NAWAL EL SAADAWI feminista, psiquiatra, escritora y activista egipcia

Sus críticas acerbas a las leyes y a la interpretación del islam que institucionalizaban el patriarcado represivo que impedía crecer a las mujeres la llevaron a perder todos sus puestos en la sanidad pública de su país, a la cárcel y posteriormente al exilio.

"Deberían de haber incluido mujeres en el comité para la reforma de la Constitución. Nombraron a ocho hombres y a ninguna mujer, por ello estamos organizando una marcha de un millón de mujeres en El Cairo.

Todos los comités e instituciones del nuevo Egipto deben de contar con mujeres. Se ha acabado eso de que solo sean hombres los que deciden.

El problema de las mujeres es crónico y está enraizado en el patriarcado y la religión. Por eso pedimos una Constitución secular, un código familiar secular y un Estado secular separado de la religión. Las mujeres han muerto en Tahrir igual que los hombres y tienen que tenernos en cuenta.

Hay mucha discriminación. Todavía tenemos poligamia y queremos abolirla, además el hombre puede divorciarse sin que se tenga en cuenta para nada a la esposa.

¿La Constitución respalda la poligamia?

Sí, porque dice que el Código Familiar no puede contradecir la sharia (ley islámica) y la sharia permite la poligamia. Egipto tiene uno de los códigos familiares más atrasados del mundo árabe.

El secularismo es fundamental para la democracia. En los cambios realizados estos días han seguido manteniendo el Artículo 2 que dice que el islam es la religión de Egipto y eso debe de desaparecer.

¿Teme que el nuevo Egipto pueda quedar bajo el control de los Hermanos Musulmanes?

No. Tengo miedo de Estados Unidos e Israel porque ellos serán los que traigan a los Hermanos Musulmanes. Estuve en Irán al principio de la revolución de 1979. La revolución iraní al principio fue secular y socialista pero EEUU se sintió amenazado por una revolución socialista e impulsó su aborto. Jomeini llegó a Irán de la mano de Francia, Reino Unido y Estados Unidos. Ellos prefirieron una revolución religiosa a una socialista.

Dis(re)membering af-\pä-ki-ˈstän\

Kiren Aziz Chaudhry, Professor of Political Science
University of California, Berkeley

Neo-liberal reforms in Pakistan have meant the whole-sale privatization of land, water, minerals and energy. Each of the four provinces in Pakistan are endowed with unique resources that create very different economic incentive structures as they integrate into international markets and each has a distinctive linguistic and cultural history that provides the terrain for historically “verifiable” claims for secession. All four provinces have dominant political parties that are at odds with each other. If international integration built on these legacies, the Af-Pak war has pushed them to the brink.

The basic infrastructural and labor requirements that are wired into the different economies created through international investment has broadened regional fissures in the most basic way possible. The privatization of land and water in the Punjab and Sindh, leasing of mineral and gas rich regions in Balochistan and the consolidation of poppy growing regions in NWFP and Afghanistan, is creating ties with international corporate counter-parts that are world players locked into cut-throat competition. The advent of new internationalized property regimes has meant that mineral rich Balochistan, land and water rich Punjab (and to some extent Sindh) are integrating into international markets in very different ways.

To be sure, these property regimes put local farmers at risk, (thereby creating new waves of urban migration), deplete aquifers with ultra-modern drilling techniques, (thereby contributing to an already alarming water shortage), use capital intensive agricultural machinery (thereby creating unemployment), but importantly, they also stir up centrifugal political forces in the provinces. Particularly in the megalopolis of Karachi, the financial and industrial center of Pakistan, muhajirs (migrants to Pakistan at partition in 1947) and their powerful political party, the Muhajir Qaumi Mahaz (MQM) has deployed a robust imagined history of being “separate” from Pakistan. They possesses the resources and the human capital to conceive of an independent future. This imagined future involves the pursuit of the “city-state” strategy of international integration. The unreasonable but vibrant dream here is to compete with the likes of Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai. The MQM has taken a particularly hard line against allowing refugees into Karachi, followed by Sindh and Balochistan. Much of the recent violence in Karachi is related to a massive influx of refugees from the war zone.

The Iranian Revolution marked the onset of violent sectarian politics in which Iran and Saudi Arabia pitted Shia against Suni and turned sectarian killing into a divinely sanctioned mission. Starting with the eight year Iran-Iraq war, on to Lebanon, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan and now Yemen, there is a way to read the whole post-1979 history of the Middle East and South Asia as a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Pushing religion center-stage was an explicit US policy, born of the fantasy that Islam would defeat Socialism. The Mujahedeen were injected with a particularly virulent virus of divine inspiration in madrasas funded by the US and staffed by Saudi Arabia, first to create the subject-soldier who would fight to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan and then to pit the (Shia) Northern Alliance against the (Suni) Pashtun. Having infused the “freedom fighters” with a frenzied desire for Wahabbi-style martyrdom through madrasas, the virus was exported to Pakistan and beyond.

