Jordan's Islamists Take the Reins of the Protests

By Karen Leigh
Monday, Apr. 18, 2011

After sitting out a three-month long wave of protests, Jordan's Islamists have finally taken to the streets. On Friday, the Islamic Action Front (IAF), Jordan's main opposition party and a branch o the Muslim Brotherhood, virtually took over the protest movement by rallying supporters in the capital Amman, turning out more than 1,000 marchers in the city. Though sometimes seen as a loyal opposition, the movement had been mostly dormant since boycotting the country's 2007 elections, claiming the polls had been rigged to subvert the Islamists' power. "It's a surprise that they suddenly came out today," says Chris Phillips, Jordan country specialist at the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Until Friday, anti-regime sentiment had been marshaled by an inexperienced group of young Jordanians who dubbed themselves the March 24 movement and modeled their actions on Egypt's activists. They had been stymied after police hit their protests with rocks, sticks and water hoses on March 25. Fewer than 400 demonstrators came out in Amman the week after that incident. Most civilians believed the movement was dead in the water. Getting young people involved in politics "is like pulling teeth," says Naseem Tarawnah, the CEO of 7iber, an Amman platform for citizen-generated media. "It's unrealistic to think that it's going to become the vanguard of the anti-government movement," adds Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha Institute. "No one should expect them to play that role. It's going to take a longer time for them to develop a larger constituency."

Since Friday, the IAF's leader, Hamzah al-Mansur, has been ubiquitous on television and in print media, a prominent spokesperson for a protest movement his organization did very little to encourage. Indeed, the demonstrations seem to be more sharply focused. Spurred by the IAF, not only did more than 1,000 paraded from Amman's central Al-Husseini mosque to City Hall, it very clearly called for reforms including the dissolution of Parliament and the toppling of Prime Minister Maaruf Bakhit.

Those demands seem to dovetail with what appear to be the sentiments of King Abdullah, who has publicly urged reform his new government, which was installed in January. "When the protests first came about and the King fired the government, there was a general sense across the population of 'give them a go, let's see what they can do before with criticize them,'" Phillips says. "In the last two weeks in particular, there's an increased sense that the government isn't going to do anything. If the IAF have mobilized people, it will be to try and regain the momentum in what was seen as a flagging protest movement and push forth reforms that had been failing to materialize."

The concern, however, is that the IAF may not speak for all Islamists. At the same time as hundreds were marching in the capital, a significant showing was being made in Zarqa, a religiously conservative village a half-hour drive from Amman. There, 350-to-400 Islamic hardliners clashed with police. A Jordanian officer, Lieutenant General Hussein Majali, told reporters that "it was clear that the demonstrators [in Zarqa] had plans to clash with police. They carried swords and daggers and were provocative, seeking to drag police into a bloody confrontation." More than 50 police were injured; with a reported 120 Salafists reportedly detained and 50 later released.

Zarqa is not unknown to the rest of the world. It was the hometown of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the much-feared head of Al-Qaeda in Iraq who was killed in 2006. But it exposes an internal division at the heart of the IAF. It remains unclear how much influence is wielded by the Salafists, a smaller extremist wing of the IAF, which is still dominated by moderates who are not calling for the overthrow of the monarchy. Salafists have been agitating for weeks for the release of 90 Islamist prisoners, including Mohammad Shalabi, convicted in 2002 of terrorism following riots in the southern city of Maan, and former Zarqawi mentor Abu Mohammed al-Maqdessi.

The internal debate between moderates and hardliners contributed to the IAF's weakness over the last couple of years. "There has been talk that they might split as an organization, or at least be internally split for a long time, preventing them from being a political force," Phillips says. But now it seems both sides have acted in concert, at least staging demonstrations on the same day. Whether Salafists and moderates can work together going forward remains to be seen.

Source: TIME.
Link: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2065874,00.html.

In Turkey, surveyors map a WWI battlefield

By CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA, Associated Press – Sat Apr 23

ISTANBUL – The World War I battlefield of the Gallipoli campaign, where throngs gather each April to remember the fallen, is a place of lore, an echo of ancient warfare that took place on the same soil. Now researchers are mapping dugouts, trenches and tunnels in the most extensive archaeological survey of a site whose slaughter helped forge the identity of young nations.

Armed with old maps and GPS technology, the experts from Turkey, Australia and New Zealand have so far discovered rusted food cans, unused bullets and their shell casings, and fragments of shrapnel, Ottoman-era bricks with Greek lettering, ceramic rum flagons of Allied soldiers and glass shards of beer bottles on the Turkish side. They announced early findings ahead of annual commemorations on the rugged peninsula on Sunday and Monday.

The chief aim is to gain a detailed layout of a battlefield whose desperate trench warfare, with enemy lines just a few dozen meters (yards) apart in some places, has been recounted in films, books and ballads, acquiring a legendary aura in the culture of its combatants.

