African protest fever: Which country is next?

Tendai Marima
Sep 2011

Revolts across sub-Saharan Africa risk being misunderstood by an attention-starved global media, says author.

Malawi, the warm heart of Africa, is further heating up. On the west coast, Senegal is boiling over as disgruntled citizens rage against attempted life presidency. In the untelevised (potential) revolution in Burkina Faso, cotton king of the Continent, people are reaching their last thread of patience with President Blaise Compaore's regime. And as a consequence of a people's revolt on the northern shores of the Red Sea, images of a deposed, ailing Hosni Mubarak and his two sons locked up in a pan-optic prison cage on trial were broadcast worldwide.

Since the end of 2010, protests across the African continent and places beyond have captivated audiences and given new and more complex meanings to the concept of people power. Increasingly, the uprisings in Africa and the Middle East have also raised the profiles of political analysts, journalists and academics relied on for their "expert views" to explain these people’s revolts. Favored by fortune, the enterprising have published books on the Arab Spring long before it's over, while Tom McMaster is still hawking the twisted memoirs of a gay girl in Damascus/straight man in Edinburgh.

Analytically, the contagious effect of mass resistance has meant that it is commonplace to use events in Egypt and Tunisia as a critical lens through which to understand what has led chanting crowds onto the streets of Mauritania, Malawi and Morocco. Though being infected with protest fever is one way of explaining events and exploring whether or not other African countries will go the way of Tunisia and Egypt, there is a tendency to narrate events within a useful but limited, potential-Egypt copycat frame.

The democratic 90s?

Curiously characterized as riots - the same word used to describe acts as diverse as placard-waving pro-democracy activists in downtown Lilongwe and Foot Locker flash-looters in Brixton, south London - pundits weighing Malawi's potential to flare up in the future also need to consider the demonstrations as one of many, a mark in time in a country's long protest history.

In 1994 Hastings Kamuzu Banda, the handkerchief-carrying strongman of Malawi, was defeated in the country's first-ever multi-party elections due in part to protests by ordinary Malawians. During Banda's trial for corruption, civilians demonstrated outside the courthouse against Banda's amnesia and geriatric defense for not remembering his fraudulent administration.

Elsewhere in Africa, the 90s was the decade to remove anti-colonial nationalists turned iron-fisted dictators from power; alongside Malawi, Kenya voted out Daniel arap Moi, multi-party elections saw the end of Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia, and a people-backed overthrow led to the fall of CIA-installed Mobutu Sese Seko of the former Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Both South Africa and Namibia claimed their independence from oppressive white-minority rule and citizens of all races cast their votes in the countries' first-ever democratic elections.

Although a rebel takeover in the DRC shows the dark side of regime change and has resulted in prolonged military rule and unending conflict in Africa, voting is a positive and different form of organized resistance against strongman rule. Like en masse protests, the result, if successful, is that a new government comes into being.

Considering how various populations have mobilized themselves in the past, framing the question "which country is next?" in the discourse of "sub-Saharan Africa, a homogenous land mass so fraught with conflict and poverty, it lacks the capacity effectively organize resistance", needs to change. From a local, regional, and continental perspective, the frequency of political protests and their size in the recent past alongside factors affecting the current political and economic climate are all useful indicators in predicting whether or not and when "sub-Saharan African countries" will be ripe for revolution.

Places without history

The evolution of digital media has made the world more instantly connected to and better informed of news events, but unequally so. For example: The UK riots have been given their due economic and historical context, while reports on Malawi's demonstrations efficiently tallied up the death toll at 19, but neglected to mention the fall of Banda as important background information. Even worse, seven months on, Burkina Faso is still the forgotten uprising, often absent from the world's broadsheets. Maddeningly, Egypt and Tunisia's young revolutionaries have repeatedly had to stress that revolutions do not come in a do-it-yourself kit pre-marked "instant"; their uprisings were "ten years in the making".

