Revolution in the Middle East

“Stop the Machine! Create a New World!” and “Human Needs, Not Corporate Greed!” are the rallying cries of a movement, October2011.org, that launched on June 6 this year, calling for the occupation, on October 6 (yesterday), of Freedom Plaza in Washington D.C. on an open-ended basis. The movement is calling for nothing less than the [...]

This week, the BBC broadcast a compelling “Panorama” programme about Syria (available below via YouTube, but also available here via iPlayer), in which reporter Jane Corbin, tracing the roots of the people’s uprising against the dictatorship of President Bashar al-Assad, focused on Deraa, the town of 80,000 inhabitants in the south of Syria where, after [...]

Where have I been for the last 12 days? Obviously, an ocean away from Wall Street, or I would have been there with the protestors of “Occupy Wall Street,” who have taken anti-capitalist protest to the heart of the beast — Wall Street, where the financial crisis caused by the unfettered greed of an unregulated [...]

On Wednesday, in Tunis, Reprieve, the legal action charity whose lawyers represent prisoners in Guantánamo, held a conference to bring together “key policymakers and members of civil society to discuss Tunisia’s role in bringing about the release of its citizens from Guantánamo Bay.” Speakers included representatives of Tunisia’s major political parties, former Guantánamo prisoners, lawyers [...]

With Libya’s former dictator Muammar Gaddafi in hiding, the uprising against his 42-year rule that began on February 15, and that, almost since it began, has been contentiously supported by NATO, has finally succeeded in providing a shadowy glimpse of a new life for the Libyan people. Huge difficulties lie ahead — preventing recriminatory horrors [...]

Photos of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s 83-year old former dictator, lying on a gurney in a prison cage as his trial began in Cairo today, may well be amongst the defining images of the year, along with the giant circle of protestors in Tahrir Square, which dominated broadcasts in February this year, and led to Mubarak’s [...]

Back in June, I reported the story of Adel Al-Gazzar (aka Adel El-Gazzar), an Egyptian and a former Guantánamo prisoner, who had been imprisoned on his return to Egypt after a decade away from home. Al-Gazzar had been seized in late 2001 in Pakistan, where he had been working as a volunteer with the Saudi [...]

The revolutionary movement that began in Tunisia at the end of last year has now sparked mass movements in Europe; principally, to date, in Greece and Spain. On the surface, these movements have little in common. In Tunisia and Egypt, the people came out in vast numbers to overthrow the hated dictators who, for decades, [...]

Yesterday, former Guantánamo prisoner Adel al-Gazzar (aka Adel El-Gazzar), who had been living in Slovakia since being freed last January from America’s notorious prison on Cuban soil, returned, for the first time in ten years, to his home county, Egypt, where he was promptly arrested. This was not because of anything he had done, but [...]

When the revolutionary impulses sweeping the Middle East first manifested themselves in Syria in March, no one foresaw how the movement would grow — or how violently it would be suppressed, although that was always a distinct possibility, given the manner in which the Ba’athist regime has maintained power in Syria for the last 41 [...]