Category: Democracy

Erdogan: Secular Muslim icon

Mustafa Malik April 5, 2023

POLLS SHOW TURKISH President Recep Tayyip Erdogan behind the opposition presidential nominee, Kemal Kilicdaroglu. Erdogan has alienated a lot of Turks through his crackdowns on descent and media outlets critical of him. The Turkish economy is reeling from double-digit inflation and the lira has been decimated by his fixation with low interest rates. The Biden administration has been consistently supporting the anti-Turkish Kurdish militia in Syria, who have aggravated Turkey’s security problems.

Well, poll numbers could be see-sawing before the May 14 the election; we can’t predict now whom the Turkish voters will finally pick as their next president. But in case – just in case – Erdogan’s 20-year rule as president and prime minister of Turkey is coming to an end, I’m wondering what legacy he would be leaving behind.

In Western political circles and media, Erdogan has been virulently reviled since he came to power, mainly because of his Islamic roots and muscular foreign policy, which occasionally clashes with those of America and the West. On the other hand, he has continually espoused and defended Muslim causes and issues around the world as no other Muslim leader has, and a Pew Research poll has found him to be the most admired statesman in the Muslim world.

Some philosophers and sociologists (Jurgen Habermas, Gregor McLennan, et al) would call him a “post-secularist,” one retaining a secular political system while allowing religious values and symbols to infiltrate the public space. Others (e.g. Asef Bayat, Vali Nasr) would label him a “post-Islamist,” as he came from an Islamist political party but has left it and set up a secular one and has been working through secular institutions.

I prefer calling the Turkish president a “Muslim democrat,” the phrase Erdogan used to describe himself to me. It identifies him, I think, more authentically. It took me years, though, to come to realize its authenticity.

On the hot, muggy afternoon of Nov. 2, 1998, my Turkish friend and interpreter, Cemal Usak, barged in with me to the office of the then Istanbul mayor, Erdogan. Usak was his classmate and boyhood friend and had set up my interview with him. Usak was general secretary to the Journalists and Writers Association in Istanbul and had been helping me with my research project.

Erdogan was putting things into cardboard boxes in the middle of the room, but he got up and led us to a coach behind a tea table blazoning a multicolor bouquet in the middle. A few weeks before, the mayor had been fired from his job after his conviction for reciting a provocative Islamic poem at a public meeting. Turkey was under the ultra-secularist government of Prime Minister Ahmet Mesut Yilmaz. The Islamist mayor had been given a 10-month prison sentence for reading out the so-called “jihadist poem.” It read:

“The mosques are our barracks, the minarets our bayonets, the domes our helmets and the faithful our soldiers….”

I had been to Turkey for nearly two months and found an Islamic resurgence roiling the country. Erdogan’s prison sentence (which would later be reduced to four months) had made him a hero of sorts among Islamists and many everyday Turks.

Having seated us on the coach, our host scampered to an assistant and was instructing him about what to put into which boxes, etc. I noticed bouquets and clusters of flowers filling the whole corner of the room to my right. I asked an attendant why there were so many flowers in the room.

“People started bringing them in since the day he returned from the court,” he said. Usak explained that he meant since the day the court gave Erdogan the prison sentence.

Erdogan rushed back and sat next to me on the coach and asked how long I had been working at the Washington Times.

I realized that Usak had briefed him about me.

I said I had left the Washington Times to take up my current assignment. “I am doing fieldwork in Western Europe and here about the prospects for Turkey’s membership of the European Union,” I added.

Erdogan’s eyes lit up, indicting his interest in the subject. He asked a couple of questions about my findings on the issue in European countries. I kept my answers brief and told him that I didn’t find “Europeans very interested in having you in the European Union.”

“You think so?” he said. “We would like to join the European Union, though.”

I was surprised to hear that.

“But your leader, Mr. Erbakan, has been opposed to Turkey’s EU membership and NATO membership,” I said.

Necmettin Erbakan, president of the Islamist Welfare Party to which Erdogan belonged, had been denouncing Turkish governments’ attempt to join the EU and Turkey’s membership of NATO, and when he was prime minister, he tried, unsuccessfully, to form an “Islamic NATO” with eight Muslim countries. Erbakan was the founder of the Islamist movement in Turkey. He had been overthrown as prime minister the year before under the pressure of army generals, the traditional guardians of Turkey’s aggressively secular system. The generals had judged him a threat to the country’s secular system.

Erdogan didn’t respond to my comment about Erbakan’s opposition to Turkey’s accession to the EU.

Religious freedom

After asking him a couple of other questions, I said, “If the Welfare Party came to power today, would you try to introduce the Shari’a in Turkey?”

“No, the Sharia is for individual Muslims to observe,” he replied, beckoning me to a glass of soft drink and a plate of biscuits placed on the tea table. “The state should be secular.”

I was stunned again. A radical Islamist wants a secular Turkish state!”

“Isn’t the secular state sending you to prison for reading an Islamic poem?” I said, having had a sip of the drink.

He explained that “the Kemalists’ version” of secularism suppressed people’s religious freedom and persecuted women who wore Islamic head covering in public, but that under his version of secularism “the state will guarantee religious freedom.”

The officials and other supporters of the staunchly secular Turkish state, founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, are known as “Kemalists.”

“I’m a secular Muslim,” he added, “but I want religious freedom. For everybody.”

Now he’s a secular Muslim!

I was shocked.

The man who was going to prison for reciting a “jihadist poem” and has been known throughout Turkey as a diehard Islamist now says he’s a secular Muslim. He must be lying through his teeth, I said to myself. I suspected that Usak had told him that I wrote in American newspapers and journals, and he just didn’t want Americans to think of him as an Islamist zealot.

