Region

By Qassim Khidir
Agence France-Presse

ERBIL, Iraq — Rewaz Faiq is just one of two women serving as parliament speaker in the Middle East, where politics is a man’s world, but the Iraqi Kurdish mother of two is unfazed.

Known for her straight talk, Faiq knew she would face challenges when she was elected in 2019 to the post in the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq.

“In Kurdistan, entering politics is not easy for women,” Faiq, 43, told AFP, citing “male domination, discrimination and sexual abuse” as the main hurdles.

“If a woman is not strong and does not shield herself, she will be entrapped by the personal and political gains of male politicians,” she said.

Men backed by powerful tribes play an influential role both in public and private life in the region, where more than eight out of 10 women are housewives.

Male politicians are seen as more influential than women in Kurdish society because they have armed bodyguards, plenty of money and the support of the media, said Faiq.

And they are in the public eye, unlike women who are banned from taking part in tribal councils where key decisions affecting the Muslim-majority, conservative society are taken.

Avan Jaff, a women’s rights activist, said Faiq reminds her of Pakistan’s late Benazir Bhutto, the first woman to head a government in a Muslim-majority country.

Faiq “has self-confidence, charisma and is a true leader. She has changed the perception of politics in Kurdistan and is giving hope to all women”, said Jaff.

And she is “strong”.

When a legislator threw a shoe at Faiq during a parliamentary session broadcast live on television in March, the speaker “did not get upset or lose control even for a second”, said Jaff.

Instead Faiq shot back telling the MP: “If you were throwing this shoe at me, I forgive you but if you were throwing it at parliament, I will not forgive you.”

Faiq, wears the veil and colourful flowing Kurdish dresses, holds a masters degree in international law and a doctorate in civil law.

She entered politics at the age of 15, joining the communist party after her village was destroyed by the regime of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

A year later, she switched her allegiance and joined the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), and was first elected to parliament in 2013.

Today there is just one other woman parliament speaker in the Middle East — Fawzia Zainal who was elected head of Bahrain’s national assembly in 2018.

Late Iraqi president Jalal Talabani, founder of the PUK in which his wife Hero has long played a key role, “truly believed in women and their abilities” in politics, Faiq said.

“Unfortunately, there are fewer female politicians now in the PUK than under Talabani, although today’s society is more open and tolerant towards the participation of women in politics.”

She admitted her non-conformist views have contributed to her isolation within her own party.

“I have felt alone over the past year-and-a-half,” said Faiq, adding that she has been lambasted on social media by PUK figures.

“At first this scared me and it was difficult. But now it has made he stronger,” she said.

During her term, parliament has passed several laws including ones against oil and drug smuggling — two of the main scourges facing Kurdistan.

But nurse Murad Abdullah said parliament is not doing enough to improve living conditions in Kurdistan, which is frequently rocked by protests against cost of living rises and corruption.

“Every month the government cuts the salaries of employees and so far we have not seen the speaker or parliament question these measures,” he said.

TEHRAN — Promising greater openness at home and outreach abroad when he was elected in 2013, Iran’s outgoing moderate President Hassan Rouhani comfortably won a second term but leaves office as a deeply unpopular figure.

Ultraconservative Ebrahim Raisi is widely expected to win the presidency on record-low turnout this coming Friday — an outcome that would set in stone the disappointment of the Rouhani years, marked by crushing economic woes.

Rouhani “wanted above all to liberalise the Iranian economy and develop the private sector’s role... by attracting foreign investment”, said Thierry Coville, a researcher at the Institute for International and Strategic Relations (IRIS) in Paris.

But that strategy was “totally trampled” by former US president Donald Trump.

Three years ago, Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from a landmark 2015 nuclear accord agreed between Iran and world powers, a deal that had promised sanctions relief in exchange for limits on Tehran’s nuclear programme and a promise never to acquire the bomb.

Trump then slapped sanctions on Iran that choked the economy to an unprecedented degree, including by seeking to stop all the country’s oil exports.

Iran’s economy contracted by more than 6 per cent in both 2018 and 2019, according to the IMF, leaving a bitter taste for the crowds who had swelled into the streets in jubilation when the nuclear accord was first agreed.

The economic malaise has since been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, leaving many Iranians struggling to get by.

Limited powers 

Targeted incessantly by criticism from ultraconservatives, who accuse the government of “ineffectiveness”, particularly over its handling of the pandemic, Rouhani was left very much on the back foot.

He has sought to defend his policies, attributing failures to Trump’s “economic war” against Iran.

Meanwhile, reformists in his coalition criticised him for abandoning many of his election pledges, particularly in the realm of civic and personal freedoms.

