Tag Archives: Turkey

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Reading: Ella Maillart — The Cruel Way

The first of my new pile of books, though i haven’t finished the last lot yet (some shall dwell in my reading stump for quite some time, I suspect, and one likely shall be read in the furthest-from orthodox manner possible; no starting at the start and finishing at the over end.

This one, Ella K. Maillart’s The Cruel Way, came to me from a conversation with Lucy who has been translating some of Annamarie Schwarzenbach, whom I met on the Pförtner bus with Isabel, translator of All the Roads are Open, currently near the top of my list for best non-fiction of the year. They both fielded me that afternoon with the names of several authors who reside at the intersection of a number of sets I have been distracted by for some time: women authors, writing on Afghanistan and Central Asia, in the (broad) subjects of anthropology and history.

I promptly forgot the names, though knew I’d get around to remembering soon enough, and thankfully Lucy scribbled them down for me. To Saint George’s!

When Annamarie travelled to Afghanistan overland by car in the second half of 1939, she did so with the companionship of another writer, Ella Maillart. For both of them, the journey resulted in a book, though until this year, Annamarie hadn’t been translated to english. Ella, on the other hand, was in english since 1947, with one peculiarity: there is no mention of Annamarie Schwarzenbach.

Ella travels with Christina. The one photo of her is from a distance, head down over the campsite, so as to be unrecognizable. Despite this (at the insistence of Annamarie’s mother), there is little or no disguising of whom she travelled with, though this does make for a somewhat sombre reading, knowing full well who Christina is, and that her identity is erased by her own mother in a perverse desire for familial respectability.

It is a rare pleasure to read two highly accomplished writers documenting the same journey; to see the same experiences through the eyes of each. Annamarie writes with such a sparse, poetic, lyrical style as to be a novelist, and very few fiction authors I have read can seduce in telling a story more than she. Ella is somewhat the opposite; a travel writer who is romantic almost becoming saccharine. Nonetheless not to say she is a poor writer, and being a couple of chapters in (arriving at Sophia), she recalls for me the best of the writers of who ventured into Central Asia in a manner unimaginable now.

Elle K. Maillart — The Cruel Way Ella K. Maillart — The Cruel Way
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Joe

He was born in South Africa, in Johannesburg, in 1934; May 5th — but even about this I only have a memory. His father was Afrikaans; his mother Turkish — or at least came from or via Turkey. Again I know little, so the following errors show only the limits of this. His name was Joseph Swanepoel. He left South Africa in the ’60s, maybe earlier, and whether directly or other found his way to Toronto, Canada where he spent the rest of his life.

He was a mechanic. Truck driver. Ran a waste paper recycling factory in Scarborough. Smoked and had a mustache. Answered the ‘phone, “Y’ello?”. Once he cut the knuckle of his thumb and a ball of dark blood oozed out. He would read in bed with his knees up and I would hide or play under the tent beneath his legs.

He gave me a Turkish middle name. Though I only found out much later about the Turkish part. He would sit up late watching TV and I would sometimes sneak down to join him. Once, when I was sick, I threw up on his shoulder. Once, when driving his truck back from the factory we stopped for donuts. He bought two boxes, one for everyone when we got home, and one for us alone as we drove, our secret. He cut the rear axel off the truck with a gas axe in the alley behind Eaton Ave. He tried to teach me to drive a forklift when I was maybe four; I almost crashed it into the pit where the new automated conveyer system was to be installed.

He changed his name to Stanton. He wanted to forget South Africa, or at least this is what I remember. A name that I was told had no significance. I remember him more from the voice on the phone and letters with his scrawling handwriting than any image of him, his face or himself as a whole.

Before I was born he had an operation on his back; a bone spur. A fifty percent chance of surviving. He did, but with this came his belief they’d implanted a transistor in his back to monitor him. Or again, this is the story I remember, or remember being told. He said we had to leave because the Italians who worked for him were trying to take over his factory and were planning on… something… so he got us out of the country. This in a letter much later.

