Iran has withdrawn its ambassador to neighboring Azerbaijan, in part over Baku’s hosting of the Eurovision pop singing contest, which the ayatollahs consider to be too sexy for their turbans. Eurovision goes back to 1956 and so much predates the “Idol” competitions, but in the US it is the latter that is better known. It works on a national basis, with each country submitting a song to be voted on by the public. The Iranian government’s extreme puritanism in the public sphere, to the extent of banning rock concerts, is one of the policies most likely to guarantee its demise, given its youth boom.
Iran is also complaining about a protest held by Azerbaijani activists in front of its embassy in which insults were hurled at Ayatollah Ruhullah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Azerbaijan used to be part of Iran’s Safavid and Qajar empires, but was conquered by the Russian Empire early in the nineteenth century. It became a Soviet Socialist Republic and then, in 1991, an independent country. Azerbaijan is largely Turkic-speaking (Azeri is a Turkic language), and its people are mostly of Shiite Muslim heritage. As with most other former Soviet SRs, most Azeris are very secular, and they tend to identify more with Sunni, secular Turkey than with Iran. Ironically, Iran has better relations with Christian-heritage Armenia, which has often been at odds with Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan is one of those SSRs that hasn’t made a transition to democracy, along with Belarus, Ukraine and Uzbekistan (some would add Putin’s Russia). So in addition to the tiff with Iran, Azerbaijan’s government and Eurovision are facing criticism from human rights activists, as Alice Ross explains below.
Alice Ross writes at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism:
“This Saturday, the Eurovision Song Contest will explode onto TV screens in a cascade of sequins and hair gel, beaming live from Baku, Azerbaijan to an estimated 120m people worldwide. But while in the UK Eurovision is a big joke, this year’s event has an extremely unfunny side.
Away from the spotlights and ballads, Azerbaijan remains an oppressive regime, where ordinary people live in relative poverty while the ruling class lines its pockets.
In Eurovision’s Dirty Secret, a Panorama team went undercover in Baku, the country’s capital, to explore a country that looks modern but hides some nasty habits – and which certainly doesn’t welcome teams of foreign investigative reporters. Within days, they are being tailed by a rather conspicuous secret-service detail, similar to the men in shades who openly film opposition protesters and hang around outside the homes of activists.
At times the oppression verges on the farcical – one man claims he was taken in for questioning after voting for Azerbaijan’s arch-enemy Armenia out of protest during last year’s Eurovision – but it can also be brutal.
Satirists and protest singers who dare to highlight the corruption of the regime are arrested and beaten according to the investigation, and journalists claim the programme have been arrested, bugged, blackmailed and even killed on their own doorsteps.
All this allows President Aliyev and his family to operate with relative impunity, amassing fabulous wealth and a string of companies in Panama. His son even owns a $40m house in Dubai’s exclusive Palm development according to Panorama – not bad for a 15-year-old.
So how can an international competition that aims to encourage understanding between nations justify holding the event there? Perhaps it’s to her credit that Ingrid Deltenre, chair of the European Broadcasting Union which runs the competition, doesn’t attempt to whitewash the country’s human rights record, holding her hands up to the reporters’ charges of oppression and corruption in the country.
The rules are the rules, she explains slightly wearily: Azerbaijan won last year’s competition and so is entitled to host this year’s event. And maybe the event will draw attention to the country’s human rights record.
But even with the rules, nobody is forcing pop stars to participate, and one of Panorama’s most entertaining segments is when the reporters confront the UK’s representative, Engelbert Humperdinck, about Azerbaijan’s human rights record, while his handlers frantically attempt to wrestle him away from the camera.
You could argue that March’s Grand Prix in Bahrain did help bring attention to the country’s human rights abuses – but a month later, while the protests continue the world’s attention has moved on. Will the same be true in Azerbaijan?
Israeli entrepreneur Shai Agassi has launched an Israeli electric car, and also arranged for four recharging stations. Israel is a perfect place for this experiment, since it is a relatively small and compact country, so the present lack of range of most electric cars (70-150 miles) may not be an issue for a lot of Israelis. The commuters between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, e.g., could use it, especially if it was easy to charge the car while one is at work. If the recharging stations could be solar or receive their power from solar or wind electricity plants, this development could be significant. (Portugal is another good candidate for this sort of arrangement).
Agassi stresses that as long as petroleum reigns, Israel will remain hostage to oil producers hostile to his country. (The natural gas fields in the Mediterranean extend into neighbors’ territory and are more a war waiting to happen than salvation, not to mention that natural gas puts carbon dioxide into the atmosphere). Thus, a move to wind and solar would help make Israel energy-independent and make it more secure.