On my way back I asked Usak what he made of Erdogan’s description of himself as a secular Muslim. My friend was a follower of Fethullah Gulen, a famous Turkish cleric who would be accused in 2016 of sponsoring a failed military coup against the Erdogan government.

“We are secular Muslims, too,” he said. Gulen and his followers were indeed secular. “You are,” I replied, “but the Welfare Party is an Islamist organization and your friend [Erdogan] is a leader of that party. An Islamist firebrand.”

I recalled my interviews with Abdullah Gul, then a member of the Turkish parliament (later president of Turkey) and Ahmet Davutoglu, a professor at Marmara University in Istanbul who was known as Erdogan’s mentor (later Turkish prime minister); both had ruled out introducing Islamic law in Turkey but neither of them had identified himself as secular. I hadn’t brought up the question, however.

I was getting ready to return to the United States and wished that I had the time to investigate why Erdogan had called himself as a “secular Muslim.”

The next day I dropped in at Istanbul’s Hurriyet newspaper office for a goodbye lunch with my friend Oktay Eksi, the paper’s chief columnist.

I told him about my interview with Erdogan and said, “Can you believe that Erdogan told me that he was a secular Muslim?”

Eksi used to be a politician belonging to the secularist Republican People’s Party.

“These Islamists are hypocrites,” he said, trying cut a piece of meat on his plate with his knife and fork. “But I heard that Erdogan, Abdullah Gul, Bulent Arinc and a few others are going to leave the Rafah [Welfare] Party.”

I stopped eating, anxious to hear more about it.

“Really?” I said. “Why?”

Eksi said he had learned from Welfare Party sources that “a number of younger party members” had decided that an Islamist party won’t have a future in Turkey, “especially after Erdogan’s jail sentence and the firing of Erbakan” as prime minister.

Those party members were “led by Erdogan and Gul to a meeting with Erbakan,” he added, where they had “a fight with Rajai Kutan.” Kutan was an Erbakan’s closest associate.

I have since been following Turkish politics and have interviewed Erdogan twice more – in Turkey and Washington – and I understand that his and many other Turkish Islamists’ transition to the “secular” Justice and Development Party (AKP) was the result of serious soul searching. They have realized that an Islamist party won’t be tolerated by the Turkish army and Kemalist elites and would be ostracized by Europe and America.

During my visit to Turkey the following year Erbakan admitted to me the rift in his party. He said some of the dissidents had been “very dear to me, and they are pious Muslim brothers,” but that they thought they could serve Islam better from “outside politics.” They were “misguided” and needed “more courage” to pursue Islamist politics, Erbakan added.

Over the decades I have frequented Muslim countries in South and West Asia and Muslim communities in America and Europe. I have seen an interesting trend among many Muslims almost everywhere. They pray and fast and are building mosques and madrasas. They agitate over the persecution of Muslims in India, Palestine and Myanmar. But they are leaving Islamist organizations.

In Bangladesh, where I live now, mosques and madrasahs are proliferating. And Friday congregations in some mosques extend to the yards. But the Bangladeshi Islamist party, the Jamaat-i-Islami, has all but become extinct.

The Bangladeshi population is more than 90 percent Muslim, but the Jamaat-i-Islami there has never received more than 6 percent of the vote. Pakistanis are 96 percent Muslim. There, too, the Jamaat never got more than 6 percent of the vote. In Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, the largest Islamist party, the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), won 8 percent of the vote at the last election, and the second-largest, the United Development Party (PPP), got 4 percent. In Morocco, the Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) suffered the most devastating defeat at the 2021 elections, having lost 112 seats and winning only 13. Yet in all these Muslim-majority countries, Islamic piety, values and symbols permeate social and cultural life.

To me, it all means that Muslims are modernizing fast and jettisoning Islamism because it doesn’t fit well with the public space where modernity reigns. Yet they continue to practice the Islamic faith and cherish Islamic values, which lend meaning to their lives.

The point I’m trying make is exemplified by Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia’s current prime minister. I met him in Washington in the 1980s as a fire-breathing Islamist youth from Malaysia. He was the leader of Malaysia’s largest Islamic youth movement, known as ABIM (Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia) and a darling of the American Muslim leaders. Together with the Islamic scholar Ismail al-Faruqi, Anwar founded the Islamic think tank International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) in Herndon, Virginia.

On his return to Malaysia, Anwar plunged into radical Islamic politics and was having a hard time making progress. Along the way, he served jail terms in sodomy and corruption cases, apparently trumped up by his political rivals. While he was going through these, he began espousing ethnic pluralism and religious tolerance. He was reaching out to the Chinese minority and other non-Muslim ethnic communities and gaining their support. Last November Anwar became prime minister as the head of a progressive alliance, while the hardline Malaysia Islamic Party (PAS) led the opposition.

Democratic institutions

In one of his first press interviews as prime minister, Anwar told Reuters that he would work hard to “rid the country of corruption, racism and religious bigotry,” the last phrase was apparently aimed at the Islamist PAS.

I see Anwar following Erdogan’s political trajectory. Once a radical Islamist, Erdogan has emerged as a leading secularist among Muslim rulers in the world. He has retained Turkey’s secular constitution and democratized its laws. Turkey is about the only Muslim country where alcohol stores and bars are open. Erdogan has wrested democratic institutions from the clutches of the Kemalist army and judiciary. And he reined in the army and the courts, which were strangleholds of Kemalism.

