Middle East

By Bushra Khaliq, August 5, 2011

The floodwaters that ravaged the southern parts of Pakistan in the summer of 2010 have long receded. Gone are the makeshift tent camps on roadsides, however the revival of normal life still remains a challenge. Thousands continue a daily struggle to support their families and re-establish livelihoods. As a new monsoon season is in full swing, last year’s trauma and economic pain still linger. While last year’s victims struggle to recover, others now worry that changing world weather patterns will cause renewed flooding.

The devastation caused by the 2010 floods was the worst in Pakistan’s history; almost 2,000 deaths, nearly 20 million displaced or affected and one-fifth of the country went under water. The deluge inflicted unprecedented catastrophic damage on a country already reeling from the effects of US-led war on terrorism. A year later, the picture is dismal.

Although many flood refugees have returned home, little is known to the world about their miserable conditions and stories of struggle. Particularly the women who are the worst-hit still facing multiple challenges after one year. Their work burden is multiplied. While husbands and male members in poor families, being daily wagers, are struggling to find sources of income, women remain busy in rebuilding their damaged shelters and dwellings.

Mike F. (NY) has translated this statement from the NPA (New Anti-Capitalist Party), our French comrades, on the Tunisian Revolution:

STATEMENT FROM THE NPA (January 26, 2011);
SOLIDARITY WITH THE ONGOING REVOLUTION IN TUNISIA.

One after the other, the pitiful declarations of members of the Fillon government, from Alliot-Marie to Lemaire and including Sarkozy, have shown that they do not understand the reasons for the revolt of the Tunisian people.

Their explanations try to camouflage their political choice to the support for a friendly dictatorship, sanctioned by Sarkozy during his trip in 2008.

The so-called transitional government to prepare for the elections, stacked with politicians from the RCD, is rejected by the great mass of the people who overthrew Ben Ali after a month of continuous demonstrations, despite ferocious police repression.

The revolution continues its forward march to force the resignation of this government and to construct organs of power where the people are represented, heard and make the decisions.

Daily demonstrations, a teachers' strike and a strike in the city of Sfax called by the UGTT [main trade union federation] show that the youth and the Tunisian people do not want to be robbed of their social and democratic revolution.

—David Finkel

January 27, 2011 -- The revolt spreading from Tunisia to Algeria, Egypt, Yemen and beyond inspires both hope and fear. Hope, because so many tens of millions of people are taking to the streets at the risk of beating, torture and death to liberate themselves and their country. But also fear, because of the chilling reality that for every democratic victory -- such as we’ve witnessed so far in Tunisia, or the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or the political revolution that ended South African apartheid – there’s also the specter of the bloodbath of Tiananmen (Beijing, 1989), Kwangju (South Korea, 1980) or Iran and Burma of the past couple of years.

Nonetheless the spirit of revolt spreads, sometimes like an underground fire in the wake of defeat. The roots of Egypt’s present uprising were laid in a semi-clandestine social-media network of solidarity with a textile workers’ strike in Mahalla, brutally crushed two years ago. The rage of young people who graduate from school with no jobs intersects with that of the 40% of Egypt’s population living just at or below the United Nations $2-per-day “absolute poverty” level – where one blogger reports that people wait for the penny-a-loaf bread to be sold the next day at half-price – and the anger of the middle class over pervasive corruption and the blockage of any meaningful political options.

Commentators have long noted that popular frustration in Arab countries is a “powder keg,” to the point where the warning is a commonplace. But we can safely state that no one predicted that the new wave of revolt would begin in Tunisia – which seemed to be a safe and stable authoritarian ally for U.S. interests and “the war on terror” (i.e. imperialism), with Islamist and leftist oppositions weak and in exile – let alone with the self-immolation of an individual, nonpolitical young street vendor who had been stripped of his future, his means of livelihood and finally his dignity.

President Barack Obama, in the State of the Union message, intoned that the United States “stands with the people of Tunisia, and supports the democratic aspirations of all people.” What a crock. In the interests of basic decency, the president would have done better to say nothing – at a moment when the U.S. government blocks Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s return to Haiti, supports a coup-installed regime in Honduras and as we know from WikiLeaks, connives with the president of Yemen to cover up American drone attacks.

In fact, nothing threatens “American interests” in the Middle East more seriously than the eruption of democracy. Without the Egyptian regime enforcing Israel’s blockade, the people of Gaza would not be kept at the edge of starvation. Even more, the threat of democracy tears the veil off the utter cynicism of imperialism’s Middle East strategy, which has always relied on ruling-family potentates to control “our” oil supplies and on presidentialist dictators to control impoverished populations. Thanks again to WikiLeaks, the world knows that these very regimes, bitterly alienated from their own people, are the ones secretly pleading for the United States to attack Iran.