With the more incredible stories, so too did his handwriting deteriorate. More paranoia, or perhaps not, perhaps it was true. But no way of knowing and I didn’t want to get too close to this aspect of the family for my own sake; I could feel my own self slipping before this.

We left, for New Zealand. A place I felt nothing for. I wanted to stay with him. I asked him to shave off his mustache before we left. A stranger came into the kitchen. Joe without hair above his lip.

He gave up smoking. I had a photo of him, much later, a passport photo. thick greying hair with a high temple swept up and back. A big nose. He might look like an older middle-aged taxi driver in Berlin. I think I lost this photo. Another one; him on a Skidoo in winter. Snow. I lost this also.

I went to see him, in 2003. From Guangzhou. I wrote to him saying I was coming, to the address he’d had for years — he’d lost the house and business after us. He said he wished he’d travelled more, wished he’d seen Hong Kong. I flew from Beijing in winter, darkness but not quite snow, to a street not far from where I’d once lived, near of Pape and Danforth. I walked to that house, unsure if I could recognise it, unclearly remembering the address. But from there to school, down the street, through the parks up and around the corner, it was all without question. I felt nothing though. Someone else’s memories, or as if I was watching a film I should respond to but … feel nothing.

Winter came properly on Christmas day. Deep snow. I was there over a month, vacillating over going to see him before I took the train to Scarborough. The address was near the station, near a mall. It was cold; bright blue sky. I arrived at a post office. It was not his home. He had his mail sent and held here. I asked about him, said I’d come from Australia and he was my father. They relented to give him a call but on his post box information there was no address, no number, no way of finding him. I left a note.

I left too, shortly after, angry, crying in the taxi, dusk on the way to the airport.

Six months later in Vienna I found he’d been in hospital the whole time with a series of bad heart attacks. I found also he’d been in contact with the rest of my family, he’d always told me I was the only one he spoke with. I got drunk fast on cocktails in the Burgtheater at a reception for the mayor and others. I wanted to hurt someone.

I never wrote to him again until earlier this year. He was in hospital again in intensive care with shingles and another round of heart attacks. I called but didn’t speak with him, sent an email via the hospital. I heard he’d received it but was confused also. About me. He didn’t return to the boarding house or wherever he’d lived for those years since we’d left. They packed up what little he had, sold most, gave the rest to him, told him the nursing home was where he would live until he recovered more, then he could go home. I’d planned to ring him, even tried once.

He died last night. Another heart attack. I hadn’t spoken to him.

I was living in an old brothel in my late teens, above a sex shop in K’road, Auckland. He would ring me about once every six months and letters every couple of months, wherever I’d moved to next, sometimes with a cheque folded in the papers. I’d told him what was going on in my life then and that if he didn’t like it he could fuck off. He’d written that he didn’t know why I was so angry but he loved me and supported me if this is what would make me happy. I sat on the wooden stairs talking with him. I can remember his voice, saying, “y’ello”, saying my name.

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eating: lamb and fresh fig tajine

Michael came back to Berlin for the weekend, a welcome surprise that coincided nicely with my weeks-long desire for a certain dish. We met in Saint Georges, where I was picking up one book and ordering another, and found ourselves wandering through supermarkets in search of spices and mmm… organic lamb.

Many of my friends seem to have read “Eating Animals” in the past weeks and months – myself included in Vienna. Reminding me why I became vegetarian in the first place, and specifically putting the onus on me to be responsible in my eating, the immediate impact has been to cut my already minimal meat and dairy eating to almost none.

With some provisos, eating meat or dairy in Europe – when these delicacies come from organic farms – is a substantially different thing to eating McDonalds or other fast food either here or in America. Nonetheless, being reminded once again of the suffering such a predilection causes – to animals, the environment, to ourselves – means I have found myself without a trace of desire for any casual eating of flesh.

Organic lamb meat is not cheap here, more than twice the price it was in Australia, some €26 a kilo. As to how the animals are treated in their lives and deaths, I’m not sure, though the German guidelines for organic farming are fairly strict. I pay then, for some salving of my conscience, though maybe it’s not enough.

