Revolutions in the Middle East

[KanadaHye]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

Thought this was a well written and thought out article...


The dominoes are beginning to fall in the Arab world, and it all began in Tunisia.


A series of street protests in December 2010 and January 2011 led to the ouster of Tunisia's former president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who fled to Saudi Arabia on January 14.

The events in Tunisia have set off a chain reaction across the entire Arab world as citizens of Arab countries have been inspired by the Tunisians' people power movement.

Major demonstrations have been held in Yemen, Egypt, Algeria, and Jordan, and there have been smaller demonstrations and minor incidents in Saudi Arabia, Mauritania, Oman, Sudan, and Libya.

A demonstration was held in Jordan on January 14 in which protesters demanded that Prime Minister Samir Rifai and his cabinet step down.

After demonstrations in Yemen, on January 23, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh announced that he would step down when his current term expires in 2013.

Over the past week, the demonstrations in Egypt have gained steam every day, and it appears that President Hosni Mubarak may have to step down.

The situation has been compared to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which led to the collapse of communism in the Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe.

But there are some major differences between the events of 1989 and the Arab world awakening of 2011 that make the comparison not completely accurate.

The current confrontation in the Arab world is not between authoritarian regimes and the forces of democracy.

The day of the authoritarian regimes is done. It may take a little longer for some of them to fall, but eventually they will all fall.

Even their patrons in the West are abandoning the dictators of the Arab world, as evidenced by Ben Ali's hasty departure.

The powers that be who run the Western world have decided that it is no longer in their interests to support puppet rulers running authoritarian regimes in the Arab world.

So they are turning to Plan B, which may have been prepared decades ago and put on the shelf until needed.

In Plan B, the Western powers will allow the authoritarian regimes of the Arab world to collapse and attempt to replace them with fake democracies run by puppet rulers beholden to their masters in the West.

And thus the current confrontation in the Arab world is actually between the forces of true democracy, who want independent countries, and the forces of fake democracy, who are seeking to establish comprador regimes, which would be the same old neocolonialism with a new face.

The forces of true democracy in the Arab world must be very careful in choosing their new leaders since the global ruling class does not want them to have independent governments and will do everything in their power to prevent such a turn of events.

And the globalists are adept at setting up governments that have all the trappings of democracy but which are actually client states with their vassals in charge.

Everything is in flux in the Arab world, which is a good thing since it provides an opportunity for change and progress after so many years of stagnation.

But there is also a great danger, since the Machiavellian manipulators of the global ruling class are skillful chaos players who plan ahead for such eventualities for decades.

The dominoes are truly falling in the Arab world, but it is not clear in which direction they are falling.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/162927.html

[ninetoyadome]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

speaking of well written articles
Azerbaijan: Protests in Egypt Are Reverberating in Baku
January 31, 2011 - 12:03pm, by Khadija Ismayilova
Azerbaijan Egypt Azerbaijani Politics Democratization
Like many Azerbaijanis, Elnura Jivazade, a resident of the Baku suburb of Khirdalan, is watching Egypt’s political upheaval closely. But unlike most Azerbaijanis, Jivazade sees Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak each morning. His statue, a symbol of Azerbaijani-Egyptian friendship, stands in a Khirdalan park that she passes each weekday on her way to work.

“I always wondered why this monument is standing here, and what will happen to it if the dictatorship falls in Egypt,” she said. “Now, Mubarak’s regime is falling, but he is still sitting here in the park with such confidence.”

The question of how Azerbaijanis will or should interpret Egyptian protestors’ ongoing struggle against President Mubarak appears to be gaining increasing currency among critics of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and many young Azerbaijanis.

Ties between the two countries largely hinge on energy -- the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijani Republic (SOCAR) is involved in oil trade and processing in Egypt -- and on good works. First Lady Mehriban Aliyeva, head of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation, serves on the board of the Alexandria Library and has a secondary school named in her honor in the Cairo suburb of Qaulubiyya, which contains a monument to the late President Heydar Aliyev.

The two countries’ First Ladies also both appeared in a pop song dedicated to peace, written by Egyptian First Lady Suzanne Mubarak and performed by the Azerbaijani singer Tunzale Agayeva.

