressure. At the same time, the purported gains from freeing the U.K. from the heavy regulatory hand of Brussels will be limited, because Britain will likely have to accept most of those rules (without ability to influence them) as part of restructured trade agreements. Immigration is unpopular in the U.K., and slowing it was a motivation for some “leave” voters, but a more slowly growing labor force likely would also reduce overall economic growth.

The rest of Europe will also be adversely affected, even though Frankfurt and a few other cities may gain finance jobs at the expense of London. The biggest risks here are political, as has been widely noted: In particular, markets are already beginning to price in the risk that other countries or regions will press for greater autonomy from Brussels. Even those sympathetic to such demands should worry that attempts to unwind existing trade and regulatory arrangements could be highly disruptive, as they will likely be for Great Britain. A move toward exit by a member of the euro zone would be particularly destabilizing, as even the possibility that a country might leave the common currency could provoke bank runs and speculative attacks on the country’s sovereign debt and on other countries that might be thought to be next in line. The challenge for European leaders will be to keep the overall integration process on track, while finding ways to meet the concerns of potential leavers. One issue that could be revisited is the EU’s commitment to the absolutely free movement of people across borders, which seems more a political than an economic principle; the perception that the U.K. had lost control of its borders was one of the most effective arguments for “leave,” and secessionist movements elsewhere have also seized on the issue. [1]

Globally, the Brexit shock is being transmitted mostly through financial markets, as investors sell off risky assets like stocks and flock to supposed safe havens like the dollar and the sovereign debt of the U.S., Germany, and Japan. Investors are perhaps more risk-averse than they otherwise would be because they know that advanced-economy central bankers have less space than in the past to ease monetary policy. Among the hardest hit countries is Japan, whose battle against deflation could be set back by the strengthening of the yen and the decline in Japanese equity prices. In the United States, the economic recovery is unlikely to be derailed by the market turmoil, so long as conditions in financial markets don’t get significantly worse: The strengthening of the dollar and the declines in U.S. equities are relatively moderate so far. Moreover, the decline in longer-term U.S. interest rates (including mortgage rates) partially offsets the tightening effects of the dollar and stocks on financial conditions. However, clearly the Fed and other U.S. policymakers will remain cautious until the effects of the British vote are better sorted out.

Although bank stock prices are taking hits, especially in the U.K. and Europe, a financial crisis seems quite unlikely at this point. Central banks are monitoring the funding and financial conditions of banks, and so far serious problems have not emerged. (It helps that the date of the referendum has been known for months, giving authorities time to prepare. Also helpful is the substantial buildup in bank capital in recent years.) Through its currency swap lines, established during the global financial crisis, the Fed is making sure that other major central banks have access to dollars. As I’ve already suggested, the biggest risks to financial stability at this point appear to be political—specifically, the risk of further defections or breakdown in the European Union—rather than economic. The story may not be over yet.

---

[1] Britain has substantial immigration from both EU and non-EU countries. The debate over Brexit sometimes seemed to confound the two, even though only the former is protected by the EU treaties.

·         Ben S. Bernanke is a Distinguished Fellow in Residence with the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution and also serves as a Senior Advisor to PIMCO and Citadel. From February 2006 through January 2014, he was Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

·         This article was published first on the Brooking Institute Web on 28 June 2018

The Paradox Of Higher Education In MENA

By Shanta Devarajan*

American University in Beirut 

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) was the cradle of higher education.  The three oldest, still-functioning universities in the world are in Iran, Morocco, and Egypt.  The University of Al-Karaouine in Fes has been granting degrees since 859 A.D.  The Ancient Library of Alexandria, in addition to being repository of books and manuscripts, was a center of learning during the Ptolemaic dynasty, with scholars traveling to there from all around the Mediterranean and beyond.  And scholars such as Ibn Khaldoun discovered fundamental economics four centuries before Adam Smith and others. In short, all of us who have benefited from a university education owe a debt to the MENA region.