Figs then. A safe topic of discussion and eating. It is fig season here, and the prices are in direct opposition to lamb and Australia. Ten ripe, fat and purple-skinned fruits for a mere €3. And spices. I have had an idea for a fresh fig and lamb curry for more than a year, though mostly finding only Tajine recipes; admittedly not so distant from a curry. I discover the name of a mixed spice called Ras el Hanout, which I don’t find in any Turkish supermarket. Maybe it has a different name. Having a long history of love with Chinese and northern Pakistan curries, I came up with this from various recipes and self-enjoyment.

Cooking with Michael and Dasniya; bottles of wine, my favourite spices an aromatic haze in the apartment, figs seared and then braised in honey and lemon juice with an avalanche of walnuts. Stewing for hours until we eat. (I should have taken photos.)

1kg organic lamb
garlic
ginger
2 red onions

saffron
tumeric
cinnamon stick
cumin
cardamom pods
mustard seeds
ras el hanout (if you can find it or make it yourself)
cayenne or paprika
salt

lamb or chicken stock

8-10 fresh figs
honey
walnuts
lemon juice

3-4 tomatoes
fresh corriander

brown basmati rice (or couscous or flatbread)

Notice the lack of measurements. I cook by throwing in as much as I think might work and then a little more. I like spices and chillies and can’t understand why anyone would want to eat such a divine thing as a curry only half-spiced.

Mash the garlic and ginger, thick slice the onions and fry on low-ish heat while cubing the lamb (leave the fat on; it’s yummy). Add lamb and turn the heat up to sear it.

Mix all the spices together – I used around a half to full tablespoon for each – crumble the cinnamon stick, throw it on top of the lamb and keep stirring till it becomes aromatic and sweats.

Add the stock, put a lid on and simmer on a looooow heat (barely bubbling) for two hours.

Meanwhile…

Sear the figs in a pan. I cut them into sixths first but it might be better to sear them whole then cut them and sear a bit more. Add the honey – a couple of big tablespoons – and let it caramelise, careful not to turn the figs to mush. Add the walnuts and lemon (juice of one) and try to avoid eating this in the next two hours.

Brown rice takes 40-50 minutes. Put it on about an hour after finishing the figs. Other things that would go well are Couscous or warm flatbread.

Two hours or so later…

Remove the lamb from the sauce, turn up the heat and reduce it till it’s fairly thick. Add the tomatoes and continue until they have become one, maybe 15-20 minutes.

Return the lamb, till it’s warmed up again, then add the figs, carefully stirring through. Throw on a good handful of fresh corriander leaves and take it off the heat.

Have some fresh figs, corriander, walnuts, lemon, other spices around for garnishes and mmm… bottles of red wine… happiness for three greedy people (or four if Gala comes along).

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germany is (slightly) embarrassing itself

Reading signandsight’s From the Feuilletons this week… it’s been dead in my feed for some time, but returned with excellent coverage of the storm Thilo Sarrazin — now former SPD and former Bundesbank board member — caused with his book, “Deutschland schafft sich ab”, “Germany is abolishing itself”. It goes a small way to being gratifying that Chancellor Merkel called his book nonsense, and he was roundly chastised and hounded out for this.

There is though a problem across europe with nationalism and racism, which manifests in anti-immigration, anti-Roma, stigmatising of Muslims that collectively needs to be addressed. My personal preference of course is for more immigration, especially now that Australia has shown itself over fifteen years to be unapologetically right wing, and someone like Tony Abbott could end up Prime Minister.

Thilo Sarrazin, SPD politician, former finance senator in Berlin and board member of the German central bank, the Bundesbank, has published a book that has scandalised Germany. “Deutschland schafft sich ab” or Germany is abolishing itself, looks at the effects of immigration, the shrinking birthrate and a growing social “underclass”. Above all, Sarrazin, who is famous for his tactless and abrasive comments, accuses the Muslims in particular of being unwilling to integrate. And German integration authorities, academics and politicians of refusing to discuss the problem.

