About.com Middle East Issues

"Noor," the Middle East's Frothiest TV Soap

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:31:34 +0000

Turkish Heartthrob: Kivanc Tatlitug, whose eyes, hair, whiskers and roses he brings his wife after their quarrels have turned "Noor" the Arab world's most successful television soap opera ever. The show was produced in Turkey in 2005-07, where it was a flop. (Michael Buckner/Getty Images)

"Noor," or "G�m�s" in its original language, is a Turkish television soap opera that originally aired in Turkey from 2005 to 2007. It was a flop. When its producer dubbed it into Arabic (in Syrian dialect) and the show aired from 2008 to 2009 on the Saudi-owned, Dubai-based Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC), a pan-Arab broadcasting network, "Noor" became an immediate sensation and one of highest-rated television shows in the world.

The show drew appeal from all demographics through storylines focusing on a large, multi-generational family whose many members lounge through love stories. "We always joked," blogger Ajnabiya wrote on another blogger's post on the show, "that the nicest thing was that each member of the family, from the Jido down to the grand-daughter was in some kind of love story. It is a fun escape for anyone, especially those living in a closed society, or as in Lebanon, always confronted with political problems and the like.

But the show's most ardent gravity centers are Noor, the generously busted dark-haired actress played by Song�l �den, and Noor's husband Mohannad, played by the seemingly blue-eyed Turkish Adonis, Kivanc Tatlitug, and his blond curls. Mohannad, a rose-plucking romantic, treats his wife as an equal, supports her in her professional dreams (she is a designer), knows how to spell the word "tender"--and enact it.

He is an angelic husband, but not an angel, at least not according to the traditional Islamic repertoire of acceptable behavior. He (like other characters on the show) had pre-marital sex and fathered a child out of wedlock. He kisses his wife. On screen. Like more groundbreaking Western television fare of a few decades ago, the show includes a storyline about a character's abortion, alcohol flows freely at mealtime, none of the women wear anything like veils, and religion is subordinate to the challenges and pleasures of everyday life, passions of the heart included.

Read the rest of "The Arab World's Most Popular Television Soap Opera."

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"Noor," the Middle East's Frothiest TV Soap originally appeared on About.com Middle East Issues on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 21:31:34.

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Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Quitting Act

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:47:40 +0000

Bye Bye Mahmoud: Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will not run again in elections scheduled for 2010. (Thaer Ganaim/PPO via Getty Images)

Late tonight from Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas preempted the regular television schedule with a speech and announced that he would not seek the presidency again in elections scheduled for January. The announcement is a rebuke to the unconvincing fits and starts of the Obama administration and the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. Abbas is especially embittered by the administration's about-face on demanding that Israel halt its illegal settlement building in the West Bank.

But Abbas, 74, is also looking for cover for his own perceived weaknesses and misjudgments. He hasn't been a strong Palestinian leader. He has not responded effectively to the challenge posed by Hamas in Gaza, proving incapable of finding ways either to reunify Palestinians under one banner or to counter Hamas' perceived legitimacy among a sizable chunk of the Palestinian electorate. Palestinians perceive Abbas' Fatah as still more corrupt and less socially responsive than Hamas.

Abbas' popularity among Palestinians, never beefy, has been plummeting in the past few weeks. The steep decline was triggered by his decision to give in to American and Israeli pressure and withdraw his endorsement of the so-called Goldstone report, the United Nations' Human Rights Council-sponsored investigation into atrocities and war crimes committed by Israel and Hamas during the war over Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009. Abbas subsequently reversed course. But his credibility hasn't. He squandered what had been a brief reversal of fortune between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.

Opting not to run for reelection was therefore not quite a surprise, especially in light of what may happen next: elections scheduled for January may not take place as long as Hamas chooses to boycott them, or as long as Fatah chooses to use Hamas' position as an excuse not to hold the elections. That would enable Abbas to stay in his post indefinitely, much as his predecessor, Yasser Arafat, never a friend of democratic processes, did. Abbas may have stumbled on a way to look like he is protesting without actually doing so. Whether Palestinians buy the act is another story.