Yet, today the quality of higher education in MENA is among the lowest in the world. Only two or three Arab universities are in the list of the top 500 universities in the world (and none are in the top 200).  Employers in the region complain that university graduates lack the skills needed to work in the global marketplace. Many are not trained in science, mathematics, engineering, and other technical subjects where the jobs are. Furthermore, these graduates lack the “soft skills,” including creativity and teamwork, partly because their training has emphasized memorization and rote learning. In Egypt, despite an unemployment rate of over 10 percent, some 600,000 jobs remain unfilled. About 40 percent of university graduates in MENA are unemployed; the labor force participation of women, most of whom are better educated than the men, is the lowest in the world.  Worse, violent extremist groups have used universities as one of their sources of recruitment.

How could this have happened? How could the same region that created higher education have a system that is so dysfunctional that it’s contributing to, rather than alleviating, the problems facing MENA?  And how can the situation be turned around, so that the universities are once again the best in the world?

We can start by seeking the reasons behind the current problems of the region. To be sure, the reasons for the high unemployment rate among university graduates are manifold and have mostly to do with the investment climate and the (lack of) growth of the private sector. But there is one feature that is common to all the countries in the region:  The majority of university graduates received jobs in the public sector. The state was the employer of first and last resort.

This feature had an impact on the quality of university education:

 The subject of specialization didn’t matter as much in the public sector, so students didn’t choose to study science and engineering; they chose somewhat “easier” subjects such as literature and history.

The public sector was not demanding of soft skills. 

The nature of the curriculum, with its emphasis on memory, repeating what the professor says without questioning or debating, may have been acceptable for the public sector—but it didn’t help the private sector, which is looking for creative minds who will invent the next Uber, for example.  This curriculum may have also made it easier for radicalized groups to recruit students. 

The second, more controversial, reason has to do with the pricing of university education. Almost all the universities provided education free of charge, based on the notion that poor people should have access to higher education as a means of escaping poverty. Unfortunately, the result has been that the overwhelming majority of students in universities come from the richest parts of the population. The pattern is not unique to MENA: It is found in Asia and Africa. And the reason has to do with economics.  Whenever something is provided for free, there is excess demand. Universities ration the excess demand by requiring students to pass an entrance exam. The rich can afford to send their children to the best secondary schools to prepare them to pass the entrance exam. As a result, the universities are full of students from the richest strata of society. Put another way, free higher education confers a huge rent to those who have access to it. And the rich are better placed to seize those rents than the poor.

In fact, the problem is worse because free education gives weak incentives to improve the quality of university education. The university has little to gain by investing in improving the curriculum (since more students doesn’t mean more revenue). Meanwhile, students don’t demand better quality as much as they would if they were paying for the education and needed to recoup their investment. The experience of Tribhuvan University in Nepal is instructive. When they started charging tuition fees in their institute of engineering, the quality improved so much that they started attracting students from all over South Asia. Moreover, the reforms spread to the rest of the higher education sector in the country.

To be sure, simply charging for higher education will not solve the problems of universities in MENA.  For one thing, poor people should still be able to afford tertiary education, but this should be addressed by providing means-tested scholarships, rather than an across-the-board subsidy that, as we noted, the rich can take advantage of. For another, the transition needs to be managed because such shifts are likely to elicit a political reaction. However, the principle has to be that universities should be given incentives to invest in higher quality education, and students should have an incentive to demand higher quality instruction.

If we can bring about these two changes—a shift in the focus of higher education away from public-sector jobs and a system of financing that aligns incentives with quality—we can go a long way towards restoring the grandeur of higher education in MENA.  As I mentioned at the beginning, the whole world owes the MENA region a huge debt for having created and nurtured university education a millennium ago. It is time to repay that debt.

·         Shanta Devarajan is the Chief Economist, Middle East and North Africa, World Bank

Note: This is an English version of the keynote speech given by Shanta Devarajan at the recent MENA conference on “Paradigm Shifts in Tertiary Education” in Algiers on May 30-June 2, 2016.

Khamenei’s Counterrevolution Is Underway

Iranians thought the nuclear deal would spark a new relationship with the West. But the supreme leader had other plans.

BY Foreign Policy SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

 
President Hassan Rouhani walk in front of Khmanei's picture

It was, in the words of the Washington Post‘s executive editor, Martin Baron, “the grimmest” of milestones. On Dec. 3, Jason Rezaian, the newspaper’s Tehran correspondent, spent his 500th day in Evin Prison. He has now been detained in the Iranian capital two months longer than the 52 Americans who were held captive in the U.S. embassy by radical students who stormed the building in 1979, heralding a revolution and the end of Iran’s formal diplomatic relations with America.

