Secular students hope to shake up AUB polls

[Originally posted at NOW]

Though support for independents may be growing, they are unlikely to threaten the major established parties on Tuesday.

The American University of Beirut (AUB) is set to hold its annual student elections Tuesday, during which undergraduates and graduates will elect representatives from all faculties to a pair of committees intended – at least in theory – to advance the interests of students within the broader university administration.

While overt affiliation with real Lebanese political parties is forbidden, it’s an open secret that most of the various “clubs” running candidates are de facto proxy parties, with the Youth Club representing the Future Movement, the Cultural Club of the South standing in for Hezbollah, and so on. As a result, student elections are often regarded as indicators of the prevailing political dynamics nationwide.

However, not all students see it that way, and indeed a minority of independents is seeking this year to convince their peers that there is something more at stake.

“We have taken for granted that student elections are a kind of survey of the political distribution in the country, and the class consciousness of students as an interest group is not really present,” says Jean Kassir, a final-year political studies student and president of the Secular Club, an independent, non-sectarian club that won a seat in the business faculty last year, and aims to win more on Tuesday. “So when you talk about a platform, or a vision for AUB, many students don’t care.”

Kassir, by contrast, clearly does care. A nephew of the late writer Samir Kassir, assassinated in the aftermath of Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2005, Jean opposes March 8 but is evidently also unimpressed by March 14, and anyway insists that policies are what count when he meets NOW at the largely deserted AUB campus on Saturday afternoon.

“Our platform specifically targets tuition fees” – a controversial 6% hike was introduced this year – “as well as the issues of transparency in financial aid, transparency in AUB expenditures, and the idea of improving overall academic standards.” He speaks at length about questionable allocations of funds by the administration (“there is no culture of accountability at AUB”) and what he believes is the failure of the mainstream clubs to address any of the above.

“What are their priorities? These guys are really obsessed by the score they get in the elections and they don’t care about the essentials. The 6% increase in tuition fees is maybe nothing for them but I know people who really cannot afford it.”

And he believes the club’s message will resonate with voters – particularly graduates – on Tuesday. They have indeed already won a graduate seat in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) unopposed (“It’s known that political parties have no chance there”). Also working in their favor is a boycott of this year’s elections by their strongest independent rivals, No Frontiers. Even Bilal Derian, spokesperson for the Future-affiliated Youth Club, conceded to NOW that independents stood to gain this year: “People now are against all that’s going on in the country, and so are becoming more and more independent from political parties.” All in all, Kassir believes they can take all the FAS and Faculty of Health Sciences (FHS) graduate seats, along with a few undergraduate seats across various faculties.

Nevertheless, the Secular Club is unlikely to significantly upset the March 14-8 duopoly, according to Makram Rabah, former vice-president of AUB’s University Student Faculty Committee, author of A Campus at War: Student Politics at the American University of Beirut 1967-1975, and an active alumnus of the Progressive Youth Organization (PYO), the unofficial affiliate of the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP).

“They’re not strong at all,” said Rabah of the Secular Club. “They might win a couple of seats, but since they’re not competing in the big ones – the vice-president, the treasurer, and so on – they’re not a challenge. They don’t have the manpower, the political leverage, or the funding.”

Indeed, Rabah believes the election is already effectively a foregone conclusion, given that the PYO – which, much like the PSP itself, enjoys a ‘kingmaker’ role, determining which of the two camps wins the day – has chosen once again to ally with March 8.

“Ever since the PYO decided a few years ago not to run on the March 14 ticket, March 14 has never won an AUB election. And there’s no reason for something unexpected from them this year.”

Derian, however, told NOW that the PYO’s alliance with March 8 actually gave Youth Club activists encouragement. “It made us work harder and boosted our people’s morales. We are working like bees this year.” Accordingly, Derian believes March 14 still has a “high chance” of winning the overall election. “Since last year, we decided to work for the students rather than for the political party we represent, and this allowed us to be powerful this year.”