Two of his statements in particular have driven politicians and press to the barricades:

From his book: “We have to assume that for demographic reasons the underclass section of the population is growing steadily. Among migrants we have seen that the birthrate is highest among those groups of migrants with the lowest levels of education, in other words those from Turkey, the Middle East and Africa. Studies on the workforce have come to similar conclusions. These show that women who are poorly or not integrated into the labour market at all are more likely to have children or increase the size of their flock. But intelligence is 50 to 80 percent hereditary and thanks to the class-related reproductive rate, this unfortunately means that the hereditary intellectual potential of the population is continually shrinking.”

And when asked in an interview with Die Welt on 29.08, whether such thing as a “genetic identity” existed, Sarrazin replied: “All Jews have a certain gene in common.Basques have a certain gene which differentiates them from others.”

(Sarrazin later apologised for this remark. He said he had read an article in theTagesspiegel about two studies – carried out by Harry Ostrer of New York University (more in English) and Doron Behar of Rambam Medical Center in Haifa (more in English) that suggest that many Jews today have shared genetic roots.)

That effectively sealed the fate of the book. Journalists, politicians and academics united in a choir of disapproval for his ideas. Even Chancellor Angela Merkeldescribed them as “nonsense”. Sarrazin’s statements were “marginalising” and “contemptuous of entire groups of society… His language is socially divisive,” shesaid on 28th August on TV. She also outlined the consequences the book’s publication would have for the Bundesbank. This institution, she said is “an advertisement for our entire country.” Yesterday the chairman of the Bundesbankasked the German President Christian Wulff for permission to remove Sarazzin from the board. Only a few hours later the SPD filed for his expulsion from the party.

In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Christian Geyer is despairing: “‘Deutschland schafft sich ab’ tells the tale of a nation’s decline. And the Muslims who make up a mere six percent of the population are being held responsible. It begs the question as to what the remaining 94 percent have spent the past decades doing to secure the future of their country. Sarrazin’s book is the attempt of a disoriented elite to exonerate itself. No wonder it is such a success.”

With reluctance and a mix of pathological fascination and disgust Arno Widmann read the book for the Frankfurter Rundschau. It is the work of the madman, he concludes: “This is Sarrazin’s second book which attempts to connect his statistically-grounded contempt for the overweight, welfare-grabbing underclass couch potato with his racist theories on cultural mentalities. His conclusion is unequivocal: The underclass – even the Germans among its ranks are not real Germans. What is unclear though is where he intends to go with this theory. And explains why he is calling for end to immigration from Turkey, Africa and the Middle East. Indian engineers don’t bother him as long as the Germans are more likely to become social workers than technicians.”

For Frank Schirrmacher in the Frankfurter Allgemeine on Sunday, this is a clear attempt “to establish a very different understanding of culture. One that links genetics with culture, and on the basis of a word that Sarrazin (citing Darwin) drops as casually as Gottfried Benn once did: ‘selective breeding‘. Sarrazin is not talking about Goethe and Schiller, though his book does mention poetry. For him, culture is the reflex of a biological process. The fact that in Germany ever more children are being born to families from the underclass milieu, automatically results in the dumbing down of society, and those who succeed in making career for themselves in spite of their background do nothing to influence his findings. There is nothing new about this theory. On the contrary, it is based on the Enlightenment idea of education, school and upbringing. But Sarrazin’s message is another one: education, which he refers to contemptuously as a ‘mantra’, is powerless as a vehicle for intellectual advancement. Individuals and entire nations are limited by their genetic and ethnic dispositions.”

In the Tagesspiegel, writers, Islam scholars, education and immigration expertsspoke out more or less in unison. The writer Feridun Zaimoglu explained: “People like him are fire starters. He is handing over the Muslim as the boogie man to a frightened middle class, with the implication that the Muslim is also responsible for the bank crisis and for the collapse of the welfare system.” The publicist Hilal Sezginwrites: “From the USA we have started to hear discussions about whether black people are less intelligent than whites. This is very obviously racism talking. In Germany too we need to develop a sensibility for the kind of debates which upset the underlying moral consensus. It is pure negligence to define groups and stir up bad blood between them.” The publicist Mark Terkessidis explains: “It might be an insult to the intelligence that Sarrazin so swears by, to have to dwell for any length of time on the long passages of utter nonsense in his book, but the debate it has triggered has clearly demonstrated that certain opinions are no longer tolerated in the political spectrum of the German republic.”