As part of his agenda for religious freedom, Erdogan struggled for years to lift the ban on Muslim women’s headscarves in public institutions until he succeeded in doing so and got the Directorate of Religious Affairs to open new Islamic schools and mosques. In his view, that was part of his struggle for freedom, i.e. religious freedom, denied to Turkish Muslims by authoritarian Kemalist regimes. A Kemalist prosecutor made a failed attempt in a court to have Erdogan’s AKP banned for its alleged threat to the secular constitution. As prime minister, Erdogan tried hard, but unsuccessfully, to join the EU and he keeps Turkey firmly in NATO, long opposed by some of Turkish Islamists.

He not only established secular democracy in Turkey but propagated it in other Muslim countries as well. During his 2011 trip to Egypt, he enraged many of his hosts when he advised them: “I hope there will be a secular state in Egypt. One must not be afraid of secularism. Egypt will grow in democracy and those called upon to draw up the constitution must understand it must respect all religions.”

Oh yes, Erdogan is also zealously espousing Muslim causes in Palestine, Kashmir, and elsewhere. He has built more than 100 mosques in a host of foreign countries. Among them is the largest American mosque built in what used to be my neighborhood in the Washington suburbs. In 2020 he earned vociferous denunciation from the West when he re-converted Hagia Sophia (or Aya Sofia) from a museum back into a mosque. Once a Byzantine cathedral, the Turks, in 1453, had made it a mosque upon their conquest of Istanbul (then the Byzantine capital of Constantinople), but Ataturk, during his campaign to de-Islamize Turkey, had made it a museum.

All this fits into Erdogan’s version of secularism, or “post-secularism.” In contemporary philosophers’ and definition, “post-secularism” allows religious values and symbols in the public space, so long as it insured equality, freedom and pluralism.

Actually, the Western liberal brand of secularism, which quarantines religion into the private sphere, is a unique invention of the West. It was devised to rid society of Christian fanaticism, which had exploded in Europe during the “Wars of Religion.”

“’Secular’ itself is a Christian term,” the eminent Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor explains, “that is a word that finds its meaning in a Christian context.” He adds that the Western concept of secularism “doesn’t travel well and should not be imposed on other cultures.”

In fact in almost none of the non-Western societies, including democratic ones, religion or religious values are completely rinsed out of the public space, as it’s done in Western and Northern Europe – and as Ataturk and his Kemalists struggled to do in Turkey for nearly eight decades. In Erdogan’s “Muslim secularist” Turkey, religious values and symbols are visible in the public space, but their adherents are not nearly as brutal and repressive as are today’s Hindu nationalists in India, known as “the world’s largest democracy,” or right-wing Jews in apartheid Israel, which the West calls “the only democracy in the Middle East.”

Erdogan’s crackdowns on his political opponents – thousands of them – has negated many of the freedoms he recovered from the authoritarian Kemalist regimes and the coup-prone Turkish military. I hear, too, that financial corruption has infected his family and party. Erdogan fatigue has crept into swathes of Turkish society. I won’t be surprised if next month’s election marks the end of Erdogan’s tumultuous political career.

But the “Muslim secularism,” or “post-Islamism,” which he has established in Turkey, will, I believe, remain his enduring political and social legacy in Turkey. I was struck to note that Kilicdaroglu, Erdogan’s Kemalist rival in the presidential election, co-sponsored the bill in the parliament that allowed Muslim women to wear headscarves in public institutions. Kilicdaroglu, too, has an Islamist party in his six-party electoral alliance!

On his campaign trail, Kilicdaroglu has been trying to court the conservative Muslim vote. Many of these Muslims hate many Kemalists’ drinking habits. Ataturk died of cirrhosis of the liver due to heavy drinking, and his critics criticize him for partying around the “raki [alcohol] table.” The Kemalist presidential candidate has vowed to steer clear of those “at the raki table.”

Erdogan’s “Muslim secularism” has all but replaced Kemalism in much of Turkish society.

Mustafa Malik, the host of this blog, researched Turkish-European relations in Turkey and five Western European countries as a journalism fellow for the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Ukraine: Russia resists NATO trap

Mustafa Malik February 28, 2023

An adventure, for sure! But to what end?

Joe Biden had an arduous 10-hour train ride through Ukraine into Kyiv to become the first American president ever to venture into a war zone not under American occupation or control. The Ukrainian capital had been under continual Russian bombardment.

Before Biden entered Ukraine, though, Washington had alerted Moscow about his visit. So it was actually a low-risk high drama.

The event that highlighted his Eastern European trip was a speech he gave on Tuesday to nine members of Eastern NATO countries. In it the president declared that he was there to show American support not only for Ukraine but also for “freedom of democracy at large.”

“Democracies of the world,” he asserted, “will stand guard over freedom today, tomorrow, and forever. … There is no sweeter word than freedom. There is no nobler goal than freedom. There is no higher aspiration than freedom…. What is at stake here is freedom.”

In fact the project to disseminate freedom and democracy is what had, ostensibly, propelled America into the defense of Ukraine and, for that matter, NATO’s unbridled expansion that triggered the Ukraine-Russia war. Critics have, however, called that mission an “empire-building” one (journalist Elizabeth Drew was the first used the phrase).

That mission had been conceived in the 1970s by a group of American intellectuals who abhorred traditional American conservatism and also the Vietnam-era pacifism and leftist radicalism. Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Norman Podhoretz, Donald Kagan and others were wedded to different concepts of liberal democracy, and they believed that America should go about promoting freedom and democracy in the world.

A second generation of intellectuals and activists who shared their views also were committed to market capitalism, and they believed, moreover, that it was America’s historic destiny to disseminate this ideology through, if need be, the use of military power. Hence they also espoused U.S. military and economic dominance over the world. The leading lights of these “neoconservatives,” as they came to be known, included Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Robert Kagan (son of Donald), David Wurmser, Frederick Kagan (son of Donald) and Elliott Abrams.