Rabah, by contrast, says Tuesday will if anything see slight gains for March 8, given that they “are entering with a winning record,” and due to poor campaigning from March 14. “March 14 are too used to the pre-2007 victories, when they were so popular that everyone voted for them. Now, you have to actually go out and get the votes, which they’re not doing.” The PYO was in fact negotiating an alliance with March 14 earlier in the year, said both Rabah and Derian, but they fell out over seat allocations.

The Secular Club, then, may be destined to remain in the political wilderness for now. Yet it didn’t take long to find supporters on campus Saturday. The very first person to walk out of Main Gate following NOW’s interview with Kassir was Qasim, an undergraduate in the business school.

“I’m voting for them,” said Qasim. “Because they’re not affiliated with any political party.”

Before the floods

[Originally posted at NOW]

The UN estimates at least 10,000 Syrian refugees living in tents in Lebanon will soon face flooding.

The center of the unofficial Nahiriyeh camp, near the Beqaa town of Bar Elias (NOW/Alex Rowell)

BAR ELIAS, Lebanon – Arriving at what locals call the “Nahiriyeh camp,” erected on a rectangular patch of gravelly sand hidden among the agrarian fields of the central Beqaa Valley, NOW briefly received a hero’s welcome on Thursday morning. The residents – Syrian refugees from Qusayr and elsewhere in Homs Province – crowded around the car, eagerly asking if we had come to hand out aid. The hope in their eyes quickly drained when we said we were only journalists, and most walked away, heads bowed, muttering under their breath. Those who stayed wasted no time in reeling off a long list of grievances: serious healthcare needs they couldn’t pay for; children denied places at schools; dangerously unclean drinking water; lack of diapers for newborns.

And yet, unenviable as living conditions for Nahiriyeh’s several hundred residents already are, they are soon to get much worse. It has begun to rain in Lebanon in the past fortnight, and though predictions of the harshest winter in a hundred years may be unreliable, snow will nevertheless cover much of the Beqaa in the coming winter months, which is grim news for the more than 270,000 Syrian refugees that the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has accounted for in the agricultural plain. Especially vulnerable are the more than 80,000 refugees UNHCR estimates are living in what it calls informal tented settlements (ITS), which are makeshift camps in all but name (unlike Jordan and Turkey, Lebanon does not officially have Syrian refugee camps). Of these settlements, UNHCR says 12% are located in flood-prone areas, which means at least 9,600 refugees will be living in flooded tents once the rain season gets fully underway.

Nahiriyeh’s residents will be among them. Invited inside the home of Umm Ahmad, a warm-spirited grandmother from Qusayr, NOW saw few means by which the family of eight would be able to escape the rain and snow. The roof comprised cardboard box panels supported by wooden beams. The walls were carpets held in place with nails. The floor was a mat thrown over an uneven, cracked layer of concrete; unprofessionally put in place by the refugees themselves. The only furniture, such as it was, consisted of a ring of uncomfortably thin mattresses, functioning as seats, children’s play areas, and beds. Asked how she planned to cope with the coming winter, Umm Ahmad could only laugh: “What you see is what we have.”

Nor were things better in Umm Muhammad’s slightly larger dwelling around the corner. Here, the roof had been fashioned out of woven rice sack material, some of which had begun to fray already. “Look at this,” she told NOW as her children looked on silently. “When it rains, this place is going to fill up.”

In anticipation of these humanitarian disasters-in-waiting, UNHCR and its NGO partners are building on the experiences of the past two winters since the outbreak of the Syrian crisis, and have been working on a so-called ‘winterization’ plan since the summer, according to UNHCR spokesperson Joelle Eid.

“In the Beqaa, we have around 280 informal settlements at risk of flooding,” Eid told NOW. “As soon as you have a lot of rain, the floor turns into mud, and those tents are at risk of flooding.” One planned response involves identifying all flood-prone locations, and then re-locating the refugees within them either to shelters or to Lebanese host families (who would then receive compensation from UNHCR), wherever possible.