Rouhani has also been criticised for his failure to obtain the release from house arrest of Mir Hossein Moussavi and Mehdi Karoubi, leaders of a protest movement against the reelection of populist president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009.

Some see such criticisms as unfair.

Rouhani’s record “must be judged against the... powers” available to the president, noted journalist Ahmad Zeidabadi.

Supreme leader Ali Khamenei is the most powerful figure in Iran, and the influence of the president is strongly limited by institutions including the Revolutionary Guard and the Judicial Authority.

‘Weakening of middle class’ 

One success Rouhani’s government can point to is an improvement in reach and quality of Internet services in the country.

But he was unable to win an end to a ban on Twitter and Facebook, despite his promise to do so, and most of the web remains accessible in Iran only via VPN.

And while the moral police are nowadays less visible on the streets, a movement opposed to obliging women to wear a veil in public spaces was rapidly crushed in 2018.

And two waves of protests were quashed in bloody fashion during Rouhani’s second term — the first in the winter of 2017-18 and the second in November 2019.

Several human rights activists, and defenders of women’s rights in particular, remain behind bars, and some have even seen their sentences increased.

“The educated middle class of the big cities is overall very disappointed in Rouhani,” Coville told AFP.

“People understand what has happened but they would have expected that he would put up more resistance against the advance of the radicals,” Coville added, referring to the ultraconservative camp.

Conservative Iranian analyst Hossein Kanani Moqadam told AFP that Rouhani had himself contributed to his marginalisation.

The president created something of a vacuum by relying on a very small circle of loyalists, cornering the “government into a political impasse”.

For Clement Therme, an associate at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, the outgoing president’s “biggest success” was to negotiate “a diplomatic compromise with Washington without crossing the regime’s red lines.

His “biggest failure remains the weakening of the middle class” and the working class “revolts” that marked his second term, Therme said.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israeli forces blocked roads in Jerusalem on Tuesday as Jewish ultranationalists prepared to march through the city's occupied east, inflaming tensions amid a fragile Gaza ceasefire and just two days after a new Israeli government took office.

Rallies by far-right Jewish groups in Arab neighbourhoods have raised tensions in recent months, prompting a police intervention in  Al Aqsa Mosque Compound last month that triggered the deadliest flare-up of Israeli-Palestinian violence since 2014.

The so-called March of the Flags celebrates the anniversary of the so-called Jerusalem's "re-unification" after Israel occupied the city in the June War of 1967.

The demonstration was originally scheduled for early May, but organisers cancelled it after police redirected the route to avoid Damascus Gate, a key entrance for Arab residents of East Jerusalem.

A new march was set for last Thursday but was delayed due to Israeli forces opposition to the route and warnings from Gaza's Islamist rulers Hamas.

The government of outgoing premier Benjamin Netanyahu last week delayed the march until Tuesday, a time confirmed late Monday by the incoming government of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.

The government said organisers had consulted police on the best route for the march, scheduled to begin at 1430 GMT.

It was planned to halt at Damascus Gate but not enter the Old City there, taking another route that avoids the Muslim Quarter before arriving at the Wailing Wall, a holy site for Jews.

"The right to demonstrate is a right in all democracies," said the newly sworn-in Internal Security Minister Omer Bar-Lev.

"The police is ready and we will do everything in our power to preserve the delicate thread of coexistence."

Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh condemned it as a provocation, while an alliance of Palestinian armed groups including Hamas called for a “day of rage” to defend Jerusalem.

“We warn of the dangerous repercussions that may result from the occupying power’s intention to allow extremist Israeli settlers to carry out the Flag March in occupied Jerusalem tomorrow,” Shtayyeh tweeted in English on Monday.

He said it was “a provocation and aggression against our people, Jerusalem and its sanctities that must end”.

By Tuesday afternoon, militants in Gaza had sent incendiary balloons over the border, with Israeli public radio reporting 15 fires in the Negev desert as a result.

Islamic Jihad activist Abu Hudhayfa said the balloons were aimed “to warn the occupation against harming the Al Aqsa Mosque or launching its march towards Al Aqsa Mosque.”

The new Israeli premier is himself a Jewish nationalist but the coalition he leads also includes centrist and left-wing parties and, for the first time in the country’s history, an Arab party.

The support of the four lawmakers of the Islamic conservative Raam Party was vital to the wafer-thin majority that the government won in a historic confidence vote that unseated Netanyahu on Sunday.

‘Very fragile’ 

UN Middle East peace envoy Tor Wennesland urged all sides to behave responsibly to avoid damage to a hard-won May 21 ceasefire that ended 11 days of heavy fighting in and around Gaza.