Overlooking the backstory, rightly or wrongly, creates an impression that countries in the global South are framed as places without history by those at the center of international news production. More likely, though irritating but unsurprising, in a fast-paced 24-hour news cycle, stories are constructed in the instant present, as though unrest springs out of nowhere - because it makes for a thrilling, racy story with mass appeal. As the West is key in shaping dominant media narratives, reporting without historic context becomes standard across a world whose media is hungry for revolution.

Needless to say, no amount of media coverage will guarantee crowds of demonstrators. Otherwise, anti-cuts protesters in London would have successfully turned Trafalgar into Tahrir Square in late March of this year. Meanwhile, Burkina Faso's most significant challenge to a 24-year-old regime has taken place largely in the absence of flashing cameras and blow-by-blow tweets, since less than 200,000 of the country's 16m people have internet access.

But not every spirited Facebook invitation to protest means that the masses will turn out on the streets: look at Swaziland and Zimbabwe. Not every attempt to topple a government in days will succeed because youth and opposition movements wish it so: see Uganda. So what if Senegal's youth movement failed to unseat Abdoulaye Wade and Blaise Compaoré defeats both civilian and junior military mutineers and clings onto power for a few more years in Burkina Faso? Regardless of the catalyst, would it be failure because protests didn't lead to the toppling of regimes in the age of the Arab Spring?

More plausible is that this is a slow combustion, a seismic knock to post-colonial African and Arab governments with a reputation for violently silencing resistance. Never before has Burkina Faso experienced months of sustained unrest where civilians demonstrate against state-sanctioned crackdowns and military rampages of public spaces like the markets of Ouagadougou, its capital.

In one afternoon, angry protesters in Dakar reversed the Senegalese president’s bid to run for re-election. Although turnout was low, the uprising in Swaziland on April 12 and the trade union protest a month before were symbolically significant, the first in years in a kingdom where political opposition parties have been banned since 1973.

To some extent, the Saharawis protesting Morocco's military dawn raids on Western Sahara in November 2010 are reflected in the subsequent Sunday marches in Morocco by an economic and politically frustrated population which, in a time of economic austerity, would probably prefer to invest in the country rather than permit its autocratic monarchy to spend another cent more on an illegal, 35-year-long Israeli-style military adventure.

Climate for revolution

In reading the tea leafs of revolution, future food security is another "which country is next" factor. The University of Texas at Austin's Strauss Center has developed research on climate change and protests and found a link between the years of surplus rain or drought and social conflict. No rain means very poor harvests, whereas excess rainfall raises the likelihood of crops being spoiled, which leads to shortages and high food prices, thus raising socio-political tensions.

For Malawi, a country dependent on crop farming and foreign aid, the Strauss Center's research would suggest a connection between climate change, food insecurity, resource wars and the current uprisings.

For now, the termination of UK aid after a diplomatic spat with the Malawi government will have little impact on food security, but this could change should violence erupt once again and the regime fails to heed calls to remember the sacred cash cows by Madonna. Instinctively, eyes roll and lips sneer at the Queen of Pop's save-a-Malawian-baby crusade, but her political influence serves a good purpose, sometimes.

In a brief statement issued after the July protests, Madonna asked the government to "find a peaceful solution that allows donors to have confidence that their money will be used efficiently". If the Material Girl is right and other foreign benefactors follow Britain's lead and withdraw financial support due to Mutharika’s further heavy-handed reaction, there could be tough times ahead for a country whose budget is 40 per cent funded by aid and whose already vulnerable food security is further threatened by climate change and the global economic downturn.

It's unlikely that "Malawi risks becoming another Zimbabwe", as human rights activist Undule Mwakasungula claims. But if the prices of bread and gas rise sharply, protests will become much more likely. For the emerging genre of political, protest, and conflict pornography, events in Malawi are the heart-racing story of marching multitudes fleeing toxic clouds of tear gas. This makes great headlines, and condemnation from "the international community" fits the porn template, but exploring the deeper, more complex reasons and making connections between these events appears to be a less-cherished task.