A parallel initiative, which Eid told NOW has already started, is the distribution of “sealing kits” to refugees – that is, materials with which flood-prone homes could be sufficiently fortified to keep out the wet. Moreover, Eid added that distribution of winter-specific aid, such as warm clothing, blankets, mattresses, and heating fuel “will start in the coming weeks.”

However, Nahiriyeh’s residents – who say they are burning cardboard indoors to stay warm at night – are unconvinced they will see much aid come their way.

“We’ve been promised many things for the winter, but so far there has been nothing.”

Luna Safwan contributed reporting.

Wilfred Owen, pacifism, and Syria

[Originally posted at NOW]

To mark the one-hundredth year to have passed since the outbreak of World War 1, British poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy has rounded up ten other poets to highlight some of the finer literary produce from the front lines. It was of course inevitable that Wilfred Owen would crop up, and Duffy’s selection of his The Send-Off is certainly among the most arresting of the possibilities.

Coinciding, however, as the year 2013 does with the first use of chemical weapons in the 21st century, one can’t help thinking the more pertinent choice would have been Owen’s Dulce et Decorum est, his unforgettable recollection of the war’s infamous gassings that led to the 1925 Geneva Protocol, intended to prevent humanity from ever again resorting to that low. The whole thing must be read in its entirety, but it’s the final lines that twist the gut tightest:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Of course, anyone with access to YouTube today can hear “the blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,” and it is this more than anything that will condemn this generation of world leaders for decades to come. Which begs the question: As much as Owen has deservedly become a symbol of anti-war movements, what would he make of “Hands Off Syria” and the rest of today’s pseudo-pacifists whose idea of moral courage is to wave portraits of the man responsible for East Ghouta?

What is a pro-Palestine activist doing promoting an Assadist nun?

[Originally posted at NOW]

Mother Agnes-Mariam, accused of complicity in a French journalist’s death in Homs, is now on a coast-to-coast speaking tour of the US.

The figure of Mother Agnes-Mariam will be recognizable to anyone familiar with the record of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the early 1990s. Never happier than when hysterically decrying the unbounded barbarism of Bashar al-Assad’s opponents, the Carmelite nun has made her name by both fabricating rebel atrocities and imputing real ones carried out by the regime, such as the 2012 Houla massacre, to the opposition. Among her more memorable recent stunts has been her claim that the videos of the aftermath of the regime’s chemical weapons attacks in East Ghouta two months ago were faked. Much more seriously, she has been accused by the widow of the late French journalist Gilles Jacquier, killed in Homs last year, of personal complicity in a regime-orchestrated plot to murder him. Not since Mother Teresa herself has anyone better exemplified Orwell’s injunction that the saintly are to be judged guilty until proven innocent.

Not that any of this stopped Agnes from being invited last week on a coast-to-coast speaking tour of the United States by, of all people, a pro-Palestine activist. Paul Larudee is a founder of the Free Gaza Movement, whose aid boats famously challenged Israel’s naval blockade of the Strip’s waters, and is also involved with the International Solidarity Movement, which carries out non-violent activism in the West Bank. One might have thought a man with such a background would take a dim view of a regime that now air-strikes Palestinian refugee camps. But Larudee has found a new calling, and recently started a nonprofit called the Syria Solidarity Movement (which, like the “Hands Off Syria” slogans, would be more accurately worded if ‘Syria’ were replaced with ‘Assad’), whose website appears to double as a clearinghouse for the latest Press TV and Russia Today reports. It is this organization that brought Agnes, whom Larudee describes as “charismatic,” to America’s shores on Thursday.

How did this happen? The answer lies in Larudee’s first meeting with Agnes, during a trip to Lebanon and Syria in May sponsored by an outfit called Musalaha (“reconciliation”), of which the nun is a leading organizer. Along with eighteen other Western personalities, including Irish Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire (who describes Agnes as “a modern hero of peace”), Larudee spent a week meeting refugees, religious leaders, and officials from both the Syrian and Lebanese governments – including, according to one report, Free Patriotic Movement leader Michel Aoun. (One wonders if the General floated his party’s longstanding proposal to expel Palestinian refugees from Lebanon.) Indeed, Musalaha’s president is none other than Dr Hassan Yaacoub, a card-carrying member of the Hezbollah-aligned FPM bloc.