In this light, the Likud government’s hope of getting 10% of its electricity from renewables by 2020 is laughably unambitious. Why isn’t Alon Tal’s Green Party more popular? Why do Israelis put up with an energy policy so beholden to petroleum producers such as Iran and Saudi Arabia?
The China Bank is offering to fund such projects (China is another big solar player, and may be seeking access to Israeli solar technological breakthroughs).
Some of Israel’s Mediterranean coast is sufficiently low-lying, including the city of Tel Aviv, that the rising ocean levels that will be caused by global warming will submerge them over time. In past eras, an increase of 1 degree celsius translated into 10 to 20 meters increase in sea level. Even if we can hold our present increase to 3 degrees celsius through a crash global green energy program, that would be an increase of as much as 60 meters or 180 feet. Tel Aviv will certainly end up under water if humanity goes on spewing carbon dioxide into the air at this rate–not in this century, but over time. A majority of Israeli Jews live in and around Tel Aviv. Climate change is the real existential threat, not bluster from Iran.
The campaigns of the candidates for president of Egypt drew to a close at midnight on Sunday, in preparation for voting on Wednesday and Thursday.
On Sunday, al-Shuruq published an opinion poll on the election. In the poll, a third of Egyptians said their number one concern was security (i.e. law and order). 14.3 percent said their biggest concern was the economic crisis. 8.3 percent said it was education. Given that the economy contracted in 2011 and is only expected to grow 1.4% in 2012, it is quite remarkable that it ranks low as a concern. People are much more worried about an uptick in crime since the revolution.
This is the ranking of the major candidates. (MB means “Muslim Brotherhood”)
1. Undecided: 29.8% (down from 33.6%) in their last poll
2. Ahmad Shafiq 15.8% (slightly up from 15.2%) – Mubarak’s last PM, Air Force Gen.
3. Amr Moussa 15.1% (Slightly down from 16%) – Mubarak FM, Sec. Gen Arab League
4. Abdul Moneim Abou’l-Futouh 13.2% (way down from 20.8%) Liberal Muslim former MB
5. Hamdeen Sabahi 12.3% (way up from 5.7%) Nasserist leftist pan-Arabist
6. Muhammad Mursi 9.5% (up from 5.2%) Muslim Brotherhood
Unfortunately al-Shuruq did not seem to say anything about their methodology, but their last poll, published Thursday, was of 1,000 Egyptians and was scientifically weighted, with men, women, urban, rural, rich and poor in their proportion to the population. If this sample is the same size, then these numbers could be plus or minus 2 points or so.
The presidential election is very important because Egypt, even more than France, has a presidential system that subordinates parliament to the chief executive. The president can dismiss parliament, for instance. The military council will issue a constitutional amendment by fiat on Monday attempting to whittle down those powers, but likely the president will remain very strong.
The big news out of the poll is that the presidential debate between the two then front runners, Amr Moussa (secularist, former foreign minister) and Abdul Moneim Abou’l-Futuh (former Muslim Brother turned Muslim liberal) hurt both candidates, but especially Abou’l-Futuh.
Abou’l-Futuh is accused of trying to be all things to all people, speaking like a fundamentalist to the Salafis and like a liberal to the Coptic Christians and secularists. One Egyptian called him a “cocktail.” This apparent indecisiveness and chameleon-like behavior seemed to help him early on, as he gathered one constituency after another to become the front-runner, but the debate showed him in a poor light as a flip-flopper.
Moussa, in contrast, was only hurt slightly by the debate, but he wasn’t helped by it. As long-serving secretary-general of the Arab League, he has favored foreign policy initiatives that most Egyptians approve of. He did break with Mubarak [over a] decade ago, but not everyone forgives him for having been in the cabinet in the 1980s [and 1990s]. His rival Abou’l-Futouh says Moussa’s victory would be the victory of counter-revolution.
The fall of the front-runners created a new front-runner, former Air Force general and aeronautical engineer, Ahmad Shafiq, who wrote a dissertation on the military uses of Outer Space (someone should introduce him to Newt Gingrich). He is former minister of aviation and boasts of the good job he did with Cairo’s international airport. Shafiq is considered by many Egyptians, especially in the countryside, as the law and order candidate. Many voters dislike him because of his close association with the overthrown Mubarak regime. But those who feel that security has suffered since the revolution hope his would be a firm hand at the till. In Daqahliyyah a couple of days ago there was a village clash between his supporters and the Muslim Brotherhood, in which several people were wounded and a Muslim Brother was said to have been killed.
