During a very fast one-day visit to Washington, D.C. on Monday this week, I participated in a day of lectures and panel discussions organized by a private company on some of the world’s most challenging political and economic issues, including the “Arab youth” panel I joined. On that same day, four striking developments in four different Arab countries reminded us why young Arabs are so worried and in some instances turn to extreme measures, like illegal or legal emigration, joining militant movements, turning to corrupt practices for their survival, or engaging in sectarian civil wars.

Four developments on the same day clarified the price we pay now for many decades of mismanagement by our public authorities and massive foreign support of our decaying order.

They were:

1) Fifteen Tunisian young men tried to commit mass suicide in front of the local municipality building in the southern town of Sened, because of their despair over finding work and also because local officials had refused to meet with them;

2) President Barack Obama agreed to send another 250 American troops to 
Syria to join the 50 already there who are fighting against the “Islamic State” (ISIS);

3) Saudi Arabian Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman unveiled an ambitious long-term plan to radically restructure the Saudi economy and public-private sector responsibilities; and,

4) President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi of Egypt sent thousands of security officers into the streets of Cairo and other cities and arrested several hundred people in a frantic attempt to pre-empt expected demonstrations against the recent decision to cede two small islands in the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia.

These four very different events all confirm once again the hard consequences of the unsustainable policies that all Arab governments, without exception, pursued since the 1970s. These included, most importantly, profligate state spending without requiring citizens to share the burdens of development; the state’s control of what citizens could read, say, hear, watch, or debate in the public sphere; and, neglecting to establish any credible mechanisms of participation or accountability by citizens. These legacies denied the contemporary Arab state the single most important factor it requires for genuine national development: educated, engaged, dynamic, motivated, and productive citizens. The Arab model of half-development built many fine roads and buildings, but did not develop the potential of the human mind, or generate meaningful income from sources other than natural resources and foreign aid. Consequently, the four developments Monday point out the enormous tasks of reform and genuine progress that the Arab states must embark on. Those four developments in a single day are a red light that alerts us to the need to move decisively, rationally, and steadily towards that elusive goal of equitable, productive, balanced, and sustainable citizen-based national development that has eluded the Arab states to date.

The mass suicide attempt by young Tunisians is without doubt the most dramatic of the developments Monday. It captures symbolically the persistence, spread, virulence, and exacerbation of the grievances and despair that caused Mohammad Bouazizi to set himself on fire in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid in December 2010, to spark the Arab uprisings. More than five years later today, we see small numbers of young Arabs embrace death by self-immolation, drowning in the Mediterranean while seeking a new life, or killing themselves and others in suicide attacks against Arab and foreign targets.

The severe and swift reforms to be launched in Saudi Arabia would seem to aim to prevent citizens there from sharing the despair that has driven Tunisians to such extremes. We have to wish the Saudis well and hope that they succeed in redirecting their national development policies to a more sustainable path, which could trigger similar needed changes in other Arab states. We will only know in a few years if the Saudi plan will succeed. The key, as everywhere else in the world, will be the extent to which ordinary Saudis roll up their sleeves, use their minds energetically, and get to work with the government in generating wealth from their human ingenuity and passions, to complement what serendipity and geology put under their topsoil.

The Egyptian and American-Syrian developments are two things at once. They are a major reason why Arab development has remained stunted, and they are also a consequence of that tragic cycle that necessitates military action on a regular basis, while we know better than ever that warfare and domestic autocracy do not bring calm, but rather they aggravate national well-being if they persist as long-term strategies.

This Monday in Egypt, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, and the United States and Syria could well be used as a benchmark by future generations who will look back one day and wonder what it was in late April 2016 that finally sparked either the Arab world’s dramatic move towards sustainable, productive growth and national development, or its self-induced ultimate slide into incoherence and catastrophic implosion.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. On Twitter: @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2016 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

The various wars and ideological contestations taking place simultaneously in Syria have entered their sixth year, with no sign of how they might end and Syria’s political future unfurl. The scale, intensity, and persistence of the last five years of nonstop and often barbaric violence reflect the fact that Syria today, as in the past four millennia at least, continues to be a central pivot in the geopolitics of the Middle East and its neighboring civilizations.

Here are my ten observations on what I see as the most important or intriguing aspects of the wars in Syria.

1. The large number of political and military actors in Syria is stunning, with several dozen major actors that impact nationally, and over a thousand that engage with others at the local and provincial levels.

2. The political and military actors in Syria represent five distinct levels of identity and interests: local, province- or governorate-level, national, regional across the Middle East, and global. The disparate interests and ever-changing alliances among them are kaleidoscopic in their variety and constant change.

3. The nature of the many actors crosses every conceivable category we know of, including state, religion, tribe and clan, ideology, ethnicity, nationality, and sect, along with ancillary sub-categories like businesspeople and others.

4. The very rapid militarization of the conflicts in Syria simultaneously reflected the direct or indirect military action of Syrians, transnational non-Syrian Islamists, regional powers (Arab, Iranian, Turkish, and occasionally Israeli), and global powers. Most of these parties actively engage in direct warfare in different parts of the country.