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Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Quitting Act originally appeared on About.com Middle East Issues on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 15:47:40.

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Extraordinary Verdict Against CIA in Rendition Case

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:56:11 +0000

Air Rendition: One of the planes operated by the CIA's front, North Carolina-based Aero Contractors, believed to have been used in CIA renditions of suspected terrorists to third countries such as Egypt. The European Union has documented more than 1,200 illegal CIA flights in European air space. (Photo by Pavel Horejsi/Getty Images)

Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, is an Egyptian cleric and member of al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, the Egyptian group chiefly responsible for the assassination of Anwar el Sadat in 1981. Nasr was living in Italy to avoid arrest following the designation of al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya as a terrorist organization by the Egyptian and American governments.

On Feb. 17, 2003, while he was walking to his mosque in Milan, Nasr was kidnapped by several CIA agents working in concert with Italian agents. Nasr was subjected to "extraordinary rendition," the illegal practice, utilized by the CIA since the Clinton administration, of kidnapping individuals and rendering them to other countries for imprisonment, and, usually, interrogation and torture by local officials not covered by American prohibitions against torture or illegal imprisonment. Nasr was flown from Italy to Germany through Swiss air space on what was one of at least 1,245 secret C.I.A. flights, some of them involving rendition, during the Bush administration, according to a European Union report.

Nasr was then being rendered from an American military base in Germany to Egypt. Egyptian prisons notorious for their brutality. According to Nasr, he was tortured repeatedly. The Chicago Tribune reproduced a letter he wrote describing his kidnapping and experience at his jailers' hands.

Soon after arriving in Egypt, Nasr wrote,

they presented me with some food and about an hour later they opened the cell door and blindfolded me and tied my hands and took me to an office and the interrogations and torture began, they removed all my clothes and removed the binds on my hands and replaced them with other binds that were like three binds; 2 binds on my hands behind my back and one bind which they tied around one foot so that I was standing on one foot and I would fall to the floor naked as they laughed and lifted me back up and again and again and the electric shocks began as well as the hand beatings and the threats to rape me if I refused to talk and if I held back anything I knew and then they gave some paper and a pen and asked me to write everything about my life and to the day that I departed Egypt and what I did outside Egypt. The interrogations were repeated a number of times.

On Feb. 16, 2007, an Italian judge indicted 26 Americans on kidnapping charges, including an Air Force colonel, along with Nicolo Pollari, who until 2007 was Italy's chief of military intelligence. Three of the Americans were later granted diplomatic immunity.

Today--Nov. 4--the CIA station chief in Milan at the time, Robert Seldon, was convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison while 22 other Americans were given five-year terms. Not one American is going to serve his sentence. They were all tried in absentia. But the convictions carry considerable symbolic force in their repudiation of the Bush administration's unilateral subordination of international law to a form of big-power vigilantism. The convictions are also, implicitly, a repudiation of the Obama administration on that score. Obama has embraced extraordinary rendition as a potential tool of anti-terrorism.

As for Nasr, he was released in 2004, imprisoned again, and released again in early 2007, the charges against him that he belonged to a terrorist organization having been dropped. He's living in Alexandria. "The ruling," The Times reports, "may bear on suits filed by Mr. Nasr and his wife. Mr. Nasr, who is now living in Alexandria, Egypt, is seeking $14 million in damages from the defendants. His wife, Ghali Nabila, is seeking $7.4 million against the Italian authorities 'for their refusal to cooperate' with justice, according to her lawyer, Luca Bauccio. In August the couple also filed a suit with the European Court of Human Rights."

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Extraordinary Verdict Against CIA in Rendition Case originally appeared on About.com Middle East Issues on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 13:56:11.