August 17th was marked as a day of mourning and protest in Malawi, but the UN has intervened and turned it into a day of dialogue between the government and the civil society coalition behind the protests. Elsewhere, this unmarked calendar date means small acts of resistance will continue in Burkina Faso, Egypt and Senegal. For those still asking "which country is next" or "is Egypt’s revolution a success": look at the small things that make up the bigger chain of events. It's these minor acts of dissent that turn a protest into an uprising, and an uprising into a revolution.

Source: al-Jazeera.
Link: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/08/201182494458583194.html.

New Chapter Opens After Gaddafi

By Karlos Zurutuza

TRIPOLI, Sep 6, 2011 (IPS) - Libyan children will go back to school without Muammar Gaddafi’s ubiquitous presence, despite a lack of new books.

"We know the challenges ahead will be massive but I’ve never been so happy at the beginning of the school term," primary school teacher Ahlam Saadi tells IPS. "I can hardly wait to teach in freedom," adds the 35-year-old from Tripoli.

Staff at Shoala Primary School in Tripoli’s Dahra district greet one another emotionally; the school is five minutes walk from the capital’s main Martyrs’ square. Colleagues hug each other, and many are in tears. Celebrations by teachers outside the school have the feel of weddings.

As the school term begins, teachers sit down to agree schedules and take administrative decisions. But the first decision has been taken unanimously before anyone set foot inside the building.

"We’ve decided to rename our school ‘Ayman Tuman’ in the memory of our colleague’s dead son," says Salwah Talah. She has almost lost her voice after a massive demonstration by women at Martyrs’ Square the previous night. The Arabic teacher introduces us to Zeynab Tuman, the mother of the 22-year-old who was killed.

"Ayman was shot by the Qatiba – local militia loyal to Gaddafi - after the evening prayers on Feb. 20," Zeynab recalls. "He had also been a student here." The school, and people in the city, remember Ayman as "Tripoli’s first martyr".

Through the tragedy of the loss, the 50-year-old teacher says she "couldn’t be happier" about the renaming of the school.

The 15 women teachers - all dressed in black and wearing colorful scarves - finally step into the building. Some are missing, and teachers say they won’t resume classes this year and, very likely, never again. Not at Ayman Tuman Primary School.

"The teachers of ‘Education for the Yamahiria’ - the subject through which Libyan children have been indoctrinated for the last four decades - obviously won’t come back," says school manager Jamal Tabi. "Needless to say, all of them were loyal to Gaddafi, and some even joined the Qatiba."

Tabi takes us on a tour of the school. The most eloquent change is the removal of Gaddafi’s portrait.

"It was mandatory to place it in front of you, never behind," Tabi recalls. Now, the large tricolor flag of the rebels has been spread at the site. It also helps cover the bullet holes on the window behind.

Tabi has been preparing to receive rebel general Ali Ashur, who visited the school with half a dozen armed men escorting.

"We’ve been touring the schools around the city to make sure security is not an issue any more," Gen. Ashur tells IPS. Paradoxically enough, the general wearing camouflage fatigues still sporting the ousted regime’s insignia on his shoulders.

"We all do until Benghazi gives us the new uniform," says the officer.

Every reminder of the previous regime has been removed in Ayman Tuman: no more portraits of the leader or green flags of the Yamahiria - a word invented by Gaddafi meaning "the republic of the masses". The last two copies of Gaddafi’s ‘Green Book’ are given away to visitors as souvenirs.

Further stages in the transformation process will be harder to carry out. It’s just about two weeks since the rebels took over the country’s capital, and teachers have hardly had any time to adapt the school material to the new times.

"Subjects such as maths or chemistry do not pose any risk but we will have to watch with the history books," says Tabi. New books being printed in Behghazi should arrive in less than a month, he adds.

Several offices, including the school library, were ransacked by Gaddafi’s troops in violent searches before the city fell.

"Many of our teachers were suspected to have links with the rebels, and they were looking for any sort of incriminatory documents," 45-year-old teacher Kamila Ashur tells IPS, speaking amid the rubble at the school’s main door. She says she couldn’t finish teaching through the term because she had to go underground when the police started looking for her at her district in Suq al-Yuma in north-east Tripoli.

