News Agency in MI | A staff member positions an Iranian flag on a stage after a group picture during the Iran nuclear talks at Vienna International Centre in Austria on July 14, 2015. Why any new agreement would likely be worse than resuscitating the existing deal.

News Agency in MI | Apadana Media

Last week, Iran announced that it had started enriching uranium to 20 percent at its underground Fordow facility. This step is a serious escalation in a long-running crisis—but, even more ominously, it is also a threat. Iran is apparently signaling that if the 2015 nuclear deal—formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action —is not salvaged in the weeks after U.S. President-elect Joe Biden takes office, it will further ramp up its nuclear program to strengthen its hand ahead of any future negotiations. Under these circumstances, any new agreement would likely be worse than resuscitating the current deal.

In spite of the Trump administration’s best efforts, the Iran deal has not collapsed completely. In 2018, the administration ceased providing Iran with promised sanctions relief. In response, Iran gradually ramped up its nuclear program, breaching the deal’s limits on uranium enrichment. Nonetheless, Iran hoped that President Donald Trump would lose the 2020 U.S. presidential election and a new Democratic administration would want to reenter the deal. Accordingly, Tehran did not withdraw or restart its plutonium program. It has continued to accept exceptionally intrusive monitoring of its ongoing nuclear activities. And it could reverse its ongoing noncompliance quickly and easily. If Biden can provide Iran with the sanctions relief it was promised, he can likely reassemble the deal (to which all the other signatories are still committed).

If he fails, Tehran will almost certainly escalate its violations. It probably won’t try to build a nuclear weapon (although the possibility it might is reason enough to preserve the deal). Instead, Iran will likely opt to scale up its nuclear program—by developing better centrifuges, installing more of them, stockpiling ever-greater amounts of enriched uranium, and perhaps even enriching to higher levels. In short, Iran will pick up exactly where it left off in 2013 when its nuclear program was first constrained by the Joint Plan of Action, the less comprehensive predecessor to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Iran will likely try to use its ramp-up to pressure the United States into negotiating an end to sanctions. Because of all the additional leverage at Tehran’s disposal, any new deal—if one is ever reached—will likely have to tolerate more nuclear activity in Iran than is currently permitted.

Advocates of holding out for a better deal argue that enhanced economic sanctions will drive Iran to make further concessions.

Advocates of holding out for a better deal argue that enhanced economic sanctions will drive Iran to make further concessions.

The problem is that Tehran has a greater capacity than Washington to escalate the crisis. Despite the current U.S. maximum pressure campaign against Iran, Iranian oil sales are back on the rise. Even maintaining the current level of economic pressure will be a challenge for the United States as Iran becomes more adept at circumventing sanctions and international support for them continues to wane. By contrast, without the 2015 deal in place, Iran could expand its nuclear program dramatically, without needing to cross the nuclear threshold.

If the idea of a competition in leverage feels speculative and abstract, the basic problem faced by the United States should be familiar from labor disputes. Managing the Iran crisis involves offering Tehran economic and security benefits in return for its not conducting certain nuclear activities. Managing a labor dispute, likewise, involves offering workers improved pay and conditions in return for their not striking. In both cases, the shape of any deal is determined by the relative leverage of the two sides.

To increase their leverage—and thus drive a harder bargain—unions may try to make the threat of a strike more credible. A classic tactic is for workers to vote to authorize a strike unless their negotiators can reach an acceptable agreement. This approach often proves effective, because it places the onus for averting a strike onto management, which can then feel pressured into making significant concessions.

In a similar way, Iran’s parliament recently sought to empower Iranian negotiators by passing a law that would prohibit international inspections and require an expansion of Iran’s nuclear program unless sanctions relief is forthcoming (enriching uranium to 20 percent is the first step in the implementation of the law). This law isn’t yet part of a dash to the bomb. But it is a signal that Iran is moving closer to the nuclear threshold and making the threat of a acquiring a nuclear weapon more credible.

As for the hope that the United States can win a competition in leverage by ramping up sanctions, its experience of playing—and losing—that game against North Korea should temper expectations. There are, of course, many differences between Iran and North Korea (starting with the fact that the former does not have nuclear weapons). However, the case does exemplify how enhanced capabilities translate into enhanced leverage—even as economic sanctions are progressively tightened

Over the course of last 40 years, North Korea has advanced its nuclear capabilities by amassing ever-larger amounts of plutonium, developing an enrichment program that “stunned” the U.S. weapons scientist who saw it, and conducting periodic long-range missile and nuclear tests. The result was that each of the deals concluded by the last four U.S. administrations was less restrictive than the previous one.

The Clinton’s administration’s Agreed Framework created a comprehensive road map for freezing and eliminating North Korea’s plutonium program. The George W. Bush administration’s deal provided for splashy “disablement” activities—including the televised blowing up of a reactor cooling tower—but was vague about next steps. A short-lived deal reached by the Obama administration in 2012 sought to freeze various North Korean nuclear and missile-related activities without requiring anything to be dismantled. And the hortatory summit declaration signed by Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump contained no concrete commitments whatsoever. (A nuclear and missile test moratorium trumpeted by U.S. officials was a unilateral gesture made months earlier.)

A senior North Korean diplomat once noted that, “the time that has been lost [in dealing with us] has not been beneficial to the” United States. If the Iran deal falls apart, the time lost will be similarly detrimental to U.S. interests. Biden is absolutely right, therefore, to indicate that the United States will reenter the Iran deal (rather than hold out for something better), if Iran comes back into compliance with its restrictions.

The post With Iran, Biden Can’t Let Perfect Be the Enemy of Good appeared first on APADANA MEDIA.

National Media Agency in MI, USA | IRAN — Ruhollah Zam, a former opposition figure who had lived in exile in France and was implicated in anti-government protests, speaks in a courtroom during a trial, November 30, 2020

National Media Agency in MI, USA | Apadana Media

In its report on the state of journalism in the world in 2020, Paris-based Reporters Sans Frontières (Reporters Without Borders) has appropriately ranked Iran as the global record-holder of killing media staff.