5. The ups and downs of various parties and their need to avoid losing means that the physical borders and political alliances among many of the fighting forces are constantly shifting and changing, with key parties often simultaneously losing ground in one area while gaining it in another. This indicates that no single party can definitively win outright today and control all Syria, though it also suggests that we cannot rule out this possibility in the future, if some key actors become exhausted, bankrupt, or lose their critical external support.

6. All the political trends and military behavior in the country since March 2011 offer nothing genuinely new in the land. They reflect existing legacies of power and identity that we have experienced in the modern Arab world since the 1920s, albeit sometimes in more extreme forms—notably state authoritarianism and brutality against one’s own people, politicized and militarized religion and ethnicity, a tendency to state fragmentation, Islamist and secular-nationalist citizen rebellions, activist for democracy and human rights, rapid environmental deterioration, socio-economic disparity, urban collapse, refugee flows, and regional and foreign military intervention.

7. The possible consideration of creating ethnically pure statelets for Alawites, Druze, Kurds, Sunnis, and others—following the trailblazing path of Israel’s self-perception as a Jewish state and the rickety “Islamic State” (ISIS) that Daesh has established in parts of Syria and Iraq—reveals the fragile and conditional nature of statehood and sovereignty in Syria today (and parts of other Arab countries). The massive destruction and pain that Syria and its people have suffered shows that indigenous and foreign powers would happily control a landscape that has been devastated and denuded of people, towns, and economic infrastructure, for they seem to care little for citizen rights or wellbeing, but seek only incumbency for themselves and their allies.

8. We witness the important paradox of, on the one hand, the strength, capacity to act, and frequent local anchorage in society of Islamist militant rebel groups like ISIS (Daesh), Jabhat Al-Nusra, Ahrar Al-Sham, and dozens of others like them in many ways; and, on the other hand, our total ignorance of whether these groups would have the management capacity and political legitimacy to actually rule all or parts of Syria if they prevailed in the long run. The proven military strength and organizational capabilities of militant Islamists in Syria reflect their power and credibility as opposition forces, but there is no indication of whether they would succeed as incumbents. Most other incumbent Islamists in the Arab world in recent decades have been total failures and managerial amateurs, and were ousted from office.

9. Regional and global powers like Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United States and Russia, support much of the fighting and political jockeying for power and position in Syria; yet, most of their long-term goals, like their short-term actions, have been mostly erratic and/or unclear. The Syrian wars are a dynamic without a clear destination.

10. Syria today reminds us of Syria a century ago, when local, regional, and foreign powers in 1915-1925 fought for control of the land and its destiny. Syria also reminds us that the great missing element in the modern Arab world remains today, as it has been for a century, the self-determination of citizenries.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. On Twitter: @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2016 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global


Talk of relative calm, even the potential for peace in Syria, is in the air, despite continuing battles in Aleppo, airstrikes, and other clashes. Joint collaboration between the United States and Russia against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and possibly a proposed joint draft of a new Syrian constitution, in addition to Russia’s withdrawal of some forces, token though that may be, are signs that the stage is being set for a serious attempt at closing down the war in Syria and preparing for political transition. Much will depend on whether or not the parties to the conflict, and in particular the President Bashar Al-Assad regime, try to push their advantage on the ground. Russia, which has played a major role in resetting the balance in the Al-Assad regime’s favor, must suspend their assistance completely to convince their ally to come to the negotiating table in good faith.

The generally accepted equation in war is that a stable balance of forces leading to a stalemate on the ground presents a good opportunity to sue for peace. The alternative is to wait until one side achieves total victory, a prospect which doesn’t seem possible in Syria anytime soon. The main combatants in Syria have all made gains and suffered losses on the ground. The regime has fended off attacks against Latakia and the Alawite mountains and seems relatively secure behind a line that stretches from near the Turkish border in the north to the Jordanian border in the south. Meanwhile, the Free Syria Army (FSA) and allied opposition forces are playing cat and mouse with ISIS north of Aleppo, but have made enough gains in that region to seriously challenge ISIS and block Kurdish forces from completing a sweep of the northern border region with Turkey. Syrian Kurds have, since the liberation of Kobani last year, established enough dominance in their region to enable them to make a strong case for autonomy once serious peace negotiations get underway.

This may well be a propitious time for the main combatants in Syria to cash in their winnings and not risk losing them to long-term attrition of their forces. This logic should be compelling to rational actors whose goals and objectives are ultimately negotiable. ISIS and the Al-Nusra Front are exempt from this characterization. The Islamic State in particular is not a rational actor in the traditional sense of the term, and does not show any interest in negotiating anything except total victory over its enemies. Al-Nusra, though different in so far as its goals are strictly Syrian, has nonetheless pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda and seems bent on achieving its ultimate goal of imposing its version of sharia law all over Syria. The Islamic State will have to be defeated decisively and Al-Nusra either contained or persuaded to sever its ties with Al-Qaeda before a serious transition can get underway. Regional and international powers have to share a common conviction of this and must make it clear to their local clients that further use of force will no longer be supported by them. The alternative to this scenario is another ten years of fighting, which Syria, the region and the world can ill-afford.

