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Middle Eastern Revolutions!

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by SurgeryXdisaster, Jan 26, 2011.

  1. punkmar77

    punkmar77 Experienced Member Uploader Experienced member


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    Nov 13, 2009
     United States
    Re: Riots in Cairo

    Libya protests: 84 killed in growing unrest, says HRW


    The number of people killed in three days of protests in Libya has risen to 84, according to the New York-based group Human Rights Watch.

    The main focus of the demonstrations against Col Muammar Gaddafi's 42-year rule has been the second city Benghazi, where security forces are said to have attacked protesters again on Saturday.

    On Friday, one hospital in the city reported 35 deaths.

    State media have warned of retaliation if the unrest continues.

    Media restrictions make it difficult to verify reports independently but the BBC has confirmed that websites including Facebook and al-Jazeera Arabic were blocked.

    Security forces opened fire in Benghazi on Friday when protesters approached a compound used by Col Gaddafi when he visits the city, which is about 1,000 km (600 miles) from the capital Tripoli, eyewitnesses say.

    * Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has led since 1969
    * Population 6.5m; land area 1.77m sq km
    * Population with median age of 24.2, and a literacy rate of 88%
    * Gross national income per head: $12,020 (World Bank 2009)

    The city's al-Jala hospital received the bodies of 35 people killed in the shooting, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW) and media reports.

    In a statement on its website, HRW says there were demonstrations in at least four other eastern cities on Friday - al-Bayda, Ajdabiya, Zawiya, and Darnah - after security forces shot dead a number of protesters in the previous days.

    A senior hospital official told the group: "We put out a call to all the doctors in Benghazi to come to the hospital and for everyone to contribute blood because I've never seen anything like this before."

    A Benghazi resident told Reuters news agency early on Saturday that many protesters were still camped outside the courthouse. Later another eyewitness told the Associated Press that special forces had fired tear gas and cleared the area.

    Benghazi residents also told the BBC on Saturday that security forces had taken critics of the government from their homes.

    In al-Bayda, video footage showed bloodstained bodies in a mortuary and protesters torching a municipal building and demolishing a statue of Col Gaddafi's Green book.

    In Darnah, east of al-Bayda, police stations are said to have been evacuated. Oea newspaper, owned by one of Col Gaddafi's sons, reported that demonstrators had lynched two policemen in the city.

    One protester told the BBC that soldiers had switched sides in some areas and joined the demonstrations. "The soldiers say we are citizens of this country and we cannot fight our citizens," he said.
    'Red lines'

    No major disturbances have been reported in the capital Tripoli, where pro-Gaddafi supporters have been demonstrating.

    Amid the crackdown, the semi-independent Quryna newspaper reported that the government would replace many state executives and decentralise and restructure the government.

    It was unclear whether the political move was in response to growing unrest.

    Earlier, the pro-government Al-Zahf Al-Akhdar newspaper threatened that the authorities would "violently and thunderously respond" to the protests.

    "The people's power, the Jamahiriya [system of rule], the revolution, and Colonel Gaddafi are all red lines and those who try to cross or come near these lines are suicidal and playing with fire," it said.

    Col Gaddafi is the Arab world's longest-serving leader, having ruled oil-rich Libya since a coup in 1969.

    Libya is one of several Arab countries to have experienced pro-democracy demonstrations since the fall of long-time Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in January. Egypt's Hosni Mubarak was forced from power on 11 February.

    The British Foreign Office is now advising UK citizens against all but essential travel to Benghazi, Ajdabiya, al-Bayda, al-Marj, Darnah, Ajdabiya, Tobruk and areas bordering Sudan, Chad, Niger and Algeria.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12512536
     
  2. punkmar77

    punkmar77 Experienced Member Uploader Experienced member


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    Nov 13, 2009
     United States
    Re: Riots in Cairo

    Graphic video of army opening fire on peaceful protesters in Bahrain

    [video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3WRKoZPPao[/video]
     
  3. Bakica

    Bakica Experienced Member Experienced member Forum Member


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    Feb 21, 2010
     
    Re: Riots in Cairo

    What the fuck ? Army has no brain at all. Fuck those people who listen to everything that royal family says.
     
  4. punkmar77

    punkmar77 Experienced Member Uploader Experienced member


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    Nov 13, 2009
     United States
    Re: Riots in Cairo

    [video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zlt7nOs4Cs[/video]

    I am going to start a new thread on Middle East Revolutions and transfer this thread to it....
     
  5. punkmar77

    punkmar77 Experienced Member Uploader Experienced member


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    This is a thread that will include the rapidly spreading revolutionary spirit that has emanated from Tunisia and Egypt.
    Bahrain, Syria, Iran, Libya, Palestine, Sudan, and many other Arab nations are in transition. The 'Riots in Cairo' thread has been merged here as well...
     
  6. punkmar77

    punkmar77 Experienced Member Uploader Experienced member


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    Nov 13, 2009
     United States
    The Arab Revolt Spreads To Kuwait

    [video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPTDP-XhjMI[/video]
     
  7. Bakica

    Bakica Experienced Member Experienced member Forum Member


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    Feb 21, 2010
     
    This is becoming more like patriotic revolution, but it's ok, they have many problems - they deserve better live.
     
  8. punkmar77

    punkmar77 Experienced Member Uploader Experienced member


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    Nov 13, 2009
     United States
    Libya: Colonel Gaddafi 'flees' to Venezuela as cities fall to protesters

    Credible Western intelligence reports say that Muammar Gaddafi has fled Libya and is on his way to exile in Venezuela, according to William Hague, the foreign secretary (of the UK)

    Following an emergency EU meeting of foreign ministers on the situation in Libya, Mr Hague was asked if Britain, or other Western countries, knew if Col. Gaddafi had left Tripoli.

    “About whether Col. Gaddafi, is in Venezuela, I have no information that says he is although I have seen some information that suggests he is on his way there,” he said.

    British officials stressed that Mr Hague was referring “not to media reports but information from other channels”. “This is credible information,” said a diplomat.

    Mr Hague said that the foreign office was offering “every possible assistance” to the 3,500 British nationals currently in Libya.

    “There should be restraint instead of violence, dialogue instead of repression in Libya. Human rights should be respected. We are concerned at this stage about our nationals in Libya,” he said.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... sters.html
     
  9. JackNegativity

    JackNegativity Experienced Member Uploader Experienced member Forum Member


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    Nov 9, 2010
     
    One by one, they're going down. Hopefully this trend goes beyond just the middle east. I can't imagine what it would take to bring this about in the USA....too many media opiates to keep the people stupid and distracted.
     
  10. JesusCrust

    JesusCrust Experienced Member Experienced member Forum Member


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    Apr 17, 2010
     
    Gadhafi's Support Crumbles As Libya Protests Continue

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/2 ... 26272.html

    CAIRO -- Deep cracks opened in Moammar Gadhafi's regime Monday, with Libyan government officials at home and abroad resigning, air force pilots defecting and a major government building ablaze after clashes in the capital of Tripoli. Protesters called for another night of defiance against the Arab world's longest-serving leader despite a crackdown.


    At sunset, pro-Gadhafi militia drove around Tripoli with loudspeakers and told people not to leave their homes, witnesses said, as security forces sought to keep the unrest that swept eastern parts of the country - leaving the second-largest city of Benghazi in protesters' control - from overwhelming the capital of 2 million people.

    State TV said the military had "stormed the hideouts of saboteurs" and urged the public to back security forces. Protesters called for a demonstration in Tripoli's central Green Square and in front of Gadhafi's residence, but witnesses in various neighborhoods described a scene of intimidation: helicopters hovering above the main seaside boulevard and pro-Gadhafi gunmen firing from moving cars and even shooting at the facades of homes to terrify the population.

    Youths trying to gather in the streets were forced to scatter and run for cover by the gunfire, said one witness, who like many reached in Tripoli by The Associated Press spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.

    Gadhafi, whose whereabouts were not known, appeared to have lost the support of at least one major tribe, several military units and his own diplomats, including the delegation to the United Nations. Deputy U.N. Ambassador Ibrahim Dabbashi accused Gadhafi of committing genocide against his own people in the current crisis.

    Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called on Gadhafi to "stop this unacceptable bloodshed" and said the world was watching the events "with alarm."

    ADVERTISEMENT

    Warplanes swooped low over Tripoli in the evening and snipers took up position on roofs, apparently to stop people outside the capital from joining protests, according to Mohammed Abdul-Malek, a London-based opposition activist in touch with residents.

    Communications to the capital appeared to have been cut, and residents could not be reached by phone from outside the country. State TV showed video of hundreds of Gadhafi supporters rallying in Green Square, waving palm fronds and pictures of the Libyan leader.

    State TV quoted Gadhafi's son, Seif al-Islam, as saying the military conducted airstrikes on remote areas, away from residential neighborhoods, on munitions warehouses, denying reports that warplanes attacked Tripoli and Benghazi.

    Jordanians who fled Libya gave horrific accounts of a "bloodbath" in Tripoli, saying they saw people shot, scores of burned cars and shops, and what appeared to be armed mercenaries who looked as if they were from other African countries.

    The first major protests to hit an OPEC country - and major supplier to Europe - have sent oil prices jumping, and the industry has begun eyeing reserves touched only after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the first Gulf War in 1991.

    Tripoli was largely shut down Monday, with schools, government offices and most stores closed, except for a few bakeries, said residents, who hunkered down in their homes. Armed members of pro-government organizations called "Revolutionary Committees" hunted for protesters in Tripoli's old city, said one protester named Fathi.

    Members of the militia occupied the city center and no one was able to walk in the street, said one resident who lived near Green Square described a "very, very violent" situation.

    "We know that the regime is reaching its end and Libyans are not retreating," the resident said. "People have a strange determination after all that happened."

    Another witness said armed men dressed in militia uniforms roamed the capital's upscale diplomatic neighborhood and opened fire on a group of protesters gathering to organize a march. People wept over the dead.

    Residents hoped that help would arrive from the other parts of the country.

    The eruption of turmoil in the capital after seven days of protests and bloody clashes in Libya's eastern cities sharply escalated the challenge to Gadhafi. His security forces have unleashed the bloodiest crackdown of any Arab country against the wave of protests sweeping the region, which toppled the leaders of Egypt and Tunisia. At least 233 people have been killed so far, according to New York-based Human Rights Watch.

    British Prime Minister David Cameron, visiting neighboring Egypt, called the Libyan government's crackdown "appalling."

    "The regime is using the most vicious forms of repression against people who want to see that country - which is one of the most closed and one of the most autocratic - make progress," he told reporters in Cairo.

    The heaviest fighting so far has been in the east. Security forces in Benghazi opened fire on Sunday on protesters storming police stations and government buildings. But in several instances, units of the military turned against them and sided with protesters.

    By Monday, protesters had claimed control of the city, overrunning its main security headquarters, called the Katiba.

    Celebrating protesters raised the flag of the country's old monarchy, toppled in 1969 by a Gadhafi-led military coup, over Benghazi's main courthouse and on tanks around the city.

    "Gadhafi needs one more push and he is gone," said Amal Roqaqie, a lawyer at the Benghazi court, saying protesters are "imposing a new reality. ... Tripoli will be our capital. We are imposing a new order and new state, a civil constitutional and with transitional government."

    Gadhafi's son went on state TV in the early hours Monday with a sometimes confused speech of nearly 40 minutes, vowing to fight and warning that if protests continue, a civil war will erupt in which Libya's oil wealth "will be burned."

    "Moammar Gadhafi, our leader, is leading the battle in Tripoli, and we are with him," he said. "The armed forces are with him. Tens of thousands are heading here to be with him. We will fight until the last man, the last woman, the last bullet," Seif al-Islam Gadhafi said.

    He also promised "historic" reforms if protests stop. State TV said Monday he had formed a commission to investigate deaths during the unrest. Protesters ignored the vague gestures. Even as he spoke, the first clashes between demonstrators and security forces in the heart of Tripoli were still raging, lasting until dawn.

    Fire raged Monday at the People's Hall, the main building for government gatherings where the country's equivalent of a parliament holds sessions several times a year, the pro-government news website Qureyna said.

    It also reported the first major sign of discontent in Gadhafi's government, saying Justice Minister Mustafa Abdel-Jalil resigned to protest the "excessive use of force" against unarmed demonstrators.

    There were reports of ambassadors abroad defecting. Libya's former ambassador to the Arab League in Cairo, Abdel-Moneim al-Houni, who resigned his post Sunday to side with protesters, demanded Gadhafi and his commanders and aides be put on trial for "the mass killings in Libya."

    "Gadhafi's regime is now in the trash of history because he betrayed his nation and his people," al-Houni said in a statement.

    A Libyan diplomat in China, Hussein el-Sadek el-Mesrati, told Al-Jazeera, "I resigned from representing the government of Mussolini and Hitler."

    Two Mirage warplanes from the Libyan air force fled a Tripoli air base and landed on the nearby island of Malta, and their pilots - two colonels - asked for political asylum, Maltese military officials said.

    A protest march Sunday night sparked scenes of mayhem in the heavily secured capital. Protesters had streamed into Green Square, all but taking over the plaza and surrounding streets in the area between Tripoli's Ottoman-era old city and its Italian-style downtown.

    That was when the backlash began, with snipers firing from rooftops and militiamen attacking the crowds, shooting and chasing people down side streets, according to witnesses and protesters.

    Gadhafi supporters in pickup trucks and cars raced through the square, shooting automatic weapons. "They were driving like madmen searching for someone to kill. ... It was total chaos, shooting and shouting," said a 28-year-old protester.

    The witnesses reported seeing casualties, but the number could not be confirmed. The witness named Fathi said he saw at least two he believed were dead and many more wounded. After midnight, protesters took over the main Tripoli offices of state-run satellite stations Al-Jamahiriya-1 and Al-Shebabiya, a witness said.

    "Gunfire was echoing across the capital all night last night," said Adel Suleiman, a Jordanian adviser to the Libyan Central Bank governor.

    "I saw scores of burned cars and shops in the capital," said Suleiman, who was among about 260 Jordanians evacuated from Tripoli.

    Mahmoud Shawkat, a 28-year-old computer engineer, said his Libyan neighbor was shot in the head during a protest in Green Square. "I'm not sure if he died," Shawkat said. "I had to flee to the airport."

    A Jordanian engineer who identified himself as Abu Saleh, 30, said armed militias were in Green Square on Monday morning, and many of them appeared to be foreigners from other parts of Africa "who were shooting randomly at people and in the air. Some of them were carrying swords."

    He said he also saw bloodstains on the road on my way to the airport and "pictures of Gadhafi were also torched."

    Fragmentation is a real danger in Libya, a country of deep tribal divisions and a historic rivalry between Tripoli and Benghazi. The system of rule created by Gadhafi - the "Jamahiriya," or "rule by masses" - is highly decentralized, run by "popular committees" in a complicated hierarchy that effectively means there is no real center of decision-making except Gadhafi, his sons and their top aides.

    An expert on Libya said she believed the regime was collapsing.

    "Unlike the fall of the regime in Tunisia and Egypt, this is going to be a collapse into a civil war," said Lisa Anderson, president of the American University in Cairo, and a Libya expert said:

    Seif has often been put forward as the regime's face of reform and is often cited as a likely successor. His younger brother, Mutassim, is the national security adviser, with a strong role in the military and security forces. Another brother, Khamis, heads the army's 32nd Brigade, which according to U.S. diplomats is the best-trained and best-equipped force in the military.

    In Benghazi, cars honked their horns in celebration and protesters in the streets chanted "Long live Libya" on Monday, a day after bloody clashes that killed at least 60 people.

    Benghazi's airport was closed, according to an airport official in Cairo. A Turkish Airlines flight trying to land in Benghazi to evacuate Turkish citizens was turned away Monday, told by ground control to circle over the airport, then to return to Istanbul.

