The Skeptic الشكاك

314 Last Week in Damascus

…I kept my head down. I didn’t want to put my incredibly gracious hosts, who had gone to some trouble to sponsor me for a visa, in an uncomfortable position by meeting controversial people. So having spent most of the past week either in a conference room in Damascus University or in Damascus’ finest restaurants (again, thanks to my gracious hosts), I can’t pretend to know what Syria is really like. I was so good that, for example, I had to come back to Cairo to hear that Syria’s State Security Court had sentenced Syrian rights activist Nizar Rastenawi to four years in prison for “spreading false information” and insulting President Bashar al-Assad. Pierre Gemayel was assassinated in Lebanon as I shopped for posters depicting the al-Assad family with Nasrallah. I didn’t even notice until I got home.

I can say that I was extended every hospitality, that the old city is very nice, the women are beautiful, and the food is delicious. I can tell you that Syrians do not eat pigeons. They keep them as pets, and release their flocks at sunset to try to lure pigeons away from other flocks with beautiful lady pigeons. I can tell you that the sight of the flocks careening over the city in tight formation made me happy.

I can tell you that the hotel was dreary, sandwiched between mukhabarat barracks and the Ministry of Electricity. Never mind. It was close to the university. The window to my first-floor room didn’t close properly and there was a wide ledge outside. So I carried my laptop with me wherever I went and spent my last day in the city watching Corky Romano on MBC2 because I didn’t want to lug the computer around. Probably unnecessary, but I’d been warned.

Before I left, one western diplomat who had spent some time working in Damascus described it to me as “a city full of intrigue.” I didn’t stay long enough to begin to untangle the web of politics, patronage, and dirt that blankets the city and constricts your chest. Just long enough to feel it. I’d once thought of living and working in Damascus. The woman at my work then responsible for security told me to forget it.

“It’s the sort of place where you’d feel totally comfortable until you stepped out of line,” she said. “By the time you felt the state’s jaws closing, it would be too late.”

I was there with a group of people from around the Middle East. As we stepped out of our microbus near the old city one evening, a cop asked us menacingly (and, strangely, in English), if we were enjoying Damascus. He was smiling, but the way he asked made you feel the correct answer was, “sir, yes, sir.”

“It’s really bad here,” one Damascene told me last week. “If you don’t know someone high up, you just get lost.”

It is a small place. You get the sense everyone who pokes his head up knows everyone else. I wasn’t about to blunder in like a bull in a china shop. So I spent lots of time in grim hotel lounges. Bored, central-casting gorrillas in bad leather jackets chainsmoked and eyed passersby. Baathists in suits and moustaches Goodfellas-ed it up at the bar. I stayed up late one night at one such lounge to listen to a group of Moroccans, Tunisians, Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians, Jordanians, and Egyptians discussing why Arab countries are struggling relative to the rest of the world. One guy blamed colonialism.

“We’ve all been colonized,” he said. “The French in Morocco, the British in Egypt. They only left a few decades ago, and the Americans never really left.”

“OK, but what about the Asian countries? What about South Korea?” A Moroccan physics professor asked. “There are still thousands of American troops stationed there. There’s a better case to be made that South Korea is under U.S. occupation than there is for, say, Egypt. Cars, mobile phones, stereos… We buy what Korea makes. The whole world buys what they make. Why? Their leaders have vision. In China, everyone works for the glory of China. Here, we think only of ourselves. We pocket the money. Our leaders don’t think about the good of the nation or the people. They think only of what’s good for them.” And so on. The conversation went on into the night. The closet Pan-Arabist in me loved it. He doesn’t get fed very often.

Lately I’ve been helping a friend out with his PhD thesis comparing the Egyptian and Syrian governments. The word “co?pted” appears maybe 2,000 times in the space of 100 pages. So as I shoveled mouth-watering mezzeh into my mouth, I was thinking how easy it would be to get co?pted in Syria. If you’re smart, connected, and willing to play along, Damascus can be a paradise. Besides, it’s easy to see the government’s point of view, why it feels threatened when Israel bombs the crap out of Lebanon and American boots are on the ground in Iraq. Why rock the boat? Why not put your shoulder to the wheel and work for Syria’s survival and greatness? Why not shut up and enjoy your rose-petal jam?

I strolled around downtown Damascus with a Tunisian one night last week. He asked me my impressions of his country. I told him it was beautiful country, but that my impressions were colored by the fact that I had only ever been there for work and saw only its darkest side: daughters of a political prisoner on the verge of death after a month-long gr?ve sauvage, for example. He was surprised. He hadn’t heard of any of the political prisoners I mentioned. As far as he was concerned—and he swore he wasn’t getting this only from government newspapers and TV—all this talk about political repression was the work of a few low activists who slander the country for personal gain. Tunisia was a modern, tolerant country Europeans visit to listen to world-famous DJs in swank nightclubs on the beach. For most middle-class Tunisians, guys who go to work and then go out with friends in the evening, it probably is.