Resolution of the Syrian conflict has a few similar experiences from which to draw some lessons, such as South Africa, the former Yugoslavia, and Tunisia. In the case of the former Yugoslavia, an internationally sponsored agreement, known as the Dayton Accords, followed by political negotiations and an international war crimes tribunal buffered the transition to peace. In South Africa, a truth and reconciliation commission helped national healing and prevented a return to violence. Tunisia’s transition has, despite continuing threats and challenges, been the only successful transition from uprising to a democracy via political reconciliation.

The initial phase of the agreement will be to promote peace and stability in Syria and neighboring countries that have been implicated in and affected by the war in Syria. The priority, therefore, should be for a conference between the main combatants on the ground, the Syrian regime, the main opposition, and Syrian Kurds. Internationally, in addition to the U.S. and Russia, the main sponsors of any peace agreement, Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia should be represented, at least as observers if not as full participants. The goal of this initial conference would be to achieve consensus on stopping all military action with forces in place and a pledge to cease all attempts to change the status quo on the ground. The U.S. and Russia will have to monitor and enforce this pledge.

As in the case of the Dayton agreement, a wide range of international organizations will have to be deployed in order to monitor, oversee, and implement components of the agreement. A peacekeeping force will have to be agreed on, and one with the right to use force since all combatants will remain heavily armed during the first phase of the transition.

A second phase should begin with a transitional government agreed to by the principal combatants and representatives from Syria’s fourteen provinces. Since one of the tasks of such a government would be the administration of transitional justice and democratic elections, senior leaders who may well be charged with war crimes should be excluded from participation. With that principal in mind, each side should be allowed to select and deselect those who represent it. The Al-Assad regime should certainly be represented in this government, but President Bashar Al-Assad and his immediate governing circle should be excluded, as they will surely be among those charged with war crimes.

The first task of the transitional government would be to set up a broad constitutional conference to include wide representation from the social, geographic, and political bases in the country. Respected lawyers, intellectuals, and leaders of civil society should be prominently represented. The constitutional conference would be tasked with codifying a new social contract among the Syrian people, to enshrine the principles of democracy and respect for human rights. Conferees will have to grapple with questions of federalism versus a decentralized but unified government, presidential versus parliamentary systems, and various types of electoral laws. The international community can certainly help by providing information and points of comparison from other cases around the world, but the choice in all these matters must be strictly Syrian.

Simultaneously with pacifying the country, the transitional government, with the help of the international community, will have to tend to immediate humanitarian needs and set the stage for national reconciliation and healing. Serious rebuilding may have to wait for a solid agreement to emerge and some stability and security to take hold, but the Syrian people must have some hope that a normal life in Syria will once again be possible. Given the major atrocities committed thus far in Syria, ground rules will have to be set for transitional justice. The case of the former Yugoslavia has become a model for an international tribunal being the proper venue for a serious and impartial consideration of all charges of war crimes against the main combatant groups.

A national truth and reconciliation commission can similarly take guidance from the South African example of how to admit mistakes of the past, reveal the truth about the disappeared, imprisoned, and executed, and charge those who must be charged while granting amnesty to those whose services were essential in ending the war and helping the transition to move forward. In terms of political reconciliation, Tunisia, which admittedly suffered the least violence in the context of the Arab uprisings, is nonetheless a model of parties with competing ideologies learning how to live and compete peacefully under the same democratic rules and political processes.

Such a process will undoubtedly take several years to complete and will be fraught with dangers and challenges, but greater wars have ended in the past. This war can, and must, be ended too. The international community, which shares some of the blame for the conflict, and has in turn been affected by its spillover effects, must be heavily involved in ending it. Elections to select Syria’s new leadership must be a Syrian responsibility, but an international force will be needed to keep the peace and guarantee the Syrian people a truly free choice. Syria’s political infrastructure has broken down and what remains does not have the trust of the majority of Syrians. All those institutions of government must be slowly and painstakingly rebuilt with the help of the United Nations and international NGOs.

The Syrian conflict has been alternately exploited and ignored long enough. The Syrian people and indeed the world can no longer afford to look the other way as the bloodletting, displacement, and hijacked childhood of an entire generation continue unabated.

Nabeel Khoury is non-resident senior fellow with the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East at the Atlantic Council. He spent twenty-five years as a diplomat in the U.S. foreign service, serving in various posts including: deputy chief of mission in Yemen; consul general in Casablanca; deputy director of the State Department Media Outreach Center in London; and director of the Near East South Asia Office of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. In 2003, during the Iraq war he served as State Department spokesperson at U.S. Central Command in Doha and in Baghdad. He has contributed to the Middle East Journal, Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Middle East Policy. On Twitter:@khoury_nabeel.

The study of Tunisia and its politics has enjoyed renewed popularity since the Arab uprisings, partly because there is more information available. The opening up of once closed or highly controlled spaces provides researchers, journalists, and academics opportunities to explore issues critically and in depth.