For the moment at least, the prospect of Rezaian being freed appears based more on hope than solid facts. There is no sign Iran’s judiciary, in spite of last summer’s nuclear deal with the West, is softening its stance. If anything, it has been sending strong indications that it will refuse to be influenced by outside pressure. On Nov. 22, a judiciary spokesman in Tehran confirmed Rezaian had been convicted on charges of espionage and that his punishment included jail time. The length of his prison sentence was not disclosed; the offenses are thought to carry a maximum jail term of 20 years.

Having first warned of foreign “infiltration” in September, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei took an even harsher line on Nov. 25. “There is a deceitful, crafty, skillful, fraudulent, and devilish enemy,” he told commanders of the Basij militia, a volunteer paramilitary force that takes orders from the country’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. “Who is that enemy? Arrogance. Of course today, the manifestation of arrogance is America.”

Khamenei went further, suggesting foreign investment and cultural influences would be the first way the West would try to bring down Iran’s Islamic system. “The most important means are two things: One is money and another is sexual attraction,” he said, warning that Iran’s “decision-makers and decision-builders” would be targeted by foreigners who want to change the beliefs and lifestyle of Iran’s people.

The comments are a world away from the pragmatism Khamenei showed in agreeing to the nuclear deal just months ago. While the supreme leader seemingly wanted a deal to end sanctions so that Iran could rejoin the global economy, his actions since suggest he doesn’t want to upset loyal elites who have been enriched in the past decade.

Basij commander Mohammad Reza Naqdi wasted little time in following the supreme leader’s cue. Two days after Khamenei’s remarks, he claimed the United States had allocated $2 billion to depose the regime in Tehran. He explicitly placed Secretary of State John Kerry, the man with whom Iranian diplomats negotiated the nuclear deal, at the center of the conspiracy. “Some $200 million out of this sum was given personally to John Kerry,” he said. “Kerry has so far headed 34 projects to depose the Islamic regime.”

Both Rezaian’s imprisonment and Naqdi’s allegations signal not only a split within Iran’s political elite over its future relations with the United States, but also a deeper divide between its politicians and long-suffering people. While the religious power center of the Islamist establishment seems more vehement than ever about the need to protect the principles of the 1979 revolution, many of Iran’s technologically savvy young population shun the mosque and look outward to the West for its entertainment and inspiration.

As such, many are still leaving the country, convinced their hopes cannot be realized. “I am not free,” said Golnaz, a 33-year-old MBA graduate who recently moved to Canada to join a tech firm. Being friends with foreigners led to her being followed and her emails being hacked. She believes President Hassan Rouhani is trying his best, but, given the resistance he faces, it is not worth the risk of continuing to waste years of her career.

Rouhani and his top officials are caught in the middle between the people and the regime. Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif initially said that he hoped Rezaian would be found not guilty but has since backed off that line when questioned about the reporter’s fate, probably sensing the backlash in an increasingly abrasive domestic climate. “The charges are serious and it’s a judiciary process,” Zarif said on Oct. 17, five days after the Washington Post first reported Rezaian had been convicted.

Rouhani, meanwhile, has openly raised the possibility of a prisoner swap, thought to involve at least three Americans, including Rezaian, for 19 Iranians convicted of sanctions offenses in the United States.

“If the Americans take the appropriate steps and set them free, certainly the right environment will be open and the right circumstances will be created for us to do everything within our power and our purview to bring about the swiftest freedom for the Americans held in Iran as well,” Rouhani said of the 19 jailed Iranians at the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Sept. 27.

His remarks, however, were followed by a sharp reminder at how little control he apparently exerts over many of his country’s security institutions. Barely two weeks later, the intelligence section of the Revolutionary Guards arrested an Iranian-American businessman, Siamak Namazi, at the home of relatives in Tehran. Around the same time it emerged that a Lebanese IT expert with residency in the United States, Nizar Zakka, had disappeared after a conference in the Iranian capital a month earlier. Adding to Rouhani’s image of powerlessness, Zakka had been invited to Tehran by the government. State television, a fiefdom of hardline conservatives who operate under Khamenei’s authority, later said Zakka was arrested for spying.

