1-Diverse Character in City Qaddafi Calls Islamist
The New York Times
Children playing on domes atop Sahaba Mosque in Darnah, Libya, on Saturday. Known as a pious city, it is a complex mix of the religious and the secular
DARNAH, Libya — This fiercely independent port city on the Mediterranean coast, once the center of a simmering Islamist insurgency in the 1990s, is now branded by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi as an Islamic emirate infiltrating his embattled country.
The charge, uttered again on Monday by Libya’s foreign minister, is familiar in the Arab world, where strongmen have long presented a stark choice to their subjects and their American backers: either dictatorship or Islamists, repression or chaos.
But Darnah offers a more complex reality: a mélange where secular currents are intersecting with religious ones, drawn together by nationalist opposition to Colonel Qaddafi’s four decades of often bizarre rule. This old Barbary port, with a reputation as one of Libya’s most pious cities and, in the words of a WikiLeaks cable, a “wellspring for foreign fighters in Iraq,” suggests a more nuanced picture of what role militant Islam may play in a city and country fumbling to forge a body politic in a land without one.
No one knows what will emerge in Libya, or in Egypt or Tunisia for that matter. But so far in each place, in a remarkable legacy of the uprisings, Islamist groups are collaborating with secular counterparts to call for democratic constitutions and the rule of law. Both groups seem to believe pluralism, if won, may best guarantee their survival.
A veteran of the war in Afghanistan, imprisoned for years by Colonel Qaddafi’s government, who praises Osama bin Laden’s “good points,” but denounces the 9/11 attacks on the United States, runs Darnah’s defenses, and no one seems all that frightened by him. A secular leader of the impromptu City Council has welcomed the stand of clerics here. Young Islamists mingle with elderly diplomats at the Sahaba Mosque, plotting the revolt that for now has focused not on competing agendas, but on what kind of state might emerge.
Across the region, Islamists demonstrate a new-found sensitivity to how the West views them. They claim to be part of a national struggle and are careful in the words they choose. It is the case even in Libya, one of the world’s most isolated places, though far less so than 15 years ago.
At the mosque, Al Jazeera was on throughout the day, and the Internet has brought an alternative to the mind-numbing propaganda of state television. “There’s a change in the mind-set, and that’s more important than the revolution,” said Ashour Abu Rashed, a lawyer and one of Darnah’s three transitional leaders.
As with many cities in eastern Libya, Darnah still bears the scars of Colonel Qaddafi’s brutality, in particular the notorious massacre at Abu Salim prison in Tripoli in June 1996, when human rights advocates say as many as 1,200 inmates were killed. Nearly 100 were from Darnah, and their portraits paper the stucco walls of the Sahaba Mosque.
So do pictures of five men killed Feb. 17, whose deaths ignited the revolt here. “It was like a flame skipping from place to place,” said Sirraj Shinnib, a professor of linguistics at Omar Mukhtar University. “This place had simmered for 20 years.”
In Darnah, there is at least a passing resemblance to the aftermath of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. Tribes and clerics emerged forcefully after authority collapsed, especially in more conservative regions.
Here, leaders of tribes like the Obeidat, Zliten, Tajjoura and Misratah already exercise authority, along with judges and a three-member council: Mr. Abu Rashed, a judge and a former diplomat, all secular figures.
Other than them, only the Muslim Brotherhood and more militant strands thought to number in the hundreds show signs of organization, many having forged bonds in prison or fighting the government in the 1990s. One of those men is Abdul-Hakim al-Hasidi, who fought for five years in Afghanistan, ended up in Colonel Qaddafi’s jails for four years and now, with hundreds of armed men, runs the defenses of Darnah and its hinterland.
He helps run much of the city’s rump bureaucracy as well, drawing on a formidable talent for logistics recognized by many in the town.
“If I answered every call, I’d be talking on the phone even if I was in the bathroom,” Mr. Hasidi joked, as he ignored a cellphone that rang incessantly.
Since the revolt began, he has fought in the town and in Brega, down the coast, and said he had helped secure hundreds of Kalashnikov rifles for the fight. But he disavows any political ambition, and it is a refrain of him and others that Libya could never be a Taliban-like state.