    There were fears of chaos as young men - including regime supporters - seized weapons from the Katiba and other captured security buildings. "The youths now have arms and that's worrying," said Iman, a doctor at the main hospital. "We are appealing to the wise men of every neighborhood to rein in the youths."

    Youth volunteers directed traffic and guarded homes and public facilities, said Najla, a lawyer and university lecturer in Benghazi. She and other residents said police had disappeared from the streets.

    After seizing the Katiba, protesters found the bodies of 13 uniformed security officers inside who had been handcuffed and shot in the head, then set on fire, said a doctor named Hassan, who asked not to be identified further for fear of reprisals. He said protesters believed the 13 had been executed by fellow security forces for refusing to attack protesters.
     
  11. JesusCrust

    JesusCrust Experienced Member Experienced member Forum Member


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    Apr 17, 2010
     
    [video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV22rbo8Itw[/video]
     
  12. Bakica

    Bakica Experienced Member Experienced member Forum Member


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    Feb 21, 2010
     
    Ok, I think I have some mad ideas, that's why I'm going to say what I think. hmm, there are lots of revolutions going on at the moment, including a protests in my country against government influenced by the ones in Africa / wherever. So, here's the thing, there are 2 options

    1) The "leaders" quit, leaving their job to someone else, who is going to be nearly the same as one before. There's always a fight between left and right, liberalists and conservatists. So what I'm trying to say is that we CAN'T achive anything with this kind of revolution, and if we make some changes they won't be enough.

    2) Now, if the government doesn't quit the protest will end / countinue until they realize that there's no point in standing on the streets anymore. Furthermore, there's a possibility that government will change their way of controling us, and that we will eventually like it - and we will like the capitalist system, which will make the things both worse and better. Why ? Well, we will except their ways, becouse it will be "good" but of course it will be just another lie (maybe not, but i think capitalism system can't work, not becouse of money / anything but people and greed).

    So, my point is that erm, I don't really see point in these revolution (I'm not about revolutions in Lybia where dictatorship is still in, but about Europe / USA). A expected revolution, or lets say what I expect it to be, isn't a one-week revolution, but revolution until we are satisfied - until end. That's why it seems like an utopia, and that's why everyone critisize it - but sonner or later they will join us somehow :D
     
  13. Malignance_is_bliss

    Malignance_is_bliss Experienced Member Uploader Experienced member


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    http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Oil-near- ... et=&ccode=

     
  14. punkmar77

    punkmar77 Experienced Member Uploader Experienced member


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    Nov 13, 2009
     United States
    A History of Middle East Mercenaries

    While the protests convulsing Bahrain and Libya this past week occurred in vastly different contexts — and will likely produce very different results — both were met with conspicuously swift crackdowns. And in both cases, reports suggest the Libyan and Bahraini regimes deployed foreign fighters and mercenaries against their own citizens, lethal clashes that left scores wounded and many dead.

    Though difficult to substantiate in the current chaos, reports from eastern Libya, in particular from the city of Benghazi, claim that snipers and militiamen from sub-Saharan Africa gunned down residents on the streets. The Dubai-based al-Arabiya network says some of the guerrillas were Francophone mercenaries recruited by one of the sons of dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Qatar-based al-Jazeera detailed pamphlets circulated to mercenary recruits from Guinea and Nigeria, offering them $2,000 per day to crack down on the Libyan uprising. And, as further reports of defections from the Libyan military filter in, the cornered Gaddafi regime may turn more and more to hired guns from abroad. On television channels and Twitter, frantic rumors circulated about Gaddafi preparing for a mercenary-backed counteroffensive against his opponents. (See pictures of the rise of Libya's Colonel Gaddafi.)

    While the violence appears to have pushed Libya to a tipping point, protests in Bahrain slackened after a week of bloody confrontations between demonstrators and the country's security forces. Sectarian tensions underlie the unrest, with the tiny island kingdom's Sunni Muslim monarchy pitted against the country's predominantly Shi'ite population. A significant segment of the state's security personnel are Sunnis brought in from countries like Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Pakistan to buttress the ruling dynasty's authority. It's a policy that Shi'ites say is symbolic of widespread institutional discrimination in Bahrain, and it played a key role in clashes earlier this month when uncompromising — and often foreign — security forces violently dispersed protesting crowds, killing at least six.

    The popular outrage surrounding the use of these foreign soldiers in the crackdowns isn't surprising, but it's only in the past century that the armies of most of the world's nation-states have actually reflected the demographics of their countries. For centuries before, most militaries contained whole regiments of mercenaries and roving soldiers of fortune and were often staffed by officers from foreign lands. The term freelance — now a feature of journalistic lingo — still carries its original martial connotation from a time when companies of fighting men raised their blades in the service of the highest bidder. (See the top 10 famous protest plazas.)

    Foreign warriors were valued by monarchs wary of their own restive populations and the rivalries and jealousies of local nobles. The great empires of the Middle East all boasted a rank of soldiers drawn (or abducted) from abroad. The Ottomans had the janissaries, mostly young Christians from the Caucasus and the Balkans, who converted to Islam and were reared from an early age to be the Sultan's elite household troops, often forming a powerful political class of their own in various parts of the empire. Elsewhere, the Mamluks, slave warriors from Africa to Central Asia forced into service by Arab potentates, managed to rule a large stretch of the modern Middle East from Egypt to Syria for some 300 years, repulsing the invasions of European crusaders as well as the Mongol hordes.

    The most famous troupe of foreign fighters to take up arms in the Middle East was the French Foreign Legion, formed in the 19th century to be the vanguard of France's imperial adventures overseas. To this day, no outfit of mercenaries attracts the sort of admiration that the legionnaires still do, remembered as the romantic heroes of Beau Geste, a motley pan-European crew braving the wild winds and natives of the North African desert. In reality, the legionnaires, a large number of whom had criminal records, bore a fearsome reputation for violence. One recruit in the 1950s described his compatriots as "panting Dobermans, desperate to be let loose amongst a Muslim crowd which they can tear apart with the fans of their machine guns." The legionnaires were present at some of France's most traumatic defeats in Indochina and Algeria and, though they still exist, their star has dimmed with France's much diminished empire. (Read "European Arab Immigrants Watch Protests Skeptically.")

    Meanwhile, a handful of British mercenaries in the Middle East left a far more indelible legacy, with none of the glory attached to the French Foreign Legion. The oil-rich Gulf states eagerly snapped up former British soldiers to help defend their kingdoms from the advances of socialists and other insurgents, often with London's tacit backing if not direct consent. In the 1960s, Qatar's feared chief of police was Ronald Cochrane, an ex-cop from Glasgow who assumed the name Mohammad Mahdi. Other British soldiers made their way into guerrilla campaigns from Malaya to Angola, enmeshed often in tangled proxy conflicts spawned by the Cold War. One English mercenary, a man identified by a 1972 television crew as Major Ray Barker-Scofield, described his patch of turf in a remote corner of Oman where he was fighting guerrillas on behalf of the government as "the last place in the world where an Englishman is still called a sahib" — in other words, his gig as a mercenary reminded him of the good old days of the British Empire.

    But, especially in the Gulf, these mercenaries played a vital role in setting up the often repressive security states that now exist. The most notorious of these hired officials was Ian Henderson, a former colonial officer who spent years trying to stamp out Kenya's Mau Mau uprising and later became chief of Bahrain's secret police for over three decades until his retirement in 1998. For his alleged involvement in the torture of a host of leftist and Islamist dissidents, Henderson earned the sobriquet "the Butcher of Bahrain." (Comment on this story.)

    According to the Guardian, Henderson's successor is a Jordanian, an appointment in keeping with the ruling dynasty's habit of hiring Sunni expatriates as its protectors. Many are reportedly also Pakistanis from the troubled desert region of Baluchistan, happy to sign up with the promise of greater pay. In an earlier era, Pakistani troops trained the armies of a number of Arab states — in the 1960s, Pakistanis were the first to serve as pilots in the Royal Saudi Air Force, while thousands of Pakistani soldiers patrolled the Saudi border with Israel and Jordan. Their training and expertise, in part the legacy of British colonial rule, proved useful to regimes in the Gulf. Further west in Libya, many of the officers who ousted the country's Western-backed monarchy in 1952 received instruction in schools first set up by the British; one particularly charismatic and ambitious officer had finished his military education in Britain itself. His name was Muammar Gaddafi.