Officials in Baku appear to be taking measures to ensure that public parallels between the Egyptian and Azerbaijani leaderships stop there. Days after protests began in Tunisia and Egypt, the Azerbaijani government’s anti-corruption commission, overseen by presidential administration Chief of Staff Ramiz Mehdiyev, met on January 27 for the first time since 2009. A number of import duties, often seen as benefiting government-friendly monopolists, have been abolished as well.

Sources in the government tell EurasiaNet.org that in recent days they have received directives advising them to avoid irritating the population and to work effectively and build public trust.

Some government critics, meanwhile, are trying to highlight similarities between Mubarak’s and Aliyev’s administrations.

A group of 100-plus non-partisan and opposition candidates, along with activists from political parties and non-governmental organizations, gathered on January 29 to urge the Azerbaijani government to either hold new parliamentary elections, or brace for popular protests similar to those seen in Egypt and Tunisia.

The leaders of the group’s main opposition parties – Musavat and Popular Front of Azerbaijan -- have not said whether or not they would be the ones organizing protests. Azerbaijan’s opposition is not known for its political muscle, but one political commentator, Shahveled Chobanoghlu, notes that events in Egypt and Tunisia have shattered myths about political change in Muslim countries.

“The first myth is that there is no opposition. If you don’t see the opposition, it does not mean there is no opposition,” said Chobanoghlu. “Election results in both of these countries show the absolute leadership of the ruling parties. So, where did all of these protesters come from?”

The second myth, he added, is that an Islamic opposition will come to power if a secular government collapses – a concept that some local critics argue prompted the Azerbaijani government’s recent arrest of an Islamic political leader and clamp-down on the hijab in schools, among other measures.

Despite Azerbaijan’s lack of a robust opposition, one political analyst, a government critic in Baku, expressed hope that the example of Tunisia and Egypt will encourage Azerbaijanis – where the median population age is similarly young, 28.5 years old – to push for “systemic changes.”
Tunisia, Egypt and Azerbaijan all suffer from “corruption, poverty . . . rigged elections, a refusal to share power, [excessive influence by families of the] First Ladies, and monopolization of the economy in favor of the ruling families,” argued Arastun Orujlu, director of Baku’s East-West Research Center.

A number of active Azerbaijani Facebook and Twitter users are drawing similar parallels. Such users are openly debating whether the Azerbaijani army would “support the nation,” if demonstrations against what they perceive as government abuses of power were held, whether the Azerbaijani police “act like in Tunisia” or whether “the Azerbaijani opposition is ready to seize the moment.”

One such user, Zohrab Ismayil (no relation to this reporter), has created a 107-member Facebook group, Support to the Revolution in Egypt, intended to offer support to those individuals critical of governments’ abuses of civil and human rights. “There is also a hope that it will have a domino effect and will echo in our country as well” Ismayil said in reference to the protests in Egypt.

Political analyst Rasim Musabekov, a non-partisan member of parliament, sees little chance that the situation in Arab countries, especially Egypt and Tunisia, can influence developments in Azerbaijan, given the countries’ dissimilar histories. “Only if the process of change will be successful and will pave the way to stable and democratic regimes, might they have an impact on the situation in Azerbaijan” Musabekov said.

Government critics like Orujlu, still maintain that events in Egypt and Tunisia have sent a powerful message. “No matter what the government and opposition in Azerbaijan are learning from what is going on in North Africa, there is something that has already changed in the world,” Orujlu said “It is an understanding that you can’t rely on dictators.”

Editor's note: Khadija Ismayilova is freelance journalist based in Baku. She hosts a daily program on current affairs broadcast by the Azeri Service of RFE/RL.

http://www.eurasianet.org/node/62802

[Federate]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

The question to ask now is: would a democratic Azerbaijan be in Armenia's interests?

[ninetoyadome]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

The question to ask now is: would a democratic Azerbaijan be in Armenia's interests?

can it be worse than the dictatorship that is present?

[Federate]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

can it be worse than the dictatorship that is present?

Is it in Armenia's interest for Azerbaijan to have a bad reputation and be corrupt so it never functions normally? That is the question mate.

[Davo88]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

A democratic Azerbaijan would probably not continue the policy of war rhetoric (i.e. status quo) promoted by Ilham Aliyev. They would rather make a serious attempt to "liberate" Karabakh or, if they're smart, they'd opt for unconditional peace.