Namazi, though long based in Dubai, is well known in Iran. His family’s Atieh Group had strong business connections with the government during the presidency of Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, from 1989 to 1997. Namazi also spoke out in favor of better Iranian-American relations and, while serving as a partner of Atieh’s Tehran consultancy, had advised foreign companies on how to do business in the Islamic Republic.

The latest arrests are another embarrassment for Rouhani who has made a major play for foreign investment to rebuild Iran’s sanctions-ravaged economy. On Nov. 28, more than 100 foreign companies in the oil industry, headed by Shell, BP, Total, and Petronas, came to Tehran and heard Iran’s oil minister make a pitch for $30 billion of investment. There was undoubtedly interest among the visitors — but if the IRGC continue to arrest foreign businessmen, the enthusiasm could quickly disappear.

As harsh as Khamenei’s remarks appear, a more optimistic interpretation is that the government is willing to take symbolic actions that signal a staunch anti-American stance — while in reality having no practical effect. On Nov. 5, for instance, the Ministry of Industry, Mines, and Trade announced it would ban the import of all American consumer goods. A push “to boost national production” was necessary instead, officials said.

The announcement was greeted by laughter among many Iranians. “They are already here,” Sara Ahmadi, a 30-year-old business executive, said of foreign brands, pointing out that there are three Nike stores on one Tehran street alone. Those shops, stuffed with clothing and exercise equipment bearing the famous “swoosh” logo of the world’s largest sports manufacturer, feature genuine merchandise — not the Chinese knock-offs sold in street markets in the capital. Several of the massive malls that have opened in Tehran in recent years also have Nike stores.

But it’s instructive that those malls were all built by companies linked to the IRGC. Iran has had commerce in Western goods in recent years, but it has mostly been restricted to regime loyalists. The hiked prices of the Nike goods on sale in Tehran suggest they were smuggled in to the country, likely from Dubai or Turkey, with the cooperation, whether tacit or explicit, of the Iranian regime. The inflated prices for premium Western products also mean that only the country’s economic elite, which overlaps strongly with its political elite, can afford to buy them.

While such contradictions perturb Iran’s rapidly aging clerical leadership, they leave Rezaian and his fellow captives looking like bit part players in a much bigger puzzle.

The nuclear deal may well have made the diplomatic deals struck in the past considerably more difficult today. In 2010 and 2011, for instance, three American hikers detained by Iran were freed after Oman brokered their release. Then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had ordered them to be freed, only to be temporarily thwarted when the judiciary cancelled their release.

Iranian authorities, such as the IRGC and the judiciary, seem inclined to play the same game with Rouhani. Even talk of a prisoner exchange in the aftermath of the nuclear deal seems certain to provoke hard-liners dead set against any broader opening toward the United States.

“To the hard-liners that would look like another deal with America, and they don’t want to send that signal,” said a Western diplomat in Tehran.

The growing list of people languishing in prison, including dozens of Iranian nationals on political charges, continues to dent Rouhani’s “moderate” reputation ahead of parliamentary elections in February next year, seen as a crucial test of the president’s clout and his hopes of re-election in 2017. Though most Iranians see the judiciary rather than Rouhani as the culprit, he is a potential fall guy for the frustrated.

“The government has been backed into a corner and, whatever they do, Rouhani and his people face a problem in getting out of this mess that the judiciary has created,” the diplomat said.

But more hopeful Iranians say Rouhani retains public confidence and shouldn’t buckle in the face of provocations from the most anti-Western elements of the regime. If the hard-liners are routed in the February elections, Rouhani will have a stronger mandate to pursue his agenda.

“Ahmadinejad and his cronies are not coming back,” a veteran political analyst said. “The public mood has shifted and this is the hard-liners’ last hurrah. The worst thing Rouhani could do would be to kowtow to them. But for now at least, none of that helps Jason Rezaian.”