    Read more:

    http://www.time.com/time/specials/packa ... 07,00.html #ixzz1ErLaMsvv

    http://www.time.com/time/specials/packa ... id=fbshare
     
  15. JesusCrust

    JesusCrust Experienced Member Experienced member Forum Member


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    Libya protests: Gaddafi embattled by opposition gains

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12564104

    British oil worker Bryan Richards describes scenes of 'mass hysteria' at Tripoli Airport (The amateur video accompanying this interview is purportedly recent footage of the scene in Libya)
    Continue reading the main story
    Mid-East Unrest

    * What next after Gaddafi?
    * Foreigner evacuation plans
    * Profile: Muammar Gaddafi
    * Who is propping up Gaddafi?

    The area controlled by Libya's embattled leader Col Muammar Gaddafi is shrinking, reports say, but Tripoli is still heavily guarded by his forces.

    Opposition politicians and tribal heads have held a meeting in the eastern town of al-Bayda to show a united front.

    Oil prices have hit their highest level since 2008 as many oil firms in Libya partly suspend production.

    Thousands of foreigners are meanwhile still trying to flee Libya through ports, airports and overland.

    The US, China and many European countries have sent in planes, ships and ferries to help people flee.

    The town of Zuara, 120km (75 miles) west of Tripoli, has reportedly become the latest area to fall to the opposition. There are no police or soldiers left there, witnesses crossing out of Libya have told journalists on the border with Tunisia.

    There is also gunfire reported on the streets of Zawiya, 50km west of the capital.
    'Mayhem'

    Thousands of people, many of them African migrants, also poured across Libya's land borders, in vans piled high with furniture and luggage.
    Map

    British oil worker Bryan Richards was evacuated to Warsaw on what he was told was the Polish presidential plane.

    He described Tripoli airport as "mayhem. No sanitation. Nothing to eat. People have been there for days".

    He told the BBC: "We've come in on Tuesday from the desert. And we walked in to the terminal and couldn't believe what we could see. We couldn't see the end of the terminal for people."
    Advertisement

    Martin Chulov from the Guardian described the scene from within Benghazi

    The BBC's Jim Muir, at Libya's western border with Tunisia, says that most of the 3,000 to 4,000 people who crossed out of Libya on Wednesday were Tunisian or Egyptian migrant workers, not Libyans.

    He says that Libyan border guards have been seizing cameras and mobile phones to prevent images getting out of the country.

    Germany has sent three warships with 600 soldiers on board to the sea area between Malta and Libya, reports the German magazine Spiegel. About 160 German nationals are still in Libya, Spiegel says.

    Oil prices have continued to climb.

    Brent crude hit $119.79 (£74.08) a barrel in early Thursday trade, before falling back to $116.80. Oil firms - including Total, Repsol, OMV and Wintershall - have been suspending all or part of their production in Libya this week.
    Last stand?

    Opposition tribal leaders and politicians met in al-Bayda in the east to demonstrate a united front against Col Gaddafi in one of the first signs of organisation for a bigger fight against the government.

    Pictures broadcast by al-Jazeera showed delegates giving speeches in a conference hall, amid loud chants against Col Gaddafi.


    Former justice minister, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, who recently resigned in protest at the violence against anti-government demonstrators, said there would be no talks with the Libyan leader and called for him to step down immediately.

    In the eastern city of Benghazi, residents have been queuing to be issued with guns looted from the army and police in order to join what they are calling the battle for Tripoli.

    A number of military units in the east say they have unified their command in support of the protesters.

    The BBC's Jon Leyne, in eastern Libya, says Col Gaddafi appears to be in control of an ever smaller area, possibly readying himself for a last stand at his home in Tripoli.

    Reports indicate the area around the capital is heavily guarded by loyalists, including armed militiamen in vehicles, our correspondent says.

    The total number of deaths has been impossible to determine. Human Rights Watch says it has confirmed nearly 300 deaths, but the International Federation for Human Rights says at least 700 people have been killed, while Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said estimates of 1,000 dead were "credible".
    Protesters secure a runway in the eastern town of al-Abrak, 24 Feb Protesters secure a runway in the eastern town of al-Abrak

    A French doctor working in Benghazi, Gerard Buffet, told the BBC the death toll there was at least 2,000.

    He said Col Gaddafi's forces used jet fighters, mortars and rockets to fire on the opposition.

    Col Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam has denied claims that the government launched air strikes against opposition-controlled cities.

    He said reports of deaths among protesters had been exaggerated, and international journalists would be allowed into Libya from Friday to see for themselves.

    US President Barack Obama has denounced the Libyan government's actions as "outrageous and unacceptable".

    He said he had ordered his administration team to prepare the "full range of options" for dealing with the crisis, but gave no details.

    In other developments:

    * Several provincial governors are reported to have defected to the opposition
    * Pro-Gaddafi forces have reportedly clashed with the opposition in Sarathra and Ajdabiya
    * Russia and the European Union jointly condemn the suppression of protests
    * US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will join a meeting of foreign ministers at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday
     
  16. JoeyV

    JoeyV Experienced Member Experienced member Forum Member


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    Sep 23, 2010
     
    TRIPOLI, Libya – Libya declared an immediate cease-fire and promised to stop military operations Friday in a bid to fend off international military intervention after the U.N. authorized a no-fly zone and "all necessary measures" to prevent the regime from striking its own people.

    The announcement by Foreign Minister Moussa Koussa followed a fierce attack by Gadhafi's forces against Misrata, the last rebel-held city in the western half of the country. A doctor said at least six people were killed.

    The U.N. Security Council resolution, which was passed late Thursday after weeks of deliberation, set the stage for airstrikes, a no-fly zone and other military measures short of a ground invasion. Britain announced that it would send fighter jets and France was making plans to deploy planes, but the U.S. had yet to announce what its role would be. NATO also held an emergency meeting.

    With the international community mobilizing, Koussa said the government would cease fire in line with the resolution, although he criticized the authorization of international military action, calling it a violation of Libya's sovereignty.

    "The government is opening channels for true, serious dialogue with all parties," he said during a news conference in Tripoli, the capital.

    The attack on Misrata, Libya's third-largest city, came as the rebels were on the defensive in their eastern stronghold after Gadhafi vowed to launch a final assault and crush the nearly 5-week-old rebellion against him.

    The opposition expressed hope the U.N. resolution would help turn the tide in their favor after days of fierce fighting.

    "We think Gadhafi's forces will not advance against us. Our morale is very high now. I think we have the upper hand," Col. Salah Osman, a former army officer who defected to the rebel side, said. He was speaking at a checkpoint near the eastern town of Sultan.


    The Western powers faced pressure to act urgently after weeks spent deliberation over what to do about Gadhafi as his regime gained momentum. The U.S. has positioned a host of forces and ships in the region, including submarines and destroyers and amphibious assault and landing ships with some 400 Marines aboard. It also could provide a range of surveillance assets.

    In an interview with Portuguese television broadcast just before the U.N. vote, Gadhafi pledged to respond harshly to U.N.-sponsored attacks. "If the world is crazy," he said, "we will be crazy, too."

    The Libyan government closed its airspace to all traffic Friday, according to Europe's air traffic control agency, Eurocontrol.

    Government tanks rolled into Misrata, 125 miles (200 kilometers) southeast of Tripoli, early Friday, shelling houses, hospitals and a mosque for several hours before pulling back to the city's outskirts, witnesses said. At least six people were killed, raising the total death toll in two days of fighting to nine, a local doctor said.

    Misrata is the last rebel holdout in the western half of the country after Gadhafi recaptured a string of other cities that had fallen to the opposition early in the uprising that began Feb. 15. Its fall would leave the country largely divided, with the rebels bottled up in the east near the border with Egypt.

    The city has been under a punishing blockade that has prevented aid ships from delivering medicine and other supplies, the doctor said.

