Bouteflika, Bashir... will other strongmen fall?

Yahoo – AFP, Stuart WILLIAMS, April 11, 2019

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a former army general, came to power
after the ousting of Islamist Mohamed Morsi, who himself was elected after the
uprising that felled longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak (AFP Photo/ISSOUF SANOGO)

Paris (AFP) - Strongmen in the Middle East and North Africa will be eyeing warily popular protests, fed by frustration with living standards and an elite perceived as corrupt, that helped push veteran Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika and now Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir from power.

While recent events in Algeria and Sudan have been unique to those countries, analysts say the rapid downfall Bouteflika and Bashir are a warning to authoritarian leaders in the region that they will ignore popular anger, especially over economic grievances, at their peril.

The Sudanese army said Thursday that Bashir had been removed from power and detained after 30 years in power following four months of protests. Last week, mass protests led Algeria's ailing Bouteflika to step down last week after 20 years.

In both situations, longtime rulers were pushed aside by existing security structures on the back of mass protests, in a sign for authoritarian leaders that an army can be a foe as well as a friend.

But this also dashed popular hopes for a true revolution, leaving a potential for further instability.

And as populations surge in the region, with the demographic switching towards a younger, more digitally savvy generation, discontent may deepen further.

Protests persisted in Algeria after lawmakers appointed a regime stalwart as the 

country's first new president in two decades (AFP Photo/RYAD KRAMDI)

'Lesson for autocrats'

"The Algerian and Sudanese contexts are very different indeed. But at the same time, there is a lesson here for autocrats and dictators, that the craving for justice, democracy, and equal opportunities is universal," said Marc Pierini, visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe.

"In both countries, people are fed up by seeing the people sitting in power, calling all the shots, and pocketing the money," said Pierini, a former EU ambassador to Tunisia and Libya, Syria, Morocco and Turkey.

"It is also interesting that armed forces are not necessarily solidly behind these autocrats anymore and perhaps have a longer view," he told AFP.

Algeria's neighbour Morocco is run by a monarchy while heavyweight Egypt is headed by strongman President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a former army general.

He came to power after the ousting of Islamist Mohamed Morsi who himself was elected into power after the uprising that felled longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose ruling party lost control of Turkey's 

two biggest cities in March polls, will be watching events in Sudan particularly closely 

after hosting Bashir on multiple occasions despite an ICC arrest warrant (AFP 

Photo/Alexander NEMENOV)

'Looking on with worry'

Sharan Grewal, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, said it was difficult to predict whether the latest convulsions would trigger a repeat of the 2010-11 Arab Spring protests that ousted regimes in Egypt and Tunisia and led to war in Syria and Yemen.

"That said, revolutions do tend to occur in waves," he said, citing the Arab Spring and the so-called colour revolutions in post-Soviet states like Ukraine and Georgia in the previous decade as well as the fall of Communism in eastern Europe in 1989.

Noting that the demands of the protesters to beat corruption and improve living standards resonate beyond Sudan and Algeria, he added: "You can be sure that dictators across the region are looking at these uprisings with worry."

Haim Malka, senior fellow and deputy director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), said regimes have been "slow to grasp and adjust to a combination of demographic, technological and economic shifts".

"The region will face more turbulence as citizens and regimes attempt to renegotiate the contours of the social contract," he told AFP, adding: "It will take years" for a new equilibrium to emerge.

Organisers of protests for the ouster of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir rejected 

his toppling by the army Thursday as a "coup conducted by the regime" and vowed 

to keep up their campaign (AFP Photo/AHMED MUSTAFA)

'Between a rock and a hard place'

The tremors in Algiers and Khartoum will reverberate well beyond the Middle East.

Another strongman to leave the stage this spring was Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev, who stepped down in what analysts saw as a bid to ensure a controlled power transition at a time of increased economic uncertainty.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose ruling party lost control of Turkey's two biggest cities in March polls and is now contesting the results in Istanbul, will be watching events in Sudan particularly closely after hosting Bashir on multiple occasions in defiance of an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant.

And even when a leader is removed from power it's far from the end of the story.

Anthony Skinner, director at Verisk Maplecroft risk assessment firm, said Bouteflika’s interim successor Abdelkader Bensalah was "between a rock and a hard place" as he sought to cater to the demands of protestors while ensuring stability.

"I expect protestors to sustain pressure on the political elite," he said, even as police resort more to water cannon, tear gas and truncheons.

"The administration wants to stick to the current roadmap without having to make further concessions," he said.

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"The Great Escape" - Mar 11, 2017 (Kryon Channelling by Lee Carroll)

“… The Fall of Many - Seen It Yet?