These are just a very few of the voices who spoke out almost in unison against Sarrazin. There were however one or two individuals who said that this criticism was missing the point:

Sociologist Necla Kelek asks in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung why Sarrazin has simply been demonised when a proper discussion about his book was what was needed. “All this fuss strikes me as somewhat staged and the racism argument smacks of red herring. So he doesn’t want to live in a Muslim Germany because he is suspicious of that sort of society. What’s wrong with this? The economist in Sarrazin has calculated that the 750,000 Turkish immigrant workers now number almost 3 million and of the able bodied among them, 40 percent live off the state instead of working. This makes no economic sense for him and leads him to ask whether immigration, in its current form, is not a mistake. This is no reason to get upset at Sarrazin. Instead we should be asking the politicians who are responsible for this state for affairs whether or not they have really served the interests of the country.”

For the writer Monika Maron in an interview in Die Welt, the public debate has missed the point: “Why can’t we leave aside Sarrazin”s obviously potty ideas about genetic theory and start talking about something much more worrying: the growing confessionalisation of our society, the millions of euros we are shelling out in welfare cheques, the deficits in education and the criminality of Muslim youth? Government schemes and vast sums of money have done little or nothing to change a situation that has been well-known for many years. What has to happen?”

In the Frankfurter Rundschau, Markus Tiedemann, a professor of educational philosophy, dismisses Thilo Sarrazin’s nonsensical hereditary theories in two paragraphs before turning on some of Sarrazin’s critics who, he says, are no better. “In 2007 Pascal Bruckner, a representative of the French nouvelle philosophie, tried to rock the self-satisfied boat of political correctness. His concept of the ‘racism of the anti-racists‘ exposes the negative dialectic of multicultural tolerance. … Anyone today who claims that it is too much to expect ‘the Muslims’ to embrace the achievements of the modern age such as emancipation and freedom of opinion, are no better that the voices who used to say that the blacks lacked the maturity to vote.”

— signandsight

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I am a Muslim

Coming to Berlin caused my attention to drift to a small part of my life I know little about, and fills me at times with a sense I am an interloper. Through Neukölln and Wedding I see old Turkish women, in their long coats and scarves, short and slightly rotund. I fly to Brussels just as the government, itself in tatters and unable to decide on any issue of serious importance decide to ban the burqa and niqab.

I am a feminist too. I Spend time in my two favourite ‘B’ cities, and come from a country, no, three countries, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, where multiculturalism, immigration, assimilation and other such words denote the irruption of the Other into colonial, European culture. Coming to New Zealand from Canada I felt I’d left civilisation to arrive where white was normal, Maori were just going to end up in jail and the Asians received grudging though suspicious respect for being over-achievers. Over time, the Antipodean pair – perhaps Australia more so – thanks to successive waves of immigrants and refugees became a place for me where sitting on a full tram meant everyone was a minority.

This is both the naïve face of multiculturalism and its point. I come to Berlin. Multiculturalism and tolerance are evinced by the populations of old west and east European countries. And then there are the Muslims. I don’t understand so well here the history that bought small pockets of Asian and African migrants to the city, but those from Turkey by comparison have much in common with Greeks and Italians in Australia, post-war looking for a better life.

In one country – and I generalise atrociously here, I am neither historian nor anthropologist – to be a migrant is to be a citizen, it is a normal state, albeit a complex and unresolved one, as illustrated by the question, ‘So, where do you come from?’ aimed not infrequently at those not sufficiently white, even if they happen to be descendants on Cantonese miners from the mid-1800s. In another, only in last decade have laws changed significantly to grant such nationality to those (and their children) not of the blood of the land.