The rest is history. If two hundred years of British colonialism left its indelible footprint on the civil administration, the political geography and the class structure of Af-Pak, the end-game of the Cold War in Afghanistan thrust Pakistan directly into the military ambit of the US-Soviet military engagement starting in 1979 when the Islamic Revolution in Iran ratcheted up American interest in a compliant Pakistan. But earlier still, when Khalk and Parcham, the two Marxist parties that overthrew the monarchy in Afghanistan, fell into feuding and the Soviet involvement in Afghan politics went from meddling to invasion, the CIA arranged for the removal of leftist (and wildly popular) Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1977 in a bloodless coup. His replacement, General Zia ul Haq, obliged the United States by putting Bhutto to death by hanging in the middle of the night. In 1979.

The depth of the training and arms the Mujahedeen received in US military camps in America was comprehensive. It was there that the secrets of turning (NH2)2CO, (a common fertilizer) into bombs were revealed. True to form, the US left Af-Pak even before the retreat of the defeated Soviet army, as the Mujahedeen slowly morphed into the Taliban. The Pakistan government and military continued their support of the Taliban as the latter fought their way from Kandahar to Kabul, with the support of all but a handful of westernized Afghans. And, conveniently forgotten as the rain-fed mushrooms quietly covered the ground, so did the United States.

As late as 1997, when the nature of the Taliban’s policy towards female education and women’s rights, not to mention their criminal justice “system” had already become a known fact, the US State Department twice entertained a delegation of Taliban to help UNOCAL nudge out their sometime partner in a sometime pipeline, the Argentinean oil firm Bridas. The UNOCAL-Taliban deal failed. Black and blue were no longer welcome at the White House. Afghanistan became a rogue state, the erstwhile “Freedom Fighters” became “terrorists” and then 911 delivered the carte blanche for the invasion of Afghanistan even though the perpetrators of the attack were mostly from the friendly country of Saudi Arabia.

So, what does even a small snapshot of a multi-dimensional proxy war look like? The algebra is bewildering: The US funds the Pakistan army to eliminate the Taliban that they themselves created a little more than a decade ago; the same weapons are used against Baloch nationalists; the US also supplies weapons to the Baloch nationalists to kill the same Punjabi soldiers that are trying to annihilate the Taliban; the Baloch are funded by India against Iran; the US supplies Iranian Baloch with money and weapons to destabilize Tehran; the US humiliates the Pakistani Army and drives a rift between the military and the citizens; the Chinese and the Russians supply the Af-Pak Taliban against the US; Saudi Arabia funds the (Sunni) Af-Pak Taliban and the Baloch nationalists to weaken Shi’i Iran. Much to the chagrin of the Pakistani public and the Pakistani army, the United States’ security interests result in a deal whereby it gains control over Pakistan air bases at Pasni, Panjgur, and Dalbadin. The bases sit on a straight line from Gwadar going north into other US controlled bases in Afghanistan—it’s another straight line to Turkmenistan. The railway links proposed in the Gwadar Port Authority’s master-plan go through all three bases, right up to Helmand Province, where an additional 30,000 U.S soldiers will soon land to perform what one New York Times journalist called the “hammer and anvil” operation to exterminate the border-crossing tribesmen. [Scott Shane, “The War in Pashtunistan,” NYT, December 6, 2009.] Much like the Algerian civil war of the 1990s, no one really knows who is responsible for the urban “terrorist” attacks. Meanwhile, the Chinese quietly continue to fund and build their mega infrastructural projects in the north, mine copper in Afghanistan and extract minerals in Balochistan.

Noam Chomsky on Obama’s Foreign Policy

“You just can’t become involved part-time in these things,” Chomsky says. “It’s either serious and you’re seriously involved, or you go to a demonstration and go home and forget about it and go back to work, and nothing happens. Things only happen by really dedicated, diligent work.”

Persepolis

La novela gráfica de Marjani Satrapi, es un relato autobiográfico de esa sorprendente y dolorosa experiencia de una sociedad que fue obligada a caminar como cangrejo, hacia atrás. La obra de Satrapi recoge las penas que causa la intolerancia, la enajenación de muchos de la vida social, y el empobrecimiento que acarrea el pensamiento único y la moral única que dictan autoridades político-religiosas, ciegas y sordas a las demandas de una sociedad que se le escapa sin remedio.