This article was published first by Foreign Policy on 9/12/2015

Lebanon's Deal with the Devil

The Prisoner Swap with Jabhat Al Nusra

By Bilal Y. Saab

Al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front fighters carry their weapons near Lebanese soldiers and policemen during their release in Arsal, eastern Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, December 1, 2015. (REUTERS)

On  December 2, the Syrian branch of al Qaeda known as Jabhat Al Nusra freed 16 Lebanese soldiers and policemen in exchange for the release of 29 Islamists and their children, who were all imprisoned in Lebanon and Syria. Broadcast live on Lebanese and Qatari satellite television, the prisoner swap was a spectacle. More than that, its symbolism, strategic significance, and regional ramifications were immediately the topic of vigorous debate.

It didn’t take long for the Lebanese to critique the transaction. As the freed hostages were hugging their parents in Beirut upon their return, Lebanese commentators were already bemoaning the “tragedy that had just transpired.” Politicians from all walks of life couldn’t believe that their government had just completed a “deal with the devil.” Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, for example, called the episode a “sovereignty scandal,” despite the fact that Hezbollah, with which Berri is allied, had an active role in securing the deal.

A closer look at who got what explains the general mood of anger and disillusionment among most Lebanese. 

Starting with the positives: First, by getting back its men alive, Beirut communicated to the country’s military that, no matter how long or how much it takes, it will not abandon Lebanese soldiers when they are abducted. Whether Lebanese officers will find comfort in their state’s performance is unclear, though, since several of their comrades were slaughtered by the same terrorists not too long ago. But this event’s happier ending might boost morale and maintain the unity of an army that is overstretched and under equipped and that is fighting terrorism day and night across the country, particularly along its northern borders with Syria. 

Second, even though the events are still murky, the Lebanese authorities have claimed that they refused to release any Islamist extremists from prison who have blood on their hands or active terrorism cases against them. It is hard to verify that without access to sensitive information, though.

Third, and perhaps most important, the deal was a product, or a harbinger, of political accommodation between rival Lebanese political factions, specifically between the Shia Hezbollah and the Sunni Future Movement. Indeed, the swap would have been impossible had Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah and Future Movement leader Saad Hariri not cooperated. For instance, Hariri flew to Doha to persuade the Qataris, who acted as brokers throughout this 16-month hostage crisis, that Abbas Ibrahim, chief Lebanese negotiator and head of the country’s General Security Directorate, is someone worth trusting, despite his strong support for Hezbollah.

Meanwhile, Nasrallah convinced his ally Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to release three women and nine children imprisoned in Syria that were on Jabhat Al Nusra’s demand list (one of those women is Khalidiyya Hussain Zeiniya, the sister of Abu Malek Al Talli, the group’s commander in the Lebanese Qalamoun area). This moment of accord between Nasrallah and Hariri could facilitate the election of a new Lebanese head of state after a year and a half of political vacuum.

Yet this outcome came with heavy costs. The sight of terrorists waving black al Qaeda flags and operating in full military uniform with impunity on Lebanese soil and in broad daylight was painful and humiliating for the Lebanese people. More practically, by agreeing to the swap, the Lebanese state projected weakness, or at the very least, sent the message that it is not opposed to doing business with terrorists. That, in turn, could invite more kidnappings and longer lists of demands. The Islamic State (ISIS) holds nine other Lebanese soldiers and police members hostage; one wonders what Beirut would give up to release them. ISIS, a larger and more powerful movement than Jabhat Al Nusra, might be able to extract more from the Lebanese state should it decide to negotiate. But beyond the popular astonishment and the fears over the price tag of potential future terrorist deals, the Lebanese state’s inability to expel Jabhat Al Nusra from Lebanese territory and end its control of the northern town of Arsal is the clearest evidence of Lebanon’s failure to win in this exchange what mattered most: the protection of sovereignty and territorial integrity.

For its part, in addition to the safe haven of Arsal, Jabhat al Nusra, might have also benefited from creating an image of a terrorist group that is capable of mercy and pragmatism in ways that ISIS is not. That reputation could help it gain a political future in Syria.

To be sure, there were some costs and compromises for the group too, including the failure to release hundreds of other high-profile extremists from the Lebanese prison of Roumieh or to force Hezbollah to withdraw its men from Syrian territory. But Jabhat Al Nusra knew that the latter demand was unrealistic and the formal loss was tolerable, compared to what it was able to gain.