"It will hasten a broader understanding of what went on at Gallipoli," Richard Reid, a researcher and author of the book "Gallipoli 1915" said of the government-funded investigation. "It will help us as nations that are always interested in trying to preserve what heritage we have."

There is heightened interest in the battle, especially among Turks who are showing more pride in their past, buoyed by economic and diplomatic advances after decades of internal strife. Australia and New Zealand mark the occasion with a national holiday on Monday, holding dawn services and closing off downtown areas for marches of veterans of all conflicts.

Before dawn on April 25, 1915, an Allied expedition under British command landed at Gallipoli on the Aegean Sea in a bid to reach Istanbul and open a sea route to Russia, an ally whose troops were wilting on the eastern front. But Ottoman armies, allied with Germany, dug in and forced their adversaries to withdraw after a nine-month campaign.

About 44,000 Allied soldiers died, and at least twice as many perished on the Turkish side. Hundreds of thousands more were wounded or suffered debilitating fever, diarrhea and dysentery.

For Turkey, the terrible losses are central to the staunch nationalism that underpins its regional ambitions today, and the battle made a hero out of an Ottoman army officer who led Turkey to independence in 1923. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk imposed a secular vision that gave the state authority over Islam, a legacy that dominates the divisive politics of modern Turkey.

"I am not ordering you to attack. I am ordering you to die," the steely commander is said to have told a regiment that was eventually wiped out. "In the time which passes until we die, other troops and commanders can take our place."

During the battle one night, local lore says, the light of a star and the crescent moon shone on the blood-soaked ground, forming the design of what became Turkey's red and white national flag.

In recent years, some of Turkey's founding "myths" have been undercut, among them the idea of a tight-knit Turkish identity that ignored the existence of ethnic Kurds and other minorities, said Kerem Oktem, author of "Angry Nation: Turkey since 1989," a book about the country's erratic transition from military to democratic rule.

"Gallipoli remains "one of the important, overarching, big, symbolic moments," he said.

For that reason, Oktem said, neither the current Islam-based government nor secular nationalists who oppose it want to "devalue or challenge" the idea that Gallipoli was a glorious victory, despite debate about its military significance.

Australia and New Zealand regard Gallipoli with equal reverence, noting the bravery and loyalty of soldiers whose British commanders considered troops from the former colonies to be untested and of poorer quality. It forged a self-image of determination, irreverence and "mateship" that is referred to as the Anzac spirit, after the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps.

The fighting happened near the mouth of the Dardanelles strait, part of a conduit between the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea. The Turkish military occupied the strategic site until 1973, when it became a national park. Memorials and cemeteries at the site discouraged thoughts of potentially disruptive fieldwork.

The new study does not involve excavation, instead using satellite-based technology to map battle positions over gullies, dense vegetation and limestone cliffs.

"Forestation had changed the natural geography of the battlefield, even of trenches and pits," said Mithat Atabay, a history professor at Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University and one of five Turks on the 14-member team. In 1994, he said, "a huge part of the forest burnt down, and the zone suffered further damage."

In October, the researchers mapped four kilometers (2.5 miles) of trenches, many of them barely visible, at locations including Johnston's Jolly and Quinn's Post, names bestowed by Allied troops. They inspected Turkish positions known as Kirmizi Sirt, or Red Ridge.

"The war on the surface was only one element of the struggle," the team said in a report. "A constant underground battle developed; tunneling became a major preoccupation on both sides of the line, for both offensive and defensive reasons."

Mapping data is entered in a digital database that can be compared with information from other sources, including maps used in the 1915 landings and Ottoman-era documents. Fieldwork resumes in September, and is expected to continue, with the help of ground-penetrating radar and aerial photographs, until the campaign centenary in 2015.

Charles Bean, an Australian journalist who covered the conflict and surveyed the battlefield just after the war, wrote about the grudging respect that was said to have developed between the underdog enemies. In an early 1916 dispatch, he recalled a memorial built by an Australian.

It was, he wrote, "a little wooden cross found in the scrub, just two splinters of biscuit box tacked together, with the inscription 'Here lies a Turk.' The poor soul would probably turn in his grave if his ghost could see that rough cross above him. But he need not worry. It was put there in all sincerity."

The remains of the ancient city of Troy lie near the Gallipoli peninsula. Alexander the Great led an army through the region. So did Persian emperor Xerxes I. The Greek historian Herodotus referred to the place in his chronicles.

"The Allies were really the last, I suppose, military expedition to try to take this particular strip of land," said Chris Mackie, a classics professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, and one of the Gallipoli surveyors. "But there were plenty before them."