The demise of Soviet communism and the unraveling of Eastern European Communist states convinced the neocons of the veracity of their views and got them excited about their mission, which became a major topic of American intellectual and media discourse in the early 1990s.

In their writings and talk show appearances the neocons argued that a democratized world would be one of peace because democracies, in their view, would never go to war against one another. Democracy, according them, was also an antidote to terrorism because 9/11 and other acts of Muslim terrorism stemmed from “the almost complete absence of democracy in the Middle East.”

The neocons formalized their agenda in a rendezvous in 1996 in which they adopted what was called the Project New American Century (PNAC). Most of them Jewish, the PNAC prepared a report for then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on resolving Israel’s security challenges based on the use of Western ideas and American military force. One of their specific prescriptions was to overthrow the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, then the most vocal Arab leader against the Israeli occupation of Palestine. They tried, unsuccessfully, to get Presidents George HW Bush (Papa Bush) and Bill Clinton to get Saddam knocked off.

Spreading freedom

Wolfowitz became secretary to then U.S. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in the Papa Bush administration and he got Cheney imbued with the idea of empire-building through the neocon mission. Their big moment came when George W. Bush (Baby Bush) – a totally blank slate in foreign affairs – was elected president in 2000. Cheney became the head of the Baby Bush transition team and he and Wolfowitz stuffed the new administration with a host of diehard neoconservatives.

As always, the American foreign policy establishment and news media had little grounding in trans-Mediterranean societies, especially Muslim societies. They were mostly mesmerized by the neoconservative ideas of spreading freedom and democracy in the Arab world. Leading neocons, especially Perle and Wolfowitz, became a feature on American TV talk shows. I was among a minority in the American news media who, while believing in freedom and democracy in general, were skeptical about spreading these ideas through the use of military power. I was also concerned about liberal democracy’s market economic version, which spawned economic injustice and inequality. I believed, too, that in order for political institutions to work they needed to evolve in each society and adapt to its cultural environment.

On the morning of Dec. 10, 2002, an audience at the Center of Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) auditorium in Washington was waiting for Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the leader of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (now president of Turkey), to give a speech. I had been scheduled to interview the Turkish leader after his speech, after which he would go on to meet Baby Bush at the White House. Wolfowitz, then U.S. deputy defense secretary, entered the room, flanked by three or four other people, and nearly half the room burst into applause.

A man in his mid-50s, wearing a blue jacket and a solid red tie, was sitting next to me in the second row. He asked another person who this acclaimed visitor was but didn’t get an answer. When he turned to me and asked the same question, I whispered light-heartedly: “He’s going to start a democratic revolution in the Muslim world. Paul Wolfowitz.”

The man gave me a dirty look. “Do you have a problem with having a democratic revolution in the Muslim world?” he shot back. The neocon mission to spread freedom and democracy in the world had become quite popular in America.

The neocons saw 9/11 as a golden opportunity to launch their project. Saddam was an Arab dictator among a half-dozen others. His harsh rule included the brutal suppression of a secessionist Kurdish uprising in the mid-1970s with the support of then U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. With the help of zealous American media, the Baby Bush administration anointed Saddam an Arab “Hitler” and a stumbling block to the democratization of Iraq. They also accused the Iraqi leader of possessing weapons of mass destruction and having links to Mohammad Ata, one of the 9/11 terrorists. All these charges would eventually prove concocted and blatantly false.

As president-elect, Baby Bush had appointed Cheney the head of his transition team. Cheney and his one-time secretary Wolfowitz crowded the new administration with neocons. The neocons got Baby Bush and his national security adviser (later secretary of state), Condoleezza Rice, excited about democratizing Iraq and through it the Muslim Middle East and eventually much of the rest of the world.

“Iraqi democracy will succeed,” Bush declared in his 2002 State of the Union address, “and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Tehran, that freedom can be the future of every nation.” Not just that, the president added that “the establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.”

In Iraq, Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs and mostly Sunni Kurds were the major contenders for power. The latter two groups collaborated with the American invaders to replace Saddam’s Sunni Arab regime. As Sunni Arabs resisted the U.S. invasion, the Americans got the Iraqi military and bureaucracy cleansed of most Sunni Arab elements, who were also subjected Shiite Arab pogrom in many Shiite-majority areas. A group of youth from among these persecuted Sunni Arabs launched the anti-U.S. terrorist outfit called the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Meanwhile, on Oct. 26, 2003, Wolfowitz paid a visit to Baghdad to see for himself the outcome of his “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” The U.S. deputy defense secretary was greeted by a group of Sunni Arab guerrillas with some 20 rockets fired from a home-made launcher at Al Rasheed Hotel, where he was staying. One 11th-floor room of the hotel was destroyed. Part of the ceiling collapsed. A door was blown off. And smoke engulfed part of the hotel. As hotel staff and American security personnel hurried him out of the hotel, Wolfowitz declared in a shaken voice: “These terrorist attacks will not deter us from completing our mission.”

The mission to transform Iraq into a liberal democracy remains unfulfilled. The invasion and a decade-long American occupation has pretty much unraveled the Iraqi state. The three Kurdish-majority northern provinces have all but seceded from the state, and the rest of the state reels from the belligerency of multiple Iraqi and Iranian guerrilla groups. Nearly 1 million Iraqis and more than 4,000 Americans perished in the Iraq during the war, which has become a Shiite pseudo-theocracy.