Referring to Ruhollah Zam’s kidnapping process that led to his trial behind closed doors, sentencing, and hanging, the internationally renowned organization has called his death not execution but a murder.

However, 42-year-old Zam was not the only journalist killed by Iran merely for his views and activities as a social media activist and reporter.

The so-called Islamist forces that came to power in Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, brazenly or secretly, started issuing death sentences for journalists and authors long before dominating the ancient country. The Islamic extremists have never hesitated to condemn to death anybody they considered to have views against the “Islamic” train of thought, or as they maintain the “Holy Shari’a.”

Before the downfall of Iran’s pro-West king, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, these fundamentalist forces believed that journalists, writers, and artists, or anybody opposing their views were apostates, and it would be “fair” to punish them by death for insulting Islam and Muslims.

After consolidating power in Iran, they practically added the killing of their critics to the extensive list of the nascent Islamic Republic’s crimes. Eliminating whoever dared to raise voices against the “glorious Islamic Republic” became a part of the new rulers’ daily life in Iran.

By grabbing all national resources across the country, Iran has successfully implemented various methods to force journalists and writers to remain silent. The plans include brutal censorship, banning newspapers and magazines, detaining and forcing writers and journalists into exile or blatantly killing them in the streets, or executing them in prisons after show-off trials.

Leading Iranian linguist, nationalist, historian, and former Shi’ite cleric, Ahmad Kasravi, is the most famous writer assassinated before the establishment of Iran.

On March 11, 1946, members of a shadowy group, Fadā’iyān-e Islam (Devotees of Islam or Self-Sacrificers of Islam), led by a controversial mid-ranking black-turbaned clergy, Navvab Safavi, stabbed to death Ahmad Kasravi and one of his assistants, while being tried on charges of “insulting Islam.”

The founder of the Islamic Republic and a supporter of Navvab Safavi, Ruhollah Khomeini, had earlier called on an offshoot of Fadaiyan-e Islam, “Young Martyrs for Islam,” to confront Kasravi, referring to him as “this illiterate (man from Tabriz).”

Furthermore, years before Kasravi’s assassination, Ayatollah Khomeini had attacked the prominent linguist and historian in his first book, Kashf al-Asrar (Decoding Secrets). He blatantly stated that Kasravi and other writers like him deserve death. In the same book, he boldly theorized the necessity of closing newspapers, magazines, and books, setting them on fire, and hanging their authors as divine rulings in Shi’ite jurisprudence.

Therefore, it is no surprise that a government based on his teachings is now leading the way in killing writers and journalists around the world.

In the last forty years, nearly thirty people, whose main occupation was journalism or writing, have lost their lives in several ways, from being shot, hanged, murdered in prison, and assassinated at home or on the street.

Two pre-Islamic Revolution directors of National Iranian Radio and Television (NIRT), Mahmoud Ja’farian and Parviz Nikkhah, and the French daily Journal de Tehran’s editor, Simon Farzami, were executed. The Managing-Director of an influential weekly magazine, Khandaniha (Reader’s Digest), Ali Asghar Amirani, and a playwright and poet, Saeed Soltanpour, were killed by a firing squad. Jalal Hashemi Tangestani was assassinated and died of unknown causes. The Assistant Editor of the daily Kayhan, Rahman Hatefi, died behind bars under torture. Popular TV showman, poet, and crooner, Fereydoun Farrokhzad, was stabbed to death in Bonn, Germany. Prominent researcher, author, historian and poet, Ali Akbar Sa’eedi Sirjani, was killed in intelligence services’ custody.

Furthermore, the Islamic Republic agents assassinated lawyer and former MP, Reza Mazlouman (aka Kourosh Aryamanesh) in Paris; author and translator Ghaffar Hosseini; prominent Iranologist and professor of ancient Iranian languages, Ahmad Tafazzoli; journalist Ebrahim Zalzadeh, poet and political activist, Ms. Parvaneh Parastou; author and translator, Pirouz Davani; writer and ideologist, Majid Sharif; and members of Iranian Writers Association, Mohammad Mokhtari and Mohammad Ja’far Pouyandeh, in Tehran. Meanwhile, a prominent author and translator, Ahmad Mir Ala’ee, and the poet and researcher Hamid Hajizadeh and his ten-year-old son were assassinated in Isfahan and Kerman, respectively.

Several writers and journalists, including Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Ms. Zahra Kazemi, bloggers Sattar Beheshti, Omid Reza Mir Sayafi, and Ya’qoub Mir Nehad, and journalists Alireza Eftekhari and Hoda Saber were killed in the Islamic Republic’s prisons.

Haleh Sahabi, a journalist and political activist, died after being physically attacked at her father’s funeral.

The administrator of a social media news channel with millions of followers, Paris-based Ruhollah Zam, was lured into Iraq, abducted, and taken back to Tehran, and executed.

A failed attempt to kill 21 Iranian journalists, writers, and poets on a bus destined for Armenia also must be added to the list of Iranian crimes against writers and people involved in media.

Iran is solely responsible for all these crimes. This process’s precedence and continuity clearly show that, regardless of which political camp has been in power in Iran, the Islamic Republic regime has always brutally dealt with journalists and writers who it considered unfavorable.

Some of these writers and journalists have been assassinated by the Iranian government when the judiciary and the country’s security services were simultaneously in the hands of the so-called reformist faction or the fundamentalists.

The saga of all those who have spent their best years of journalism or literary and artistic creation in forced silence, exile, prison, and grappling with censorship is another painful story needing a different feature.

The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Radio Farda.

National Media Agency in MI, USA | Apadana Media

The post A Killing Field Named The Islamic Republic appeared first on APADANA MEDIA.