You are going to see more and more personal secrets being revealed about persons in high places of popularity or government. It will seem like an epidemic of non-integrity! But what is happening is exactly what we have been teaching. The new energy has light that will expose the darkness of things that are not commensurate with integrity. They have always been there, and they were kept from being seen by many who keep secrets in the dark. Seen the change yet?

In order to get to a more stable future, you will have to go through gyrations of dark and light. What this means is that the dark is going to be revealed and push back at you. It will eventually lose. We told you this. That's what you're here for is to help those around you who don't see an escape from the past. They didn't get their nuclear war, but everything else is going into the dumper anyway. … “

"The Recalibration of Awareness – Apr 20/21, 2012 (Kryon channeled by Lee Carroll) (Subjects: Old Energy, Recalibration Lectures, God / Creator, Religions/Spiritual systems (Catholic Church, Priests/Nun’s, Worship, John Paul Pope, Women in the Church otherwise church will go, Current Pope won’t do it), Middle East, Jews, Governments will change (Internet, Media, Democracies, Dictators, North Korea, Nations voted at once),Integrity (Businesses, Tobacco Companies, Bankers/ Financial Institutes, Pharmaceutical company to collapse), Illuminati (Started in Greece, with Shipping, Financial markets, Stock markets, Pharmaceutical money (fund to build Africa, to develop)), Shift of Human Consciousness, (Old) Souls, Women, Masters to/already come back, Global Unity.... etc.) - (Text version)

“… The Shift in Human Nature

You're starting to see integrity change. Awareness recalibrates integrity, and the Human Being who would sit there and take advantage of another Human Being in an old energy would never do it in a new energy. The reason? It will become intuitive, so this is a shift in Human Nature as well, for in the past you have assumed that people take advantage of people first and integrity comes later. That's just ordinary Human nature.

In the past, Human nature expressed within governments worked like this: If you were stronger than the other one, you simply conquered them. If you were strong, it was an invitation to conquer. If you were weak, it was an invitation to be conquered. No one even thought about it. It was the way of things. The bigger you could have your armies, the better they would do when you sent them out to conquer. That's not how you think today. Did you notice?

Any country that thinks this way today will not survive, for humanity has discovered that the world goes far better by putting things together instead of tearing them apart. The new energy puts the weak and strong together in ways that make sense and that have integrity. Take a look at what happened to some of the businesses in this great land (USA). Up to 30 years ago, when you started realizing some of them didn't have integrity, you eliminated them. What happened to the tobacco companies when you realized they were knowingly addicting your children? Today, they still sell their products to less-aware countries, but that will also change.

What did you do a few years ago when you realized that your bankers were actually selling you homes that they knew you couldn't pay for later? They were walking away, smiling greedily, not thinking about the heartbreak that was to follow when a life's dream would be lost. Dear American, you are in a recession. However, this is like when you prune a tree and cut back the branches. When the tree grows back, you've got control and the branches will grow bigger and stronger than they were before, without the greed factor. Then, if you don't like the way it grows back, you'll prune it again! I tell you this because awareness is now in control of big money. It's right before your eyes, what you're doing. But fear often rules. …”

The dangerous reality of corruption in the arms sector

In a new report, anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International, revealed that two-thirds of international defense companies are not doing enough to counteract 

under-the-table arms deals.

Deutsche Welle, 27 April 2015

Saudi Arabian tanks (Photo: /AFP/Getty Images)

Corruption, by definition, implies risk, but in the context of the arms sector, it has a particularly dangerous undertone. Not only does it waste public funds and threaten the reputation and financial wellbeing of individual companies, but it can also harm, and indeed claim lives.

That, however, does not prevent it from happening on a magnificent scale. According to a new Transparency International (TI) report on the quality of corporate anti-corruption programs, two-thirds of defense companies fell far short of the mark.

Of the 163 arms manufacturers in 47 countries to volunteer information for the , 107 demonstrated little evidence of schemes designed to ensure good business practice, and a further 37 failed to provide any at all.

Far from being restricted to any particular region, these companies are based all over the world, from France to Russia, Japan to Finland, Romania to Singapore, with some countries represented at both ends of the index's six-band scale. The US, by way of example, is a mixed picture.

"All four companies in the top band are American," TI researcher Leah Wawro said in reference to Bechtel, Fluor, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. "But there are also seven US companies in the lowest band," she told DW.

On the upside

Many others US arms manufacturers feature throughout the index, painting a somewhat dubious picture of overall national business practices in the sector.

Corruption pushes up the price of global
 military spending and often hits the
taxpayer

"The lack of transparency among some big US companies," Wawro said "is concerning."