In 2003, as America’s war raged in Afghanistan (as also in Iraq), I had a conversation with the neocon Zalmay Khalidzad, an immigrant from Afghanistan whom I had met at the Rand Corporation, a Washington think tank. (Khalidzad would later become the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.) He had been among the signatories to a letter the neocons had written to Clinton calling for the overthrow of Saddam.

I reminded Khalidzad that his native Afghanistan had been an extremely backward county, which had never tried democracy. Could the Afghans work out “liberal democracy” the neocons’ professed mission? I asked.

“It may take some time,” he replied. “But there should be no problem, really. The America will always support them.” The Americans have returned home, being soundly defeated by the Taliban, which they had overthrown, and Afghanistan has revived its old obscurantist Islamic theocracy.

Ukraine imbroglio

Among those who were alarmed by the neocon agenda to democratize the world through the American military might were the Russians, especially Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Soviet leaders joined their European and American counterparts to decide a reunified Germany’s niche in the world. East German Prime Minister Hans Modrow wanted a reunified Germany to be a neutral state unattached to any security bloc. Gorbachev and his Foreign Minister, Eduzard Schevardnaze, were skeptical of the idea. The havoc wreaked by Nazi Germany to Russia during World War II was fresh in their minds. They wanted the new, unified Germany to become part of a multi-state security structure. West Germany had been a NATO member, but when NATO wanted the reunified state to retain the membership of the alliance, they balked. They were concerned that the Western defense alliance might begin to expand eastward to countries that had been in the Russian sphere of influence.

Gorbachev sought an assurance from the Western leaders against NATO’s eastward expansion as a condition for Germany’s inclusion into the alliance. A host of Western statesmen, including Papa Bush and then German Chancellor Helmut Kohl gave him that assurance. “Not one inch eastward,” declared James Baker III, Bush’s secretary of state, on Feb. 9, 1990.

In the ensuing neoconservative hullabaloo about the democratization of the world and expansion of the American hegemony the commitment given to the Russians was forgotten. NATO began to rake in one cluster of Eastern European countries in 1999 and then another in 2004. In April 2008, at its Bucharest summit, the Western military alliance declared that it would next bring in Georgia and Ukraine. Moscow was alarmed. The two countries are at Russia’s doorsteps and the Russians saw the proposal as a Western scheme encircle Russia militarily. Russian President Vladimir Putin denounced the move “a direct threat to Russia.”

As NATO ignored his warning, Putin, in 2014, invaded and annexed the Crimean peninsula and also the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. Both territories are inhabited by a plurality of Russians, who had been agitating for political and cultural autonomy. The current Russian invasion of Ukraine, launched last February, is intended to prevent Ukraine’s accession to NATO.

This past Tuesday, when Biden – a Cold War retiree committed to the neocon mission – vowed to spread freedom and democracy; Putin, in Moscow, reminded the Russians that the war in Ukraine was not about Ukraine, but “about Russia’s national security.” He vowed to continue the war as long as it took. He declared, specifically, that Russia would hold on to the Donbass region and help the Russian-speaking people there to continue “fighting, defending their right to live on their own land, to speak their native language.” I can’t imagine Putin, or any other Russian leader, returning Donbas, let alone Crimea, to Ukraine again.

It’s hard to believe that the war can be sustained very long. Ukraine has lost 100,000 lives in the war. About 16 million Ukrainians have been uprooted from their homes. Up to 18 million Ukrainians, 40 percent of the of the country’s population, will need some sort of humanitarian aid in the coming months.

According to the World Bank, Ukraine’s economy contracted by 35 percent in 2022, and as many as 60 percent of Ukrainians are expected to end up below the poverty line.

The Russian economy is 10 times that of Ukraine. The cost of the war to Russia is minor in comparison. Indeed the Russian government has sought to project a business-as-usual picture of life for the average Russian citizen. The International Monetary Fund has upgraded its estimate of Russia’s economy, and now predicts a fall of GDP this year of only 3.4%, compared with an estimated drop of 8.5% in April this year.

Ukraine is carrying on its war mainly with Western arms and money – worth $40 billion worth so far, $30 billion of which from the United States. Meanwhile, Europe is reaching the limits to its military and financial support Ukraine. The Biden administration is pretty much the main source of support for Ukraine. But the administration is leery about escalating the military support, fearing provoking Russia into using nukes or getting into a direct conflict with the United States.

On top of it all, the Republicans, who control the House of Representatives, are already resisting U.S. aid to Ukraine. And both major Republican presidential candidates, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former President Donald Trump, are vocally opposed to further U.S. commitment to the Ukraine war.

At some point, the parties have to talk seriously about peace. China and India are sending feelers for that. While Ukraine and America have announced that complete withdrawal of all Russian troops for Donbas – and even Crimea – is a precondition for peace negotiations, that would be a non-starter for the Russians.

To end the war, whenever that happens, the Ukrainians will face a choice: To cede the Russians at least part of Donbas and forget about Crimea; or let Russia wreck their country, leaving the rest of it independent, democratic, and maybe part of NATO.

That would, of copurse, be a better outcome for the neocons than that of their 20-year-long war in Afghanistan. They’ve lost all of that country to the Taliban, who have turned it into the world’s most radical theocracy! Jeffrey Sachs (“probably the most important economist in the world,” Time.) has called Ukraine “the latest neocon disaster.”

Mustafa Malik, the host of this blog, is an international affairs commentator.

Ehtiopia’s nationalist journey

Mustafa Malik July 12, 2021

Ethiopia’s liberal Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has been assured a second term in office as his ruling Prosperity Party has won the federal parliamentary election by a landslide, capturing 410 of 436 seats.