    "They haven't stopped shelling us for a week — we sleep to shelling, and wake up to shelling. They are targeting houses and hospitals," he said, adding the hospital had been overwhelmed.

    "We have had to perform surgeries in the hallways using the light from our cell phones to see what we're doing. We are also using some clinics around the town, some only have 60 beds, which isn't enough," he said.

    Another doctor claimed Gadhafi's forces had surrounded some neighborhoods and were shooting at people who ventured out of their homes. "Militias used two ambulances to jump out of and shoot at innocent people indiscriminately," he said.

    The situation appeared to be calm in Benghazi.

    Col. Osman said Gadhafi's forces had surrounded the nearby city of Ajdabiya, but rebels remained inside.

    The shift toward international action reflected dramatic change on the ground in Libya in the past week. The rebels, once confident, found themselves in danger of being crushed by an overpowering pro-Gadhafi force using rockets, artillery, tanks, warplanes. That force has advanced along the Mediterranean coast aiming to recapture the rebel-held eastern half of Libya.

    Gadhafi troops encircled the city of Ajdabiya, the first in the path of their march, but also had some troops positioned beyond it toward Benghazi, the second largest Libyan city, with a population of about 700,000.

    A large crowd in Benghazi was watching the vote on an outdoor TV projection and burst into cheers, with green and red fireworks exploding overhead. In Tobruk, east of Benghazi, happy Libyans fired weapons in the air to celebrate the vote.

    Libya's unrest began in Benghazi and spread east to Tripoli. Like others in the Mideast, the uprising started with popular demonstrations against Gadhafi, rejecting his 41 years of despotic and often brutal rule. The tone quickly changed after Gadhafi's security in Tripoli forcefully put down the gatherings there.

    Soon rebel forces began arming themselves, quickly taking control of the country's east centered on Benghazi. Some Libyan army units joined the rebels, providing them with some firepower, but much less than Gadhafi's remaining forces.

    There are no reliable death tolls. Rebels say more than 1,000 people have been killed in a month of fighting, while Gadhafi claims the toll is only 150.

    ___

    Lucas reported from Benghazi, Libya. Associated Press writers Slobodan Lekic in Brussels and Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report.



    http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110318/ap_ ... _libya_525
     
  17. JoeyV

    JoeyV Experienced Member Experienced member Forum Member


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    Sep 23, 2010
     
    BENGHAZI, Libya – Moammar Gadhafi warned international forces they would "regret" intervening in Libya and his troops attacked the heart of the 5-week-old uprising on Saturday, swarming the first city seized by the rebels with shells, gunfire and warplanes.

    "Where is France, where is NATO?" cried a 50-year-old woman in Benghazi. "It's too late."

    Leaders from the Arab world, Africa, the United States and other Western powers were holding urgent talks in Paris on Saturday over possible military action after the Libyan government, apparently hoping to outflank the effort, declared a cease-fire.

    On Saturday, a warplane was shot down over the outskirts of the key rebel-held city of Benghazi, sending up a massive black cloud of smoke. An Associated Press reporter saw the plane go down in flames and heard the sound of artillery and crackling gunfire in the distance.

    Before the plane went down, journalists could hear what appeared to be airstrikes from it. Rebels cheered and celebrated at the crash, though the government denied a plane had gone down — or that any towns were shelled on Saturday.

    The fighting galvanized the people of Benghazi, with young men collecting bottles to make gasoline bombs. Some residents dragged bed frames and metal scraps into the streets to make roadblocks.

    At a news conference in the capital, Tripoli, the government spokesman read letters from Gadhafi to President Barack Obama as well as others involved in the international effort.

    "Libya is not yours. Libya is for the Libyans. The Security Council resolution is invalid," he said in the letter to French President Nicolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister David Cameron, and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. "You will regret it if you dare to intervene in our country."

    To Obama, the Libyan leader was slightly more conciliatory: "If you had found them taking over American cities with armed force, tell me what you would do."

    Government spokesman Ibrahim Musa said the rebels are the ones breaking the cease fire by attacking military forces.

    "Our armed forces continue to retreat and hide, but the rebels keep shelling us and provoking us," Musa told The Associated Press.

    In a joint statement to Gadhafi late Friday, the United States, Britain and France — backed by unspecified Arab countries — called on Gadhafi to end his troops' advance toward Benghazi and pull them out of the cities of Misrata, Ajdabiya and Zawiya. It also called for the restoration of water, electricity and gas services in all areas. It said Libyans must be able to receive humanitarian aid or the "international community will make him suffer the consequences" with military action.

    Parts of eastern Libya, where the once-confident rebels this week found their hold slipping, erupted into celebration at the passage of the U.N. resolution. But the timing and consequences of any international military action remained unclear.

    Misrata, Libya's third-largest city and the last held by rebels in the west, came under sustained assault well after the cease-fire announcement, according to rebels and a doctor there. The doctor, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared reprisals, said Gadhafi's snipers were on rooftops and his forces were searching homes for rebels.

    "The shelling is continuing, and they are using flashlights to perform surgery. We don't have anesthetic to put our patients down," said the doctor, who counted 25 deaths since Friday morning.

    Libya's deputy foreign minister, Khaled Kaim, denied late Friday that government forces had violated the cease-fire and invited four nations to send observers to monitor compliance: Germany, China, Turkey and Malta.

    "The cease-fire for us means no military operations whatsoever, big or small," he told reporters in Tripoli.

    He said military forces were positioned outside Benghazi but that the government had no intention of sending them into the city.

    ___

    AP writer Hadeel al-Shalchi contributed to this report from Tripoli, Libya.



    http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/ap_on_re_af/af_libya



    Heres The video:
    http://news.yahoo.com/video/world-15749 ... o=24580442


    Whats your take on all this AP? I'm really Interested to know.

    Do you Think Is was a Good/Bad Decision for U.N. To Interfere with Libya?
     
  18. punkmar77

    punkmar77 Experienced Member Uploader Experienced member


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    Nov 13, 2009
     United States
    Some 500 arrested in Syria crackdown: rights group

    AMMAN (Reuters) – Security forces have arrested some 500 pro-democracy sympathizers across Syria after the government sent in tanks to try to crush protests in the city of Deraa, the Syrian rights organization Sawasiah said on Tuesday.

    The independent organization said it had received reports that at least 20 people had been killed in Deraa since tanks moved in on Monday, but communications with the southern town where the protests against President Bashar al-Assad began on March 18 had been cut making it hard to confirm the information.

    "Witnesses managed to tell us that at least 20 civilians have been killed in Deraa, but we do not have their names and we cannot verify," said a Sawasiah official, adding that two civilians were confirmed dead in the Damascus suburb of Douma, which forces entered earlier in the day.

    At least 500 were arrested elsewhere in Syria, it said.

    Amnesty international, citing sources in Deraa, said at least 23 people were killed when tanks shelled Deraa in what it called "a brutal reaction to people's demands."

    "By resorting to the use of artillery against its own people today, the Syrian government has shown its determination to crush the peaceful protests at virtually any cost, whatever the price in Syrians' lives," said Malcolm Smart, Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa Director.

    Government forces also stormed the Damascus suburbs of Douma and Mouadhamiya on Monday, shooting and making arrests, a day after they swept into the coastal town of Jabla, where at least 13 civilians were killed, rights campaigners said.

    Diplomats said the figures for civilians killed could be as high as 50 in Deraa and 12 in Mouadhamiya, which lies on the road to the occupied Golan Heights southwest of Damascus.

    "The regime has chosen to use excessive violence. It worked in 1982, but there is no guarantee it will work again in the age of the internet and phone cameras," said a senior diplomat referring to the 1982 crushing of a revolt in the city of Hama which killed up to 30,000 people.

    Footage posted on the internet by demonstrators in recent days appears to show troops firing on unarmed crowds. In the Damascus suburb of Barzeh residents described security forces firing at unarmed protesters from a heavy machinegun mounted on a truck.

    The White House, deploring "brutal violence used by the government of Syria against its people," said President Barack Obama's administration was considering targeted sanctions to make clear that "this behavior is unacceptable."