But shady arms deals are by no means confined to the far side of the Atlantic. Several European companies, including four German ones - Diehl, Rheinmetall, MTU Aero Engines, Krauss-Maffei Wegmann - performed poorly. A fifth, ThyssenKrupp, has made improvements since the first such index was published in 2012, and now ranks in the top end of the table.

It is one of 33 percent of companies to have make strides in the right direction, which Wawro says "shows that transparency in this sector is possible."

And that transparency is crucial, because corruption in the defense sector can itself prove to be a lethal weapon. An underhand procurement contract, for example, can leave soldiers in the field without the equipment they need to defend themselves and their country, and that in turn can compromise national security.

Acutely susceptible to corruption

That might read like an incentive for manufacturers to ensure good practice, but as Michael Littlewood, chief executive and co-founder of , which measures corporate responsibility and business ethics, explained, the very nature of the arms industry makes it vulnerable to corrupt players within it.

He cites the use of sales agents as one of the biggest problems on the road to transparency.

Several factors make the arms industry vulnerable

"If a company is selling all over the world but doesn't have offices in every country, they have representatives who know the market and the customer," Littlewood said. "That makes them reliant on the ethics of the agent, who might do a corrupt deal without the defense company knowing about it."

He says it is up to manufacturers to make sure they are using decent representatives, and that legislation such as the UK's 2011 Bribery Act is a useful tool in forcing companies take responsibilities for their own choices and decisions.

The murky waters of offsets

Unlike previous TI surveys looking at anti-corruption programs in the arms sector, this one asked companies to provide information on offsets, which Littlewood describes as a "peculiarity of the defense industry."

The practice - which requires companies bidding for national arms contracts to agree to invest in other areas of the importing country's economy - lends itself to below-board dealings.

"Their bids are measured by what companies propose," the business ethics expert said. As such, a contract might be awarded on the basis of a weapons manufacturer agreeing to plough money into an unrelated sector in which the buyer, however, has a vested interest. It is very difficult to track exactly what money goes where and how aboveboard that is.

Getting clean

Besides the obvious responsibility that individual companies are expected to assume for their arms deals, TI says national governments have a vital role to play in ensuring defense becomes a corruption-free industry.

Corruption in the arms industry
also puts soldiers' lives at risk

"Purchasing governments should require, in policy if possible, all defense companies to have an ethics and anti-corruption program in place," Wawro said, adding that the same should apply in reverse, and that exporting governments should expect their national defense companies to operate on an ethical basis. They should hide nothing they don't have to.

"There tend to be high levels of secrecy in the defense sector," Wawro said. "Sometimes there are genuine national security concerns that require secrecy, but too often 'national security' can be a veil for corrupt activities."

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Pakistan prepares for Saudi royal to hunt 'protected' birds

Yahoo – AFP, 2 Feb 2015

A falcon (R) tries to catch a Houbara bustard during a falconry competition,

 part of the 2014 International Festival of Falconry, in Hameem, 150km west of

 Abu Dhabi, on December 9, 2014 (AFP Photo/Karim Sahib)

Quetta (Pakistan) (AFP) - Pakistani authorities are finalising arrangements for a Saudi prince to visit its southwestern desert region to hunt the Houbara bustard, a bird supposedly protected by law, officials said Monday.

An advance party has already been reached the Yak Much desert in the province of Baluchistan along with falcons which will be used to catch the bustard, officials said.

Saudi Prince Fahd bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz is expected to join the group in coming days. He led a hunting party to Baluchistan last year that officials said killed more than 2,000 bustards.

The birds are listed as "vulnerable" and declining in numbers by the International Union for Conservation of Nature's "Red List" of threatened species. Hunting them is banned in Pakistan.

But authorities issue special permits to wealthy visitors from Arab countries. Permit holders are in theory restricted to hunting a maximum of 100 of the protected birds over 10 days, but only in certain areas.

A Houbara bustard flies during a falconry competition -- part of the 2014

 International Festival of Falconry -- in Hameem, 150km west of Abu Dhabi,

on December 9, 2014 (AFP Photo/Karim Sahib)

Saifullah Zehri, district forest officer for wildlife in Chagai district of which Yak Much is a part, told AFP the advance party arrived on Sunday in a C-130 transport plane.

"They were fully equipped and had all the material which is required for bird hunting," Zehri said.

Arab sheikhs are known as enthusiastic hunters, travelling to Pakistan each year to hunt the bird using the traditional Arabian method. They arrive by private jets from the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

According to conservative estimates, between 500,000 and a million birds of all species migrate through Pakistan each year -- flying south from Siberia to pass the winter in Central and South Asia.