Media Agency in Battle Creek MI | FILE PHOTO: A general view of the Bushehr nuclear power plant, 1,200 km (746 miles) south of Tehran, August 21, 2010. Iran began fuelling its first nuclear power plant on Saturday, a potent symbol of its growing regional sway and rejection of international sanctions designed to prevent it building a nuclear bomb. REUTERS/Raheb Homavandi

Media Agency in Battle Creek MI, US | Apadana Media

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States plans to announce additional Iran sanctions on Friday related to conventional arms and to the metals industry, sources familiar with the matter said.

The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, did not provide details on the sanctions, the latest in a series that U.S. President Donald Trump has imposed on the Iranian economy to try to force Tehran into a new negotiation on curbing its nuclear program. The State and Treasury Departments did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the announcement.

US News | Apadana Media

The post U.S. plans new Iran sanctions related to metals, conventional arms appeared first on APADANA MEDIA.

World-wide deaths are running far beyond what would have been expected without the pandemic

The recorded death count from the Covid-19 pandemic as of Thursday is nearing 2 million. The true extent is far worse.

More than 2.8 million people have lost their lives due to the pandemic, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from 59 countries and jurisdictions. This tally offers the most comprehensive view yet of the pandemic’s global impact. Deaths in these places last year surged more than 12% above average levels.

Less than two-thirds of that surge has been attributed directly to Covid-19. Public-health experts believe that many, if not most, of the additional deaths were directly linked to the disease, particularly early in the pandemic when testing was sparse. Some of those excess deaths came from indirect fallout, from health-care disruptions, people avoiding the hospital and other issues.

To better understand the pandemic’s global toll, the Journal compiled the most recent available data on deaths from all causes from countries with available records. These countries together account for roughly one-quarter of the world’s population but about three-quarters of all reported deaths from Covid-19 through late last year.

The tally found more than 821,000 additional deaths that aren’t accounted for in governments’ official Covid-19 death counts.

US Press Agency in Battle Creek | Apadana Media

The post The Covid-19 Death Toll Is Even Worse Than It Looks appeared first on APADANA MEDIA.

National Media Agency in MI | Iran Seeks Leverage in Nuclear Standoff

News: Tehran wants U.S. to lift sanctions as price to recommit to landmark accord; some say moves aim to pressure Biden

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, shown in 2019, faces pressure to shorten the steps toward building a nuclear weapon.
PHOTO: ALEXEI DRUZHININ/KREMLIN/REUTERS

Since President Trump withdrew the U.S. from a multilateral agreement aimed at curbing Iran’s atomic ambitions, Tehran has moved steadily to step up uranium enrichment and, most recently, said it was starting work to produce a key material used in nuclear warheads.

European diplomats, who have sought to salvage the accord, say they see the Iranian moves as an effort to increase pressure on Washington and President-elect Joe Biden to rejoin to the deal and lift sanctions.

The question now is: Have the Iranians gone so far that a U.S. return is less likely?

Since the Trump administration started its maximum-pressure sanctions campaign, policy makers in Tehran skeptical of the 2015 accord have gained more sway, pressing President Hassan Rouhani to take increasingly serious steps that shorten the path to a nuclear weapon, according to Iranian officials.

“The hard-liners want to show public opinion they can achieve better outcomes,” said one senior Iranian official.

The post Iran Seeks Leverage in Nuclear Standoff With U.S. appeared first on APADANA MEDIA.

US News Agency in MI | Iranian Guard drones in drill mirror in Saudi attacks

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard conducted a drill Friday that saw “suicide drones” crash into targets and explode, triangle-shaped aircraft that strongly resembled those used in a 2019 attack in Saudi Arabia that temporarily cut the kingdom’s oil production by half.

US News Agency in MI | Apadana Media

Iran has long denied launching the attack on the sites of Abqaiq and Khurais while Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels initially claimed the assault.

However, the United States, Saudi Arabia and U.N. experts believe the drones were Iranian, likely launched amid an escalating series of incidents stemming from President Donald Trump’s unilateral withdrew from Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers.

The Guard’s decision to use the drones on Friday alongside a series of missile drills comes as Iran tries to pressure President-elect Joe Biden over the nuclear accord, which he has said America could re-enter.

Tehran recently seized a South Korean oil tanker and begun enriching uranium closer to weapons-grade levels, as the U.S. sent B-52 bombers, the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier and a nuclear submarine into the region as a deterrent in Trump’s final days as president.

“The nuclear issue is likely to be the Biden administration’s first foreign policy test,” wrote Simon Henderson, an analyst with the Washington Institute for Near-East Policy. “Ultimately, the United States holds the best hand, but Iran may still be able to play the game quite well, even with a weak hand.”

Iranian state television described the drill as taking place in the country’s vast central desert, the latest in a series of snap exercises called amid the escalating tensions over its nuclear program. The footage showed four of the unmanned, triangle-shaped drones flying in a tight formation.

Another scene showed the drones smash into targets Iran described as being “hypothetical enemy bases” and detonate. One target appeared to be a missile vehicle — a telling target in a region where American forces and their Gulf Arab allies rely on Patriot missile batteries for defense.

Looking at the footage frame by frame, the triangle-shape drone appeared to have two fins on either side. This strongly resembles the so-called “Delta” drones used both in the Abqaiq and Khurais assault in September 2019, as well as a May 2019 attack on Saudi Arabia’s crucial East-West pipeline. Saudi Arabia showed damaged drones to journalists after the attacks, while U.N. experts included images of the drone in a report.

Experts refer to such bomb-carrying drones as “loitering munitions.” The drone flies to a destination, likely programmed before its flight, and either explodes in the air over the target or on impact against it.

Iranian officials did not acknowledge the resemblance, nor did they immediately identify the drones used.

“The message of this drill is our might and firm determination to defend our sovereignty, our holy ruling system and our values against the enemies of Islam and Iran,” said Gen. Hossein Salami, the Guard’s top commander.