Which left me wondering: Were I Syrian, would I spend my life like Anwar al-Bunni, on a revolving door in and out of prison for speaking my mind, or would I shut up and enjoy my rose-petal jam?

[tags]Syria[/tags]

312 Cohen the Dupe

Still traveling (London, Boston, Paris, Cairo, and soon Damascus in the space of a week), but I had to take a moment, while waiting for my next flight, to congratulate Mohamed Kamel. He’s really pulled the wool over Roger Cohen’s eyes. Cohen has bought the NDP’s rhetoric and scaremongering about the Brothers and Israel hook, line, and sinker:

Does Egypt really need any more democracy at a time when Islamists are a force at the ballot box?

[…]

Prudence on democracy seems the only reasonable course. Mubarak’s Egypt is inching in a democratic direction. Overdrive could kill the enterprise, damage American interests, and create further regional turmoil.

Read the rest of his appallingly bad article in The New York Times. Oh no, wait, you have to pay to get really annoyed with the Times. Save your money and read Mona al-Naggar’s much better piece about the aftermath of the Eid sexual assault scandal. Yesterday afternoon, two activists were detained at a demonstration protesting the lack of police response to the assaults. Hossam is all over it at Arabawy.

[tags]Egypt[/tags]

311 Alexandrian Blogger Detained… Again

Alexandrian blogger Abd al-Karim Suleiman, who was detained after last year’s sectarian clashes in his neighborhood, has been detained again. See the Free Abd al-Karim campaign blog for more.

Via Sandmonkey and Hossam.

[tags]freekareem, Egypt, Bloggers[/tags]

310 Thirty Muslim Brotherhood Students Detained

The Muslim Brotherhood is reporting that State Security officers have detained 30 of its members from Helwan University. Others are reportedly in hiding, as SS officers are camped in front of their homes.

[tags]Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt[/tags]

309 HRW on Al-Sadat

Human Rights Watch has condemned the imprisonment of Talaat al-Sadat, an MP for the opposition Al-Ahrar Party and the nephew of President Anwar al-Sadat (Arabic).

[tags]Sadat, Egypt[/tags]

308 Fish and a Fetid Canal

This article by Erik Stokstad, from the current edition of Science, may be the most important of the year. If a Canadian study of marine ecosystems is correct, commercial fish species may be close to extinction by 2048. This is important and troubling news on its own, but it’s particularly troubling when you consider that fish constitutes an important source of protein for much of the world’s (human) population. A collapse of world fish populations could have wide-reaching political and economic consequences.

Dr. Boris Worm, of Halifax, Nova Scotia’s Dalhousie University, was the chief researcher on the study. He and his team first analyzed the results of 32 experiments on the fate of marine species on local scales. They then studied changes in species diversity over the course of 1,000 years, pouring over fisheries records, archaeological evidence, and sediment cores. They also studied records of how many fish were caught in 64 ocean regions between 1950 and 2003. Together, these large marine ecosystems produced 83 percent of the world’s fish over the past 50 years. After looking at how fast species have returned to 48 marine reserves where fishing is prohibited, they determined that if things keep going as they have been, there will be no more fish in the ocean.

I mentioned this to Manal, Alaa, and Ahmed Gharbeia this afternoon over lunch in Bulaq. They’re hipper to the real problems the planet is facing than I am. This is old news apparently. I had no idea, but Spanish waters are apparently fished out and so Spaniards must import fish for their traditional fish dishes? And food fish are getting smaller through natural selection? And there’s a region on Lake Victoria where the World Food Program thought it would be a great idea to start farming Nile perch—at least until the perch ate all the other fish, leaving the fishing villages nothing to eat but bananas?

I’ve been thinking lately that it’s awfully silly to be spending so much time on human rights when there will be no humans to have rights if we keep going like we’re going. I attribute my recent concern to the canal that runs along the Bulaq side of the canal along Sudan Street. I’ve been spending a lot of time next to it for the past few days. For those outside Cairo, Bulaq is a sprawling slum. The trash that the flies, the cats, and the desperately poor can’t digest simply accumulates in and around a fetid canal.

Every member of Parliament and the Cabinet should go for a nice long walk there at least once a month see how their constituents live—their poise as they walk to work on a sunny morning, their steps unconciously slipping into time with the pop pounding from the cassette kiosk by the microbus station; the flirtatious glances young men and women give each other as they pass by; the tough 11-year-old girl who defies the Ba2el Shayukh Mafia’s attempts to shut down the tobacco trade on the block. I wonder if any one of them would be able to say these people don’t deserve better.

“The Egyptian people are better than they need to be,” one resident told me today. “They wouldn’t stand for this treatment if they knew what rights they have.”

“How can they think about their rights when they’re thinking about staying alive?” I asked.

The foul waters of the Bulaq Canal and the thought that by the time I die there might be no fishable fish in the ocean make me wonder how anyone can think about his rights when he should be thinking about how to survive. So I’d like to thank Amr for the link he left in the comments.

[tags]fish, environment, Egypt[/tags]

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