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Matrix Muhammad: Pre-Loaded

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:51:53 +0000

East Meets West: The Prophet Muhammad in a 17th century Ottoman copy of an early 14th century image from northwestern Iran or northern Iraq. Note the saintly halos, a reflection of Christian Byzantine influence. These days, East and West are about to influence each other by way of Hollywood. (Reproduction from the Biblioth�que nationale de France / virtual exhibits)

Bahrain last year held its first human rights film festival. Dubai has been holding film festivals since 2004. Abu Dhabi has a couple, and if you look hard enough in Jeddah, in puritan Saudi Arabia, film festivals are held there, too, albeit not too successfully.

Not to be outdone, Qatar this year--last week, to be precise--held its first Tribeca Film Festival in Doha, with Robert DeNiro (Tribeca's co-founder) and 31 movies headlining the launch.

The biggest surprise: Qatari investment company Al Noor Holdings' decision to plunk down $150 million for a feature film about the Prophet Muhammad, to be produced by Barrie Osborne, the producer of "The Matrix," the Lord of the Rings series, the violence fest known as "Face/Off" and the delightfully cartoonish "Dick Tracy."

Osborne had Keanu Reeves play the messiah in The Matrix. Reeves isn't about to be Muhammad: Word has it the Muhammad flick will follow the Islamic (though not Koranic) precept against showing the likeness of Muhammad or even his immediate family (no Julia Roberts in the role of Aisha). So it'll be an interesting creative challenge for whoever directs the flick. How to show Muhammad's lives and wives without showing him or them.

It'll also be cause, I hope, for an interesting debate about that rather silly tradition that prohibits depictions of the Prophet (and engenders all sorts of more than silly conflicts and often bloody over it). And it should be cause for debate over the producers' agreement, if there is such an agreement, to subordinate artistic license to religious edict. The artistic work is compromised before it's even begun.

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Matrix Muhammad: Pre-Loaded originally appeared on About.com Middle East Issues on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 11:51:53.

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How Obama and Clinton Caved On Israel's Settlements

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:44:50 +0000

Israel's Illegal Immigrants: Jewish settlers in the illegal encampment of Migron in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank. (Uriel Sinai/Getty Images)

When Barack Obama was elected president precisely a year ago, his stance on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict seemed clear: Israel had to freeze its settlement building. Then talks could proceed. Little by little, like so much else in the Obama agenda, the clarity has given way to prevarication, backtracking and outright surrender.

In May, when his approval was in the 68% range and he was riding even higher on the the momentum of his speech to the Muslim world in Ankara and the anticipation of his speech on the Middle East from Cairo, Obama's first meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put Netanyahu in his place. Obama was sticking to his demand, Netanyahu looked humbled, Palestinians were hopeful.

That didn't last.

_{Netanyahu
(Getty Images)}

By September, after the summer's tea-party and town-hall disinformation jamborees over health care reform and with Obama's approval down to the low 50s, Obama was moving away from the freeze and looking to just get Palestinians and Israelis at the same table. His rhetoric, too, had left the stratosphere and was skimming barely above marshy cliches: "It is past time to stop talking about staring negotiations; it is time to move forward." You think? Move forward he didn't.

By Last Saturday, Obama was out of the picture on the prospect of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, letting his secretary of state, the beleaguered Hillary Clinton, cave for him in one of the most craven displays of spinelessness so far witnessed with this young administration. She not only abandoned all calls for a settlement freeze. She accepted Netanyahu's belligerent refusal to accede to any American demands, characterized his decision to keep building settlements at a slower pace a show of "restraint" (the same word her predecessor used when Israel was killing civilians by the hundreds in a matter of days in Gaza in 2009 and in Lebanon in 2006). Then Clinton called Netanyahu's "restraint" on settlements "unprecedented." She was actually praising Netanyahu's contempt for American demands. If Israel were to end all settlement building, "unprecedented" would be the wrong word. Israel would merely, finally, be beginning to comply with international law, and even then just barely. Actual compliance would require dismantling the settlements, all of which are illegal according to the United Nations, not just the 100-odd "outposts."