The Guard also launched solid-fuel ballistic missiles named Dezful and Zolfaghar during the drill, with state TV repeatedly airing imagery of the simultaneous launch of eight missiles from truck-based launchers.

Iran’s missile program has a 2,000-kilometer (1,250-mile) range, far enough to reach archenemy Israel and U.S. military bases in the region. Last January, after the U.S. killed a top Iranian general in a drone strike in Baghdad, Tehran retaliated by firing a barrage of ballistic missiles at two Iraqi bases housing U.S. troops, which saw dozens of troops injured with concussions.

___

Associated Press journalists Amir Vahdat and Mehdi Fattahi in Tehran, Iran, contributed to this report.

The post Iranian Guard drones in drill mirror those in Saudi attacks appeared first on APADANA MEDIA.

Iran’s elite military force says it can deter long-range maritime threats with ballistic missiles tested on Saturday.

The drill saw anti-warship ballistic missiles launched in the Indian Ocean [Iranian Revolutionary Guard/Sepahnews via AP]

Tehran, Iran – The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) tested long-range missiles and drones against land and sea targets in Iran’s fourth large-scale military show of force in two weeks amid tensions with the United States.

The IRGC on Saturday fired long-range ballistic missiles that travelled 1,800km (1,118 miles) and struck artificial targets in the northern part of the Indian Ocean.

“Choosing a plethora of long-range missiles to hit sea targets shows that if the enemies of the Islamic republic harbour any ill will toward our national interests, maritime trade routes or our land, they will be targeted and destroyed by missiles,” said Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of the armed forces.

“We have no intention for any aggression, but we announce with this drill that any aggressors to our country will be attacked with full force and in the shortest time.”

IRGC commander-in-chief Hossein Salami said on Saturday one of the elite military organisation’s goals is to be able to target “enemy war vessels” including aircraft carriers.

 

Iran held a military exercise involving ballistic missiles and drones in its central desert [Imamedia via AP]

On Friday, the IRGC fired dozens of “next-generation” missiles from an undisclosed location in desert areas in central Iran that were shown in videos aired by state broadcasting to hit their land targets.

“This is the roaring sound of a large number of IRGC ballistic missiles, which have this time been equipped with detachable warheads and can be guided outside the Earth’s atmosphere,” a state broadcast reporter said as a barrage of missiles was launched behind him.

Shortly after, the IRGC also tested loitering munitions, or “suicide drones”, that were shown to hit a variety of land targets.

Tensions with the US

The fourth show of Iranian military force in the new year, the IRGC drill comes after two months of renewed tensions with the outgoing US President Donald Trump administration around the January 3 anniversary of the assassination of Iran’s top general by the United States.

Qassem Soleimani, who led the foreign operations arm of the IRGC, was killed in a Trump-ordered drone strike in Baghdad last year.

In the past two months, the US has flown nuclear-capable strategic bombers over the Middle East and has stationed an aircraft carrier in the region to “deter” a potential Iranian response.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, on the other hand, has accused the US of trying to “fabricate pretext for war”.

The Trump administration has only intensified its “maximum pressure” campaign, which started after unilaterally abandoning Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers in 2018, before president-elect Joe Biden enters the White House on January 20.

The US Treasury on Friday announced new sanctions targeting Iran’s shipping, aerospace and aviation industries.

On Thursday, on the second day of a maritime drill by Iran’s army, personnel spotted – and captured on camera – a foreign submarine that quickly left the scene after receiving warnings. The submarine appeared to be American.

As part of the drill, the army inducted Iran’s largest military vessel into its fleet, fired torpedoes from locally made submarines, and conducted special forces operations.

On January 8, the IRGC unveiled a huge underground missile base along the Gulf coast that it said was one of “many” such bases.

Days earlier, Iran’s army held its first-ever drill for locally made drones in the northern province of Semnan, which included aerial targeting and destruction of objectives using air-to-air missiles, hitting land targets, and employing suicide drones.

‘Not looking to commit a crime’

Iran’s state broadcaster aired footage of missiles being fired at two US bases in Iraq last year in response to Soleimani’s assassination on Friday night for the first time.

In the footage, Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the head of the IRGC’s aerospace division, is shown in an operation room where he issues the order to fire the missiles that inflicted damage on the US bases, but no fatalities.

“We’re firing the missiles one by one so the people can get away. We’re not looking to commit a crime,” he said, calling Trump a “criminal”.

A recent interview with Hajizadeh was also aired, in which he said 13 missiles were fired at the bases and the US was on high alert but did not know where Iran would strike.

He also said then-Iraqi prime minister Adel Abdul Mahdi was informed “out of respect” that US targets would be hit by Iranian missiles – without knowing the location – only half an hour before the strike.

Hajizadeh claimed that Iranian missiles killed an unknown number of US troops, saying the Americans “themselves brought the dead out from under the rubble, but first dismissed the Iraqis from the location”.

“We had readied 400 missiles just for those first moments,” he said of Iran’s anticipation for a potential US reprisal, adding Iran could cause “irreparable damage” to all US bases in the region by firing 500 missiles at the same time.

Michigan News Agency | Apadana Media

The post Iran’s Revolutionary Guard tests long-range missiles, drones appeared first on APADANA MEDIA.

Saudi Arabia has brought Qatar back into the fold, as Iran stirs things up in the Gulf

US Press Agency: Iran bares its teeth, while its rivals mend fences

The third day of January marked a year since America assassinated Qassem Suleimani, a talismanic Iranian general who marshalled militias across the Middle East. The mood was febrile. American officials feared commemorative reprisals. Muhammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, tweeted that “intelligence from Iraq” indicated an American “plot to fabricate pretext for war”. The uss Nimitz, an American aircraft-carrier, having been ordered home from the Persian Gulf days earlier as a conciliatory gesture to Iran, was told to stay put. In the end, January 3rd passed without incident. Yet the day that followed was anything but uneventful.