For a relatively small prisoner swap, this deal’s complexity was remarkable, as evidenced by the number of local, regional, and internationals players that were involved. Key to the success of the deal was Qatar. In a previous article in Foreign Affairs called “The Dishonest Broker,” I wrote about Qatar’s desire to cement its role as a go-to mediator in the region. Its active involvement in this hostage crisis, which Doha made sure to air live on its satellite channel Al Jazeera for all the world to see, is the latest example of the small country’s commitment to playing an oversized mediation role, despite serious concerns by its neighbors about its real intentions. Yet regional questions about Qatar’s good offices notwithstanding, the truth is that Western countries, including the United States, find value in Doha’s access to some of the Middle East’s bad actors. After all, if bombing terrorists and adversaries fails, somebody has to facilitate talks. 

The level of pragmatism that Doha displayed throughout the negotiations was notable. Qatar and Hezbollah have a visceral and strategic disagreement over Syria—the latter doing everything in its power to ensure Assad’s survival and the former committing to his toppling—but it didn’t stop Qatari emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al Thani from cooperating with Nasrallah to secure the release of the Lebanese hostages. Specifically, following instructions from Tamim, the Qatari intelligence services convinced Jabhat Al Nusra leaders to refrain from upping their demands in the final minutes of the negotiations and go for the deal. 

But realpolitik wasn’t limited to Qatar and Hezbollah. Turkey, which provided logistical assistance by hosting talks on multiple occasions between lead Lebanese negotiator and leaders of Jabhat Al Nusra under Qatari mediation, agreed to receive some of the freed prisoners of the terrorist group. Russia and the Syrian government, who have adversarial relations with Ankara, agreed to a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Jabhat Al Nusra along the northern borders. Iran implicitly blessed the deal through Ali Akbar Velayati, a top advisor to the Supreme Leader who recently visited Beirut. And although Saudi Arabia did not have a direct involvement in the swap, its controversial and surprising approval of the nomination of Suleiman Franjieh as Lebanon’s new president, despite his close personal friendship with Assad (whom Riyadh is committed to deposing) and undeniable support for Hezbollah (which is suspected of killing Rafik Hariri, Saudi Arabia's main man in Lebanon), contributed to the overall de-escalation of tensions.  

Prisoner swaps typically require compromises by both sides. But in this particular deal, it must be said, Jabhat Al Nusra emerged as a winner. What’s tragic is that Lebanon is not in a position to correct wrongs and retake what was lost. The Lebanese army is incapable of dislodging all terrorists from the north and Hezbollah, despite its tactical successes against Sunni extremists, is busy securing its own areas in the southern suburbs of Beirut and fighting its enemies on Syrian territory. Only the end of the Syrian conflict can effectively neutralize the Sunni militant threat to Lebanon and prevent another costly swap. That sworn adversaries momentarily set aside their differences to achieve this latest deal offers hope, but it will take a much bigger dose of pragmatism and compromise to reach a solution to the civil war in Syria.

·         This article was published first by Foreign Affairs on 06/12/2015 

The Czar vs. the Sultan

Putin and Erdogan see themselves as heirs to proud empires. But fighter jets and tough talk can’t mask imperial decline.

BY JULIA IOFFE

Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Vladimir Putin

Before Crimea was Russian, or Ukrainian, or even Soviet, it was Turkish. Well, Ottoman. And Russia had already annexed Crimea once before 2014, long before — in 1783. This was after a six-year war with the Turks, in which the Russians essentially wiped out the Ottoman navy. The conflict ended with the Treaty of Kainardrji, signed in 1774, which has come to be seen by historians as the first partition of the Ottoman Empire, the beginning of its long, slow decline. In losing Crimea to Russia, the Ottoman Empire, for the first time ever, lost Muslim subjects to a Christian power. (The Crimean Tatars, who have been especially opposed to Moscow’s newest takeover of the peninsula, are the vestigial limb left behind by the Ottomans, bucking again at its new Russian owner — which has, in turn, cracked down on them.) That war and the treaty that ended it, Bernard Lewis wrote some 200 years later, was “the turning point in the relations between Europe and the Middle East.”

Nor would it be the last time the Russians and the Turks butted heads. Over the next two centuries, they would clash again and again as the Russian Empire pushed deeper and deeper into the Ottoman heartland: the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Black Sea, and the Dardanelles. One young Russian army officer wrote about his experiences fighting the Turks, French, and British at Crimea, in 1854. The work, which came to be called The Sevastopol Sketches, was the second the young man — Leo Tolstoy — ever published.