When asked how she will teach who Gaddafi was, the history teacher goes ballistic.

"How am I going to explain my students who was Gaddafi? I’ll tell them about that horrible regime, the detentions, the tortures…I’ll tell them that his ideas weren’t good for any human being," says Ashur, waving a makeshift rebel flag with the half moon and star painted in tipex.

"I'm not only teaching history, I'm also making it."

Source: Inter-Press Service (IPS).
Link: http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=104995.

Syria: Lies and slurs for those who dare to challenge Ribal and Rifat Assad

- Chris Doyle
Sunday, 04 September 2011

Global Arab Network - Well you know, when you have a go at Ribal or Rifat Assad that they will resort to anything, such is their record. (Rifat has apparently plenty of loyal well paid thugs in his entourage).

So a few days after having campaigned against the holding of an Eid reception hosted by an MP promoting Ribal’s Iman organization (if you can call it that as there no semblance of a board, accounts or where it is registered, but photos of Ribal and his MP friends) my wife Rim and I get slagged off in an online article (if you can call it as such) in Arabic and English. It is highly defamatory in practically every word.

It has not been a pleasant week. The Conservative Member of Parliament who is hosting the event, Daniel Kawczynski, instead of answering why he his promoting an apologist for crimes against humanity, has written to both our employers. Rim was called in to meet with her head of department at Imperial College, who far from chastising her as Daniel hoped, asked her if she wanted protection. Daniel called me various things on the phone including that I was a “raving lefty and a communist”.. It seems he is taking lessons from the Assad family in making threats and intimidating critics.

I wrote back in July against Ribal when an MP gave him a platform to speak in Parliament, not just because it was so offensive generally, but also as the regime was pulverising Hama at the time making it doubly insensitive.

I also, as can be seen on my Twitter account @doylech, lobbied against Ribal's event coming up this Wednesday. Caabu issued a press release on Friday. Huge pressure has been applied by Syrians and Syrian human rights organizations taking up the issue protesting to MPs and even Ministers. Ribal's cozy relationship with a select few MPs, some of whom he has funded to go to the Middle East, is now under threat. Ribal of course acts as the front man for his father, as his arch apologist-in-chief. Ribal comically told Channel 4 News that his father had been a democrat since the 1970s, something that will appall all those killed, injured, tortured, and brutalized when he was at the top of the regime and running its notorious special forces. His great defense of his father was that he could not have ordered the shelling of Hama in 1982 which killed over 10,000 people as he was in Damascus at the time, as if his presence on the spot was required for him to give the order to his special forces.

It remains a disgrace that Rifat is roaming free in luxury throughout Europe living off his ill-gotten gains, and that his sons are excusing his behavior and polishing his image. It is a crazy world where the EU is sanctioning regime officials inside Syria but seem incapable of taking any action against Rifat and others .

So this is the background to the slurs in this article. They add up to nothing but strangely echo nonsense that both Daniel Kawczynski said to me on the phone and were also written in the comments section of my Guardian article. I am in no doubt that this is not a coincidence.

It is a bizarre set of accusations for a start barely worthy of writing about. Apparently according to the unknown author, Rim's intervention on BBC women's hour sounded like apologists for Iran when discussing women. (a non-hijab wearing wife of a British husband acting as a puppet of the Iranians!!) The interview was back in the early days of the protests, and the point of the program was to examine why it seemed not so many Syrian women had participated. She mentioned Mothers' appearing on TV talking about their being children killed. She makes clear that these demonstrations were very, very risky for women.

Rim must be the only Syrian women not to know how terrible the situation is on the ground. Contrary to this rant, Rim has every idea how angry Syrian society is, she is part of it, with family on the ground with friends all over the country. I have had to comfort her daily as news of friends being arrested, tortured or killed have come in but above all, as her country that we love lurches into a dangerous and unknown future, with a regime that seems to know no limits to its brutality.