On Sunday it was reported that at a couple of news conferences in Cairo critical of Shafiq, his supporters came and broke them up, beating up critics. One event showcased charges that there was corruption at the Aviation Ministry while he headed it.
Also benefiting from Abou’l-Futouh’s plummet and Amr Moussa’s failure to get traction is leftist candidate Hamdeen Sabahi. Younger than several of the other candidates, Sabahi is typically described as a follower of the ideas of Gamal Abdel Nasser. He supports workers and the poor and promotes Arab socialism. He is highly critical of Israel of of what he calls US imperialism. He was one of the founders of the Kifaya! (Enough!) movement against Hosni Mubarak, which began with protests in solidarity with the second Intifada of the Palestinians in 2001 and continued with a huge protest against the Iraq War in 2003, then against the corrupt Egyptian elections of 2005. His numbers have doubled, putting him in the category of a plausible candidate if he continues to surge. He could not impossibly end up in the run-off election between the two front runners, which is envisioned if no one gets a clear majority in the first round.
And, improving somewhat but still not out of single digits is Muhammad Mursi, an unreconstructed Muslim Brother who says he wants to implement Islamic law in Egypt. Mursi did a Ph.D. in engineering at the University of Southern California and claims to have been an assistant professor there briefly. Although the Muslim Brotherhood has a strong party machine and can’t be counted out, Mursi labors under real disadvantages. Many Egyptians fear giving the Brotherhood the presidency, given their control of parliament. Many are angry at the Brotherhood for reneging on its pledge not to run a presidential candidate. Many feel that the Brotherhood has proved bad managers, bollixing up the process of appointing a committee to draft a new constitution and trying to stack it with their members of parliament (a move that the courts have struck down).
In al-Shuruq’s last poll, the Brotherhood suffered a ten point gender gap, with women disproportionately declining to support it, and many youth were not enthusiastic for it either.
That three of the four frontrunners in this poll are secularists, and that two have associations with the overthrown former regime, is quite remarkable, and suggests something of a backlash against the Muslim fundamentalist tide in the parliamentary elections of last fall. Some Egyptians tell me that they are fairly secular-minded and like having a good time, and they didn’t vote for puritanism when they voted for the Brotherhood. They just wanted to make sure the Mubarak regime couldn’t come back. Now they are worried about the tourist industry being scared away by the Brotherhood, and they are worried that their own beer parties are in danger, and they are worried about the rash of burglaries and increase in firearms. So these people want a secularist with political experience instead of more fundamentalism.
Polls are snapshots, and even if this one is accurate, it may not predict the results of the presidential election very well because of the small sample and the very large number of undecided voters. And, my conversations with Egyptians have hardly been scientific. But both the polling and the conversations suggest some real concerns of the public on the fronts of religion-state relations and concerns about security.
If the world can be seen in a grain of sand, watch out. As Wisconsinites are learning, there’s money (and misery) in sand — and if you’ve got the right kind, an oil company may soon be at your doorstep.
March in Wisconsin used to mean snow on the ground, temperatures so cold that farmers worried about their cows freezing to death. But as I traveled around rural townships and villages in early March to interview people about frac-sand mining, a little-known cousin of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” daytime temperatures soared to nearly 80 degrees — bizarre weather that seemed to be sending a meteorological message.
In this troubling spring, Wisconsin’s prairies and farmland fanned out to undulating hills that cradled the land and its people. Within their embrace, the rackety calls of geese echoed from ice-free ponds, bald eagles wheeled in the sky, and deer leaped in the brush. And for the first time in my life, I heard the thrilling warble of sandhill cranes.
Yet this peaceful rural landscape is swiftly becoming part of a vast assembly line in the corporate race for the last fossil fuels on the planet. The target: the sand in the land of the cranes.
Five hundred million years ago, an ocean surged here, shaping a unique wealth of hills and bluffs that, under mantles of greenery and trees, are sandstone. That sandstone contains a particularly pure form of crystalline silica. Its grains, perfectly rounded, are strong enough to resist the extreme pressures of the technology called hydraulic fracturing, which pumps vast quantities of that sand, as well as water and chemicals, into ancient shale formations to force out methane and other forms of “natural gas.”
That sand, which props open fractures in the shale, has to come from somewhere. Without it, the fracking industry would grind to a halt. So big multinational corporations are descending on this bucolic region to cart off its prehistoric sand, which will later be forcefully injected into the earth elsewhere across the country to produce more natural gas. Geology that has taken millions of years to form is now being transformed into part of a system, a machine, helping to drive global climate change.