Which is all to say that what happened yesterday, when the Turks and Russians clashed over who was where when in the skies over a small sliver of land is nothing new in the relations of these two erstwhile empires.

For that is what they are. Both 

Turkey and Russia have the hearts and souls of massive, multi-ethnic empires, hearts and souls that still beat inside trunks shorn of their expansive limbs, limbs for which they still hunger today. Both exist today as greatly diminished, regional powers struggling to project greater influence — the kind that befits empires and their histories. And, in doing so, they assume their old stances, as if from muscle memory. “When you travel to Turkey, do you trust even one Turk?” wrote Maxim Kononenko, a prominent, pro-Kremlin blogger. “And so it is with all those who spoke in Turkey’s name today. They are all Turks and you cannot trust them.”

Some Russians have described yesterday’s shoot-down in larger historical terms: it is the first time that there has been a real, military conflict between Russia and NATO, wrote the liberal Slon.ru. Russian officialdom, however, is framing this squarely as a conflict between Russia and the hotheaded, trigger-happy Turks. Wednesday’s evening news, dedicated almost exclusively to the incident, made much hay out of the fact that Washington and Europe, even NATO, spent all of Tuesday chastising Turkey and throwing cold water on the idea that one plane and one territorial incursion would lead to a wider conflict.

If anything, NATO and the Europeans are the good guys in this interpretation of events — certainly a first in recent Russian history. Why? Because Turkey, the villain in this story, is trying to derail a grand, historic coalition against terrorism, one that has Russia as its main axis. The de-escalation facilitated by Western powers, the evening news report noted, “is needed so that this conflict doesn’t harm the fight against terrorism in general and against ISIS specifically.” That is, Russia sees itself as doing the work necessary to protect the civilized world against the threat of terrorism, work that benefits France, Britain, and the United States as much as it benefits Russia. (Left unstated is the assumption that it doesn’t benefit Turkey, or its Islamist-sympathizing government.) It is analogous to the way Russia has portrayed its role in World War II, especially recently: Russia fought back the menace of fascism for the good of the ungrateful West, which would have drowned if not for Moscow’s help.

This is why, beneath the propaganda and cynical geopolitical maneuvering, Moscow finds Western critiques about its role in Syria so deeply frustrating, insulting even. To Russia, such complaints are as old as time, centuries-old efforts to block Russian imperial ambitions at every possible turn for no apparent reason — even to the point of lining up with the Muslim Ottomans against Christian Rus in the mid-19th century. And, much to Russia’s chagrin, this constant Western interference greatly slowed Russian imperial expansion.

At the same time, Russia has historically viewed the Turks as a good buffer against European expansion. “If we have allowed the Turkish government to continue to exist in Europe, it is because that government, under the predominant influence of our superiority, suits us better than any of those which could be set up on its ruins,” wrote Karl Nesselrode, the Russian empire’s foreign minister, in 1830. Sound familiar? The instinct for maintaining the stability of unsavory neighboring powers, even as Russia slowly chips away at their peripheries, is an old one, encoded deep in the Russian state psyche. These other powers exist, in one form or another, as mirrors in which Russia can see itself as an empire, and preen.

I mention all this ancient history because the conflict over the Russian plane in Turkish airspace — and, according to my sources in the U.S. government, it was in Turkish airspace — is not about the plane, or the airspace, or the Islamic State, or even NATO. It is about two empires, the Russian and the Ottoman, that continue to violently disintegrate to this day, decades after they have formally ceased to exist. Look at Ukraine and Moldova, look at Syria and Iraq. These are the death throes of empire, the long tails of their legacies, shaking themselves out as the rest of the world tries to contain and smooth the convulsions of transition.

And it is about two men, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, without much irony, see themselves as heirs to the two mantles of these two long-gone empires. They, in turn, have revived those empires in the minds of their subjects, constantly dangling before their eyes the holograms of greatness past. It is no surprise, then, that, as the number of actors and the potential for conflict has grown in Syria, that the first flash of it would happen between two men who feel so keenly their countries’ phantom limbs.

* This article was first published by Foreign Policy on 25/11/2015