I am expected to regard Islam and Purdah as fraught spaces where identity and ideology is fought. I am expected to do this from certain positions which afford me the place of not-Other. As one who is a descendant of Europeans and coming from a string of colonial outposts, I am granted a certain status as within. This status implicitly includes a codex I might loosely describe as the european project, a very modernist, enlightenment one of hope, progress, and emancipation. As a woman, likewise. As one whose lovers tend to be queer in a fashion that even unsettles those with whom I nominally share this inner space, likewise again.

And what if I were to be an interloper? What if my very pale skin, pristine heritage – both by blood and nationality, perfect english mixed to the point of beguiling post-nation-state internationalism, what if all this hid something revolting? What if it turns out I am the Other, and in this conversation of Islam in Europe, I, who by virtue of my identity and politics should be a natural conspirator in defining Them in opposition to Us, usurp the debate like a terrorist on a plane by saying…

“My grandmother was Turkish Muslim.”

“Oh, that’s why she couldn’t stay with you, because the kitchen wasn’t Halal.” A conversation in Melbourne at a café in Burke St Mall, the alley beside the former Post Office, perhaps early 2006, I suppose I was in Melbourne making hell. We are talking about where I grew up in Toronto, Eaton Ave. I had proved to myself when in Toronto a couple of years earlier that I had lived there and it wasn’t some invented memory by walking from home to school, remembering the route through parks, down streets, around corners. Now sitting at this table I am perhaps inventing a new memory of two dark shapes, my father’s parents, visiting when I was a child.

I shall assume this memory is false, that I don’t remember her. Though I do remember well having a middle name which I discarded as soon as I was able to, and that throughout, while branded with it had no idea why my father would have chosen such a name. Knowing myself somewhat, and my tendency for honesty despite the consequences, I would have said, when various teachers laughingly asked in front of the class how I came to be blessed with such a concoction, “My father gave it to me, it’s Turkish” and suffered yet more.

So I discover myself to be an interloper. Certainly the grandchild of a muslim woman, certainly named because of her and this fact, fairly certain she was from Turkey, but whether Turkish in fact or just passing through, perhaps Kurdish, or even Central Asian, I have no idea. Her name also, a blank.

I see these old women in Neukölln and Wedding and am reminded of her. I wonder if she would be like them. I wonder how it would have been growing up if not separated by hemispheres, I wonder more flightingly if by some small shift of chance I would nonetheless be in Berlin, but as the daughter of Gästarbeiterin, and perhaps wear a hijab as the girls of these Kieze sometimes do.

The conversations I’ve had in Berlin and Brussels about muslims, immigration have often left me troubled. Hearing tropes that sound suspiciously unfriendly yet unable to grasp the argument or conditions that led to such views even among artists. Unable to provide a convincing riposte outside of my experiences in Australia, and knowing also the pressing need to be able to argue forcefully against the easy racisim that pervades the public discussion reduced to ‘Islam in Europe’. Of course I began reading. I found Katherine Pratt Ewing’s Stolen Honor – Stigmatizing Muslim Men in Berlin in St George’s, an impulse purchase. Butler, Said, anthropology, and naturally I am drawn in, though equally in other respects problematic. But there is no one single answer.

It is perhaps that it is a question in the first place that it is a problem. The Muslim question. The Turkish question. Here in Brussels now – and across Europe even in Turkey – the hijab, niqab, burqa question.

I shall not be morally relativist here. It is the fundamental point of human rights to not be relativist; it is to be absolutist, to say, “Here is the minimum acceptable”, to say these things are not open to negotiation.

It is not the role of the government to decide how a woman might dress. It is not the role of a government to place itself in the position of proxy for a woman’s voice, therein stating whether such dress is choice or not. It is not the role of a government to use a woman’s body as the site on an ideological battle. It is not the role of the government to use the instrument of law in the name of women’s rights to impose a diminishment of those rights upon the very subject of their supposed emancipation.

I say this as a feminist. I say this as a woman, as a granddaughter of a Muslim woman, as an atheist, as a queer.