_{Clinton
(Getty Images)}

Clinton wasn't finished. "And," The Times noted, "she conspicuously avoided criticizing the demolition of Palestinians' houses in East Jerusalem, though she said her opposition to it had not changed." Some opposition. It's not the first time Clinton has displayed indifference toward the West Bank.

Arab states did their bit of criticism as Clinton made her way to Morocco, where she got chummy with that country's little dictator (who took a vacation from his endless vacations and made an effort to be in the country for a change, to attend the Forum on the Future)

When Clinton was asked about the criticism over her about-face, she resorted to child-care language--from a written statement: "I will offer positive reinforcement to either of the parties when I believe they are taking steps that support the objective of reaching a two-state solution."

Positive reinforcement isn't what the two sides need at this point. A pliant, spineless mediator isn't what they need. What they need is pressure and demands backed up by threats: The United States bankrolls Israel's economy and military to the tune of $3 billion a year, and the Palestinian Authority to the tune of $815 million. Most of the aid to Israel is military. Much of it subsidizes Israel's military occupation of the West Bank.

The money can--and morally should--be withheld if Israel continues to refuse to budge on settlements.

But Netanyahu knows the money weapon isn't in the arsenal of an American president. At least not those who continue to defer to Israeli presumptions at the cost of American interest and Palestinian rights.

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How Obama and Clinton Caved On Israel's Settlements originally appeared on About.com Middle East Issues on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 20:44:50.

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Obama's Afghanistan: From Nightmare to Inferno

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 15:29:12 +0000

Taliban Poster Child: Afghan President Hamid Karzai's virtual re-election by dismal turnout and crooked means gives the Taliban marketing machine fresh recruiting tools. (Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)

Afghanistan's Abdullah Abdullah, the only credible challenger to incumbent President Hamid Karzai, made official what was reported yesterday: he's withdrawing from the run-off election planned for Nov. 7. Karzai is re-elected by default.

By hook and by crook, too. As Abdullah put it on Sunday, a "transparent election is not possible." And Karzai refuses to accede to Abdullah's one demand in order to remain in the process: the wholesale reform of the electoral process. Reforming that process should be a no-brainer following the lobotomized election in August. According to Democracy International, which monitored the Afghan election, just 4.34 million legitimate votes were cast in a country with a population of 33 million and 15 million eligible voters. Karzai got just 2 million of those votes, or 13% of the electorate, after almost 1 million votes cast for him were invalidated. Abdullah got 1.4 million after some 192,000 votes cast for him were invalidated.

Many reasons led to the dismal turnout. The Taliban's brutal tactics of intimidation and outright murder on election day kept voters home. NATO and American forces proved incapable opf securing the country for the vote anymore than they've proved capable of securing it for daily life. The process itself was a sham. Most Afghans knew it going in, so they didn't go in at all. They're not about to go in in larger numbers should the run-off be held.

Yet that's just what Karzai appeared to be wanting. His government's legitimacy is nil. He might have thought that by holding the runoff anyway, a runoff that has little chance of being any more legitimate than the August vote, his re-election will somehow get a cloak of legitimacy.

Don't bet on it. Afghanistan's experiment in democracy is over. Karzai is emerging out of this as a corrupt, irascible, thuggish strongman wannabe. The Taliban is jubilant. Karzai makes the Taliban's case that he has no legitimacy other than as an instrument of western powers who can't keep western bombs from killing Afghan civilians and can't make good on the pretenses of legitimately representing Afghans.

[Nov. 2 Update: The run-off was canceled.]

It's bad news for Afghans. It's equally bad news for the Obama administration, which is trying to make the unwinnable decision of sending more troops to Afghanistan--or not. For even the 64,000 Americans and 35,000 other non-Afghan troops there now, what's the aim, what's being defended, when the symbol of Afghanistan is Hamid Karzai, the poster child of Taliban recruiting?

Afghanistan was, with Pakistan, Obama's biggest foreign policy challenge. It's just gotten much worse, because it's now domestic policy, too. Every military family with a son or a daughter in Afghanistan or heading there (or worse: with a son who doesn't come back) will be asking him: what the hell for?