Hunt: Fahd bin Sultan is said to have killed

1,977 houbara bustards in just 21 days while

on holiday

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Spain's King Juan Carlos poses in front of a dead elephant

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Romney's Bungled Critique of a Failed Mideast Strategy

Bloomberg Businessweek, Romesh Ratnesar, September 13, 2012 

A man waves his rifle as buildings and cars are engulfed in flames after
being set on fire inside the U.S. consulate compound in Benghazi late
 on September 11, 2012.

Mitt Romney’s response to the assaults on U.S. embassies in the Middle East was willfully misleading (accusing the Obama administration of issuing a statement sympathizing “with those who waged the attacks,” indisputably ill-timed (trying to score political points off a national tragedy) and quite possibly fatal to his chances of becoming president. If Romney hoped to draw a foreign-policy contrast with Obama, he blew the opportunity.

In many ways, that’s unfortunate. The eruption of anti-American violence in Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere has exposed flaws in America’s strategy in the Middle East and in particular the decade-long goal of implanting democracy in the Arab world—an idea that became known during the Bush administration as the Freedom Agenda. The trouble for Romney is that his closest advisers don’t want to distance themselves from that agenda; if anything, they’re prepared to double down on it. And that goes a long way toward explaining why Romney has yet to prove he’s up to the job of commander-in-chief.

In the aftermath of 9/11, a consensus took hold in America’s foreign-policy establishment. Victory in the war on terrorism required not just the liquidation of al-Qaeda but wholesale reform of Islamic societies. Radicalism was merely a symptom of repression. The overriding strategy that guided U.S. policy for half a century—preserving stability and the balance of power in the region—was tossed aside. If the region’s autocratic regimes failed to set their people free, the U.S. wouldn’t hesitate to do it for them.

This thinking led in part to the invasion of Iraq, a war opposed by liberal Democrats like Barack Obama. Yet as president, Obama has bought into the Freedom Agenda as well. With the emergence of the Arab Spring in 2011, Obama shed his realist instincts and embraced the project of democratizing the Middle East. The administration backed the ouster of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, and Yemen’s Ibrahim Saleh and offered covert support to rebels battling Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. The idea that the U.S. is better off with democratically elected governments in power than with autocratic ones has become a bipartisan article of faith.

The rage on display on the streets of Cairo and Benghazi and Sana’a, however, tells a different story. There’s simply no evidence that the introduction of democracy will make the Middle East any more stable any time soon. Supporting the aspirations of the Arab people to choose their own leaders is undoubtedly worthy, in and of itself. But it’s folly to believe that doing so will extinguish radicalism or make extremists in the region hate America and its allies any less. Undertaking costly military interventions to depose tyrannical regimes may be morally justified, but they haven’t made America any safer or empowered moderate, pro-Western forces in the region. And as experience has taught us in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya, the chaos that regime change unleashes is often beyond our capacity to control.

A Republican candidate advised by wise men such as Brent Scowcroft or Henry Kissinger might have spelled out a soberer, more realistic approach than the one pursued by the last two administrations—one that deemphasized democratization and accepted the limits of the U.S.’s ability to remake the region in its image. It would acknowledge that the Freedom Agenda hasn’t worked—or at least, not nearly as well as we might have hoped.

But Romney’s foreign-policy views have been shaped entirely by the same cohort of neoconservatives who came up with the idea of the Freedom Agenda in the first place. So rather than present a coherent, responsible critique of the administration’s foreign policy, Romney blusters about attacking Iran and intervening in Syria’s civil war, while repeating the transparently bogus charge that Obama is “apologizing” for America and offering sympathy to the enemy.

Such posturing probably plays well on Fox News. But it instills little confidence that Romney has any clue about what the U.S. should do in the Middle East.

Ratnesar is deputy editor of Bloomberg Businessweek.

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"Healing the Military Energies in our family Tree" – Jun 13, 2011 (Kryon channelled by David Brown)

“ … There’s much violence and anger throughout the world; when we look at the Middle East, we can see that changes are coming there. The West has a lot of power over the Middle East, but that power will begin to dissolve. The Muslim people of this world will begin to have their own power, and their own prosperity, and they will begin to disconnect from the Western World. This disconnection doesn’t have to be violent as violence only happens when somebody hangs onto what doesn’t belong to them....

... What Military Energy means if we use an analogy: it would be like putting grinding paste into the oil of your motor car. Once you release these energies you will begin to feel lighter as you disconnect from this reality, and, you will find it easier and easier to release any other negative emotions. Military Energies are the core of all your problems...."