On January 4th Iran said it had resumed enriching uranium to 20% purity, a level that is nine-tenths of the way to weapons-grade, at its underground Fordow facility. Under the terms of a nuclear deal signed by Iran and six world powers in 2015, but abrogated by America in 2018, Iran is forbidden to enrich anything at all at Fordow, let alone to such levels.

The post Iran bares its teeth, while its rivals mend fences appeared first on APADANA MEDIA.

There was a chill in the air as Mona Seif walked to Cairo’s Tahrir Square from a protest outside the heavily guarded state television office known as the “fortress of lies.” Eighteen days into Egypt’s “January 25” revolution in 2011, President Hosni Mubarak stubbornly clung to power and the mood, though defiant, was subdued.

As Seif reached the neoclassical Egyptian Museum on the edge of the square, crowds of people began to scream deliriously. It took the 24-year-old activist a split second to comprehend what was happening: After three weeks of extraordinary highs and deflating lows, punctuated by state-sponsored violence, Mubarak had finally bowed to popular pressure and ended his 30-year reign.

Hundreds of thousands of people exploded in a frenzy of celebration. Women leapt in the air and men pumped their fists. Others knelt and faced Mecca in prayer.

“I just remember I cried,” said Seif. “I kept on screaming with people around me and some started hugging me. I wanted to reach my parents, but the phones were completely down, there were so many people calling. So I started … to look for familiar faces — my brother, my father.”

In that giddy moment, it was easy to believe the Arab world had fundamentally changed. Never in modern times had the region been gripped by such expectation. In December 2010, 26-year-old Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi fatally set himself alight in an act of despair that resonated across nations. The subsequent mass protests forced the dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali into exile on Jan. 15, 2011, and triggered a wave of popular uprisings as the Arab Spring unfolded.

A girl sits high on the shoulders of a grown-up as demonstrators gather to protest against the visit of Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki on Dec. 17, 2012, in Sidi Bouzid, south Tunisia, the birthplace of the country’s recent revolution.

(Hichem Borni / Associated Press)

If Bouazizi’s tragic act sparked the revolutions, it was Mubarak’s fall that truly emboldened protesters throughout the Middle East, breaking a decades-long veil of fear and reinforcing the belief that the people could make a difference. As the region’s most populous nation, Egypt was traditionally its trendsetter, and Mubarak was the doyen of Arab despots. If he could fall, who was safe? For millions determined to shake up the old order, it was the moment the impossible seemed possible.

“We felt so empowered that we believed we would be able to deal with anything that came next,” said Seif, who spent the revolution shuttling between Tahrir Square and a “citizens’ journalism hub,” as activists used social media to mobilize and spread their message around the world. “We also knew that there’s something else to deal with,” she said. “But I don’t think we understood the magnitude of it.”

It was a prescient sentiment. A decade on, Seif has never felt more fearful for the future. Her older brother, Alaa, an icon of the revolution, and her younger sister, Sanaa, are among tens of thousands of people jailed since President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi seized power in a popularly backed 2013 coup that ousted the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood government. Egypt is more oppressive than ever. A withering crackdown that first targeted the Islamist movement has evolved into an assault against all forms of critical debate.

“I don’t operate on hope anymore. I’m mostly motivated by household survival,” Seif said, her speech racing with emotion. “The current state of things is too violent, too nightmarish.”

Her family’s experience epitomizes a decade of shattered dreams. Rather than ushering in the freedoms many Arabs yearned for, the uprisings exposed the difficulty of fostering change in nations long ruled by despots who had hollowed out state institutions and built predatory patronage networks.

The Arab Spring also highlighted the struggles of popular movements in transforming people power into institutionalized political influence. Today, it is the strongmen who still dominate, while the grievances that inflamed millions of Arabs, from systemic unemployment to corruption and yawning inequalities, remain. In many cases, they have worsened. Young revolutionaries whose courage drove the uprisings have been persecuted, with many seeking exile, exhausted by waves of crackdowns.

Syria, Yemen and Libya are ripped apart by conflict, with hundreds of thousands dead and millions forced from their homes. Even in Tunisia, which has managed a successful transition to democracy, there is an aching sense of unfulfillment.

“The revolution raised the slogans of freedom, dignity and employment. … It was carried out by the defeated, the excluded and the marginalized,” said Olfa Lamloum, a regime opponent who returned to Tunisia after Ben Ali was deposed and now runs a nongovernmental organization.

“Ten years after the revolution … they’re still marginalized. They’re still excluded. They’re still without dignity.”

She could be speaking about any of the countries where uprisings erupted. In 2011, there were about 8 million people in the Middle East and North Africa living below a poverty line of $1.90 a day. By 2018, that number had swelled to 28 million, according to the World Bank, in a region with the world’s highest youth unemployment rate.

Ten years on from that hopeful day in Tahrir Square, a recent survey of young Arabs found that nearly half of 18- to 24-year-olds had considered leaving their countries. In Libya, Egypt and Tunisia, many predicted protests could erupt again, citing corruption and lack of job prospects as the main causes of instability. Lamloum points to the thousands still making the perilous journey to Italy in boats as a sign of this despair.

“This confirms they believe there is no hope left for them in Tunisia,” she said.

Taking on Kadafi

On Feb. 17, 2011, Libyans inspired by events in Cairo and Tunis used social media to call for a “Day of Rage” to protest Moammar Kadafi’s despotic 42-year rule. The dictator responded with predictable ruthlessness, dispatching his feared security forces to demonstrations in the eastern city of Benghazi. But the protesters remained defiant.

Ahmed (not his real name) was a 22-year-old fresh out of university, determined to join the crowds filling Benghazi’s streets. On Feb. 18, he ventured out with his father.

Moammar Kadafi in 1987.

(John Redman / Associated Press)

“I remember thousands and thousands all over and screaming and yelling against Kadafi … and looking at my father’s face,” Ahmed said. “He was in such awe, such disbelief, because he lived through the prime of Kadafi’s authority in the 1970s and 1980s, when colleagues [in academia] were hanged.”