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Top Ten (Plus 1) Good News Stories in the Muslim World, 2008 (That Nobody Noticed)

Cheerful Saturday morning reading I thought I’d post in its entirety, though I do think anyone who has the slightest interest in the Middle-East and Central Asia should make a habit of reading Juan Cole. Wish that I hadn’t missed number 8 though…

We all too often focus only on negative developments, and while it is understandable for people to keep their eyes on impending calamities, obsessing about the bad sometimes causes us to miss good news. We see a lot of that even with regard to the US. For instance, there has been a 23% decline in violent crime over the past twenty years in the US, but people who watch a lot of television (especially, I presume, police procedurals) tell pollsters they think crime has gotten worse.

I see significant positive stories in the Muslim world in 2008 that don’t get a lot of press in the US, but which will be important for the incoming Obama administration.

1. The Pakistani public, led by its attorneys, judges and civilian politicians, conducted a peaceful, constitutional overthrow of the military dictatorship of Pervez Musharraf in 2008. Last February, the Pakistani public gave the largest number of seats in parliament to the left of center, secular Pakistan People’s Party. The fundamentalist religious parties took a bath at the polls. In August, the elected parliament initiated impeachment proceedings against Musharraf, who resigned. A civilian president, Asaf Ali Zardari, was elected. George W. Bush is reported to have been the last man in Washington to relinquish support for Musharraf, who had rampaged around sacking supreme court justices, censoring the press, and imprisoning political enemies on a whim. Pakistan faces an insurgency in the northwestern tribal areas, and problems of terrorism rooted in past military training of guerrillas to fight India in Kashmir. But the civilian parties have a much better chance of curbing such military excesses than does a leader dependent solely on the military for support. True, the new political leadership is widely viewed as corrupt, but South Korean politics was corrupt and that country nevertheless made progress. Besides, after Madoff/Blagojevich, who are we to talk? The triumph of parliamentary democracy over military dictatorship in Pakistan during the past year is good news that Washington-centered US media seldom could appreciate because of Bush’s narrative about military dictatorship equalling stability and a reliable ally in the war on terror. In reality? Not so much.

2. The Iraqi government succeeded in imposing on the Bush administration a military withdrawal from Iraq by 2011. The hard negotiations showed a new confidence on the part of the Iraqi political class that they can stand on their own feet militarily. The relative success of PM Nuri al-Maliki’s Basra campaign last spring was part of the mix here. But so too was the absolute insistence by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani that any Status of Forces Agreement not infringe on Iraqi sovereignty. The Sadr Movement resorted to street politics, aiming to thwart any agreement at all, thus providing cover to al-Maliki as he pushed back against Bush’s imperial demands. The Iraqi success in getting a withdrawal agreement has paved the way for President-elect Obama to fulfill his pledge to withdraw from Iraq on a short timetable.

3. Syria has secretly been conducting peace negotiations with Israel, using the Turkish Prime Minister Rejep Tayyip Erdogan as the intermediary. There are few more fraught relationships between countries in the world than the Israel-Syrian divide, but obviously Bashar al-Asad and Ehud Olmert felt that there were things they could fruitfully talk about. Ironically, the clueless George W. Bush went to Israel last spring and condemned talking to the enemy as a form of appeasement. While he got polite applause, the Israeli mainstream is far more realistic than the silly Neocons who write Bush’s speeches, and Olmert went on talking to al-Asad. Unfortunately, the Israeli attack on Gaza has caused Syria to call off the talks for now. It should be a high priority of the Obama administration to start them back up.

4. There has been a “near strategic defeat for al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia.” “Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” conducted numerous bombings and shootings in the period 2003-2006, during which the Saudi authorities got serious about taking it on. Saudi Arabia produces on the order of 11 percent of the world’s petroleum, and instability there threatens the whole world. The dramatic subsiding of terrorism there in 2008 is good news for every one. Opinion polls show support for al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia plummeting, and determination to fight terrorism is overwhelming. In polling, a solid majority of Saudis say they want better relations with the United States. Yes. The Wahhabis are saying that. And their number one prerequisite for better relations? A US withdrawal from Iraq. (See above).