In his latest paper for the London School of Economics (LSE) Middle East Center’s Working Paper Series, Professor Charles Tripp explores the political effects of this opening up of spaces. In his estimation, the redefinition of space, the struggle over what is “public,” and what constitutes public business (res publica) suggest a substantive change in the practice of politics in Tunisia. In all its complexity, what we have been witnessing over the last several years has been Tunisians setting the boundaries of a new “Tunisian Republic.”

Fadil Aliriza, guest editor for Sada, interviewed Charles Tripp to explain and summarize the ideas he explores in his recent paper.

What initially attracted you to the question of space and its role in politics in Tunisia?

I had been interested for some time in how urban space is configured to reinforce established forms of power, but also how it becomes the object and site of struggle for those who try to challenge the status quo. With the uprisings in Tunisia and elsewhere across the Middle East and North Africa, this interest deepened—especially since the focus of much of the political struggle was the occupation of public space both physically, by security forces and hundreds of thousands of citizens, and in a symbolic re-appropriation of the sites where dictators had asserted and advertised their own presence and domination.

Amid continuing economic misery, ideological polarization, and security concerns, how is the question of physical or institutional space key to the study of politics?

Space should not be thought of simply as physical place. Rather, in its socially constituted forms—symbolic, ideational, discursive, as well as institutional and physical—it lies at the heart of power relations because it can provide the terrain for contending political interests to find expression. In Tunisia, as elsewhere, it is here that the systematic forms of exclusion due to the economic disparities of class and region can force themselves onto the public agenda—as they did in 2010 to 2011 and more recently in early 2016. By bringing their claims into the public arena, citizens can challenge the often unspoken forms of exclusion that may deprive them of their rights. For this same reason, these spaces can become the place where ideological polarization is played out and given substance, often serving to sharpen the divide as citizens take up actual or symbolic positions confronting one another. This is why the unreconstructed security forces become so concerned, leading them to employ the old methods of repression to impose a particular view of order in the name of social peace.

In your latest study, you focus on the “republic” instead of the “state.” Is this concept particularly suited to Tunisia given its history and institutions, or could it bear fruit even in the study of countries popularly understood to be experiencing state collapse?

The idea and the reality of the “republic” is a way of encapsulating the ideals of a common political project, not in terms of its substantive content, but in terms of the basic principles that provide the framework for a politics of non-domination. That is, it should be one where all citizens have equal rights to participate in the shaping of their common futures within a framework of laws and institutions (the state) that emerge from public deliberation and that are answerable to the public. This is the ideal.

Of course, in Tunisia as elsewhere the reality of postcolonial politics differed markedly from the republican ideal. It took the events of 2010–2011 to re-assert such an ideal in the teeth of those who had hijacked the forms of the republic for their purposes. The rapidity and enthusiasm with which others across the region followed the Tunisians’ example and not only took up the ideals of the lost republic, but also participated in the mass re-creation of the public as a political force, demonstrates the appeal of the republic. Again, the terrible cycle of events over the past few years in Libya, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain has demonstrated that republican aspirations are not enough. But the fact that they are still powerfully present has also been shown in the recent mass demonstrations in Syria (since the ceasefire), Yemen, Lebanon, and Iraq. Significantly, in all of these countries it needed the (possibly only temporary) creation of space for republican protest to re-emerge. For different reasons, these spaces have been restricted and closed down in Libya, Egypt, and Bahrain.

Many credit Tunisia’s “strong state” institutions as having helped the country avoid greater violence post-2011. If the “state” is more closely linked with stability while the “republic” is always being redefined, does this suggest it is easier for popular movements to shape a new republic than to reform the state?

Tunisia’s institutions and Tunisian citizens’ accustomed interactions with them helped to prevent other outcomes, particularly those involving violence and civil war as in other parts of the region. However, these should not be seen in contrast to the republic. Rather, what happened in 2010–2011 was the effort to make those institutions accountable to the people and re-found them in the republican ideals that would make them accessible to all, not the preserve of the few. In this respect, it was noticeable that these were both state institutions but also non-state institutions, such as the Tunisian General Labor Union (UGTT) which was reclaimed by its members—its leadership having been close to the old regime.

As in other countries, so in Tunisia, there were parts of the institutional apparatus of the state that were less easy to recapture. This has been most obviously the case in the Ministry of the Interior, whose employees have indeed held onto the idea that they represent a form of stability that puts their claims above those of the rest of the public and believe, therefore, that the public is answerable to them rather than the other way round. Similar attitudes persist in other branches of the state administration, as well as in some of the circles of the Nidaa Tounes party.

You write that Tunisians with different visions of the republic—Bourguibist, Ben Aliist, secular, Islamic, or social-democratic—have all so far agreed that “the republic, flawed as it may be, offers a better alternative than the scenarios” unfolding in the region. Do you think Tunisians are succeeding?

They share ideas of political space. Even if they disagree about what should fill it or how people should act within it, the right to enter such space and to participate in the debates that it encourages is the right of all Tunisian citizens. This does not mean that all the actors trust one another, nor are they satisfied that the institutions of the republic are working in the way that they would like to see, but it still makes sense to conduct politics within this framework. There are clearly social, economic, and ideological factors that place immense strains upon this, so one should not assume that what has been achieved in Tunisia is immune from such pressures, nor underestimate the dangers that this can pose for the republic. Nevertheless, it is worth thinking about what historical or contemporary factors have given Tunisians this chance to redefine republican space as a space for purposeful but bounded, rather than boundless, political contention.