“Tensions are rising again in Jerusalem at a very fragile & sensitive security & political time, when UN & Egypt are actively engaged in solidifying the ceasefire,” Wennesland said, urging all parties “to act responsibly and avoid any provocations”.

The US embassy told its staff to avoid entering the walled Old City in the heart of occupied East Jerusalem because of the march and “possible counterdemonstrations”.

Israel’s annexation of east Jerusalem since the Six-Day War of 1967 is not recognised by most of the international community which says the city’s final status should be a matter of negotiation between the two sides.

The Palestinians claim the city’s east as the capital of their future state.

The iconic Al Aqsa Mosque Compound in the heart of the Old City is Islam’s third holiest site and a national symbol for all Palestinians regardless of religion.

It is also Judaism’s holiest site, although by longstanding convention Jews are not allowed to pray inside the compound. Visits by Israeli Jewish politicians often trigger violence.

Hamas warning 

When the march was originally announced for last week, senior Hamas official Khalil Hayya warned it could spark a return to violence like that of May 10-21.

Hamas spokesman Mohammed Hamadeh said Tuesday that mediators had been in contact with Palestinian armed groups in recent days to appeal to them “not to engage in a military escalation on the basis of the march.”

“All options remain on the table, however,” the spokesman added.

Last month’s conflict started after Hamas issued a deadline for Israel to remove its security forces from flashpoint areas of occupied East Jerusalem, and then fired a salvo of rockets at Israel when the ultimatum went unheeded.

Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip between May 10 and 21 killed 260 Palestinians including some fighters, the Gaza authorities said.

HODEIDAH, Yemen — The bodies of 25 migrants were recovered off Yemen on Monday after the boat that was carrying them capsized with up to 200 people on board, a provincial official told AFP.

Fishermen who found the bodies told AFP that they were floating in the waters of Ras A Ara in the southern province of Lahij, an area so rife with human trafficking that local people call it the "Gate of Hell".

"The boat overturned two days ago and was carrying between 160 and 200 people," said Jalil Ahmed Ali from the Lahij provincial authority, citing information given by Yemeni smugglers. The fate of the other people on board was unclear.

The UN's International Organization for Migration confirmed to AFP that a boat sank in the area but said it was still trying to establish the details of the incident.

Despite the grinding war in impoverished Yemen, migrants continue to travel there in the hopes of finding work in Saudi Arabia and other neighbouring oil-rich states whose economies depend on millions of foreign labourers.

The fishermen said the victims, found in the Bab Al Mandab Strait that separates Djibouti from Yemen, appeared to be of African origin.

"We found 25 bodies of Africans who drowned when a boat carrying dozens of them sank off the Yemeni shores," said one of the fishermen.

"We saw the bodies floating in the water 16km from the shores of Ras Al Ara," added another.

Migrants often find themselves stranded in Yemen, which is mired in the world's worst humanitarian crisis after six years of conflict.

The beaches of Ras Al Ara are among the areas most targeted by smugglers.

Earlier this month, local people appealed to Yemen’s internationally recognised government to intervene, saying the area had become a free-for-all for human traffickers without any action from the authorities.

In recent months, dozens of migrants have died in the Bab Al  Mandab strait, a major route for international trade but also for human trafficking.

In April, at least 42 migrants died off Djibouti after the capsize of their boat which had left from Yemen, according to an IOM report. They were likely among those who try to return home after finding themselves stranded or detained.

The IOM reported this month that 5,100 immigrants arrived in Yemen so far this year, while 35,000 travelled in 2020 and 127,000 in 2019 before the outbreak of the coronavirus which suppressed demand for labour in the Gulf states.

The UN agency often sends migrants back to their home countries from Yemen. But it said in April that more than 32,000 migrants, mostly from Ethiopia, were still stranded in the Arabian Peninsula’s poorest country.

ALGIERS — Algeria was early Monday still waiting for the results of a parliamentary election boycotted by the long-running Hirak protest movement and marked by widespread abstention.

Ahead of the official results, an Islamist party seen as moderate, the Movement of Society for Peace (MSP), said its candidates were in the lead in most regions.

It warned against “numerous efforts to alter the results”.

With the widespread abstentions, established parties linked to the regime — the National Liberation Front (FLN) and the Democratic National Rally (RND) — had been seen as likely to lose seats.

A statement by the National Independent Elections Authority (ANIE) cited by several news outlets late Sunday refuted “unfounded” claims regarding the election, without naming the MSP.

