Hands off: Women rally worldwide against Egypt assaults

[Originally posted at NOW]

Though the three men smoking cigarettes on the balcony of the Egyptian embassy probably didn’t realize it, the scene they were witnessing on the street below them Tuesday evening would also be seen by their consular colleagues in 36 cities across the world.

Responding to an online call from the Uprising of Women in the Arab World organization, some 30 activists gathered outside the embassy in Bir Hassan to rally against what they called the “sexual terrorism practiced on Egyptian female protestors.” Carrying placards and a large banner depicting Umm Kulthoum as a protestor, they took on Egyptian accents as they chanted, “Strong women in Tahrir, harassers in prison!,” “Down with the government of the [religious scholar]!,” and “Harassment will lead you nowhere, try again and I will break your hand!”

Similar protests were also held at 6pm outside three dozen Egyptian embassies in the Levant, North Africa, Europe, the USA, and the Far East.

“We are here because we directly relate to the harassment and rape that Egyptian women are being subjected to, because we are subjected to similar violence in our own countries as well,” said Diala Haidar to NOW at the protest. “It’s time for us to stand up in solidarity in all matters related to women’s issues in this region.”

Other demonstrators emphasized the same point. “I came to protest the violation of women’s bodies and minds and privacy in all the Arab countries, not just Egypt, because we have a lot of violations going on in Lebanon that we don’t talk about,” said Ghina Daou. “I’m here to defend those women who don’t have a voice to speak.”

Though sexual harassment has been among women’s grievances in Egypt for years, recent weeks have seen an alarming increase in the brutality of assaults. On January 25th, at a demonstration in Cairo’s Tahrir Square marking the second anniversary of the revolution that overthrew dictator Hosni Mubarak, over 20 women were separately attacked by mobs of hundreds of men, who stripped their clothes, molested them, beat them, and even cut their genitals with knives.

“One of the women on January 25th had to have a hysterectomy. Another ended up in intensive care,” said Bridgette Auger, a journalist who has reported from Egypt since October 2011 and was herself a victim of a group assault last June. Since the revolution, there has been “a shift in the mood [in Tahrir],” she told NOW, as well as in the organization of attacks. “You really feel that something is going on.”

Indeed, premeditated sexual assaults have “become a tactic to use against protestors, to push them away from political life,” according to Farah Barqawi, one of the organizers of Tuesday’s demonstrations. “Terrorizing these female protestors is the easiest way to keep them away from Tahrir,” she told NOW.

Predictably, opinions vary as to who exactly is organizing and funding the mobs. “Some of course are blaming the [Muslim Brotherhood], some accuse Salafists and fundamentalists in general, and some on the [Brotherhood’s] side are accusing fellow revolutionaries,” said Barqawi. At Tuesday’s protest in Cairo, demonstrators invoked [President Muhammad] Morsi’s name in relation to the attacks, chanting “Women ousted Mubarak, women will bring down Morsi.” In doing so, they appeared to point a finger at the Brotherhood.

Activists stress, however, that the phenomenon is not limited to Egypt, highlighting Syria in particular as a worrying case. Areen al-Asmi, organizer of the Damascus chapter of Tuesday’s protest, told NOW that “we Syrian women encounter sexual harassment and even rape by men from both sides [of the military conflict].” Those who have sought refuge outside the country fare little better: “In refugee camps outside Syria, people are buying women’s bodies. Syrian women in Jordan are forced into prostitution and trafficking.” Due to obvious security concerns as well as fears of arrest, Asmi said the Syrian response to Tuesday’s call was to be a strictly electronic one, confined to individuals’ homes.

What, then, should governments do to address these widespread abuses? “Our main request is to establish and enforce a very strict law against sexual harassment, assault and rape, whether in daily life or during protests, and to bring aggressors to court instead of carrying out virginity tests on the victims,” said Barqawi.

“Second is to try as much as possible to stop these attacks. There is no justification whatsoever for police standing and watching what’s happening in Tahrir, while groups of volunteers are doing their work for them. Even if they don’t receive orders, what are the police waiting for? What did they learn about ethics and protection in all their years of training?”

However, with Egypt’s only current legislative authority, the Shura Council, issuing statements Monday explicitly blaming women themselves for sexual assaults, it may be some time yet before such measures are undertaken.

Yara Chehayed contributed reporting.