This interview was lightly edited for style and length.

This article is reprinted with permission of Sada. It can be accessed online here.

Charles Tripp is a professor of politics at SOAS, University of London and a fellow of the British Academy. His most recent book is The Power and the People: Paths of Resistance in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Suddenly, Egypt’s cultural pages are filled with articles extolling the legacy of the Egyptian Surrealist movement, affirming its “Egyptianness” and the imperative of recognizing its heritage. A welcomed initiative, even if it has arrived sixty years too late and is unlikely to yield any interest from the Egyptian Ministry of Culture.

Since its inception, the ministry marginalized and rejected what have come to be known as the Egyptian Surrealists, a group of artists and writers who established the Art and Liberty Group in 1937. The culture ministry was founded during the age of the Free Officers, who overthrew the monarchy in 1952, for many reasons, among them to combat and eradicate the heritage and ideas of the Surrealist movement, exile its creators, and erase its history. Throughout the past half-century, the ministry succeeded in doing just that.

Surrealism was never a movement aligned with nationalistic, militaristic, or fascist ideas. Its creators defended individual freedom and the concept of international citizenship. They warned against fascism—the offspring of exuberant feelings of patriotism and Arab nationalism. Likewise, the Surrealists were part of a linguistically, culturally, and ideologically diverse Egypt that existed before July 1952, and had no place afterwards in the Free Officers’ state.

The resurgent interest in Surrealism results from a cutthroat race underway between the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Sharjah Biennale in the United Arab Emirates. The two are competing to present the heritage of the Egyptian Surrealist movement to the world. The first exhibition is organized by Sam Bardaouil and will be inaugurated this September in the Centre Pompidou in the French capital. Bardaouil has spent more than three years with a team of researchers collecting the cultural heritage of the movement’s artists, writers, and poets, which is scattered between Egypt and Europe.

The Paris exhibition, which will probably be the most comprehensive, could not possibly be organized without the loan of Surrealist paintings, many of which are held in ministry storehouses suffering from neglect and disregard. That is why, in November, a French delegation visited Egyptian Minister of Culture Helmy El-Namnam. The latter agreed quite readily for the works to travel in the company of restorers and a hired crew from the ministry, without any material compensation. There was neither an agreement imposing an Egyptian partnership nor even minimum guarantees to exhibit the show in Egypt.

After being displayed in Paris, the “Egyptian Surrealists” will tour several cities in Europe, without ever reaching Cairo. Their artworks will return to the culture ministry’s storehouses, concealed in oblivion, while everyone forgets the photograph of the minister with the visiting French delegation and his celebration of Surrealism.

Surrealism ended with the ascent of the Free Officers in July 1952. In this fascist climate, the state established the Ministry of Culture, which never offered any form of appreciation for the Surrealists’ work. The tale of the artist Ramses Younan explains the historic relationship between the Ministry of Culture and the Surrealist movement. Facing the state’s restrictions on the public sphere, Younan applied for a research grant from the ministry. The committee’s jury, including Abbas Al-Aqqad and Oum Kalthoum, believed that the canvases of Ramses Younan—which had been displayed in the most famous Paris galleries since the forties—were not works of art. Rather, Oum Kalthoum said to him that he did not know how to paint. Younan, in the end, applied as a translator and obtained a grant to translate books.

At the turn of the millennium, Paula Henein—granddaughter of the poet Ahmed Shawky and wife of Georges Henein, founder of the Surrealist movement in Egypt—died. Their heirs offered to donate Georges Henein’s library to the ministry, but did not receive any response. So they donated it to the French Cultural Center in Mounira, where the library of the Surrealist movement’s instigator remains.

With the international interest in reintroducing the Egyptian Surrealists this year, the culture ministry’s reaction has not gone beyond souvenir photos with visiting French and Emirati officials who arrive to make agreements with the ministry.

The Sharjah Art Foundation—which has become one of the most important institutions concerned with modern and contemporary art in the region, only rivaled by the Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar—has also entered the fray in search of Egyptian Surrealism’s heritage. They selected for this task Salah M. Hassan, director of the Institute of Comparative Modernities at Cornell University. He is working to prepare an exhibition titled, “When Arts Become Liberty: The Egyptian Surrealists,” scheduled to launch in Sharjah at the beginning 2017, part of which will be displayed in Egypt later on. Sharjah additionally organized a three-day research conference about the history of the Egyptian Surrealist movement this past November at the American University in Cairo.

But why is an Emirati cultural organization concerned with the reconsideration of an Egyptian movement? The answer was found in the remarks of Hoor Al-Qassemi, director of the Sharjah Art Foundation. She explained that the conference and the exhibition are part of the foundation’s enormous project to document Arab art movements, “so as to construct a vision for a future richer in creative accomplishments and expressive energy, a future we all share in sketching the features of, and in enriching and deepening our human potential, outside of narrow concepts and affiliations.”