Elections to about a fifth of the seats have been delayed because of Covid-19, logistical problems and, in the case of Tigray province, a secessionist movement.

Ethiopia has become a political laboratory in which Abiy is testing a high-stakes hypothesis. It’s that several dozen ethnic communities – a half-dozen of whom deeply estranged from one another – can be molded into a unified democratic nation. The Tigrayans under the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) have posed the most potent of the challenges to his mission.

The TPLF had dominated the federal government for 27 years even though Tigrayans make up only 6 percent of the Ethiopian population. Traditionally militarist, they dominated the Ethiopian federal bureaucracy since an uprising overthrew the Communist Dreg regime in 1991. The TPLF then led the formation of a coalition of ethno-nationalist parties named Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). Through the EPRDF, the Tigrayan party institutionalized its principle of ethnic communities’ rights to self-determination and even secession. The 1994 federal constitution underpinned that centrifugal framework.

But despite Ethiopia’s loosely federal constitutional structure, the TPLF maintained an iron grip on the federal government and unleashed a reign of terror, muzzling and persecuting critical voices. Human Rights Watch termed their wanton persecution as “crimes against humanity on unimaginable scale.” During 2016-2018 the long-festering protests against the TPLF repression under the cover of EPRDF, exacerbated. Led initially by the activists from Omoria, the largest enhno-nationalist region in the coalition, and Amhara, the second-largest, the protests overwhelmed the government. In February 2018 Hailemariam Desalegn, Ethiopia’s beleaguered prime minister, resigned hoping to facilitate an end to the “unrest and political crisis.”

Several parties in the EPRDF coalition – especially the Omoro Democratic Party and Amhara Democratic Party – succeeded in picking the young, visionary Abiy Ahmed from Omoria as Hailemariam’s successor. Once in prime minister’s office, the reformist Abiy released thousands of political prisoners; lifted restrictions on the independent media; scrapped the anti-terrorism law, which was being used as a tool of oppression; ended the state of emergency, under which the TPLF was carrying on the witch-hunt of opposition activists; and invited the country’s once-banned opposition groups back into the country from exile. Among the leading political activists against whom Abiy dropped charges of anti-state activities were Jawar Mohammed, who has since turned into his fierce political rival; and Andargachew Tsege, who had been on the death row 24 hours before the prime minister met him in his office. Abiy stunned his country and the world by ending the decades-long war with Eritrea, which earned him the 2019 Nobel Prize for Peace.

Ethiopia is made up of 10 semi-autonomous federal states, organized along ethnic lines, and ethnic violence has soared in recent years. To pursue his liberal, nationalist agenda, Abiy led the formation of a new party, the Prosperity Party. Four of the EPRDF’s five political parties joined the Prosperity Party. The fifth, the TPLF, grumbling over its loss of three decades of domination of the Ethiopian government and politics, refused to join and began to organize Tigrayan activists into violence and rebellion.

The TPLF insurgency came to a head in November 2020 when armed Tigrayans attacked a federal military base in Tigray. The Abiy government dispatched a federal military force to subdue the rebellion, which was defeated by TPLF rebels. Apart from the Tigrayans, other ethnic groups are also carrying on violence and repression against rival ethnic groups. Amhara authorities annexed a vast part of western Tigray, forcing hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans to seek refuge elsewhere in the country and in nearly Sudan. Clashes between the Afar and Somali ethnic groups have cost many innocent lives. Benishagul-Gumuz is home to a host of ethnic groups including the Gumuz, Berta, Shinasha, Mao, Kimo, and Fadashi. Conflicts among them have caused continual blood-letting. And so on and on.

Ethiopia is one of the world’s oldest nations, replete with a proud history and many cultures. In early youth I was fascinated by the legend of the Ethiopia’s Queen of Sheva. Narrated differently in the Quran and the Old and New Testaments, the saga of the queen is highlighted by her visit to King Solomon in Jerusalem and returning home after conceiving his son. The Ethiopian dynasty of Menilek I, who Ethiopian believe was Solomon’s son by Sheba, lasted until 1974 when the last monarch of the Solomonic dynasty, Emperor Haile Selassie, was overthrown in a pro-Communist military putsch.

Apart from my intellectual interest in Ethiopian affairs, I have been intensely curious about the Nobel-laureate Abiy’s mission to remold the interminably feuding Ethiopian ethnic groups into a unified, democratic nation “where every Ethiopian,” he said, “moves around relaxed, works and prospers.” Abiy’s vision of Ethiopia reminds me of Mahatma Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founding fathers, respectably, of independent India and Pakistan. Oxford-educated barristers. They set up their multi-ethnic, multinational states as Westminster-style liberal democracies. Pakistan fell apart when Bengalee ethno-nationalists seceded from the old Pakistan, complaining of relentless political and economic repression by Punjabi ethnic elites. The rise of Hindu fundamentalism in India has eclipsed Gandhi’s secularist political model. Hindus, however, make up 82 percent of the Indian population, and Hinduization has overlapped ethnic fissiparousness in the Hindu heartland of the Indian plains. Secessionist movements fester in several outlying non-Hindu regions, especially in the Muslim-majority Kashmir.

My question about Ethiopia: Can Abiy really tame Ethnic fissures and recast the country into a nation whose “sovereignty is respected and feared, and whose territorial integrity is preserved,” as he has promised?

I see the idealist Ethiopian prime minister pursuing at best a long-term project. Today’s stable Western democracies such as Britain, the United States, France and Germany evolved through ethnic and religious conflicts and mayhem over centuries. Many post-colonial states were haphazardly created overnight as “nation-states” by cobbling together disparate ethnic and religious communities and are expected to function as unified nations. Examples include Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Democracy and elections often challenge their state structures, instead of integration them.