[Federate]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

Pattern of Life: Where Would Hosni Mubarak Flee?

When dictators are overthrown they are typically either killed in short order (think Nicolae Ceauşescu) or they flee. Without too much statistical analysis, we can come up with deposed leaders that left their country for France (Baby Doc of Haiti) and Saudi Arabia (recently, Ben Ali from Tunisia).

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is in trouble. Given the ongoing protests against his government, we may be interested in finding out where, if forced, he would flee. We won’t attempt to make a judgement call on whether he will survive or explicitly find his travel plans since they presumably don’t exist directly in the open source.

In considering where Mubarak might go, we’ll use his patterns of communication and travel over the last 12 months as identified in Recorded Future to provide guidance.
Communciation Patterns
Hosni Mubarak Communication Patterns


Hosni Mubarak Communication Trends

* Hosni Mubarak had interactions with a large number of world leaders including Obama, Clinton, Merkel, Sarkozy, and Berlusconi.
* Mubarak also privately met with the head of Oman – Sultan Qaboos bin Said – during his visit to Egypt.

Travel Patterns

Inspecting the treemap of President Mubarak’s travel patterns over the last year, we find some interesting clues to where he might go if forced to leave Egypt:

Hosni Mubarak Travel Patterns

* One of the highest momentum cities in the visualization is London. This comes with an interesting indicator on the Huffington Post: “It was reported two days ago that Gamal Mubarak, son of President Mubarak was heading to London with a big entourage and about 80 pieces of luggage along with his mother, Suzanne Mubarak, and high officials, though Egyptian sources dismiss the report as false.”
* Germany stands out in the above treemap, and we learn that Mubarak traveled there for cancer treatment in 2010. Would Germany have him back given that they provided him medical attention? Similarly, Mubarak also travelled to Paris for suspected health reasons.
* Italy has been called out as the strongest European connection for Egypt, and Mubarak seems to have a strong relationship with Berlusconi. Mubarak also stopped in Greece when returning from his last trip to Italy.
* Other web sources (not at all verified) suggest a strong relationship between Mubarak and the rulers of the UAE might make it a prime destination.
* Mubarak has travelled to a number of Arab nations like Libya, Jordan, Sudan, Algeria, but those places would be potentially unstable and not necessarily offer protection in the long run.
* Ben Ali, the former leader of Tunisia, recently fled to Saudi Arabia where Mubarak was for discussions in late 2009. The Egyptian president met with King Abdullah in mid-2010 in a peace summit, and the Saudi king very recently expressed his support for Mubarak. Supposedly this chant can be heard in Egypt right now: “Christian or Muslim it’s not important, similar poverty similar concerns! Hosni Mubarak, Hosni Mubarak, the plane is waiting, the plane is waiting. Saudi Arabia is not far!”
* Mubarak has also been in the US for peace summits and other political meetings, but the US seems an unlikely place to flee.

Conclusion

Hosni Mubarak has a much broader set of connections and travel patterns than Ben Ali of Tunisia, and potentially has more places to go should he be forced from Egypt. Still, the options seem limited if he wants to establish a long term place to stay.

Even if Mubarak has kept plenty of interactions with the US, France, UK, Germany, and others, it would seem unlikely that any of those countries would take him in although Italy may be an exception.

Saudi Arabia stands out as the strongest candidate given both its recent display of support as well as historical connections. The UAE and Oman might be other relatively safe places.

In the end, our bet is on Saudia Arabia.

http://blog.recordedfuture.com/2011/01/30/pattern-of-life-where-would-hosni-mubarak-flee/

[Federate]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

In collaboration with our academic partners Prof. Cingranelli at the Political Science Department, SUNY Binghamton University and Profs. Sam Bell and Amanda Murdie at the Department of Political Science, Kansas State University, we developed a Domestic Political Violence Model that forecasts political violence levels five years into the future. The model enables policymakers, particularly in the COCOMs, to proactively plan for instances of increased domestic political violence, with implications for resource allocation and intelligence asset assignment. Our model uses the IDEA dataset for political event coding, plus numerous indicators from the CIRI Human Rights Dataset, Polity IV Dataset, World Bank, OECD, Correlates of War project, and Fearon and Laitin datasets. Here is our model’s forecast for 2010 – 2014 as a ranked list:

1. Iran
2. Sri Lanka
3. Russia
4. Georgia
5. Israel
6. Turkey
7. Burundi
8. Chad
9. Honduras
10. Czech Republic
11. China
12. Italy
13. Colombia
14. Ukraine
15. Indonesia
16. Malaysia
17. Jordan
18. Mexico
19. Kenya
20. South Africa
21. Ireland
22. Peru
23. Chile
24. Armenia
25. Tunisia
26. Democratic Republic of the Congo
27. Belarus
28. Argentina
29. Albania
30. Ecuador
31. Sudan
32. Austria
33. Nigeria
34. Syria
35. Kyrgyz Republic
36. Egypt
37. Belgium

Using a regression model applied to a large number of drivers of conflict variables spanning numerous open source social science datasets, our model uses a novel Negative Residuals technique. Negative Residuals result from the model predicting higher levels of violence than actually experienced, indicating nation states that are pre-disposed to increasing levels of violence based on the presence of environmental conditions and drivers of conflict with demonstrated correlation with measured political violence. The residuals imply that these are states that we expect to observe increases in violence although not necessarily high levels of violence. So Iran and Sri Lanka are not expected to have the same level of violence but are expected to have the same magnitude increase in violence.

There some unexpected countries on our list like Czech Republic and Italy. Time will tell the accuracy of our model’s predictions although recent political violence in Ecuador is an early indicator of the model’s effective performance. The model uses nuanced measures of repression and captures variables that can be manipulated by policy makers. Our project page has further details on the model.

http://radicalism.milcord.com/blog/

[KanadaHye]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

In collaboration with our academic partners Prof. Cingranelli at the Political Science Department, SUNY Binghamton University and Profs. Sam Bell and Amanda Murdie at the Department of Political Science, Kansas State University, we developed a Domestic Political Violence Model that forecasts political violence levels five years into the future. The model enables policymakers, particularly in the COCOMs, to proactively plan for instances of increased domestic political violence, with implications for resource allocation and intelligence asset assignment. Our model uses the IDEA dataset for political event coding, plus numerous indicators from the CIRI Human Rights Dataset, Polity IV Dataset, World Bank, OECD, Correlates of War project, and Fearon and Laitin datasets. Here is our model’s forecast for 2010 – 2014 as a ranked list:

1. Iran
2. Sri Lanka
3. Russia
4. Georgia
5. Israel
6. Turkey
7. Burundi
8. Chad
9. Honduras
10. Czech Republic
11. China
12. Italy
13. Colombia
14. Ukraine
15. Indonesia
16. Malaysia
17. Jordan
18. Mexico
19. Kenya
20. South Africa
21. Ireland
22. Peru
23. Chile
24. Armenia
25. Tunisia
26. Democratic Republic of the Congo
27. Belarus
28. Argentina
29. Albania
30. Ecuador
31. Sudan
32. Austria
33. Nigeria
34. Syria
35. Kyrgyz Republic
36. Egypt
37. Belgium

Using a regression model applied to a large number of drivers of conflict variables spanning numerous open source social science datasets, our model uses a novel Negative Residuals technique. Negative Residuals result from the model predicting higher levels of violence than actually experienced, indicating nation states that are pre-disposed to increasing levels of violence based on the presence of environmental conditions and drivers of conflict with demonstrated correlation with measured political violence. The residuals imply that these are states that we expect to observe increases in violence although not necessarily high levels of violence. So Iran and Sri Lanka are not expected to have the same level of violence but are expected to have the same magnitude increase in violence.

There some unexpected countries on our list like Czech Republic and Italy. Time will tell the accuracy of our model’s predictions although recent political violence in Ecuador is an early indicator of the model’s effective performance. The model uses nuanced measures of repression and captures variables that can be manipulated by policy makers. Our project page has further details on the model.

http://radicalism.milcord.com/blog/

Looks like a busy decade for the CIA/SIS and Mossad

[londontsi]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

.

.

Its really good some democrats really care about Egypt.

Listen when he is asked "Do you beleive in democracy?"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/hardtalk/9383436.stm