Before the protests, we have been involved in doing what can to help Syria, whether by promoting development, encouraging reform, and also promoting Syrians and Syrian culture that has been so often been denigrated in the West. Indeed I have spent 20 years doing little else but working against the demonization of Arabs in the West. We hoped, like so many others, that Bashar just might bring about some reforms. It was a faint hope but we clung to it. Those hopes have been dashed once and for all.

So during these years we helped with various organizations devoted to helping Syria. We set up a small charity, one of the first international NGOs to operate in Syria. Gulf Sands Worldwide not its Syria branch (not Rami Makhlouf who I lobbied to get sanctioned) donated to the Damask Rose Trust, a UK-based charity. Neither of us knew that Makhlouf was a shareholder of Gulf Sands in Syria at the time, but the donation was of no benefit to him nor us. Even today I am not sure just where Makhlouf has tucked away his extraordinary wealth that he has stolen from the Syrian people. I confess I may have bought one of his mobile phone SIM cards, and perhaps used one of his airport taxis, as there is little choice of course.

Rim and I are proud to be Trustees of the Damask RoseTrust that has done fantastic work in difficult conditions to help the deprived in Syria, set up a hotline for victims of domestic violence and supported rural communities. We make no apologies for that. I am proud of her role in setting up the Syrian Professional Women’s Association, an organization here in the UK, devoted to assisting Syrian professional women. I am also proud of what she did whilst involved some years ago with the British-Syrian Society (BSS). She took on some major successful cultural projects but felt she had to step down from the BSS, some time ago. Her cultural work was based on her passionate interest in Arabic and Islamic culture - she has recently curated a major exhibition at the Royal Society.

Our efforts pale into insignificance compared with those on the ground who risk their lives on a daily basis. We shall continue to assist in whatever small way we can.

It is a pity that @all4syria has allowed itself to be abused by Ribal Assad and his family. This does little to help the future of the Syrian opposition (Ribal has no interest in genuine opposition of course), which neither Rim nor I would ever dare to claim we represent, is crucial. Working together for a free and democratic Syria has never been more important. That there are those who seek to undermine all of this shows just how scared the Assad family is. That there are a handful of British MPs who collude with Ribal Assad is a shame on Westminster...

Source: Global Arab Network.
Link: http://www.english.globalarabnetwork.com/2011090411860/Opinion/syria-lies-and-slurs-for-those-who-dare-to-challenge-ribal-and-rifat-assad.html.

African anti-desertification summit convenes in Algiers

2011-09-06

Algiers is hosting representatives of 40 African countries this week for a regional anti-desertification conference, AFP reported on Monday (September 5th). The meeting will develop a roadmap for aligning the countries' national programs with the strategy outlined by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). It will also prepare for the UNCCD international conference in South Korea next month.

Algeria chairs the UNCCD African group.

Source: Magharebia.
Link: http://www.magharebia.com/cocoon/awi/xhtml1/en_GB/features/awi/newsbriefs/general/2011/09/06/newsbrief-06.

Mauritania rains spur locust fears

2011-09-06

Mauritania on Monday (September 5th) dispatched teams to monitor the movement of locusts, APA reported. The move comes after heavy rainfall created conditions favorable to the crop-destroying insects, which have already been observed in Assaba and Tamachekatt. Early monitoring by the national locust control center (CNLA) aims to prevent a possible invasion. Ground and air units will treat some 30,000 hectares across the country.

Source: Magharebia.
Link: http://www.magharebia.com/cocoon/awi/xhtml1/en_GB/features/awi/newsbriefs/general/2011/09/06/newsbrief-07.

Marching across Syria, chanting to topple the regime

- Talal Abdullah
Tuesday, 06 September 2011

Global Arab Network - Syrian soldiers opened fire in and around the rebellious city of Homs on Tuesday, killing two people, including a teenager, as the U.N. secretary-general urged the world to take action on Syria.

Also, the bodies of five unidentified people, including a woman, were found around the city center, activists said.