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Obama's Afghanistan: From Nightmare to Inferno originally appeared on About.com Middle East Issues on Sunday, November 1st, 2009 at 15:29:12.

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Karzai Wins Dirty as Abdullah Quits Run-Off in Afghan Election

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 21:42:50 +0000

Calling It Off: Abdullah Abdullah won't be in the run-off against Afghan President Hamid Karzai, whose corrupt regime is emboldened and embittered. (Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)

Abdullah Abdullah will not be the next president of Afghanistan. He won't even pursue a second election. The run-off incumbent president Hamid Karzai finally agreed to last week, after much inelegant and transparently corrupt prevarication, won't take place. Abdullah planned to withdraw by Sunday, though it was not clear on Saturday whether he would do so quietly or by denouncing Karzai.

If denunciations are in the air, the Afghan government, no longer legitimate or barely so, faces more than a political crisis. Some violence could result from Abdullah's decision. If Abdullah concedes on American terms (the Obama administration wants him to go quietly), Karzai doesn't emerge more legitimate, but still does so less shakily: he won't have a civil war on his hands. Either way, it's a deflated ending to an election clearly stolen.

But it's not a stunner: there was speculation all along that Abdullah would not keep challenging Karzai for the presidency of Afghanistan: Abdullah would pull out and call the whole thing a sham, he would work out a power-sharing deal with Karzai, Karzai would convince him to concede by granting Abdullah's demand that the whole electoral process be reformed.

And nobody, as The Economist put it last week, really wants a second election, "not Mr Karzai, who fears that his voters will not come out again; probably not Mr Abdullah, who has declared himself open to other options; not the Afghan electorate, who will be asked again to brave the Taliban's death threats; not the UN, which must manage the arduous logistics of organising another ballot with winter closing in; and not NATO troops, who will risk their lives for an election that may not be any cleaner than the last."

As it turns out, Abdullah is getting neither a power-sharing deal nor the concessions from Karzai that he was seeking (a revamp of the election law). He's getting nothing but the celebrity status of an opposition leader railroaded by seemingly democratic instruments machinated into anti-democratic cudgels.

The election was a sham. A run-off would likely have been no less of one. Karzai's legitimacy, so tangible in 2002, is in tatters. So is that of the government he controls rather thuggishly now. The British prime minister called Karzai's decision to accept a run-off "statesman"-like. There was nothing statesman about it. Karzai gave in to American and Western pressure unhappily and resentfully. His ostensible "win" now that Abdullah has withdrawn will ensure that a more embittered and emboldened Karzai will run government even more like the mob boss he was becoming.

It's bad news for Afghanistan, and paradoxically bad news but the only news the Obama administration was really ready to deal with. Karzai, like so many illegitimate (because unelected, or elected by sham) leaders across the Middle East, is a known entity. But all that says is that Obama is as comfortable as his predecessor(s) dealing with known and knowingly bad entities. It's bad news for the United States, at least for those in the United States who imagined a different approach in Obama. Day after day, from Iran to Afghanistan to Iraq to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Obama administration is looking like spruced up Bush. More eloquence. Same old deals. Is it any wonder the Middle East looks no closer to breakthroughs under Obama than it did under Bush? Only Karzai smiles.

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Karzai Wins Dirty as Abdullah Quits Run-Off in Afghan Election originally appeared on About.com Middle East Issues on Saturday, October 31st, 2009 at 21:42:50.

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Dictatorial Dynasty in Egypt: From One Mubarak to Another

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 23:59:33 +0000

Face Time with Bigwigs: Gamal Mubarak, Hosni Mubarak's son (right), debates with (from left) Middle East envoy Tony Blair, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in a BBC World Debate at the 2008 World Economic Forum on the Middle East in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. (Salah Malkawi/ Getty Images)

Among North Africa's Dictators' Row--Mohammed VI in Morocco, Abdelaziz Bouteflika in Algeria, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Muammar el Qaddafi in Libya and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt--Mubarak, at 81, is the oldest, longest-serving, and next to Qaddafi (depending on Qaddafi's mood), most repressive of the bunch, though they all, with Qaddafi's exception, pay lip service to democratic and humanitarian reform to stay on the lucrative side of American aid and weaponry.