5. The crisis of state in Lebanon was patched up late last spring by the Doha agreement. Qatar’s King Hamad Al-Thani showed himself a canny negotiator. Hizbullah came into the government and received support as a national guard for the south as long as it pledged not to drag the country into any more wars unilaterally. Lebanese politics is always fragile, but this is the best things have been for years. Lebanese economic conservatism allowed its banks and real estate to avoid the global crash, and hotel occupancy rates are up 25% over 2007, with a 2008 economic growth rate of 6%. The new president, Michel Suleiman, has also pursued responsible diplomacy with Syria, and the two countries are normalizing relations after years of bitterness. For all the potential dangers ahead, 2008 was a success story of major proportions in Lebanon.

6. [pdf] Indonesia’s transition to democracy that began in 1998 has been ‘consolidated’ and it has regained its economic health, paying back $43 billion in loans to the International Monetary Fund. Indonesia is the world fourth most populous country and the world’s largest Muslim country, comprising something like 16 percent or more of all Muslims. It faces many challenges, as do all young democracies, but when 245 million Muslims have kept democracy going for 10 years, the thesis that Islam is somehow incompatible with democracy is clearly fallacious.

7. Turkey avoided a major constitutional crisis in 2008 when the constitutional court declined to find the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) guilty of undermining the official ideology of secularism. AKP is mildly Muslim in orientation, in contrast to the militantly secular military. The verdict gave Turks an opportunity to work on bridging the secular-religious divide. Turkey, a country of 70 million the size of Texas, is a linchpin of stability in the Middle East, and it survived a crisis here.

8. Major Arab pop singers jointly performed an anti-war opera that called for co-existence among the region’s Christians, Muslims and Jews and an end to the senseless slaughter. It ran on 15 Arab satellite channels,and one satellite channel ran it nonstop for days. It was the Woodstock of this generation in the Arab world and it got no international press at all.

9. King Abdullah II of Jordan pledged an end to press censorship in Jordan. Tim Sebastian reports,

‘The man at the center of this event was King Abdullah of Jordan, who last month gathered together the chief editors of Jordan’s main newspapers and told them that from now on there would be big changes in the country’s media environment. Specifically, no more jailing of reporters for writing the wrong thing and a new mechanism would be created to protect the rights of journalists, including their access to information. “Detention of journalists is prohibited,” he said. “I do not see a reason for detaining a journalist because he/she wrote something or for expressing a view.”‘

It is legitimate to take all this with a grain of salt, to be skeptical, to wait and see. But Sebastian is right that if the king means it, it is big news for Jordan and the Middle East, and the court in Amman should be pressured to stand by the new procedures.

10. The United Arab Emirates is creating the first carbon-free city, “Masdar,” as a demonstration project. That the Oil Gulf, a major source of the fossil fuels that, when burned, are causing climate change and rising sea levels, has become concerned about these problems, it is a very good sign.

— Informed Comment

And the eleventh, from the comments:

Anonymous said…

Not surprising that you forgot, but for millions in South Asia recently, there was very good news: Bangladesh just had free, fair, and peaceful elections. In a nation of 160 million (90% of whom are Muslim), a secularist party was elected with landslide mandate. Bangladesh is now the second largest Muslim democracy (after Indonesia) and the 6th largest democracy in the world.

http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/560410

Shayer said…

Don’t forget Bangladesh, the 4th largest Muslim country in the world just had their largely peaceful, free, and fair elections in 7 years with the secularists capturing 230 of 300 seats in the Parliament and Jamaat-i-Islami (the Islamist party)went from 20 seats in the 2001 election to only 2 seats effectively wiping them out and showing a great rejection of islamist ideologies.

The Awami League, the winners in this election, offers to share power with the losing parties and the losing party BNP conceded defeat showing a change from part politics where the oppostion would always take to the streets and protest.

The good news shows the Bangladeshis commitment to democracy and the resilience of a moderate Islam that renounces violence.