    Syria has been under U.S. sanctions since 2004 for its support of militant groups. Several Syrian officials, among them Assad's cousin Rami Makhlouf, a tycoon, are under specific U.S. sanctions for "public corruption."

    Leading human rights campaigner Suhair al-Atassi said Assad has launched a savage war designed to annihilate Syria's democrats by attacking Deraa, Jabla and Damascus suburbs.

    "President Assad's intentions have been clear since he came out publicly saying he is 'prepared for war'," Atassi said, referring to a March 30 speech to parliament.

    Security forces and the gunmen loyal to Assad have killed more than 350 civilians across Syria since pro-democracy protests broke out in Deraa, rights groups say. A third of the victims were shot in the past four days as the scale and breadth of a popular revolt against Assad grew.

    http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110426/wl_nm/us_syria
     
  19. JackNegativity

    JackNegativity Experienced Member Uploader Experienced member Forum Member


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    Nov 9, 2010
     
    Local news was saying this morning that in addition to using tanks on the protesters, they've been going door-to-door shooting people.
     
  20. SenI

    SenI Experienced Member Uploader Experienced member Forum Member


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    Oct 4, 2009
     Russian Federation
    Understanding the period - Class analysis and events in the Arab world

    Article by the Turkish section of the ICC outlining the nature of the recent events in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya and across the Middle East and trying to draw an understanding of the current situation internationally.
    [​IMG]

    1. What is going on and why it is important to understand it.

    ‘Revolution’, today with the events currently going on in the Arab world this seems to be the word on everybody’s lips. The first thing that it is necessary to understand when discussing the subject is that not everybody means the same thing by it. The term revolution seems to have been completely devalued today so that any change of bosses is deemed a revolution, from the ‘Rose Revolution’ in Georgia to the now called ‘Lotus Revolution’ in Egypt, where not even the bosses have changed, with seventeen of the old twenty-seven cabinet members still in government, we have been treated to a whole series of so-called ‘revolutions’ by the media; the ‘Orange Revolution’ in the Ukraine, the ‘Tulip (or Pink) Revolution’ in Kyrgyzstan along with the ethnic cleansing that accompanied it, the ‘Cedar Revolution’ in Lebanon, the ‘Purple Revolution in Iraq (this one was actually a term used by Bush, which didn’t catch on at all), and the ‘Green Revolution’ in Iran, the list goes on and on.

    For us as communists, a revolution is not just the change in management of the current system. It means a fundamental change of the system and the overthrow of the capitalist class, not just a change of faces. That is why we completely reject the idea that what is happening today in the Arab world and Iran are in any way revolutions. If they are not revolutions though, it raises the question of what the nature of these events actually is. It is not only the mass media that is talking about revolutions but also many of those on the left as well. Are they all wrong? And if they are wrong what do these events mean for the working class?

    2. Putting the events into a historical context.

    If we are to try to understand current events, it is necessary to be able to place them in a historical context. It allows us to understand the balance of power between different classes, and the dynamic of the situation. Certainly over the last decade the working class has began a slow return to combativeness after the dreadful years that were the nineties. However, it would be a terrible mistake to think that class struggle today is at the same level that it was in the 1980s, let alone the 1970s.

    While the past ten years has shown the beginning of a return to class struggle, it must be recognised that it is a very slow process. To put it into context we must look back a few years. The wave of international struggles that began in 1968 were reaching a crescendo at the end of the 1970s. The mass strike was a very real possibility internationally. Possibly the three high points of the period, in chronological order, were the ‘Winter of Discontent’ in the UK in 1978-799, the mass strike in Iran in 1978-79, and the Polish strikes of 1980-81. The defeat of these movements was catastrophic for the working class, and led to the years of the 1980s being years of, not a general class offensive, but of defensive actions. The struggles of the 1980s although at times very intense, essentially involved different groups of workers being picked off, isolated, and defeated.

    The period also saw the rise of neo-conservatism, represented internationally by Reagan, Thatcher, and Kohl, and in this country by Turgut Özal. The end of the decade saw the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the whole ideological campaign, which accompanied it, with bourgeois academics and ideologues proclaiming the end of both class society and even the end of history. How wrong they were, yet for a very, very short while it could have seemed like that, and the lack of class activity in the 1990s only emphasised the point.

    By the turn of the century it was becoming obvious that things were not ging the way they imagined. After Saddam had been defeated for the first time, and this new era of global peace had broken out, the rest of the decade, after the end of history brought over fifty wars across the world, and as the crisis deepened, not openly as in the past few years, but slowly, creeping up, hitting some countries like ours and Argentina dramatically, we began to see the working class return to struggle.

    Of course it came slowly, ten years without class struggle, after ten years of defeat had taken a terrible toll on the working class. A lost generation, remember how people said in Turkey “Don’t talk about politics, it is dangerous”, meant a loss of vital experience within the class.

    Although the last decade has seen this slow increase in struggles, they had still until very recently still been generally struggle of isolated groups of workers. The past few years, however, have seen a growing realisation that in order to win workers have to fight together. Witness the TEKEL movement here, or even in Americas, for so long a backwater of class struggle, generalised attacks are leading to a generalise response with masses of workers supporting Wisconsin teachers, and many calls for a general strike. It is in this framework of understanding that we have to try to comprehend the events going on today, and too do this we need to look at a couple of recent large scale struggles.

    3. Putting the events into the context of recent struggles.

    The current struggles in the Arab world are, in our opinion, certainly not struggles where the working class is the leading force. This does not mean that masses of workers are not participating in them, but that the working class has not been able to assert itself as a class, and has ended up being dragged along within an agenda set by others, and in Libya today we see the disastrous consequences of this with workers on both sides enthusiastically joining up with what is effectively a civil war on behalf of different bosses. We think that it would be instructive at this point to try to situate the events in relation to the recent movement in Greece and Iran.

    4. Greece

    The movement in Greece in December of 2008 erupted after a fifteen year-old anarchist was shot dead by two policemen on a Saturday night. Within an hour of the murder violent confrontations with the police had begun in the area around Exarcheia Square in Athens, an area which is traditionally a stronghold of the anarchist movement. By the end of the evening confrontations had occurred in nearly thirty different locations across Greece. The next day the demonstrations continued, and on Monday morning thousands of high school students walked out and demonstrated outside of police stations.

    On the Wednesday following the shooting there was a general strike involving over a million workers. This strike, however, was not in response to the murder or the demonstrations, but had been organised prior to these events. In fact the country at the time was also in a period of large scale labour unrest due to the government’s economic policies. It is in this context that we need to try to understand the weakness of the Greek movement.

    Despite their being widespread anger against the government’s policies and the mass protests over the murder of a child, the two never seemed to connect. The only strike in support of the protest movement was a half day strike of primary school teachers. Although there were of course many workers involved in the protests, the workers did involve themselves as workers, but on an individual level. This is not to say that attempts weren’t made to link the struggle to the working class. Militants occupied the HQ of the General Confederation of Greek Workers in Athens and called for a general strike. And yet the working class didn’t move as a class, and ultimately the protests died out.

    We see this as a recurring theme in today’s struggles, large scale protest movements without any real input from the working class. If we go back to the struggles that we mentioned earlier, in the UK, Iran, and Poland, it is clear that the working class played a central role. In these struggles today that is not the case. Why it is not the case and what it means for struggles in the current period is a crucial question. Before we attempt to analyse it, we will first look at another example, the struggles in Iran following the elections of the summer of 2009.

    5. Iran

    In June 2009, following allegations of electoral fraud, mass demonstrations broke out in the streets of Tehran, and rapidly spread across the entire country. The state reacted viciously and unleashed its repressive forces resulting in hundreds of deaths. Whilst the initial protests were clearly fermented by anger caused by the obvious fraud in the elections, more radical slogans began quickly to emerge.

    Similar to the movement in Greece we saw massive violent clashes with the forces of the state, this time on an even larger scale, but again we saw workers involved as individuals and not as workers. Although information was hard to come by, it seems that there was only one strike, at the Khodro car factory, which is the biggest factory in Iran, all three shifts walked off for an hour each, in protest against state repression. As in Greece the movement on the streets lasted for a few weeks and then faded out.