Mubarak, in power 27 years and the quote unquote winner of five consecutive six-year terms as president, is feeling his age. He rose to power as Anwar el Sadat's vice president. But Mubarak never appointed a vice president of his own, fearing that of he did so he would not only seem to be grooming a successor, but encouraging one to succeed him before he was willing. Dictators don't like competition.

But even this latest of pharaoh knows he's not immortal. Since the earlier part of the decade, Mubarak seems to have been grooming his son Gamal, now 46, for the job. Gamal's debutant ball was the 2002 National Democratic Party convention (the NDP is the president's party; it uses the word "democratic" the way North Korea and the old East Germany, among other dictatorships, have used the word: as an unfunny inside joke). Back then Mubarak p�re decreed the establishment of something called the Policies Secretariat and made Gamal its chief. It was a fancy way of dressing up nepotism in an important-sounding job, though in reality the job was little more than resume-padding in the shadow of the father's allies.

Egyptians like to laugh. But they know when the joke is on them, too.

In the 2005 parliamentary elections, the Muslim Brotherhood was banned from running, as are any parties that hint at challenging Mubarak's rule, so it fielded independent candidates as much as the Brotherhood could within the constraints of Egypt's byzantine electoral laws--and won 20 percent of the People's Assembly. Mubarak was thoroughly embarrassed, so he decided to give his political party a face-lift. Gamal would be its Botox. Wouldn't you know it: He went and got the NDP a Facebook page, though at 179 members (in a country of more than 80 million), it looks like Gamal is having trouble making friends. He also reportedly started a Flickr page and put up a few videos on YouTube.

It's not that Gamal wouldn't make a good president, or at least a better president than his father has been. The son believes, at least outwardly, in more liberal economic policies. He is younger, more dynamic, more interested (and less fearful) of engaging in diplomacy. But say what you will: the son of a dictator inheriting power is still inheriting a dictatorship. Egypt can do better. It needs better, if it's to pull out of its phlegmatic poverty and perhaps help pull the rest of the Arab world out of its anti-democratic stupor.

The NDP is having its annual convention this very weekend. Supposedly conventioneers won't be talking succession. But like all else in Egyptian politics, there's what you say for public consumption, and what you do behind closed doors. Of course succession is on everyone's lips. It's time for strategy at the NDP.

The reason: Egyptians aren't exactly thrilled by the Mubarak dynasty. They don't have much choice. Mubarak has the guns and the torture chambers (Egyptian prisons are notorious dens of brutality). But where they do, they show it. Two weeks ago opposition leader Ayman Nour, who's known Mubarak's prisons firsthand, launched the Egyptian Campaign Against Tawreeth, or inherited power. It's a risky move. He could land in prison again. Mubarak need only wince.

But Mubarak may need to be careful, too. Too heavy a hand before the scheduled 2011 presidential election in Egypt and he may invite more formidable opponents into the race, like Mohammed El Baradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency and Nobel laureate, who is Egyptian and has been under some pressure by reformists to run.

You can bet that Egypt's neighboring dictators are watching avidly. What happens to one of their own may well have repercussions across Dictators' Row. The last thing they want is an effective democratic movement that takes hold in the Arab world's most populous country--and blows westward. Not that what five men want should matter so much. What 166 million people think and live with should matter more. For now, it unfortunately doesn't, and North Africa's dictators are doing their best to keep it that way.

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Dictatorial Dynasty in Egypt: From One Mubarak to Another originally appeared on About.com Middle East Issues on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 23:59:33.

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Will Hillary Clinton Dare Unveil Morocco's Hypocrisy?