Accordingly, while in more unguarded moments Larudee asserts that Musalaha “has the trust of most Syrians,” he elsewhere admits that it “is ostensibly non-political, but there is no such thing in Syria today […] it exists with the approval of the Assad regime, which means that there are inherent limits to its range of activity.” The reader is free to believe this affiliation had nothing to do with the universally pro-regime opinions espoused by the refugees from Qusayr and elsewhere Larudee met, which he summarizes as follows:

“Whatever the faults of the Assad regime […] it is the only thing preventing the utter destruction of Syria.”

I’ve met Qusayr refugees without Aounist politicians by my side who told a rather different story, but perhaps that’s just how the cookie crumbles. In any event, the refugees evidently made an impression on Larudee, who in a Counterpunch essay developed what they told him into a general defense of dictatorship:

“Sometimes the only choice is between an autocratic regime that is pro-Western and one that pursues an independent course. The U.S. will attempt to coerce or overthrow any independent-minded government, but an autocratic regime has a better chance of resisting because its repressive apparatus will crush dissidence before it has a chance to breathe.”

In other words, any tyranny, no matter how absolute, is better than being allies with America (never mind here that Assad was in fact a willing, if duplicitous, partner in Bush’s War on Terror). Rarely does one see enthusiasm for totalitarianism articulated so candidly. By now it comes as no surprise that Larudee’s frequent calls to end “foreign intervention” make reference neither to the undisguised invasion of Syria by Hezbollah, nor the massive and vital assistance given the regime by the Party of God’s backers in Iran (his country of birth, incidentally). Larudee prefers to blame Syria’s carnage on the West, which we learned last month has trained a grand total of 50 opposition fighters to date. That such a man presents himself as a courageous speaker of truth to power is bad enough. That he does so in partnership with a propagandist and accomplice of a mass murderer is an insult, not only to Syrians, but also to Palestinians, whose noblest of causes deserves far more honorable an advocate.

10 Questions for Brown Moses

[Originally posted at NOW]

NOW talks to the pioneering blogger of Syria’s armed conflict.

Eliot Higgins, better known as Brown Moses, is a British blogger who attained international recognition in early 2013 when his analysis of publicly-available YouTube videos led to the unearthing of a classified Saudi operation to arm Syrian rebels through Jordan with weapons purchased from Croatia. His blogging subsequently assisted Human Rights Watch in compiling evidence of cluster bomb use by the Syrian regime, and is now often cited in leading international newspapers. In April, Higgins helped NOW identify the brigade that launched the first lethal Syrian rebel rocket attack on Lebanese soil. After raising funds from private donors including the Avaaz activism platform, Higgins launched Arabic versions of his blog and Twitter account in June.

NOW: How would you summarize the Syrian conflict at present?

Eliot Higgins: Pretty much a meat-grinder for both sides, with no end in sight.

NOW: What in particular are you researching at the moment?

Higgins: Aside from working on a new website, I'm currently on the lookout for evidence of a new, larger fuel-air explosive bomb that might have been used in the conflict recently.

NOW: Earlier this month, there were reports of preparations for an imminent battle between rebels and the regime and/or Hezbollah along the Lebanese-Syrian border near Arsal. Have you seen any video evidence to this effect?

Higgins: Not so much video evidence, but there's plenty of reports of both sides preparing for fighting commencing at any moment.

NOW: Have you learnt any Arabic since you began covering Syria? You must have picked up some words here and there.

Higgins: Mostly I've learnt to recognize place names, and the names of various groups in Syria. As with anyone following Syria, the first word you learn is takbeer, followed by Allahu and akbar.

NOW: Some journalists, e.g. Patrick Cockburn, have criticized the practice of treating YouTube videos as evidence in reporting on Syria. How easy would it be to produce a fake atrocity video that would fool you?