15 Demonstrators were killed on Monday in the central city of Homs and the northern province of Idlib, according to Mahmoud Merhi, head of the Arab Organization for Human Rights. Security forces also carried out a “major assault” on Monday on the town of Nawa, near the southern province of Daraa where the uprising began in March, Merhi said by phone on Tuesday.

Arab League Secretary-General Nabil el-Arabi will visit Damascus on Wednesday, Egypt’s state-run Middle East News Agency reported, without saying how it got the information. The visit takes place in the wake of expanded sanctions by the European Union in response to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown on dissent.

In the northwestern province of Idlib, Adelsalam Hassoun, 24, a blacksmith, was killed by army snipers on Monday just after he had crossed into Turkey from the village of Ain al-Baida on the Syrian side, his cousin told Reuters by telephone from Syria.

"Abdelsalam was hit in the head. He was among a group of family members and other refugees who dashed across the plain to Turkey when six armored personnel carrier deployed outside Ain al-Baida and started firing their machineguns into the village at random this morning," Mohammad Hassoun said

Thousands of families fled their homes in the northern border region in June when troops assaulted town and villages that had seen big protests against Assad.

Faced with a heavy security presence in central neighborhoods of Damascus and Aleppo, and military assaults against a swathe of cities from Latakia on the coast to Deir al-Zor in the East, street rallies calling for an end to the Assad family's domination of Syria have intensified in towns and villages across the country of 20 million.

Demonstrators have been encouraged by the fall of Libya's Muammar Gaddafi and growing international pressure on Assad. The European Union has imposed an embargo on Syrian oil exports, jeopardizing a major source of revenue for Assad, who inherited power from his father, the late Hafez al-Assad, in 2000.

"Economic pressure will be key in swaying the merchant class toward the side of the uprising, but Assad will keep adopting the military solution and deploying heavy weapons across Syria," said Syrian dissident in exile Bassam al-Bitar.

"International intervention, something akin to a no-fly zone, will still be needed to protect protests and encourage more members of the army to defect," Bitar, a former diplomat, told Reuters from Washington.

Source: Global Arab Network.
Link: http://www.english.globalarabnetwork.com/2011090612080/Syria-Politics/marching-across-syria-chanting-to-topple-the-regime.html.

Thousands show up at anti-Putin protest in Moscow

June 12, 2012

MOSCOW (AP) — Thousands of Russians are gathering Tuesday for the first massive protest against President Vladimir Putin's rule since his inauguration as investigators summoned several key opposition figures for questioning in an apparent bid to disrupt the rally.

Anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny, leftist politician Sergei Udaltsov, liberal activist Ilya Yashin and TV host Ksenia Sobchak were called for interrogation by the Investigative Committee just an hour before thousands of protesters were to gather for a march across downtown Moscow.

The interrogation session would make it hard, if not impossible, for them to appear at the rally, and it follows searches of their apartments Monday that were described by some as a crude attempt by the government to derail the protest.

Udaltsov snubbed the summons, saying on Twitter that he considers it is his duty to lead the protest as one of its organizers. He may now be arrested. Braving a brief thunderstorm, thousands of protesters showed up on the iconic Pushkin Square ahead of the planned march.

"Those in power should feel this pressure, we will do this by no means no matter what are the methods, peaceful or not," said Anton Maryasov, a 25-year-old postgraduate student. "If they ignore us that would mean that the bloodshed is inevitable."

The investigators' action follows a quick passage last week of a new bill that will raise fines on those who take part in unauthorized protests 150-fold, to nearly the average annual salary in Russia.

The top Twitter hashtag in Russia on Monday was "Welcome to the Year '37," a reference to the height of the purges under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Tuesday's protest has city approval, but any shift from the agreed upon location and timeframe could give police a pretext for a crackdown.

The previous big opposition rally a day before Putin's inauguration in May ended in fierce clashes between police and protesters. The raids of the opposition leaders homes and their questioning were connected to the May 6 protest.

Andrey Bulay in Moscow contributed to this report.