After Saturday’s vote, electoral commission chief Mohamed Chorfi said that turnout had been just 30.2 per cent — the lowest in a legislative poll at least 20 years.

He said it would be 96 hours before official results are announced.

Fewer than one percent of registered voters cast their ballots in Kabylie, a mainly Berber region east of Algiers, and the cities of Bejaia and Tizi Ouzou.

“As expected, the majority of Algerians snubbed the ballot boxes. The low turnout confirms the strong trend towards rejecting the vote,” read the front page of French-language daily Liberte.

President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, himself elected on an official turnout of less than 40 per cent in late 2019, put a brave face on the figures.

“For me, the turnout isn’t important. What’s important is whether the lawmakers that the people elect have enough legitimacy,” the president said.

Journalists arrested 

The Hirak protest movement, which apart from a hiatus due to the coronavirus pandemic had held twice-weekly demonstrations for reform until they were effectively banned last month, rejected the polls as a “sham”.

The movement has urged boycotts of all national polls since it mobilised hundreds of thousands of people in early 2019 to force longtime president Abdelaziz Bouteflika and his cronies from power.

But voting day was mainly calm, except in Kabylie, where ballot boxes were ransacked and security forces detained dozens of people, rights groups said.

Two prominent journalists detained on the eve of the election and released Saturday, Khaled Drareni and Ihsane El Kadi, condemned their “arbitrary” arrests.

“I believe you have the right to know that two journalists... were subjected to arbitrary arrest and detention for no apparent reason,” Drareni wrote on his Facebook page.

On Sunday, authorities cancelled France 24’s right to operate in the country, over its “clear and repeated hostility towards our country and its institutions”, the communications ministry and government spokesman Ammar Belhimer said in quotes carried by the APS news agency.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ranked Algeria 146 out of 180 countries and territories in its 2020 World Press Freedom Index, a 27-place drop from 2015.

TEHRAN — Dressed in a black turban and long religious coat, Ebrahim Raisi casts himself as an austere figure and an anti-corruption champion of the poor ahead of Iran’s presidential election.

The 60-year-old ultraconservative, widely seen as the favourite to win the June 18 poll, heads the judiciary and is a “hodjatoleslam”, one rank below that of ayatollah in the Shiite clerical hierarchy.

His campaign centres on a promise to “battle unrelentingly against poverty and corruption”.

He operated on a similar platform for the 2017 election, when he won 38 per cent of the vote, well short of the margin needed to prevent moderate President Hassan Rouhani securing a second consecutive term.

Born in November 1960 in the holy city of Mashhad in northeastern Iran, the republic’s second biggest urban centre, he rose to high office as a young man.

Aged just 20, Raisi was named prosecutor-general of Karaj, which neighbours Tehran, in the wake of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

For the exiled opposition, his name is indelibly associated with the mass executions of Marxists and other leftists in 1988, when he was deputy prosecutor of the Revolutionary Court in Tehran, although he has denied any involvement.

Raisi has decades of judicial experience, serving as prosecutor-general of Tehran from 1989 to 1994, deputy chief of the Judicial Authority for a decade from 2004, and then national prosecutor-general in 2014.

Student of the guide 

In 2016, supreme leader Ali Khamenei put Raisi in charge of the powerful Astan Qods Razavi charitable foundation, which manages the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad and controls a colossal industrial and property asset portfolio.

Three years later, Khamenei appointed him head of the Judicial Authority.

Raisi is not renowned for any great charisma.

He studied theology and Islamic jurisprudence under Khamenei and, according to his official biography, he has been teaching at a Shiite seminary in Mashhad since 2018.

Many Iranian media outlets see him as a possible successor to Khamenei, who will turn 82 in July.

Raisi is also a member of the assembly of experts who select the supreme leader.

Married to Jamileh Alamolhoda, an educational sciences lecturer at Tehran’s Shahid-Beheshti University, Raisi is the son-in-law of Ahmad Alamolhoda, the Friday prayer imam and supreme leader’s representative for Mashhad.

He and his wife have two daughters, both of whom hold advanced degrees.

He is one of five ultra-conservative candidates approved to run for the presidential poll.

But he has received strong backing from the two main coalitions of conservative and ultra-conservative parties, and is the only runner able to count on broad support across what is a very diverse and even fragmented conservative scene.

He has also sought to extend a hand beyond his traditional support base, in a nation that is deeply torn over personal freedoms.

Raisi has pledged to defend “freedom of expression”, the “fundamental rights of all Iranian citizens” and “transparency”.

‘Uproot sedition’ 

But such promises ring hollow for reformists and even moderate conservatives, who view Raisi as a bogeyman ill-equipped to govern.

