Blogs

Over at the Daily Star, Michael Young (whose excellent book, The Ghosts of Martyrs Square, I reviewed for World Affairs last year), has some harsh words about the Obama administration's support for Kofi Annan's peace overtures to Bashar Assad, arguing that they are merely a delaying tactic that will keep the regime in power: 

The truth is that it’s the Obama administration and its European partners that have adopted the Russian and Chinese perspective. When President Barack Obama says that Assad will fall, that’s empty oratory destined to keep Syria at arm’s length during an election year, and avoid accusations that the U.S. president is soft on mass murder. But Obama’s focus is elsewhere. He prefers to subcontract Syria to regional states, even to the feckless Russians, so that he can pursue America’s strategic reorientation away from the Middle East.

I recently came across the saddest commentary on Ukraine’s eastern provinces that I have ever encountered. It’s a video blog by one Stanislav Tsikalovsky from the city of Luhansk. The 34-year-old Tsikalovsky goes by the name of Proctologist. His slogan is: “Believe me, because madmen always speak the truth.”

The truth that recently caught the attention of some 30,000 Ukrainians came in a video Tsikalovsky made after a trip to Lviv, in western Ukraine. Here’s what he had to say:

With allegations surfacing that Israel has gained access to air bases in Azerbaijan for a possible attack on neighboring Iran, it's worth reading this Tim Judah essay from last month about relations between the Jewish state and its new Muslim ally in the Caucasus. 

This month marks the 53rd anniversary of the Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule. It was March of 1959 when the Chinese took control of Lhasa. Soon after, the Dalai Lama fled to India. The China the world knew then is today unrecognizable in countless ways. The future of Tibet, however, remains unresolved.

In researching the current situation in Tibet, I paused when considering the following: Tibetan women have a long history of peaceful resistance. On March 12, 1959, in the middle of the Tibetan revolt against Chinese rule, Tibetan women organized a nonviolent protest in front of the Dalai Lama’s home in Lhasa. It lasted for weeks. An estimated five to fifteen thousand women came together to appeal for support against Chinese occupation. Afterwards many were imprisoned, tortured, or executed, including a woman by the name of Pamo Kusang.

As the Arab League summit opens in Iraq, I have two pieces out today looking back at the 2011 rotating presidency of Qatar, a little Gulf state that has been famously busy in the regional diplomacy of the Arab Spring. As it transfers the reigns of rotating leadership this week in Baghdad, we ask how sustainable Qatar's outsized role is.

A few days ago I took a trip south to the small poor Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid where the revolution against Ben Ali began. While I was out, thousands of Salafists descended on Tunis, waved their black flag, demanded an Islamic state, and incited “war” against “the Jews.” Roughly 1,500 Jews live in Tunisia. Most are in the capital and on the island of Djerba.

A Tunisian journalist I've been working with was appalled by these people. That doesn't surprise me. He's an educated liberal-minded cosmopolitan person and most Tunisian journalists are against the Islamists. Slightly more surprising is the fact that the leftist, liberal, and Islamists parties in the government have condemned the Salafists for their incitement. Even Ennahda, Tunisia's version of the Muslim Brotherhood, condemned the Salafists. The Ministry of Religious Affairs, which is controlled by Ennahda, piled on.

That wouldn't have happened in Egypt.

After a decade of authoritarian stagnation, three months of pro-democracy protests brought politics back to Russia. Nowhere is this seen more vividly than in the municipalities, which have become an arena of vigorous competition. Although administrative pressure and fraud continue to mark Russian elections, a resurgent civil society and serious monitoring efforts by independent groups have offered at least a measure of counterbalance. The results are evident.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban gave a fiercely nationalistic speech in Budapest two weeks ago, upping the ante in his battle with the European Union. I analyzed it for the New Republic here. 

I've just returned from my first ever vacation in Africa—in Kenya. It was the first time I've ever visited the continent and not been working. (After seven years, it was about time!) The trip got me thinking about something that I hear from friends and colleagues all the time—that they prefer not to vacation anywhere in close proximity to poverty. If you're going to go to relax, it doesn't feel right to do it a few minutes drive from the world's largest slum, Kibera, for example. I get it: the contradictions can feel startling and guilt-inducing, even perhaps so much that your relaxation becomes less so.

But I think there is a strong case for vacationing in places that are “troubled”. Tourism is one of the lowest-cost industries to develop, one of the fastest ways for countries to transcend image problems and build a reputation for business, and among the best ways to employ large numbers of people in productive services.

On Monday, President Obama met with Hu Jintao, his Chinese counterpart, in Seoul. According to Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, the two leaders agreed to “coordinate” their response to North Korea’s “potential provocation.”

And what provocation would that be? In the middle of this month, Pyongyang stated it would launch an “earth observation satellite” sometime between April 12th and 16th. Nobody, however, believes that story. The launch, apparently intended to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the birth of North Korean founder Kim Il Sung, will be a test of a ballistic missile, and as such will constitute a violation of Security Council resolutions and the deal, announced on February 29th, between the US and the North.

Tunisia's Islamist party Ennahda has caved to overwhelming pressure from liberal, leftist, and other secular parties and abandoned its push for making Islam the basis of the country's new constitution.

Just a few days ago I spoke to several people here in Tunis who thought a compromise might be reached, that Sharia law would be described in the constitution as a source of legislation rather than the source, but it looks like the Islamists won't even get that much.

Fresh off NATO’s success in deposing Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi last year, many are calling upon the Western military alliance to do something about Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s yearlong violent repression of a popular uprising. Yet NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has been absolutely clear that the alliance will play no such role. “It’s important for me to stress that NATO has no intention whatsoever to intervene in Syria,” Rasmussen said at a press conference in Washington last month. Last Friday, I heard the secretary general reiterate this message at the German Marshall Fund’s annual Brussels Forum. “We have no intention to intervene in Syria because it’s quite another case than Libya,” he said.

There's no two ways about it, this is just great news: Having lost a run-off election yesterday, Senegal's President Abdoulaye Wade conceded defeat to his challenger, Macky Sall. Reuters reports on the mood in Dakar:

Excited residents gathered at tea shops as boys hawked newspapers splashing headlines like 'Wade Knocked Out', after a night marked by fireworks, honking horns and singing in parts of the capital Dakar that followed his former protege Macky Sall's election win.

"This is a victory for all Senegalese people, not just the politicians," said Bassirou Sylla, 32, a trader in Dakar's upscale neighbourhood of Point E.

The reasons to celebrate abound. A smooth transition of power "resets" democratic norms in a region that has seemed recently prone to coups. A new face in Senegal could reinvigorate investment and provide the economy with a much-needed kickstart. It might also lift the political mood in the country, which in recent years has grown increasingly cynical about the ability of democracy to deliver.

There are some easy explanations for the killings of Afghan civilians by Staff Sergeant Robert Bales in the 3rd Stryker Brigade. They describe an unbalanced individual reaching the breaking point in a stressful environment. Yes, the 38-year-old shooter from Joint Base Lewis-McChord had too many deployments in Iraq in a short period, and a traumatic brain injury (we don’t know how serious), and rumored marital trouble can’t have helped. But there are tens of thousands of soldiers who have had multiple deployments and many of these have had personal issues. They haven’t murdered any civilians.

In his first interview after seizing power, Mali's self-proclaimed junta leader, Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo tells a journalist from Africable that he has never cast a vote in his life. If there are three candidates standing for election, he explains, rest assured he won't have confidence in any of them. And he'd rather not vote than choose.