As torched state buildings and police stations smoldered and the bodies of martyrs were laid to rest, the security forces began pulling back.

“It was unimaginable,” Ahmed recalled.

WORLD & NATION

Libya post-Kadafi: Lurching from one crisis to another

May 26, 2019

I first met Ahmed a few days later, when I crossed into Libya from Egypt after covering the fall of Mubarak. As Kadafi’s grip loosened, Benghazi was a city high with expectation. The old courthouse, which looked out on the Mediterranean, was a cacophony of activity, a focal point for revolutionaries who set about establishing a “national council” and publishing the first editions of the Libya Free newspaper.

Ahmed, who spoke perfect English, became my fixer. Over the coming weeks, we sped along behind trucks and cars crammed with rebel fighters toward “front lines” that in the early days were often no more than barriers erected across the desert road to Tripoli. Most had never picked up a gun in anger. Often, they would fire in the air in a show of bravado, then retreat after Kadafi’s better-equipped forces lobbed mortars and rockets in their direction. But they were resolute, and the intervention of NATO fighter jets in March neutralized Kadafi’s military superiority.

Ahmed watched from the sidelines. He was keen to join his peers in battle, but committed to his work with me. In May, after I left Libya, he finally enlisted.

“I don’t think I would have been able to live with myself if I hadn’t done it,” he said. “It still annoys me today that I wasn’t able to reach the protests on February 17.”

Three months later, he was in the revolutionary convoy that rolled into Tripoli as huge crowds cheered their liberators. The images are still vivid: “You think these things are imaginary and made up, but it was like that exactly.” Ahmed then took part in the assault on Kadafi’s compound, which signaled the fall of Tripoli. The culmination of seven months of tumult and bloodshed, it was also an intoxicating period of hope, as the nation felt the shackles being lifted.

Academics, lawyers and others now had a chance to shape the nation in their vision. Ahmed put down his AK-47 and returned to Benghazi to raise awareness about the constitutional process, voting and political parties. Most Libyans had zero experience of elections but, in July 2012, they cast their ballots.

“It was like Libya had won the World Cup — national flags everywhere and people hanging out of cars, honking their horns,” Ahmed said. “A lot of people, even in Libya, forget how good it was because of how bad things are [now]. But if you talk to anyone and remind them of the details, they remember, yeah, actually how powerful it was.”

Syria: Assad cracks down

As Egypt, Libya and Tunisia navigated the bumpy road toward elections, Mazen Darwish was braving security forces’ bullets in Damascus. In March 2011, he was briefly detained as the Syrian uprising against the Assad regime gathered momentum. The shootings, beatings and arrests “were an early sign that it was not going to go the same way as Egypt or Tunisia,” he remembers.

A human rights lawyer, Darwish knew the risks of opposing a regime with a history of ruthlessly snuffing out dissent. But he prayed Assad would agree to compromises, so the protesters could, at least, achieve partial gains.

Early on, Darwish and others met groups of youths and warned them against violence and sectarianism.

“We thought the regime couldn’t win if the opposition used political or peaceful and moral means because our demands were patriotic,” he recalled. “But we always said if the regime managed to lure the protest movement to violence or sectarianism, it would win because these are its two favored arenas.”

He believes the opposition’s use of arms was inevitable after the regime resorted to brutal methods to crush them. It also became apparent that the struggle in Syria would not remain a domestic affair. The regime was soon supported by Iran and the militias it backed, including the Lebanese movement Hezbollah.

In 2015, Russia’s intervention tilted the war irrevocably in Assad’s favor. And as peaceful protest morphed into armed rebellion, governments such as Turkey and the U.S. provided arms and cash to the opposition, including the Islamist factions that ultimately dominated moderate groups.

Darwish and others tried to convince Islamists to avoid violence but, he said, “The regime, regional actors, domestic factions, they all had an interest in violence.”

However, it was the regime, with its chemical weapons and barrel bombs, that “started the violence and created the ground for others” to behave likewise.

Darwish endured this brutality firsthand. In February 2012, regime forces sealed off streets around his office in Damascus, bundled him and 15 others into a bus and carted them off to a military base. Over three and a half years of detention, he was beaten with clubs, shocked with electric prods and hung by his arms. On one occasion, his limp body was dumped among the dead, only for guards to realize he was alive.

“It was a form of revenge with no other objective,” he said, speaking in a measured tone.

He was released in 2015 to a Damascus he no longer recognized. Most of his friends had left Syria or were imprisoned or missing — among tens of thousands of people the regime had “disappeared.” Darwish escaped to Germany, joining the nearly 6 million Syrians — almost a third of the population — who have fled their homeland.

Today, Assad, with Russian and Iranian backing, has reclaimed control of most of the country. But he clings to a Pyrrhic victory as the broken nation’s economy teeters toward collapse. Millions are destitute. ISIS, the jihadi group that exploited the chaos to take over swaths of Syria, remains a threat despite losing its hold on territory.

“There are no victors in Syria,” Darwish said. “The Syrian nation lost.”

Now 47, he knows “utopian” thoughts of regime change are delusional for the foreseeable future, though he believes Assad will eventually be replaced from within as his foreign backers realize they are better off without him.

“The regional and international players will reach a point … where it will no longer be possible to invest in the Syrian war,” Darwish said. But even that seems optimistic for now.

A devastated Yemen

Yemen was already one of the most fragile Arab nations before uprisings erupted against its veteran president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, in the last days of January 2011. Tribalistic, impoverished and blighted by a corrupt, weak state, it was awash with arms and a base for one of Al Qaeda’s most active branches.

After months of protests, Saleh, a despot who once compared ruling Yemen to “dancing on the heads of snakes,” agreed to a transition that would end his 33-year reign. Another aging veteran of the regime, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, took over, but all the old problems continued.