Why Lebanon's economy fails: Interview with Harvard Prof. James A. Robinson

[Originally posted at NOW]

What makes one country richer than another? How is it that some states, despite having ample natural resources and hard-working populations, lag behind others without such benefits? Are politics, culture, religion or geography to blame? And how can a dysfunctional economy reverse its fortunes?

In the sleek, sea-view Hamra offices of the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies (LCPS) on Monday morning, these were among the questions addressed by James A. Robinson, the David Florence Professor of Government at Harvard University and recent co-author of “Why Nations Fail." NOW took part in a roundtable discussion with Robinson led by LCPS Director Sami Atallah, after which the below follow-up questions were asked.

The core argument of “Why Nations Fail,” says Robinson, is that it is political institutions above all that determine economic prosperity. He cites the examples of post-apartheid South Africa, and the US vis-à-vis Latin America, to dismiss cultural and geographic explanations, respectively. Though he confesses he is “not an expert on the Middle East,” he believes his findings on Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa are universally valid, rejecting the idea that Islam or anything particular about Arab culture are of relevance. Wherever you look around the world, he says, “Politics are the crucial thing that determines economic growth.”

Specifically, Robinson distinguishes between “inclusive” political systems, which incentivize and reward a broad section of society for their productivity, and “extractive” ones, which divert economic gains toward an elite minority. Before the British Industrial Revolution, he says, all governments were extractive, and average incomes varied little from country to country. Ever since then, average incomes have both increased significantly and become significantly more unequal across countries, with inclusive systems at the top and extractive ones dragging behind. The key to achieving prosperity, therefore, is “the transition from extractive to inclusive institutions.”

Within the region, he cites Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria as classic examples of extractive systems. That they have both faced a popular challenge, he says, makes him “much more optimistic about the Middle East than before,” though he is concerned about the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s attempts to concentrate power too narrowly among themselves at the expense of broader inclusivity.

As for Lebanon, he calls it a “fascinating” and perhaps unprecedented example. “For 2,000 years no one managed to dominate Lebanon.

“There’s no useful European model for comparison.”

NOW: You recently co-wrote an article enumerating ten ways that states fail. Lebanon’s problems seem closest to your Colombia and Somalia examples; i.e., a weak, almost absent central state and little law and order. How can these be tackled?

Prof. James A. Robinson: That’s a very hard question. If you think historically about how states are formed, it usually involves one group in society managing to effectively dominate the others. Which usually means, as in the English case, it’s part coercion and part buying people off. After the War of the Roses, Henry VII had so weakened the aristocracy that he demilitarized them and created a monopoly on violence. And then he bought them off by incorporating them into the state.

Does that model work here? It’s hard to think of the Maronites, or the Shiites, or whoever, creating a coercive monopoly over the other groups, disarming them and going down the British road. But there’s no reason that every country has to go down that road.

It seems here they’ve been trying to find a constitutional solution to the problem, but the difficulty is that no group wants to create an effective central state because they’re just too scared that it’ll be dominated or captured by other groups. And so you’re in this perpetual flux, whereby those who know power is changing to their benefit have no incentive to hand it over, while those who know it’s changing to their disadvantage don’t want that to be formally acknowledged.

How do you stabilize that situation? I don’t think the British model is relevant for thinking about Lebanon. Maybe the current system does offer some advantages. After all, Lebanon’s communities have been coexisting for over 1,000 years. In some ways it seems to be outside interference that exacerbates the problems. If everybody just left Lebanon alone, I think it would be much better off.

NOW: It’s interesting you mention demilitarization, because as you may know, at the end of the Lebanese civil war, every militia agreed to disarm with the exception of Hezbollah, whose arsenal today is substantial. What effect does that have?

Robinson: Well I think that’s probably a very bad thing, because then there is no equality of arms. You would hope to have no arms at all, of course, but an equality of arms is at least better than asymmetry, which then raises the fears of all the other groups and leads to them arming in turn.

NOW: You’ve also written recently on Israel and Palestine. Why are Israelis so much better off than Palestinians?

Robinson: Israelis are so much better off because they’ve imported so many resources; education, human capital, technology and so forth. They also have highly inclusive institutions, while Palestinian ones tend to be more extractive. At the same time, Israel has throttled Gaza, where there’s no movement of labor and highly limited trade. And they’ve done the same, to a lesser extent, in the West Bank.