“The valleys will be filled… the mountains and hills made level”
Boom times for hydraulic fracturing began in 2008 when new horizontal-drilling methods transformed an industry formerly dependent on strictly vertical boring. Frac-sand mining took off in tandem with this development.
“It’s huge,” said a U.S. Geological Survey mineral commodity specialist in 2009. “I’ve never seen anything like it, the growth. It makes my head spin.” That year, from all U.S. sources, frac-sand producers used or sold over 6.5 million metric tons of sand — about what the Great Pyramid of Giza weighs. Last month, Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Senior Manager and Special Projects Coordinator Tom Woletz said corporations were hauling at least 15 million metric tons a year from the state’s hills.
By July 2011, between 22 and 36 frac-sand facilities in Wisconsin were either operating or approved. Seven months later, said Woletz, there were over 60 mines and 45 processing (refinement) plants in operation. “By the time your article appears, these figures will be obsolete,” claims Pat Popple, who in 2008 founded the first group to oppose frac-sand mining, Concerned Chippewa Citizens (now part of The Save the Hills Alliance).
Jerry Lausted, a retired teacher and also a farmer, showed me the tawny ridges of sand that delineated a strip mine near the town of Menomonie where he lives. “If we were looking from the air,” he added, “you’d see ponds in the bottom of the mine where they dump the industrial waste water. If you scan to the left, you’ll see the hills that are going to disappear.”
Those hills are gigantic sponges, absorbing water, filtering it, and providing the region’s aquifer with the purest water imaginable. According to Lausted, sand mining takes its toll on “air quality, water quality and quantity. Recreational aspects of the community are damaged. Property values [are lowered.] But the big thing is, you’re removing the hills that you can’t replace. They’re a huge water manufacturing factory that Mother Nature gave us, and they’re gone.”
It’s impossible to grasp the scope of the devastation from the road, but aerial videos and photographs reveal vast, bleak sandy wastelands punctuated with waste ponds and industrial installations where Wisconsin hills once stood.
When corporations apply to counties for mining permits, they must file “reclamation” plans. But Larry Schneider, a retired metallurgist and industrial consultant with a specialized knowledge of mining, calls the reclamation process “an absolute farce.”
Nothing speaks more urgently to the creeping fascism of American politics than the assertion by our representatives, who apparently have never read a book on Germany in the 1930s-1940s or on the Soviet Union in the Stalin period, that forbidding DoD and the State Department from subjecting us to government propaganda “ties the hands of America’s diplomatic officials, military, and others by inhibiting our ability to effectively communicate in a credible way.” And mind you, they want to use our own money to wash our brains!
As Will Rogers observed, “This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.”
I love our guys and gals in uniform, but they can be extremely obnoxious in any discussion about US government policy that ‘gets off point’ or ‘doesn’t serve the mission.’ At Washington think tank events, I’ve seen them repeatedly close down discussions among e.g. State Department foreign service officers. You don’t want most of the DoD types providing information to us, because it won’t be in any way balanced.
Of course, having a Pentagon propaganda unit at all is highly anti-democratic. The best defense of the truth is a free press. It should also be remembered that nowadays everything in Washington is outsourced, so government propaganda is often being turned over to Booz Allen or the American Enterprise Institute, which have a rightwing bias.
Doing propaganda abroad has the difficulty that it doesn’t stay abroad. False articles placed in the Arabic press in Iraq were translated into English by wire services, who got stung.
Then, another problem is that the Defense Intelligence Agency analysts *also* read the false articles placed in the Arabic press by *another* Pentagon office, which they did not know about. So the analysts were passing up to the White House false information provided by their own colleagues!
I was told by an insider that one reason Washington analysts often read my blog in the Bush years was that I had a reputation for having an accurate bull crap meter, and thus my judgments on what was likely to be true helped them fight the tendency to believe our own propaganda!
Not only should this amendment be gotten rid of quick, but their constituents should please vote out of office Reps. Thornberry and Smith next November.
Chris Woods and Jack Serle write at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism
Though the hour was late, Yemen’s social media was still very much awake.
A US drone’s missiles had just slammed into a convoy of vehicles in a remote part of Yemen, killing three alleged militants.
The attack – like all other US drone strikes outside warzones – was supposed to be clandestine. Yet within minutes Sanaa-based lawyer Haykal Bafana was reporting the strike in almost-realtime. Just after 1am on May 17 he posted the following on Twitter:
#Yemen NOW | Missile strike on car in Wadi Hadhramaut. Near city of Shibam. Suspected US drone attack.