Former President Ali Abdullah Saleh delivers a speech during a gathering of his supporters in Sana, Yemen, on Aug. 24, 2017.

(Yahya Arhab / EPA / Shutterstock)

“You had all these hopeful messages on the political side, while people saw a deterioration in every basic service,” Rafat al-Akhali told me. “Corruption and patronage was even expanding as new powers came into the transition.”

Akhali saw it happen from close up. He left Yemen’s capital Sana as a 19-year-old after winning a scholarship to Canada in 2002 but continued to work with youth at home. He returned when the revolution was in its infancy, convinced the “tide had changed.” After the transition, he took a post with a government bureau that oversaw reforms, believing the moment was ripe to push for change from within.

It was not to be. As the government foundered, the Houthi movement of battle-hardened Islamists from the country’s north saw an opening to move on Sana, vowing to sweep the corrupt from office. Young militiamen took over ministries, stopping and searching Cabinet members. Akhali, who was briefly youth and sports minister, recalls how teenage fighters, AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades slung over their shoulders, demanded to see government documents, even though many were illiterate: “They’d hold the paper upside down and say, ‘What is this? You are not allowed to bring this in.’”

Akhali realized the state in Yemen was a “mirage”: “You suddenly find there’s no military, no security — there’s nothing.” In January 2015, the Houthis attacked the presidential palace, forcing Hadi’s government into exile. The region’s next proxy war was about to explode.

Days after this assault, King Salman ascended the throne in neighboring Saudi Arabia and appointed his favorite son, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, as defense minister. The 29-year-old MBS was on a fast track to becoming crown prince. By March, he was spearheading a Saudi-led offensive — blessed by Washington — against the Houthis, who are viewed by Riyadh as an Iranian proxy stoking conflict in their backyard.

In Sana, Akhali, his wife and two young sons fled to their basement as fighter jets pummeled the neighborhood. After two weeks of bombardment, they jostled through crowds and boarded an evacuation flight to Jordan.

“It was the worst thing to be woken up by an explosion, so we thought we needed to get out for a few weeks until this stuff is done and [the warring parties] reach an agreement,” he said.

It would be four years before Akhali returned, fleetingly, to a devastated nation stalked by disease, with 14 million people — about half the population — at risk of famine. The United Nations describes Yemen as the world’s worst man-made humanitarian crisis.

According to a 2019 report, about 60% of the more than 233,000 Yemenis who have died, either in fighting or through lack of food or access to services, were children under 5. Thousands of boys have been recruited as child soldiers; young girls have been forced into marriages by desperate families.

Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, is bogged down in a conflict it cannot win while the Houthis retain their hold on Sana and the north. Akhali relocated to the United Kingdom and is a fellow at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government.

“It seems if you want to have any change, you need foreign backing and you need weapons,” he reflected. “Can we effect change at this time? That’s the question I struggle with.”

Lessons from Libya

In Libya, Ahmed’s nagging doubts about the country’s trajectory grew as neophyte politicians failed to knit together a functioning state and as armed factions, born out of the revolt, battled over the oil-rich nation’s resources. He recalls predicting to his mother in 2014 that there was going to be a war that year.

“She was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ I told her, ‘The polarization, it’s just escalating.’”

But even he underestimated how bad it would get, as Libyan warlords, such as the septuagenarian former military officer Gen. Khalifa Haftar, carved the country into fiefdoms.

“Everything we had struggled for, [Haftar’s forces] were like just, bang, undo it,” Ahmed said. “Life just stopped … it was the whole thing, street-to-street fighting, jets bombing, tanks in the street.”

He views Haftar as a wannabe dictator in the mold of Kadafi. But the general’s self-proclaimed assault against Islamists resonated with Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. Militias in the west of Libya, some Islamists, drew backing from Qatar and Turkey. On April 4, 2019, Haftar launched an offensive against a weak UN-backed government in Tripoli, triggering a proxy war on the Mediterranean’s southern shores.

When I visited Tripoli last February, the capital had been under siege for months. As fighters hunkered down in abandoned, bullet-scarred homes, civilians in surrounding areas lived in fear of the next rocket or drone attack. Turkish intervention turned the tide against Haftar and today there is an uneasy peace, but many say foreign powers will determine their country’s future.

“There were definitely a lot of wrong decisions made by Libyans, the fighting, watching the attacks against each other. So we definitely need to take responsibility,” Ahmed said. But “70% of it is an international conflict, Libya is just the battleground.”

Ahmed, who is now studying for a master’s degree in peace and conflict studies in Turkey, says one lesson of the past decade is that if the guns do fall silent, local actors should not be pressured to rush transition periods. Ahmed and Akhali argue that internationally backed initiatives often put too much emphasis on elections, instead of supporting fragile states to build effective institutions and lay the foundations needed to ensure voters have buy-in and outcomes are respected.

Akhali said “electoral democracy” should be an end result, not a starting point. “It’s not up to international powers to say, ‘No, you have to get there in two or three years.’ No state was formed, or evolved, in two years.”

‘Rebuilding from zero’

Even the most successful Arab Spring experiment underscores how hard it is for countries to emerge from dictatorship. Tunisia has many elements of stability that have eluded others. The military is not powerful enough to meddle in politics. The main Islamist movement, aware of the regional dynamics, was quick to rebrand as a Muslim democratic party and cooperate with secular parties. There is also a vibrant civil society and greater social freedoms.

Yet unemployment has remained at about 15% and there are still gaping regional inequalities. Many Tunisians are angry at politicians they see as self-interested and unable to work for the public good.

“We are rebuilding from zero,” said the Tunisian civil society activist Lamloum. “We lived under dictatorial regimes for decades. … The absence of alternatives and the difficulty of constructing alternatives goes back to that.”

Tunisians in 2014 celebrate the third anniversary of the uprising that ousted longtime autocrat Zine el Abidine ben Ali, taking note of the advances toward pluralism and justice that compare favorably with the other Middle Eastern countries that have seen Arab Spring revolutions.