“Impossible,” he quipped.
“People are already Muslims, and we don’t need an Islamic state to tell us that,” he added. “If I had extremist thoughts, then people wouldn’t have sided with me.”
Libyan officials have singled out Mr. Hasidi as the head of a supposed emirate here, part of the government’s narrative that militant Islamists have hijacked the revolt.
“This group is now leading the military operations,” Foreign Minister Moussa Koussa said Monday. “Where did they come from? They came from Al Qaeda.”
Mr. Hasidi laughs at the charge. He promised to lay down his arms once victory is won and return, he said, to teaching.
“Politicians,” the 45-year-old Mr. Hasidi added, “can deal with the politics.”
Secular figures here were adamant in endorsing the Islamists’ right to form parties and, at the Sahaba Mosque, slogans were markedly bereft of religious sentiment. “Freedom, dignity and national unity,” read one.
A leaflet circulated there pronounced demands almost identical to those uttered in Egypt: a transitional government, a constitution approved by referendum, parliamentary and presidential elections and a democratic state built on pluralism, the peaceful transfer of power, the rule of law and guarantees of human rights and the protection of freedoms.
Mr. Abu Rashed, who is 66, called his generation “the generation of fear.”
“In the shadow of a new democratic system, everyone should now have their space, and every opinion should be heard,” he said. “In the end, there will be dialogue.”
Next to him was a cleric, Shukri Abdel-Hamid, who had spent 10 years in prison.
“We want a civil state, pluralism, with freedom enshrined by law,” he said, before echoing a sentiment heard often in Egypt and Tunisia. “Extremism was a reaction to oppression and the violence of the state. Give us freedom and see what happens.”
Libya’s rebellion is young, and some residents warned that Islamists may grow more radical the longer it lasts. Some at the mosque warned that foreign intervention in the conflict would be resisted. But in the town, it was tribal divisions that seemed to frighten people more than the longstanding secular and religious divide.
“There are some Islamists here, but so what,” said Marwan Saud, a pharmacist. “Let them form a party and then we’ll see. That’s their right, the freedom to speak.”
Ibrahim Badawy contributed reporting from Darnah, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Tripoli, Libya.
2-The Mauritius miracle |
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| Suppose someone were to describe a small country that provided free education through university for all of its citizens, transportation for school children, and free health care – including heart surgery – for all. You might suspect that such a country is either phenomenally rich or on the fast track to fiscal crisis. |
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| After all, rich countries in Europe have increasingly found that they cannot pay for university education, and are asking young people and their families to bear the costs. For its part, the United States has never attempted to give free college for all, and it took a bitter battle just to ensure that America’s poor get access to health care – a guarantee that the Republican Party is now working hard to repeal, claiming that the country cannot afford it. But Mauritius, a small island nation off the east coast of Africa, is neither particularly rich nor on its way to budgetary ruin. Nonetheless, it has spent the last decades successfully building a diverse economy, a democratic political system, and a strong social safety net. Many countries, not least the US, could learn from its experience. In a recent visit to this tropical archipelago of 1.3 million people, I had a chance to see some of the leaps Mauritius has taken – accomplishments that can seem bewildering in light of the debate in the US and elsewhere. Consider home ownership: while American conservatives say that the government’s attempt to extend home ownership to 70 percent of the US population was responsible for the financial meltdown, 87 percent of Mauritians own their own homes – without fueling a housing bubble. Now comes the painful number: Mauritius’s GDP has grown faster than 5 percent annually for almost 30 years. Surely, this must be some “trick.” Mauritius must be rich in diamonds, oil, or some other valuable commodity. But Mauritius has no exploitable natural resources. Indeed, so dismal were its prospects as it approached independence from Britain, which came in 1968, that the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Meade wrote in 1961: “It is going to be a great achievement if [the country] can find productive employment for its population without a serious reduction in the existing standard of living….