As Bafana later explained to the Bureau, his relatives live in Shibam, a town of 30,000. ‘When the drone struck, the town – which was then experiencing a power cut – had completely lit up. My relatives got straight on the phone to tell me about the attack.’
‘No attacks so far’
The day prior to the strike Bafana had already tweeted that drones were behaving suspiciously in the area. Hadhramaut province, a sparsely-populated former sultanate, is far from Yemen’s troubled south, where most of the fighting and US drone strikes are currently taking place.
There has been militant activity there for some years, report locals, and surveillance drones have been active at night since 2010. But until now there had never been a drone strike. ‘But suddenly four or five days ago, my relatives were reporting drones over them in daylight, all the time, which was rare. Militants were also being seen moving about in the area, maybe preparing the way for an evacuation from the fighting in the south. Everyone was expecting something to happen’, Bafana recalls. He tweeted the news to his followers.
#Yemen | Hearing multiple claims of drone sightings in Hadhramaut, especially in Shibam/Qatn directorates (KSA route). No attacks so far. — Haykal Bafana (@BaFana3) May 15, 2012
When the deadly attack finally came in the early hours of Thursday morning, the target itself was hardly a secret.
Earlier, Arabic-language online media in the provincial capital of al-Mukalla had reported that a convoy of alleged al Qaeda rebels was heading north. That news was also swiftly tweeted.
Others were clearly also charting the convoy’s progress. As the vehicles approached Shibam at around 1am local time, at least one car, a Toyota Hilax, was destroyed by missiles from above. Yemen’s own air force has neither the know-how nor the equipment to launch a precision strike on moving vehicles in the dark.
With drones the issue has always been the civilian casualties. And they are piling up, especially now.’
Lawyer Haykal Bafana
News agencies would later report the attack as a drone strike, naming two of the dead as Zeid bin Taleb and Mutii Bilalafi, both described as local al Qaeda leaders. Like the dozens of US drone strikes in Yemen that preceded it, Thursday’s attack was supposed to be secret. Yet Twitter and other social media were tracking in near-real time the events surrounding the operation.
‘It is incredible how the same type of technology used by the CIA to kill people with drones in the Yemen, is empowering the Yemenis to tweet the attacks as they are happening,’ Noel Sharkey, professor of robotics at the University of Sheffield told the Bureau.
‘They can send us all pictures and bring us closer to the horror they are experiencing. Technology in the small may eventually bring down the over-use of military technology in the large.’
#NoDrones
Social media tools like Facebook and Twitter – which played an important role in Yemen’s Arab Spring uprising – are now being used by activists to draw attention to a large increase in US drone strikes in recent weeks.
As Haykal Bafana notes, within minutes of his tweeting Monday’s attack the news was also posted on Facebook and on local Arabic micro-news sites. ‘Web use is as low as 2% here in Yemen. But it still makes a big difference. Many people get their news from the small local media sites rather than from foreign or state agencies. And Twitter is increasingly important.’
When President Obama’s chief counter terrorism adviser John Brennan visited Sanaa on Sunday, Twitter witnessed an online protest with the hashtag NoDrones.
Yemen-based youth activist Sadam al-Adwar (@sadamtweety), for example, said ‘I’m against #terrorism & #extremism, i’m also against #drones. It’s counter-productive & fuels more extremism.’
And @WomanFromYemen, otherwise known as NGO consultant Atiaf al-Wazir, told her more than 8,000 followers: ‘For every headline you read regarding “militants” killed by drones in #Yemen, think of the civilians killed that are not reported. #NoDrones.’
Liveblogging without knowing it
Yesterday’s Yemen drone strike appears to be the first in which events were reported on in real time.
‘I’ve never heard of an example of people tweeting while drones were actually in the area,’ said Dr Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Policy, an expert on Yemen security issues.
‘It really gets to the myth that you can keep these strikes covert, and if you do not have an information campaign that supports their use, you leave yourself flat-footed by people reporting what is being done in real time.’
There is a precedent. Last year a Pakistani man unknowingly tweeted the presence of US Special Forces attack helicopters on the way to kill Osama bin Laden. On May 1 last year Pakistani IT consultant Sohaib Athar tweeted the following.
Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).
After a ‘huge window shaking bang’ he debated the significance of the night’s events on Twitter, even as US Special Forces carried out their controversial raid. He quipped to a follower that ‘moving to Abbottabad was part of the ‘being safe’ strategy.’
But as the news of Bin Laden’s death broke Athar lamented ‘Uh oh, now I’m the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it.’
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