(Fethi Belaid / AFP / Getty Images)

According to the International Monetary Fund, Tunisia needs about five years of 5% growth even to reduce unemployment to 11%. Yet the economy expanded by an average of 1.7% from 2010-17, far below the decade before spring 2011. Still, Lamloum said there is no sense of “crushing defeat.”

“There are still youths who have not been defeated and are still able to fight some battles — and win them,” she said. “The revolution did not succeed, but in my opinion the revolution lost a battle, it did not lose the war, the bracket has not been closed.”

All those interviewed agreed the uprisings had been inevitable, whether in 2011 or at another point, due to the conditions people were living under. Ahmed said: “There was so much good, but so much bad as well.” Citing historical precedents, such as the 1968 Prague Spring, he said “these springs take time.”

“I just regret there are still governments and groups of interests who don’t want these societies to have freedom,” he added. “They are still trying to insist on providing two options, either dictatorship or chaos.”

In Yemen, Akhali says warring factions will ultimately thrash out a power-sharing agreement, but then comes the daunting task of rebuilding a devastated society. “Is it fixable? We have to cling to that hope,” he said.

In Berlin, Mazen Darwish keeps his revolutionary flame flickering as president of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression. He documents abuses in Syria and helped German prosecutors charge a notorious former intelligence officer, Anwar Raslan, with war crimes. It is, he said, his way of keeping “justice on the table” and preventing “the politicians, the princes of war … the regional governments” from agreeing political settlements that fail to secure a genuine peace based on accountability.

When he reflects on the events of a decade ago, Darwish said Syrians were pushed to revolution by “years of despotism, of backwardness and bad economic and social conditions … but it isn’t possible to have real structural change without a heavy price. Personally, I was prepared to pay the price, although I never wished for the price to be this. Never.”

In Cairo, Mona Seif planned to begin a PhD, but has put her studies on hold to focus on the plight of her brother and sister. The rearrest of Alaa — a blogger who was detained in September 2019, six months after completing a five-year jail term — “made me realize I can no longer try to sustain a normal life,” she said.

Seif, who documented abuses by the security services, can barely hide her anger as she struggles to comprehend the popular support for the 2013 coup that brought an end to Egypt’s brief democratic chapter. She never understood those people, some of whom had packed into Tahrir Square to call for Mubarak’s resignation, “selling the idea of a pragmatic choice” of siding with the military because they loathed the Muslim Brotherhood government.

“There was this notion … [among] a lot of Sisi supporters … that, ‘Yes, the army was going to commit massive violations, but it’s never going to touch us, it’s going to be against Islamists.’” It was a period, she said, that “changed our worlds, our social circles and friendships.” Egyptians, like many other Arabs, argued over the question of stability versus democratic freedoms. “I never felt so alienated.”

Antigovernment protesters perform the Muslim Friday prayers at the continuing demonstration in Tahrir Square in Cairo in February 2011. Ten years ago, an uprising in Tunisia opened the way for a wave of popular revolts against authoritarian rulers across the Middle East known as the Arab Spring.

(Tara Todras-Whitehill / Associated Press)

When I returned to Cairo for the 2018 presidential election, virtually all forms of critical debate had been silenced. The president secured 97% of the votes. Those businessmen willing to talk on the record lauded Sisi for returning stability and reviving a bankrupt economy after the Brotherhood’s divisive and turbulent rule.

But an improving macroeconomic picture often masks the reality for most — in Egypt, poverty has continued to rise. Even before the 2011 uprising, the country was attracting record levels of foreign investment and enjoying a spurt of healthy growth.

HA Hellyer, an Arab-English Middle East analyst, describes a “tinderbox” in the region, where the structural problems, from economic inequalities to demographic pressures, are worse than before 2011. The coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated these.

He says leaders could push through reforms and provide better services to ease people’s frustrations, but “instead, I think they’ve decided, ‘We tried this whole opening-up thing a decade and a half ago and that resulted in inadvertently empowering civil society that eventually led to the events of 2011. So they are going to clamp down and make sure it never happens again.’”

Things can’t go on like this indefinitely, he said. “It doesn’t mean things are going to blow up tomorrow, but … at some point it will crack.”

In the past two years, such cracks appeared with protests in Sudan, Algeria, Iraq and Lebanon forcing political resignations. Once more, however, they revealed the challenges of securing substantive change from the street — in the latter three, ruling elites remain entrenched, while in Sudan the military shares power with civilians in a transitional government.

In Cairo, Seif describes a “brewing anger beneath the surface.”

“This is very similar, but in a more intense way, to 2010, where many of the younger generation were feeling that there was no space for them, for work or having families or any kind of future,” she said. “The current situation cannot be sustained forever, but I don’t know if that will lead to another 2011 — I didn’t expect a 2011.”

Like other activists, she sounds worn down, the glorious moments of revolution not forgotten, but overwhelmed by what followed. She keeps the memories of 10 years ago hidden deep inside, “protected from all the darkness,” and said she will only truly begin to reflect when she’s sure of the safety of her family and friends. But like others interviewed here, she has no regrets about standing up to power.

“It’s weird because I’m not saying it as a statement. I actually questioned myself a lot and I find it so strange that despite all of this happening, at my lowest moments, never once did I feel, ‘I regret the revolution.’”

Andrew England is the Financial Times’ Middle East editor. Additional reporting by Heba Saleh, FT North Africa correspondent.

The post The lost decade: Voices of the Arab Spring on what happened next appeared first on APADANA MEDIA.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said Thursday Iran had informed it that it had begun installing equipment for the production of uranium metal. It said Tehran maintains its plans to conduct research and development on uranium metal production are part of its “declared aim to design an improved type of fuel.”

News | Apadana Media

The post European powers press Iran to back off latest nuclear move appeared first on APADANA MEDIA.