[T]he outlook for peaceful development is weak.” As if to prove Meade wrong, the Mauritians have increased per capita income from less than $400 around the time of independence to more than $6,700 today. The country has progressed from the sugar-based monoculture of 50 years ago to a diversified economy that includes tourism, finance, textiles, and, if current plans bear fruit, advanced technology. During my visit, my interest was to understand better what had led to what some have called the Mauritius Miracle, and what others might learn from it. There are, in fact, many lessons, some of which should be borne in mind by politicians in the US and elsewhere as they fight their budget battles. First, the question is not whether we can afford to provide health care or education for all, or ensure widespread homeownership. If Mauritius can afford these things, America and Europe – which are several orders of magnitude richer – can, too. The question, rather, is how to organize society. Mauritians have chosen a path that leads to higher levels of social cohesion, welfare, and economic growth – and to a lower level of inequality. Second, unlike many other small countries, Mauritius has decided that most military spending is a waste. The US need not go as far: just a fraction of the money that America spends on weapons that don’t work against enemies that don’t exist would go a long way toward creating a more humane society, including provision of health care and education to those who cannot afford them. Third, Mauritius recognized that without natural resources, its people were its only asset. Maybe that appreciation for its human resources is also what led Mauritius to realize that, particularly given the country’s potential religious, ethnic, and political differences – which some tried to exploit in order to induce it to remain a British colony – education for all was crucial to social unity. So was a strong commitment to democratic institutions and cooperation between workers, government, and employers – precisely the opposite of the kind of dissension and division being engendered by conservatives in the US today. This is not to say that Mauritius is without problems. Like many other successful emerging-market countries, Mauritius is confronting a loss of exchange-rate competitiveness. And, as more and more countries intervene to weaken their exchange rates in response to America’s attempt at competitive devaluation through quantitative easing, the problem is becoming worse. Almost surely, Mauritius, too, will have to intervene. Moreover, like many other countries around the world, Mauritius worries today about imported food and energy inflation. To respond to inflation by increasing interest rates would simply compound the difficulties of high prices with high unemployment and an even less competitive exchange rate. Direct interventions, restrictions on short-term capital inflows, capital-gains taxes, and stabilizing prudential banking regulations will all have to be considered. The Mauritius Miracle dates to independence. But the country still struggles with some of its colonial legacies: inequality in land and wealth, as well as vulnerability to high-stakes global politics. The US occupies one of Mauritius’s offshore islands, Diego Garcia, as a naval base without compensation, officially leasing it from the United Kingdom, which not only retained the Chagos Islands in violation of the UN and international law, but expelled its citizens and refuses to allow them to return. The US should now do right by this peaceful and democratic country: recognize Mauritius’ rightful ownership of Diego Garcia, renegotiate the lease, and redeem past sins by paying a fair amount for land that it has illegally occupied for decades. *Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University and a Nobel laureate in Economics. His latest book, Freefall: Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy, is available in French, German, Japanese, and Spanish.© Project Syndicate, 2011. |
CATITAN SUT.
Agaknya era gerakan Islam yang berpaksikan rhetorik dan slogan-slogan agama dengan istilah-istilah arab sudah berlalu. Masyarakat sekarang lebih tertarik kepada kenyataan-kenyataan yang matang dan seimbang. Masyarakat lebih menghormati tindakan-tindakan yang membuktikan keprihatinan dan kebersamaan gerakan Islam dalam agenda-agenda yang seharian dalam kehidupan mereka.
Tiada guna tokoh-tokoh yang bercakap bergegar-gegar mengutuk pihak lain yang dituduh sebagai unislamic, tetapi mereka sendiri kontang dari idea-idea untuk membangun masyarakat sehingga mereka hanya mampu bercakap isu-isu awangan yg conceptual,
Marilah kita sucikan hati kita, kita hindarkan dari sikap hasad-dengki, ghairah untuk menjadi pemimpin, ghairah untuk mengumpul manafaat dunia. Kita hindarkan sikap yang mendakwa secara terus-terusan atau secara tersembunyi yang kita lebih islamic dari kelompok lain, seolah-olah kita terselamat dan terjamin dari kebinasaan yang menimpa orang lain.
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