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:10:38 +0000

Hosting Repression: Then-President Bill Clinton with Mohammed VI, Morocco's dictator (with Don Johnson shave, third from left), before a state dinner at the White House on June 20, 2000. Lalla Meryem and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton flank the men. (White House Pool Photo via Getty Images)

When U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton travels to Morocco on Nov. 2, will she publicly protest Moroccan King Mohammed VI's latest crackdown, this time of the press? (He's witch-hunted Shiites and gays previously.)

Clinton is attending the 6th Forum for the Future, one of those high-minded gatherings of high-titled viziers launched in 2004 to "help establish an environment conducive to an informal, flexible, open and inclusive dialogue" in the Middle East. How ironic, then, how hypocritical that this year's conference is being hosted by speech-crushing Morocco, where not even a news conference about freedom of speech can be held in peace.

_{Where the news conference should have been held}

Reporters Without Borders on Oct. 28 attempted to hold just such a conference in Casablanca. Communications Minister had approved the event, which was to be held at the Royal Al-Mansour Hotel. Note the repressive seal of approval from the start: in countries that marginally respect the press, communications ministers don't exist, and when they do, they don't presume to be gatekeepers to press conferences.

Let that one pass. When Reporters Without Borders' Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Jean-Fran�ois Julliard attempted to give his news conference, he was barred from doing so at the agreed meeting room. So Julliard held it in the hotel lobby.

"Reporters Without Borders came to express its support for Moroccan journalists, who are currently being subjected to an avalanche of lawsuits and prosecutions, and to demonstrate its solidarity with Idriss Chahtane, the managing editor of the newspaper Al-Michaal, who is in prison," Julliard said.

_{Where the press conference was held}

"The fact that this news conference could not be held in a normal fashion is a clear indication of government tension and the delicate nature of this situation. The communication minister felt he had been duped about the latest Reporters Without Borders press freedom index and about its press releases, and did not want to see us."

Duped? By facts? In the past 10 years, Moroccan journalists have been sentenced to a total of 25 years in prison and news media have been fined a total of $3 million, according to a Reporters Without Borders survey of Mohammed VI's decade in power.

Julliard added: "We further intend to formally refer the difficulties and lack of media diversity to US secretary of state Hillary Clinton before her first official visit to Morocco for the Forum of the Future being held in Marrakesh on 2-3 November."

Good luck. The Obama administration has been no more inclined to press for greater liberties in the Middle East than its predecessor, which created the Forum of the Future. It's been mostly words--the clunky and heavy handed words of George W. Bush, the elegant and inspiring words of Barack Obama. But at the end of the day, the Middle East today, including Morocco, is either equally or more repressive than it was a decade ago and making strides to nowhere. Shame on people like Mohammed VI, of course, who pretend to be more enlightened than they are. But shame, too, on people like Bush, Obama and Clinton, whose forums of the future presume to press for change while merely giving cover to all-too familiar repressions.

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Will Hillary Clinton Dare Unveil Morocco's Hypocrisy? originally appeared on About.com Middle East Issues on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 08:10:38.

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Powerbroker Warlord: Afghanistan's Abdel Rashid Dostum

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:47:36 +0000

Don't Mess With Dostum: Abdel Rashid Dostum is among Afghanistan's most feared and least scrupulous warlords. He serves in President Hamid Karzai's government. (Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)

Rashid Dostum is one of Afghanistan's pre-eminent warlords, power brokers, and current deputy commander in chief of the Afghan National Army, a largely ceremonial post granted him by Afghan President Hamid Karzai in exchange for Dostum's political support (which appears to be paying off: Karzai looks set to keep his presidency, corrupt though he and the process leading to his electoral victory have been).

Dostum was a brutal general fighting alongside Soviet forces during most of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Dostum switched sides late in the war, joining the mujahideen and, subsequently, leading the fight against the Taliban with characteristic ruthlessness. Dostum's checkered, bloody past sums up the nature of rule-by-warlord in Afghanistan.

Read a complete profile of Dostum.

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Powerbroker Warlord: Afghanistan's Abdel Rashid Dostum originally appeared on About.com Middle East Issues on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 17:47:36.

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