Of course, there is no room for new affiliations in the art markets in Dubai and Doha. The historical and artistic archive in these countries is limited, and their modernization projects new. Thus, they are striving to turn their museums and projects into repositories. Sometimes, these museums reflect a hypothetical image of an imaginary Arab identity. At other times, they cling to a vague universality with undefined features.

In this context and in the world of free markets, the Ministry of Culture appears to be a shepherd who can’t be bothered to tend his flock. So it is better for the livestock to be managed by those who know its value and are capable of taking care of it.

The locked museums and storehouses of the ministry have been emptied of their treasures, and are to be exhibited in Paris, Dubai, and Doha. Egyptian heritage has no place in Egypt. The minister is thrilled to have his photo op with a foreign delegation, while the French and Gulf Arabs compete over displaying Egyptian culture and history. French cultural financiers want to link the movement’s history to the colonial period and its accomplishments. Our Arab brothers want to redefine it as an Arab movement in order to conceal the black hole in their own national identity. Amid all this, the ministry has merely assumed the role of storeroom keeper and broker, providing international and Arab curators the opportunity to haul our heritage out of Egypt and exhibit it abroad.

This article was originally published in Akhbar Al-Adab and is translated from the Arabic by Cairo Review Contributing Editor Jonathan Guyer.

Ahmed Naji is a journalist for the weekly literary review Akhbar Al-Adab. He is the author of two novels, Rogers and The Use of Life, and co-founder of the art research network MHWLN. On February 20, he was sentenced to two years in prison for “public indecency,” for an extract of his second novel republished in Akhbar Al-Adab. He is the recipient of the 2016 PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award from PEN America.

We are well into the start of the sixth year since uprisings and revolutions rocked parts of the Arab World in January-February 2011, and the balance sheet of achievements is very mixed, and mostly disappointing, beyond Tunisia’s fragile move into the world of constitutional, pluralistic democracies. The two most troubling aspects of what is going on in the other five countries that erupted into major street demonstrations and regime counter-attacks are the lack of any clear national consensus on how to govern the country, and the deep, militaristic interventions by foreign countries, including Arab, Iranian, Turkish, Russian, American and other powers.

Along with the five Arab uprisings countries of Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, and Bahrain, we should also add Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq to complete the list of eight Arab states that now face serious domestic challenges across every major dimension of life: political policies consensus, constitutional governance, economic growth, peaceful and tolerant pluralism, environmental viability, basic security, and—most importantly—genuine sovereignty that allows the citizens of a country to manage their own affairs without external interference.

The easy and simplistic analysis one encounters across the world, especially in the United States, is that Arab lands are hopelessly caught in their own self-made sectarian wars waged by ethnic, national and religious communities that are unable to live together peacefully. This strikes me as exaggerated, and insufficient to explain the profound problems these countries have faced for decades in every aspect of life, such as education quality, environmental ravages, economic mismanagement, corruption, crony capitalism, rule by security forces, widening disparities and inequalities, and a proclivity to allow foreign powers to manipulate us. These problems ravaged our societies well before any serious sectarian clashes occurred, so we should seek an explanation for our troubled condition much further back in our history.

In almost all Arab countries that suffer serious internal conflicts, political violence, and ideological, ethnic, sectarian or socio-economic stresses that have come to the fore in recent decades primarily, their common basic weakness is that they never credibly found a way to achieve an agreed, organic relationship between the rulers and the ruled. The exercise of power and public authority has always been defined by small groups of men—usually anchored in military establishments—who seized and sat in the seats of power. The exercise of responsible citizenship, in terms of duties performed and services enjoyed, has never been fully clear to the citizens or the rulers. The result has been either harsh authoritarian rule deeply backed by foreign powers or national fragmentation and bouts of chaos, incivility, civil wars, state collapse, and large demographic shifts, like internal displacement, ethnic cleansing, forced exile, or emigration at any cost.

So we see today in Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Lebanon, and Iraq very unsettled conditions that include active warfare, control by external powers, or political authoritarianism that only exacerbates weak citizen-state links and further erodes the socio-economic foundations of the state. Remarkably, some countries like Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, and Yemen still engage in some sort of formal political process that seeks to create and ultimately validate a national governance system that is acceptable to all the key domestic and foreign parties.

That is by nature a very difficult task when external powers are directly involved in local decision-making, as is the case in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain, and Yemen. The task is made easier if the external parties (like the United States and Russia, or Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia) should agree on the main issues in play, but this rarely happens. This is made all the more difficult today when we see both regional powers and global ones involved in these countries at the same time.

The sad reality for the moment, at least, is that most of these Arab countries have not only lost their relative stability and calm, they have also forfeited most of their sovereignty to external regional and global powers, or to strong internal forces that share and contest power with the government (like Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen, Muqtada Al-Sadr’s movement in Iraq, and others).