He says he wants to assemble a “government of the people for a powerful Iran” and to eradicate “corruption hotbeds” — a theme he’s already pursued in his latest judicial role, through a spate of highly publicised corruption trials against senior state officials.

Even judges have not been spared by his much trumpeted anti-corruption drive; several have been sentenced over the past year.

Asked in 2018 and last year about the 1988 purge, Raisi denied playing the slightest role, even as he lauded an order he said was handed down by the Islamic republic’s founder Ayatollah Khomenei to proceed with the purge.

And when the Green Movement in 2009 protested against populist president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad winning a disputed second term, he was uncompromising.

“To those who speak of ‘Islamic compassion and forgiveness’, we respond: we will continue to confront the rioters until the end and we will uproot this sedition,” he said.

KHARTOUM  — Sudan will only be willing to strike an interim deal with Ethiopia over its controversial Nile dam on conditions including an assurance of further talks, the water minister said on Monday.

Downstream Egypt and Sudan have been pushing upstream Ethiopia to ink a binding deal over the filling and operation of its massive dam on the Blue Nile that broke ground in 2011.

“Given the time constraints, Sudan will accept an interim agreement based on certain conditions which include signing on all the terms that have been already agreed,” Water Minister Yasser Abbas told reporters in Khartoum.

“There should also be guarantees that negotiations will continue ... and that those talks will be held within a defined timeframe.”

The minister said the three countries had already “reached consensus” over most technical matters but failed to reach a binding deal.

There had been “no development” in talks since African Union (AU) sponsored negotiations in Kinshasa in April.

Addis Ababa, which said it reached its first target of filling the dam last year, has announced it will proceed in July with or without a deal.

Egypt, which depends on the Nile for about 97 per cent of its irrigation and drinking water, sees the dam as an existential threat.

Sudan hopes the project will regulate annual flooding, but fears its own dams would be harmed without agreement on its operation.

Dozens of Sudanese protesters gathered outside the Italian embassy in Khartoum on Monday to protest the role of Italian contracting giant Salini Impregilo in the dam’s construction.

“We want to voice our rejection of the company’s role especially as there are not enough studies on the structure’s safety,” protester Walid Ali told AFP.

“If Ethiopia goes ahead with the second stage of filling, it will be catastrophic,” Ali said.

Last week, foreign and water ministers from Egypt and Sudan agreed at a meeting in Khartoum to “coordinate efforts... to push Ethiopia to seriously negotiate a deal”.

Last month, AU Chairman Felix Tshisekedi and the US envoy for the Horn of Africa, Jeffery Feltman, held talks with officials from Egypt and Sudan on the long-running dispute.

Sudan’s relations with Ethiopia have been also been hit by a dispute over the use of the Fashaga farmland near their common border.

BAGHDAD — Iraqi authorities said on Sunday the remains of 123 people killed by the Daesh terror group extremists had been removed from a mass grave in a bid to identify them.

The Badush prison massacre was one of the worst crimes Daesh carried out after it seized control of a third of Iraq in a lightning offensive in 2014.

In June that year, Daesh fighters attacked the north-western prison, freeing Sunni Muslims inmates and forcing 583 mainly Shiite prisoners into truck, before driving them to a ravine and shooting them.

In recent weeks, dozens of family members of the victims have given blood samples, which will be compared to the DNA of the remains, which were found in the mass graves in 2017.

“Thousands of families are waiting to know what happened to their relatives,” Najm Al Jubburi, governor of the Nineveh province where the prison is located, told AFP.

The mass grave, discovered after Iraqi forces took control of the area in March 2017, is one of more than 200 the extremist group left behind in its rampage of brutality, according to the United Nations.

The remains of up to 12,000 people are believed to be buried in these graves, the UN says, which has accused Daesh of having committed genocide in Iraq.

One of those waiting for closure in Iraq is Abbas Mohammed, whose son was jailed at Badush following his arrest by US forces in 2005.

“After 17 years of not knowing whether my son is alive or dead, I need an answer,” he told AFP.

Iraq has been struggling to identify remains of people from several violent episodes in its recent history, and is still discovering mass graves from the regime of executed dictator Saddam Hussein.

The task has been challenging, as remains have often been burned or exposed to the elements over the years.

“Work conditions are difficult,” Saleh Ahmed, a member of government commission tasked with identifying the “martyrs”, said at the site of the Badush mass grave.

“The heat is overwhelming. Some remains are entangled, and there are snakes and scorpions everywhere,” he said, as 30 workers carried out the grim task of removing bodies from the grave.