(Religions – Zionism - March 1, 2012 - Matthew Channelled by Suzanne Ward)

9. It can be no other way—simply, this is the physics that governs life in this universe. As Earth continues apace into successively higher planes, nothing with low vibrations in any form—physical bodies, subversive plans, theft, dishonesty, unjust laws and imprisonment, bigotry, cruel customs and deeds—can survive.

10. Moving on, no, it will not be quite like religions being “totally discarded and replaced by universal laws in the Golden Age.” When the truths come forth that science and spirit are one and the same and that religious dogmas were originated by early leaders of church and state to control the masses, people whose consciousness has risen beyond the constraints of third density will adhere to the spiritual aspects of their respective religions and the devised, controlling aspects will fall by the wayside.

11. One of the truths to come forth is that Zionism, which by dark intent has been made synonymous with Judaism, actually is a bellicose political movement within the Illuminati, and its aim for more than six decades has been to create conflict and instability in the entire Middle East. Zionists, who have wielded powerful influence within and behind major governments and their military forces, do NOT represent the Jewish peoples in Israel or anywhere else. And, like all other Illuminati factions, they have been committed to that cabal’s goal of global domination.

12. Although Semites are of diverse national origins and religions, the Zionists have been successful in convincing many that “anti-Semitic” is exclusively prejudice against the Jewish peoples and opposition to Israel’s right to defend itself from its “enemies.” By means of that blatant distortion, they obtained not only world sympathy, but also massive defense funding from Israel’s allies, most especially the United States, all of which served to increase the Illuminati’s vast profits from their industrial-military machine.

13. In addition to controlling the masses through dogmatic teachings, religions have served the dark purpose of divisiveness to such an extent that it resulted in centuries of trauma and bloodshed. Witness the Crusades, wars between Catholics and Protestants, pogroms against Jews, executions of “blasphemous” individuals who refused to “recant.”  (Read More …)

US general booted for Afghan remarks

'They don't understand the sacrifices that America is making,' he said of Afghan leaders 

MSNBC, NBC, Nov, 4, 2011

Maj. Gen. Peter Fuller  /  U.S. Army

WASHINGTON — A top U.S. general in Afghanistan was relieved of duty Friday for "inappropriate public comments" after calling the Afghan government "isolated from reality" and President Hamid Karzai "erratic."

Maj. Gen. Peter Fuller, deputy commander for training Afghan security forces, blasted the Afghan government, military and Karzai in an interview with POLITICO published on Thursday.

He called Karzai "erratic" for recently saying Afghanistan would side with Pakistan if the latter declared war on the U.S.

"Why don’t you just poke me in the eye with a needle!," Fuller was quoted as saying. "You’ve got to be kidding me … I’m sorry, we just gave you $11.6 billion and now you’re telling me, 'I don’t really care'?"

Fuller also said he had trouble explaining to Afghan officials that Western funds were limited. 

"You guys are isolated from reality" he said he told Afghan generals. "If you're in a very poor country like Afghanistan, you think that America has roads paved in gold, everybody lives in Hollywood."

"I actually had someone senior tell me, 'All I want to do is put them [tanks] on a flat bed and drive them around in a parade'," he added.

Fuller said Afghan leaders "don't understand the sacrifices that America is making to provide for their security. And I think that's part of my job to educate 'em."

Fuller was relieved of duty by the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen.

"The Afghan people are an honorable people, and comments such as these will not keep us from accomplishing our most critical and shared mission: bringing about a stable, peaceful and prosperous Afghanistan," Allen said in a statement.

Story: Cash flows, but can Afghan training legacy last?

It was not clear what Fuller would do next, but such disciplinary action usually ends military careers.

In June 2010, Gen. Stanley McChrystal resigned as the top U.S. officer in Afghanistan after disparaging remarks about civilian bosses in a Rolling Stone magazine article. He retired from the Army a month later and went on to teach at Yale University.

NBC's Jim Miklaszewski and Courtney Kube, as well as The Associated Press, contributed to this report.

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"Healing the Military Energies in our family Tree" – Jun 13, 2011 (Kryon channelled by David Brown)

“ … There’s much violence and anger throughout the world; when we look at the Middle East, we can see that changes are coming there. The West has a lot of power over the Middle East, but that power will begin to dissolve. The Muslim people of this world will begin to have their own power, and their own prosperity, and they will begin to disconnect from the Western World. This disconnection doesn’t have to be violent as violence only happens when somebody hangs onto what doesn’t belong to them....

... What Military Energy means if we use an analogy: it would be like putting grinding paste into the oil of your motor car. Once you release these energies you will begin to feel lighter as you disconnect from this reality, and, you will find it easier and easier to release any other negative emotions. Military Energies are the core of all your problems...."