This troubled common condition across most of the Arab world reflects issues that go far beyond neat but simplistic sectarian rivalries. Instead it is anchored in the Arab states’ failures in three critical and continuing realms: their refusal to allow their own citizens to define national policies, values, and priorities and validate statehood itself; their incompetent inability to manage their national human and mineral wealth in a manner that would achieve sustained wealth, social equity, and national viability; and, due to the structural weaknesses generated by the above two factors, their willingness to allow foreign powers to come to their rescue and thus to dilute or effectively eliminate their sovereignty.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. On Twitter: @RamiKhouri.

Copyright ©2016 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global


The New York Times is not only considered the leading newspaper in the United States, it is also something of a bellwether of intellectual and political trends in the country. So it was noteworthy that the newspaper’s Monday opinion page feature “Room for Debate” comprised five different views on these questions: “Is Anti-Zionism merely Anti-Semitism in disguise? When does criticism of Israel become bigotry? Is rejection of the Jewish state a rejection of Jews?”

Never mind the Israel-centric nature of the questions that highlighted Israeli sentiments rather than a balance between the views of Israel and those of its critics. I still call this noteworthy because in the annals of the Israeli-Palestinian and wider Arab-Israeli conflicts, how openly and how strongly one can criticize Israeli actions against Palestinians, in particular, has become a very sensitive matter that increasingly has generated Israeli-led counter-measures to minimize such criticisms. This is because the critics of Israel’s most egregious and often illegal policies—notably occupation, colonization, mass incarceration, assassinations, and direct and indirect siege of Palestinian civilian communities—now also call for measures to deter or punish it.

Such actions have been spearheaded by the global Palestinian civil society initiative known as BDS, the initials for the proposed measures to boycott, divest investments, and sanction Israel for its mistreatment of Palestinians in three concentric circles: those living in the Israeli state as citizens, those living under Israeli occupation in the territories occupied in the 1967 war, and those who are exiled refugees living elsewhere in the region or the world.

The BDS movement has slowly been gaining strength across the United States and other parts of the world, because it has successfully projected its actions in the same spirit as the anti-apartheid sanctions against the racist South African regime half a century ago. Israelis and their friends fiercely reject these parallels, and some of them accuse the BDS movement of being simply a cover for old-fashioned anti-Semitism that rejected giving Jews equal rights as other citizens.

This battle has heated up steadily in the past decade, and has made significant gains in the heart of Western societies, rather than on their radical fringes only. Israelis became worried and started to take action in recent years, especially when some leading American mainstream churches, trade unions, and academic or professional associations signaled their willingness to sanction or boycott Israelis or foreign companies or organizations that profit from the occupation and colonization of Palestinians.

This escalating public debate about whether criticism of Israeli policies is just disguised anti-Semitism has damaged both Israel and its critics. Israel is hurt because its policies are coming under much greater public and global scrutiny in the context of discussions about apartheid, and Palestinians and their supporters are hurt because they are being savaged with the accusation of anti-Semitism. It is important to acknowledge that anti-Semitism is among the most damning brands of villainy that exist in the world today, because of its organic link with the inhuman scale, criminality, and brutality of the Holocaust against the Jews in the 1930s and 40s. Anti-Semitism paved the way for the Holocaust, and persisted after the Nazis were defeated.

So it is a very big deal that opponents of the BDS movement resort to calling it anti-Semitic, in their vigorous attempt to shut down the escalating criticisms of Israeli policies and the parallel calls for corrective sanctions against Israel for the crimes it commits. Yet it seems now that it is even a bigger deal that the anti-Semitism accusation seems not to have achieved its aims of crushing the BDS movement, and in fact may have had the opposite effect: the question of whether one does or does not criticize/sanction Israeli policies has put a huge spotlight on those policies in the public arena around the world, rather than muted the discussion of how Israel treats the Palestinians or complies with international law. This debate has now reached the New York Times opinion pages.

In some ways, this has become the new front line of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the United States, and also to a lesser extent in Europe and other parts of the world. This has quickly rubbed up against the right to free speech in the United States, including the right to criticize any government’s policies and actions. It also highlights massive contradictions or hypocrisies among those who reject boycotting Israel for its harsh and often criminal acts, but advocate boycotting Iran or other states or political groups for their actions.

The simple and right answer to me is that every country’s or political group’s record should be open to public scrutiny, including Israelis, Arabs, Iranians, Americans, and others. Those that are deemed to engage in criminal or terrorist actions should be liable to sanctions, boycotts, divestment, or other such punitive actions, like those that the United States government itself routinely carries out against its foes or those whom it deems to engage in criminal behavior.

For this debate to reach the opinion pages of the New York Times is an important symbolic milestone, indicating that this is a topic that deserves public debate, rather than remaining in the realm of shadowy accusations or veiled racism, colonialism, anti-Semitism, or other such crimes that remain very much part of our world today.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. On Twitter: @RamiKhouri.

Copyright ©2016 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

As Israelis and Palestinians continue to battle to the death in their contested land, it is important to note a historic shift in how the minds, hearts, and public politics of the world perceive the Palestine issue and a just Palestinian-Israeli-Arab peace accord that assures the equal rights of all parties. In many arenas and dimensions, far from dropping off the global political map, Palestinian rights are popping up in more venues around the world, with a regular public focus on countering and even sanctioning Zionist excesses and criminal actions, such as expropriating and colonizing occupied Arab lands.