    In March of 2007 there were massive workers struggles, which started with a 100,000 strong teachers strike, and spread to many other sectors continuing for months. Yet two years ago the working class didn’t move despite the massive repression the state unleashed against the demonstrations, most of the participants in which were working class people.

    Without the strength of the working class behind them, movements such as this have a tendency to wear themselves out. If we look back to the period at the end of the 1970s in Tehran, by the autumn of 1978 the movement seemed to have exhausted itself. A popular movement, similar to those we see today, including all of the disposed, but also other classes seemed to be running out of steam. It was in October when the working class entered the struggle with massive strikes, particular those in the vital oil sector, that the situation changed, and revolution seemed to be a real possibility, workers councils were formed and the government fell. After Khomeni took power, the state spent the next few years struggling against the workers committees in the factories.

    Of course, we could have talked about other popular struggles, the ‘Red Shirt’ movement in Thailand being a prime example, again another mass movement mobilising tens, even hundreds of thousands of people, many of them workers, against the state, another movement that lasted a few weeks, and then burnt out, and another movement where workers weren’t involved as a class.

    6. What were our perspectives before the movement in the Arab world?

    How did we characterise the period before the recent series of revolts that has spread across the Arab world, and to what extent were we right? Basically we perceived of the current period as one in which the working class was slowly recovering its will to struggle. The reopening of open economic crisis across the world in 2007, certainly changed this dynamic somewhat, but not substantially. It is very clear that it caused a momentary dip in working class confidence with workers being afraid to struggle due to the possibility of losing their jobs. However this can be counterbalanced by the vast number of workers who were forced to struggle due to the severity of the bosses’ economic attacks. Also important was the lack of experience within the working class itself, and the lack of workers consciousness of their power as a class.

    The mass outburst of struggle in countries including, but not only, Greece and Iran were seen in this context. The mass austerity programmes taking place across the world were seen as likely to force the working class into struggle and not only the working class, but also other disposed classes, witness the mass food riots in various countries across the world in 2007-08. However we believed that the working class was not yet strong enough to take a definitive role in these struggles. Of course, it was always possible that something could happen and the working class would impose itself on a struggle. “The day before a revolution nothing seems more unlikely. The day after the revolution nothing seems less likely” said Rosa Luxemburg. However we felt that the development of working class consciousness and strength would be a slow process, punctuated by mass revolts where the working class would be unable to play the central role.

    Then on 17th December last year a young man burnt himself to death in idi Bouzid in Tunisia, and the world seemed to change.

    7. Tunisia

    Following Mohamed Bouaziz self-immolation outside the town hall hundreds of youths gathered to protest and were met by tear gas and violence. Riots broke out. As the scale of the protests increased the town was sealed off by the state. It was too late though the fire had already begun to spread. Four days later there was rioting in Menzel Bouzaiene, and within a week in the capital Tunis. After 28 days President Ben Ali had run off to Malta on the way to his new refuge in Saudi Arabia.

    The thing that we need to analyse here as communists is the class nature of this revolt. Many commentators in the mainstream press have drawn an analogy with the events of Eastern Europe twenty years ago when the bosses were changed across eastern Europe, and with the more recent ‘colour revolutions’. For us the class nature is of central importance.

    The causes of the revolt seem to be widespread discontent amongst the working class, mass unemployment and low wages as well as anger against a kleptocratic government. Certainly the demands of the movement were centred on working class demands concerning jobs and wages, and of course anger at the resulting police repression played a huge part. Mass youth unemployment and a overwhelmingly young demographic lead to much of the movement being centred around rioting and street protest of, mainly, unemployed youth. However, there were also big workers strikes particularly amongst teachers and miners as well as a general strike in Sfax. The state also used lockouts in the attempt to stop the strikes spreading, a tactic that we will see used again in Egypt. Also we saw the UGTT, the regimes union confederation, taking the side of the struggles and seeming to ‘radicalise’, a sure sign that there was widespread struggle amongst the working class.

    It seems clear to us that in the events in Tunisia, although not exclusively, represented on the whole a working class movement. In Egypt this would be less so with the working class still playing an important role, and in Libya the working class would be conspicuous by its absence.

    To return to the events in Libya though, after the fall of Ben Ali, a ‘Unity Government’ was announced, with 12 members of Ben Ali’s RCD, plus the President and Prime Minister who had just quit the party in an attempt to gain credibility, , three representatives from the trade unions and a few individual representatives of small opposition parties. Despite the Prime Minister’s assurance that all members of the RCD in the government had ‘clean hands’, the protests continued. The union representatives resigned after a day in office, obviously keen on keeping their new found credibility, and the rats started to leave the RCD like a sinking ship with its central committee disbanding itself on the 20th.

    And as protests continued in Tunisia and people continued to protest, and governments continued to fall, a spark had been lit.

    8. Egypt

    Algeria saw the first signs of flames with large scale rioting hitting many cities in early January, but it was in Egypt that the fire really started to burn. The first protests were held on National Police Day, 25th January. The protests were widely advertised on social media, and particularly through Asmaa Mahfouz’ , a female journalist, you tube video going viral. The media have picked up on all this calling it a ‘FaceBook revolution’, but it is worth remembering that hundreds of thousands of leaflets were also distributed by various groupings.

    The protests on the 25th drew tens of thousands of people in Cairo, and thousands of others in cities across Egypt. As the movement grew there became a real possibility of Mubarak falling just as Ben Ali had done. The government closed workplaces with a clear intention of stopping workers strikes breaking out. There seemed to be splits within the state as the military as an organisation, not individual troops on the ground, refused to fire live ammunition. Mubarak promised to form a new government, then promised that he would step down at the next elections in September. Meanwhile the protests continued. On 2nd Febuary, the ministry of the interior organised an assault of the demonstrations by Mubarak loyalists. The army stepped in, although at times somewhat half heartedly, to divide the twp sides, clearly preparing the way for if Mubarak was forced to go. The next week, the reopening of workplaces meant the reopening of workers strikes Workers in many different industries in Cairo and across the delta began strikes. These strikes and the very real possibility of them spreading seemed to be the final point that convinced the military that Mubarak had to go.

    On the 11th of February, the military’s representative new Vice President Omar Suleiman announced that Mubarak had resigned and two days later the military enacted a constitutional coup. Strikers were instructed to go back to work, and strikes were forbidden. For a while they continued, but then went back to work mostly after winning wage increases and concessions.

    The class nature of the Egyptian events seems different from those in Tunisia. While the movement in Tunisia seemed to have a mostly working class character the events in Egypt seemed to have a wide cross class character encompassing all social classes. Whilst the working class played an important role, possibly even a crucial one, it was never the leading force.

    Many on the left talked about their being a mass strike in Egypt. The protests in Egypt saw many more workers strikes than the struggle in Tunisia. We can put this down to Egypt having a more experienced and militant working class. While we believe that the potential for the mass strike was there, and that it was quite possibly this that scared the military into dumping Mubarak when they did, we don’t believe that it materialised. All in all around 50,000 workers were involved in strikes, over 20,000 of them at one factory. While this demonstrates an important movement it was not the mass strike, and was not even on as big a scale as the strike wave in Egypt a few years earlier. The speed with which the movement dissipated showed that it was not as strong as many on the left were saying.

    9. Libya

    The protests in Libya began on 15th January, and from the start it was clear that these were very different in their nature. The thing that started the protest was the arrest of Fathi Terbil, a lawyer representing Islamicist militants murdered in a massacre in a prison, in Benghazi. Police violently broke up the protests in Benghazi, but that didn’t stop them from spreading to nearby al-Bayda, as well as Az Zitan near to Tripoli in the West. In an effort to make concessions as the demonstrations spread the state accede to some of the protestor’s demands and realised 110 members of al-Jama’a al-Islamiyyah al-Muqatilah bi-Libya, a Jihadi group from prison. Still the protests continued.