Higgins: I think it's important to stop thinking about videos from Syria as individual and separate pieces of evidence, but in many cases a video is just part of a body of evidence, and a lot of my work is about exploring the evidence that might surround a video.

NOW: What aspects of the Syrian conflict do you feel are most overlooked or poorly covered in the mainstream media?

Higgins: I think there's a huge amount of things really. It's a very complex conflict, and only a small amount of it gets any sort of in-depth reporting. This is in part because of the difficulties faced by reporters on the ground in Syria.

NOW: What are the most shocking, moving, and/or amazing videos you’ve seen from Syria?

Higgins: Apart from the many horrific injuries and deaths, I'd say videos where people are handling UXO [unexploded ordnance], for example, one where a small group of children start kicking an unexploded 240mm mortar, or the various videos showing them handling unexploded cluster bombs. Some of the DIY weapons I've seen have been quite impressive, such as the Hell Cannon, or the Molotov cocktail launcher (that didn't seem to catch on).

NOW: What is the most frustrating part of your work?

Higgins: Videos and channels constantly being deleted from YouTube. Fortunately there are some organizations systematically archiving all the videos for future reference.

NOW: If the Syrian conflict ended tomorrow, what would you do instead?

Higgins: Well I started the blog writing about the UK phone hacking scandal, and it looks like that's going to be big news again, so that would keep me busy.

NOW: Have you ever been/would you ever come to Lebanon?

Higgins: I've never been, and I certainly have nothing against going to Lebanon.

Taken by storm

[Originally posted at NOW]

Released Saturday after 17 months’ captivity in Syria, Hajj Ali Tirmus tells NOW about the experience and the factors that led to his release

Hajj Tirmus was one of 9 remaining Lebanese captives in Azaz released on Saturday (NOW/Alex Rowell) 

There was fatigue in his eyes and his voice was as hoarse as a sick man’s, but Hajj Ali Muhammad Tirmus was in jovial spirits when NOW met him in his modest Haret Hreik apartment Monday afternoon. Sitting comfortably in a black shirt, jeans, and leather sandals, he cracked jokes with the constant stream of well-wishing visitors and beamed at his wife Mona as she handed out festive sweets and coffee.

“It’s so precious a feeling, it’s undescribable,” he told NOW of his return to Lebanon after seventeen months of captivity in the northern Syrian town of Azaz at the hands of the Islamist "Northern Storm" rebel brigade. As relatives wiped tears of relief from their cheeks, Tirmus recounted his experience as one of the nine Lebanese men kidnapped in May 2012 while returning from pilgrimage to Iran and held in Azaz until a deal was reached over the weekend to exchange them with two Turkish pilots kidnapped in Beirut two months ago.

The group of pilgrims, which numbered over 60 men and women, had been traveling in two buses, and for the first couple of days, the men that were kept by the kidnappers were separated in two corresponding groups. “This scared us. We wondered, ‘Are they going to kill us? Or kill the others?’” said Tirmus.

After a few days, the men were united, but their hopes of release began to decline as the weeks turned into months. “We were continuously promised that our release was imminent. [Northern Storm leader] Abu Ibrahim shook our hands and told us it was coming in a manner that genuinely convinced us. This was the worst part for me. It was like promising a child you’ll give him a toy every day, and never doing it. After two months, we started to think we’d never be freed.”

A typical day, said Tirmus, would consist of telling stories and recalling memories over cups of tea, in addition to praying and reading the Quran. “We complained to them that we had no Qurans to read. So, after some debate among themselves, they went to the local mosque and brought some for us.”

At no point, he said, were they beaten. They did, however, have two major fears at all times. The first was being killed in the crossfire between Northern Storm and Syrian regime forces (of the approximately 60 militants who kidnapped them, Tirmus estimates more than 40 were subsequently killed in combat). The second was falling victim to internal disputes within Northern Storm itself. “They argued frequently, especially over money.” One guard in particular, who was notorious for stealing cash and jewelry from captives – including Syrians – so irked his comrades that a quarrel eventually led to his being killed, said Tirmus.