In 1970 Pakistan gave its feuding ethnic communities their first national elections, which allowed long-estranged ethnic Bengalees in the eastern province the opportunity to vote for secession and create independent Bangladesh. In multi-ethnic Iraq, America’s pie-in-the-sky neoconservatives prescribed elections, hoping to set up a Western-style secular democracy. The Iraqi Kurds used their votes to create all but independent Kurdistan. Shiite and Sunni Arab Iraqis are being governed, under the democratic system, by their religious (Shari’a) laws. In Lebanon, 78 years of democracy and elections have failed to integrate its half-dozen confessional communities into an integrated nation. Abiy thinks his electoral mandate would enable him to remake the multi-ethnic Ethiopian chimera into an integrated, liberal democratic nation.

Abiy’s mission is noble, but I think the best course for him to pursue it would be to open painstaking dialogue and negotiations among Ethiopia’s feuding ethnic groups for a unique brand of nationhood and type of national integration that would best fit the country’s unique communal history and behavior patterns. Today Ethiopia seems unprepared to achieve the national cohesion of contemporary America or Britain. The patriotic and visionary prime minister and Ethiopian political elites should, I think, settle for the level of national integration that is feasible today. And they may, if they want, to work toward ushering in the like of the British or American model in the future, if that is possible, hopefully without civil wars.

Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator, lives in Sylhet, Bangladesh.

Pakistan could be in U.S. doghouse

Mustafa Malik June 27, 2021

PAKISTAN’S REFUSAL TO allow a CIA base in its territory has pissed off the Biden administration. The Americans also resent Pakistan’s close ties to China, their global adversary.

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has said that, given Pakistani Muslims’ bitterness toward the United States, allowing Americans a base for hostile operations in Muslim Afghanistan would be “suicidal” for his administration.

Islamabad fears a downturn in its relations with Washington, which has almost always been the case after Pakistan failed to comply with a U.S. military or security demand. The worst case, some Pakistanis say, occurred when Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaqat Ali Khan, decided to get rid of a U.S. military base in Pakistan to avoid antagonizing what used to be the Soviet Union. These Pakistanis link Liaqat’s decision to his assassination in 1951, referred to in declassified U.S. documents. Others, who included former Pakistani prime minister and my mentor Nurul Amin, accused the United States of orchestrating disruptions of Pakistan’s democratic process through its military and bureaucratic elements.

Amin told me in 1969 that the United States had got Pakistan’s second prime minister, Khwaja Nazimuddin, fired by the bureaucrat-turned Governor-General Ghulam Mohammad. Nazimuddin, Amin’s close friend, had refused to join the U.S.-sponsored Baghdad Pact unless the pact had a clause stipulating that America would defend Pakistan against “external threats” (India). My mentor said Gen. Mohammad Ayub Khan, then commander-in-chief of the Pakistan army, had carried the Pentagon’s instruction to Ghulam Mohammad and was sipping tea in Mohammad’s portico when the governor-general fired the prime minister. The governor-general, a titular head of state, didn’t have the constitutional authority to dismiss the prime minister and would not let Nazimuddin convene the parliament (Constituent Assembly) to demonstrate the support of a parliamentary majority behind him. But Gen. Ayub and the military brass signaled to the deposed prime minister that they supported the governor-general’s action.

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto wrote in her autobiography that the United States was behind the overthrow and execution of her father, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, because Z.A. Bhutto had defied Henry Kissinger’s brutal pressure to abandon Pakistan’s nuclear program.

President Biden’s announcement that all U.S. troops would be pulled out of Afghanistan by Sept. 11 has been followed by a dramatic Taliban offensive against the forces of the Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, an American protégé. The George W. Bush administration had invaded and occupied Afghanistan 20 years ago in response to Al Qaeda’s attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, which the United States had dislodged from power in Iraq and Syria, have also increased their activities in in Afghanistan. Intelligence officials have told Biden that even though the United States and its allies have “diminished” the militant forces in Afghanistan, they could threaten the U.S. homeland again in about two years. The Biden administration is looking desperately for CIA bases to keep them in check.

Pakistan’s rejection of the CIA base proposal follows a long and devastating “war on terror” in that country, sponsored by Washington. Mostly Muslim Pakistanis have always opposed their country being dragged into a U.S. war against Muslim forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Still, Pakistan had to agree to participate in that war after Richard Armitage, then U.S. deputy secretary of state, threatened the head of Pakistan’s intelligence services that America would “bomb [Pakistan] back to the Stone Age” if it did not join the U.S. fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. More than 70,000 Pakistanis perished in that war, which was ratcheted up by President Barack Obama (after he had won the Nobel Peace Prize!), infuriating further Pakistanis of all political stripes.

Most Pakistanis, too, feel bitter about U.S. support for each of their four military dictators and America’s hostility to the democratic governments who failed to fulfill U.S. demands. Liaqat Ali Khan, the first Pakistani prime minister, had angered the Harry Truman administration, not only by asking America to pull out its base outside the Pakistani city of Peshawar. Liaqat was friends with then Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and had turned down an American plea to pressure Mosaddeq to drop his plans to nationalize the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (predecessor of the BP). In 1953, four months after the Pakistani Prime Minister Nazimuddin had been overthrown, the CIA station chief in Tehran, Kermit Roosevelt, and the U.S. ambassador there, Loy Henderson, openly incited and bribed Iranian army officers and bureaucrats into staging a military coup against the democratically elected Iranian prime minister, whom the Eisenhower administration replaced with the tyrannical dictator Mohammad Riza Pahlavi.