    The state reacted in an extremely violent way with death squads used to demoralise the protestors. Massacres were reported on both sides as senior Islamic figures and tribal leaders issued declarations against the regime, and called for the government to step down. By now protests had spread to the west where demonstrations in Tripoli were crushed viciously by the state. In the South the Tuareg people were called into the revolt at the request of the powerful Warfalla tribe.

    On the 22nd Gaddafi appeared on state TV to deny reports that he had fled to Venezuela, and vowed to fight “until the last drop of his blood had been spilt”. The next day as demonstrations grew in size and many tribal leaders, who had been previously silent started to call for Gaddafi to go, William Hague the British foreign minister, first started to talk about ‘humanitarian intervention’. By this point the situation had clearly developed into a civil war.

    And where was the working class in all of this? To a large extent Libya, like many of the Gulf oil states, relies on foreigners to do the majority of its manual jobs. The vast majority of the working class in Libya was desperately trying to get out of the country as the situation deteriorated and the violence increased. Unlike in Tunisia, and Egypt, the working class didn’t appear to play a significant role in any way. The movement from the start seemed to be dominated by Islamicism and tribalism. There were no workers strikes that we know of, and the one report of an oil strike in the Arab media was later shown to be just the management closing down production.

    Of course there are Libyan workers too. Evidently though they were too weak to play any role in these struggles as a class. That doesn’t mean that workers had no role at all in the events. The demonstrations that took place in Tripoli all seemed to occur in working class districts. However the working class was too weak to assert its own interests and have basically been used as cannon fodder in a civil war in which they had no interest, and are now dying under the bombing raids of the US and its allies. Before we continue with the story of how the war developed and how the imperialist powers became involved, we will quickly look at what was going on in other Arab states.

    10. Events in other States and Reaction in Bahrain

    The first country to follow Tunisia’s lead was neighbouring Algeria. Protests started there on 3rd January in response to increases in the price of basic foodstuffs. Whilst isolated riots have been common in Algeria over the past few years, these were different in that they spread over the entire country within a week. The protests were virtually entirely around class demands, and were beaten back by a mixture of repression and concessions.

    In January large scale protest also began in Jordan and Yemen. In Jordan protests against high prices inflation and unemployment were organised by the Muslim brotherhood. It ended up in the King changing a few faces in the government, and having to make wide-reaching economic concessions.

    The protests in Yemen are still continuing as we write. It currently seems that the military is in the process of changing sides with Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar , a leading general infamous for massacres in the 1994 civil war switching to the side of the protestors.

    Outside of the Arab world Iran and TRNC have also seen protests with a revival of the ‘Green Movement’ in Iran and protestors shot dead in the streets. Bahrain has also been another focal point of demonstrations eventually resulting in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf co-operation council sending in troops to help to ‘stabilise’ the situation as the Bahraini state unleashed its repressive forces against demonstrators. The movement in Bahrain seems to have taken more and more of a sectarian dimension with members of the Shia majority which was the leading force in the protests against the Sunni monarchy, now openly calling for Iranian intervention. Also protests in the Northern Shia majority areas of Saudi Arabia have been held in support of the Bahraini rebels. Bahrain has also seen attacks launched upon foreign workers, mostly from South East Asia by the demonstrators. Events of this sort have also been reported in Libya.

    Finally the Syrian army has just massacred 15 protestors outside a mosque in the small southern town of Daraa, which has been the centre of the protest movement due to local anger about the arrest of a group of children in a school for writing pro-Egyptian revolt graffiti on a school wall.

    Virtually unnoticed amongst all of this has been the protests in Iraq, where a minimum of 35 people have been murdered by the state. Of course Iraq is already a ‘democracy’ occupied by US military advisors, which is probably why these murders received less news coverage than others.

    11. Libya and the Descent into All Out War

    Now to return to Libya where today we have a full scale NATO bombing campaign going on. Of course it isn’t the first time that Libya has been bombed by the Western powers. Nor was the 1986 bombing of Tripoli by the US the first time. In fact the first time aerial bombing was used in history was 1911 by the Italians in the Italio-Turkish war. The Italians soon update from using bombs to chemical weapons.

    At the end of February it looked like Gaddafi had lost the initiative, but by the middle of March, he had regained the upper hand with thirteen of the country’s twenty two districts back under state control, and two more seeming that they were about to be retaken. The road to Bengahzi seemed to be open, and the end of the rebellion in sight. It was at this point on the 17th of March that United Nations resolution 1973 was passed authorising a ‘no-fly zone’. After getting a poorly attended Arab League meeting with only about half of its members present to back to bombing campaign to give it some sort of ‘legitimacy’, the military operations are now under NATO control with the Arab League criticising the bombings that they called for. It seems like they, like much of the world, had somehow imagined that a ‘no-fly zone’ would just involve shooting down any aircraft trying to bomb civilians, and not a mass bombing campaign murdering civilians. It almost as if Iraq had never happened. For those with short memories 110 Tomahawk missiles and bombing raids by the British and French air forces on March 19th would have acted as a sharp reminder.

    Now it is clear, beyond any doubt, that the events in Libya have degenerated into an all out civil war with workers on both sides being massacred on behalf of those who control, or would control Libya.

    12. Where are we now?

    It seems now that the reaction has firmly set in. The events in Libya show only the worst extent of where the weakness of the working class, and its inability to impose itself on the situation have left us. How resilient the Gaddafi regime will be and whether it can hold on remains to be seen. We think that it should be remembered that back in the middle of February people were only giving Gaddafi a few days, yet he is still in power in Tripoli. We suspect that he will hold on for longer than the West imagines. At the moment he is appealing to the idea of protecting the homeland and national defence. The Warfalla tribe, over a million strong and nearly 20% of the population are now pushing for reconciliation, claiming almost unbelievably that no significant tribal figures are involved in the rebellion. As loyalties shift to and fro large amounts of cash are said to be changing hands.

    In Yemen it is becoming increasingly clear that whoever ends up on top it will just be a reshuffling of leaders. Bahrain has seen another rebellion crushed just as the one back in the 1990s was. Syria will probably manage to ride out the protests even if it takes a few more massacres. After all those who remember the tens of thousands of civilians murdered in the city of Hama at the start of the 1980s know that the Assad regime isn’t adverse to a bit of blood.

    And so it seems that a movement which began in Tunisia is now drawing to a close. That isn’t to say that there won’t be more murders of protestors, or even the odd dictator falling, such as Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen, to be replaced by a military strong man. However the movement that erupted at the end of last year with such promise seems to be over, or at least dead to the working class.

    13. What conclusions can we draw?

    For us our general analysis of the period remains unchanged. The working class is returning to struggle slowly but surely, but is not yet strong enough to stamp its imprint firmly onto the times. We expect that the future will show us more struggles along the lines of the revolts in the Arab states and those previously in Greece and Iran. As the economy continues to stagnate, a process that cannot but be aided by the increase in oil prices caused by an ongoing war in Libya, and the massive withdrawal of capital to Japan that is almost bound to happen in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami of March 11th, states will have no other solution but to resort to increasing austerity and increasing repression.

    The working class in some of the Arab states, most notably Tunisia and Egypt, but also Algeria has made a step towards recovering its experience of how to struggle. In others the weakness of the working class has been brutally exposed and the resulting repression and increase in sectarian tensions, not to mention Libya being dragged into a civil war will almost certainly act as a weight around the neck of the working class.

    Those on the left who talked of workers’ revolution in the Arab world have been shown to be wrong. The working class is still to week to assert itself. The road to rebuilding the lost experience and class consciousness will be long. Yet there are reasons to hope. The speed with which the Egyptian military jettisoned Mubarak after workers strikes broke out shows that the ruling class, at least, is still well aware of the potential that the working class holds, and in a far away country where working class struggle has for years been conspicuous by its absence, workers in Wisconsin fighting against cuts in the largest struggle the US has seen in years raised banners supporting Egyptian workers implicitly recognising that the class struggle is an international one of workers across the world facing the same sort of attacks.

    Link:
    http://libcom.org/library/understanding ... arab-world
     
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