Six killed in pro-democracy protests in Syria

By Khaled Yacoub Oweis and Suleiman al-Khalidi
Sat Apr 23, 2011

(Reuters) - Syrian forces killed at least six people on Saturday when they fired on mourners calling for the end of President Bashar al-Assad's rule at mass funerals of pro-democracy protesters shot a day earlier.

Witnesses and rights campaigners said security forces killed three people in Damascus's Barzah district and a further three when they fired at mourners trying to join funerals near Izra'a in southern Syria, where at least 12 burials were taking place.

The mourners were chanting "Bashar al-Assad, you traitor! Long live Syria, down with Bashar!"

"There was a heavy volley of gunfire in our direction as we approached Izra'a to join the funerals of martyrs," a witness from the southern city of Deraa who came to join the burials told Reuters.

Security forces also opened fire at a funeral in Damascus's Douma suburb, wounding three people, witnesses there said.

Mourners in Harasta, a town near Damascus, also came under fire from security forces, before staging a sit-in to demand the release of detainees arrested in the last few weeks.

Protesters staged another sit-in after a funeral for four people from Irbeen, near Damascus. "We are not leaving until the political prisoners are released," one protester told Reuters by phone.

Friday was by far the bloodiest day in over a month of demonstrations to demand political freedoms and an end to corruption, with at least 100 people killed, said two activists.

Friday's violence, in areas stretching from the port city of Latakia to Homs, Hama, Damascus and the southern village of Izra'a, brings the death toll to more than 300, according to activists, since unrest broke out on March 18 in Deraa.

Damascus remained tense on Saturday and many people stayed indoors, one activist told Reuters from the capital.

"This is becoming like a snowball and getting bigger and bigger every week. Anger is rising, the street is boiling," he said.

Two Syrian lawmakers, both from Deraa, told al-Jazeera television they were resigning from parliament in protest at the killing of demonstrators. Theirs were the first resignations from within Assad's autocratic regime.

"Security solutions do not work," said one of the lawmakers, Khalil al-Rifaei.

Syrian parliament is effectively appointed by the authorities. Resignations were unheard of before the protests.

CRACKDOWN CONDEMNED

U.S. President Barack Obama condemned Friday's violence and accused Assad of seeking help from Iran. A Syrian government source said in a statement published on official state media Obama's statement "was not based on objective vision."

"This outrageous use of violence to quell protests must come to an end now," Obama said in a statement. "Instead of listening to their own people, President Assad is blaming outsiders while seeking Iranian assistance in repressing Syria's citizens."

France's Foreign Ministry said Paris was "deeply concerned."

"Syrian authorities must give up the use of violence against their citizens. We again call on them to commit without delay to an inclusive political dialogue and to achieve the reforms legitimately demanded by the Syrian people," it said.

Friday's protests went ahead despite Assad's decision this week to lift the country's hated emergency law, in place since his Baath Party seized power 48 years ago.

A statement by the Local Coordination Committees, a grouping of activists coordinating protests, said the end of emergency law was futile without the release of thousands of political prisoners -- most held without trial -- and the dismantling of the security apparatus.

In their first joint statement since the protests erupted last month, activists said the abolition of the Baath Party's monopoly on power and the establishment of a democratic political system was central to ending repression in Syria.

Aided by his family and a pervasive security apparatus, Assad, 45, has absolute power, having ignored demands to transform the anachronistic autocratic system he inherited when he succeeded his late father, president Hafez al-Assad, in 2000.

Amnesty International said Syrian authorities "have again responded to peaceful calls for change with bullets and batons."

"They must immediately halt their attacks on peaceful protesters and instead allow Syrians to gather freely as international law demands," said Malcolm Smart, Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa director.

(Additional reporting by Mariam Karouny in Beirut; Editing by Sophie Hares)

Source: Reuters.
Link: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/23/us-syria-protests-idUSTRE73L1SJ20110423.

Iraqis defy ban, rally in Baghdad square

BAGHDAD, April 22 (UPI) -- Hundreds of Iraqis, defying a government ban, rallied Friday in Baghdad's Tahrir Square against corruption and the U.S. occupation.

Authorities had forbidden rallies in Tahrir and Firdous squares, the Kuwaiti news agency KUNA reported.

The demonstrators demanded the ouster of three city officials, the release of prisoners held without charge, the withdrawal of American forces and no permanent U.S. bases.

The crowd included women and elderly people seeking answers on the fate of missing loved ones. A ministerial commission is to meet on the prisoner issue Sunday.

Source: United Press International (UPI).
Link: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2011/04/22/Iraqis-defy-ban-rally-in-Baghdad-square/UPI-68591303479943/.

Gaddafi regime 'to use tribes in Misrata battle'

By Richard Hall
Saturday, 23 April 2011

A senior Libyan government official said the Libyan army will pull out of the besieged, rebel-held city of Misrata and be replaced by armed tribesmen.

Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Kaim told journalists late yesterday that "we will leave it for the tribes around Misrata and the Misrata people to deal with the situation in Misrata".

Mr Khaim cited NATO airstrikes as the reason for the army withdrawing from the city. "The tactic of the army is to have a surgical solution but with the airstrikes it doesn't work."

The announcement may come as a surprise to US military officials, who earlier expressed fears of a "stalemate" in the conflict, and confessed that allied air-strikes have so far failed to deal a decisive blow to Muammar Gaddafi. Admiral Mike Mullen told a news conference that although the bombardment has stemmed the advance of government troops, it has not allowed rebel fighters to launch significant counter-attacks.

Conflict in Misrata, the only rebel stronghold in the west of Libya, is largely street fighting. The US deployed two unmanned aircraft piloted from the US on Thursday, but poor weather forced both to turn back.

Source: The Independent.
Link: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/gaddafi-regime-to-use-tribes-in-misrata-battle-2273754.html.

Popular committees convene in Tahrir

Popular Committees for the Defense of the Revolution held their first conference in Tahrir today in the country's first attempt at creating a local base for political action.

Yassin Gaber, Friday 22 Apr 2011

The Popular Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (PCDR) began their first general conference in Tahrir Square at 1:00pm after Friday prayer. The conference was announced weeks ago “to announce the political orientation [of the PCDR] during the next phase [of the revolution] and to expand the techniques of joint action, cooperation with other committees and the introduction of other initiatives.”

A stage was erected on the eastern side of the square close to Mohamed Mahmoud Street. Hundreds gathered around the stage which was surrounded by signs identifying the different committees from Kafr Shukr, Boulaq, Giza, Alexandria, Imbaba and Al-Omraniya among others.

Members of the Egyptian Public Security Forces (EPSF) were present in the square, wearing arm bands to distinguish themselves. The EPSF have been continuing in their role as protectors of the streets in the absence of security. Bystanders, upon discovering the cause of the gathering, began to question the need for such committees, arguing that the military and the police together have ensured the country’s security.

Members of these committees have been gathering every Monday at the Center for Socialist Studies in Giza as part of the PCDR’s central committee for organization. They’ve had heated debates for the past two weeks on the group’s political focus, the recruitment of new members, the venue of their conference and even the creation of banners and signs. They’ve leafleted many cities across the country.

The stage was host to musicians, poets and political speakers trying to reignite the spark that was Tahrir. Though the crowds energy was strong at times, particularly during the musical performances, the conference’s message seemed to fall on deaf ears. Many members of the crowd were not aware of the gathering’s purpose.

A committee member from Giza explained that it was the Muslim Brotherhood who had pulled out of the protest arena in order to paint protesters as outlaws, nevertheless he believed that people wouldn’t have come to Tahrir had they been satisfied with the progress thus far.

Committee members handed out leaflets which outlined their founding principles which focused on the trial of the corrupt, the return of illegally appropriated funds to the people, the dismantling of local councils, the election of governors and all local officials, an end to military trials and the dismantling of the new National Security apparatus, intended to replace the reviled State Security apparatus.

The founding principles highlighted the PCDR’s main roles in the coming interim period: namely, to educate and spread the principles of democracy to the people, to facilitate the “supervision and the participation by the people in societal affairs” and involvement of the Egyptian people in the nation building process.

Within an hour of the conference’s commencement, people began chanting against def-facto leader Field Marshall Tantawi and corruption as the conference seemed to fizzle out.

Source: Ahram.
Link: http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/10595.aspx.

Egyptian government to ease siege on Gaza

23/04/2011

CAIRO (Ma'an) -- The Egyptian government will apply new procedures at the Rafah crossing on the Egypt-Gaza border to ease travel for residents of the besieged coastal enclave, officials said Thursday.

During a meeting in Cairo, Baha Ad-Dusuqi, head of Palestinian affairs in the Egypt's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, informed Gaza government spokesman Taher An-Nunu that new measures would be in place at the terminal soon.

An-Nunu appealed to the Egyptian government to open the Rafah crossing swiftly.

Since Israel imposed an illegal blockade on the Gaza Strip, the Rafah crossing is the only gateway to the rest of the world for Gaza residents.

The officials also discussed internal Palestinian reconciliation, and the need to restore national unity between the Hamas-run government in Gaza and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

An-Nunu said the Gaza government was confident in Egypt's ability to mediate an end to the division, and said national unity would empower Palestinians to deal with Israel's occupation.

Ad-Dusuqi said Egypt was keen to help unity efforts. The new Egyptian government, in place since the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak in February, sought strong relations with Palestinians, the official added.

Egypt would not hesitate to support Palestinians' rights in all areas, Ad-Dusuqi said.

An-Nunu said the Gaza government would support Egypt's new leadership as it transitioned to full stability.

Source: Ma'an News Agency.
Link: http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=381040.