The United States has often had direct links to Pakistani army generals independently of the country’s civilian authorities, but Imran Khan doesn’t seem to be in the danger of being overthrown by a U.S.-sponsored military coup. Khan has been coopted by the Pakistani army generals and is running the country, especially its foreign relations, at the generals’ behest. The Pakistani decision not to have a CIA base was basically made by those generals, who know that a U.S. base could trigger civil unrest in the country.

The Pakistani economy is in shambles, and Islamabad fears that the Americans could deny it the needed economic support and punish it diplomatically and otherwise for rejecting their base request and also for maintaining Pakistan’s historically close relations with China. The Biden administration apparently believes that having had Pakistan’s giant neighbor, India, in its corner in an anti-Chinese alliance (Japan and Australia being the other partners), it can afford to sideline Pakistan. Washington seems indifferent to the possibility of Pakistan joining a growing number of unfriendly Asian countries including China, Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia.

~ Mustafa Malik worked as press secretary and speechwriter for the late Nurul Amin, Pakistani prime minister and vice president.

Mustafa Malik worked as press secretary and speechwriter for Nurul Amin, a former Pakistani prime minister and vice president. He hosts the blog ‘Muslims and Liberals.’

Liberal democracy derails

Mustafa Malik June 24, 2021

LIBERAL DEMOCRACY ISN’T serving Americans very well, not, at any rate, in their well-being. Nicholas Kristoff is making the point poignantly. America’s “greatest threat,” writes the Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist, isn’t Communist China or authoritarian Russia “but our underperformance at home.”

Kristoff cites data from several surveys to support his argument. Fifteen-year-old American kids can’t do as well in math as do their peers in many in less developed countries such as Latvia, Poland and Russia. One in five of these children can’t read as well as 10-year-olds do in many other countries. Even more depressing, America is “one of only three countries, out of 163, that went backward in well-being over the last decade.”

Many Americans would, of course, still argue that they are blessed with “the world’s greatest democracy,” which is “a beckon of freedom” for the rest of the world. I travel a lot and one of my favorite haunts is Kolkata (Calcutta), India, the hub of my native Bengali culture. Two years ago, my friend Susnata Sen, who teaches history at Rabindra Bharati University in Kolkata, asked me, in jest, if Trump had “lost his way to a lunatic asylum” and ended up at the White House! In 2008, in Doha, Qatar, a stringer for the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun inquired of me “how in the world did you succeed in getting W” as our president?

I told them both that democracy is “a gift of the Enlightenment,” which had derailed through the “corruption of another gift of the Enlightenment,” liberalism.

Liberalism was originally conceived as the ideology of freedom of the individual from the tyranny of monarchy and religious bigotry and prejudices. The idea was that the human mind, disabused of these strictures and prejudices, would be free to inquire rationally about the world around it, develop the sciences and technology and pursue pleasure and happiness. It sounded as a momentous idea – the greatest message to mankind since Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and Muhammad’s Farewell Sermon (in which the Islamic prophet abolished blood revenge, forbade usury, reminded men of their rights and responsibilities toward women and women’s rights over them, warned men against evil conduct, and so forth).

The one thing that was missing in the Enlightenment missive was, however, moral duty. John Locke, Voltaire or John Stuart Mill didn’t talk about men’s and women’s responsibilities to their kin and community. And that is reflected in the ideology of capitalism and free enterprise, whose corruption has been all but completed by neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, the latest twist to capitalism, calls for the elimination of price controls, deregulation of capital markets, lowering of trade barriers, etc., unleashing the forces of wanton plunder and pillage on society, regardless of the poverty, privation and hardships they visit upon the masses. It’s all about making money and pursuing individual pleasure, caring little about kin, community, humanity or its fulfillment.

In 1991 I was researching U.S. foreign policy options in Arab societies with a fellowship from the University of Chicago Middle East Center and hired a research assistant from Washington suburbs. Abdul Matin (not his real name) was a hardworking immigrant from my native India. He took a second job and got his wife to work for another family to make ends meet. They had three children, born in India and Kuwait. One of them was a toddler, and the two others helped their parents around the house besides toiling over their hard schoolwork.

At my Washington office, an American friend used to drop by for coffee and chitchat and sometimes complained about his son not doing well in school because of an under-funded school with inadequately qualified teachers in a rather depressed area in the nation’s capital.

One morning Matin showed up for work with a smile stretching from one ear to the other. He showed me his young son’s school grade released the previous day. The boy got all A’s and just one B.

I congratulated Matin. “You have a brilliant boy!” I said.

“Well,” he replied, “most of the credit goes to my daughter,” he said. Matin had told the children that education was “the most important thing” for them to do in life. Every day his daughter made sure her younger brother did his homework diligently and checked out each of his report cards. Matin’s wife wasn’t educated enough to check up on the boy’s progress in school. And the girl “reports any problem” the boy had to the parents, Natin said.

I saved a copy of the boy’s grade report and showed it to my American friend on his next visit. I told him how the family helped the Hindi-speaking boy do so well in an English-medium school.

“I just have to get serious about my kid’s school work,” he said, pensively. “He has to cut back on his Nintendo games.”

Mustafa Malik worked three decades as a journalist for American newspapers and researcher of U.S. think tanks. He now lives in Bangladesh.

Mustafa Malik, the host and editor of the blog ‘After the Clash,’ worked for more than three decades as a reporter, editor and columnist for American, British and Pakistani newspapers and as a researcher for two American think tanks. He also conducted fieldwork in Western Europe, the Middle East and South Asia on U.S. foreign policy options, the “crisis of liberalism” and Islamic movements. He wrote continually for major U.S. and overseas newspapers and journals.