Indeed, while a multitude of factors were evidently at work, it appears to have ultimately been inter-rebel dynamics in Azaz that made the pilgrims’ release possible. Last month, al-Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) militants overran Northern Storm’s positions in Azaz, killing a number of their fighters as well as their media spokesman, as a part of a wider campaign to eliminate nominally Western-backed rebel brigades. A statement issued by Northern Storm Monday admitted that ISIS’ “occupation of our bases” compelled the group to “hasten the exchange.” So weakened had the brigade become, according to Syria analyst and Middle East Forum fellow, Aymenn al-Tamimi, that holding on to the captive pilgrims may have simply no longer been feasible.

“Northern Storm has more or less been crushed by ISIS,” al-Tamimi told NOW. “Apparently,” over the past few days, “a number of their fighters have gone over the border to seek Turkish protection.”

Adding to this consideration, Tirmus believed the Azaz clashes led to substantial pressure on Northern Storm from the Turkish government, mindful of the fate of its own citizens held captive in Lebanon.

“Our kidnappers had met with [US Senator] John McCain. In fact, they met him in a room we were once held in for a period. Because of this, [ISIS] considered Northern Storm to be kuffar [infidels]. When they began fighting each other, Turkey started working to release us, because they knew if we were killed, the two Turkish pilots would be killed too.”

“As much as we are against kidnapping and all injustice, we have to say the kidnapping of the Turkish pilots was the reason we were freed. We wish Turkey had worked so proactively for our release from the start,” added Tirmus.

Whatever the reason, Tirmus told NOW he just looked forward to putting the whole ordeal behind him.

“Now I’m going to spend time catching up with my family, friends and neighbors. Then, after a break, I’ll go back to work and my normal life.”

Luna Safwan contributed reporting.

24 years after Rushdie, Islamists put Brits once again under police protection

[Originally posted at NOW]

Heresy hunters have a tendency to reserve their most concentrated and toxic venom for precisely those deviants whose doctrinal improprieties are the slightest. When Salman Rushdie, in a moment of delirious desperation after nearly two years of fatwa-induced fear for his life, allowed himself to be persuaded by an Egyptian fraudster into converting to Islam, the effect on his would-be murderers in Tehran was worse than had he done nothing at all. Supreme Leader Khamenei, who alone had the power to revoke the assassination order issued by his predecessor, responded that the fatwa would forever remain valid even “if Rushdie became the most pious man of all time,” while the Iranian state press howled that the novelist’s death was now imminent. So far from earning him leniency, his membership in the club only placed him in redoubled peril.

And so it has proven – on a far broader scale – with Islam’s 21st century holy warriors, who may well despise the Jews and the rest of the kuffar, but with nothing like as much conviction as they loathe their Muslim rivals. Just last week it was reported that yet another Salafist in Gaza had shunned battle with the Zionists, preferring to make his way to Syria via Turkey to fight the true jihad against the “nusayri” regime. And then we learn that Somalia’s al-Shabaab has chosen to mark the festival of Eid al-Adha by threatening several prominent British Muslims, including an imam, whom it said had “mutilated the teachings of Islam” by failing to endorse things like the wanton slaughter of shoppers in Kenya last month. In an eerie symmetry – and a sign of how much progress has been made in 24 years – it transpires that at least three of these men will be placed under Rushdiesque police protection.

I happen to be an atheist, and one of the school that says we’d be better off without faith of any kind, no matter how secularized or ‘moderate’. All the same, to abandon fellow foes of extremism in their hour of need would be no less shameful than the silence of many Muslims (and indeed non-Muslims, for that matter) after 1989 who couldn’t stomach Rushdie’s godlessness. The British government must be urged to put every necessary resource at the assistance of Mohammed Ansar, Usama Hasan and Ajmal Masroor, no less than it must do everything in its power to confront and defeat the abominable thugs who would kill the rest of us the moment after they were done with them.