We see this most clearly in Europe and the United States, where open societies based on the rule of law provide credible opportunities for activists to challenge and stop their societies’ complicity in Israeli colonial policies. This works in both directions, as public debates advocate Israeli as well as Palestinian positions. But by making the Israel-Palestine issue a matter for public discussion in local political or professional arenas—such as state legislatures, mainstream churches, universities, commercial activities, the media, and academic societies—the net effect is clearly to the advantage of the Palestinians.

This is because the debates focus on issues that Zionism and the state of Israel have always sought to downplay in the global discussion of this conflict, and that the Palestinians in contrast have sought to highlight: the international rule of law, the nature of Israeli political and military practices, and how to prod both sides to comply with existing international laws, conventions, and UN resolutions that uphold the rights or protection of all concerned.

Israel has continued its heretofore largely successful propaganda tactics and associated political leverage that depict the Palestinians globally as violent anti-Semites who refuse to accept Jews in their midst and seek to destroy the state of Israel and kill Jews. Yet the pendulum of global public perceptions has swung back to a more balanced position that continues to criticize Palestinian armed resistance, political violence, and occasional acts of terrorism against civilians, but more and more routinely these days also analyses Israel through the prism of South African apartheid practices. Israel is worried, as it should be if apartheid is the political term most often associated with it.

So Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his posse of professional propagandists, illusionists, and liars now desperately try to link the Palestinians with terrorists such as the “Islamic State.” They have also tried to associate Palestinians with Iran, assuming that Iran is widely negatively viewed in the West, but that policy also failed on two counts: The West and the world have rejected Israel’s exaggerated fears and bluster, have successfully negotiated with Iran, and mainstream Western political circles have harshly criticized Netanyahu’s attempts to influence their domestic policy-making systems—for example, his rallying pro-Israeli groups in the United States against President Barack Obama.

The question of Israel-Palestine now has expanded into a wider contest over free speech on American college campuses, where Israel’s intemperance freely accuses people of anti-Semitism in a desperate attempt to restrict public discussion or criticism of Israeli practices, such as colonial settlements, mass incarceration of Palestinians by the thousands, the continuing semi-siege of Gaza, or cold-blood killings of Palestinians who are not a clear security threat. Such tactics have only generated more public, focused, and intense debates on Israeli and Palestinian practices, and explored more seriously the available responses—including boycotts and sanctions—of institutions and countries around the world that base their actions on law, justice, and morality.

The important trend taking place is two-fold: the Palestinians’ shift from mostly ineffective military and government actions to a non-violent political challenge to Israel’s occupation and colonization of Arab lands, and, greater public political debates about the Israeli and Palestinian people’s mutual actions and rights, and how the world should act to achieve those rights.

The first line of global political action on Palestine-Israel is no longer Israel’s ability to make its security the main focus of discussion and to nudge big powers’ policies in its favor; instead, it has shifted to how collective global action can get both sides to comply with existing global norms while ensuring their mutual security and well-being. Some novel developments: The UN secretary-general speaks out forcefully on these issues, the French government wants to launch an international peace conference on Israel-Palestine, Sweden and other states recognize the state of Palestine, the European Union highlights its opposition to official contacts with Israeli institutions in occupied Arab lands, and one American senator has asked his government to investigate the actions of both Israeli and Arab governments. The times they are a changing, and mostly for the better as far as the Palestine issue in the world’s eyes is concerned.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. On Twitter: @RamiKhouri.

Copyright ©2016 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

The most useful analogy to describe the situation in Syria that keeps changing by the week is that of a kaleidoscope. With every turn, the elements comprising the image within the kaleidoscope change shape, place, and color—but they always end up in some kind of balanced relationship that gives the whole image integrity, symmetry, and some temporary permanence. This is Syria today with its dozens of major political and military elements that change positions but always result in some kind of temporary balance of power.

This has been going on for over five years now, suggesting that this is a defining rather than an occasional aspect of the conflicts playing themselves out in the country. The latest twist has seen the Russian armed forces partially pull out of the country, and the combined Syrian-Russian militaries liberate Palmyra from the control of “Islamic State” (IS, or Daesh).

This opens the way for Russian-, Iranian-, and Hezbollah-backed Syrian troops and irregular militias to keep moving north and northeast, eventually to liberate Dayr Al-Zawr and Al-Raqqah. This triggers new possibilities that others in Syria must react to, including most importantly whether Syrians in the northeast would welcome back the foreign-buttressed government in Damascus with open arms, or resist it and instead seek to forge a new order of governance based on the will of the people who live there.

This reminds us of the multiple concentric circles of elements that make up the Syrian national kaleidoscope, including, most notably (take a deep breath here): some pro-regime Syrians and many anti-regime Syrians, remnants of IS, the powerful Al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Al-Nusra, Ahrar Al-Sham and other strong Islamist rebel groups, Free Syrian Army elements, assorted Kurdish political and armed groups (some of which already announced plans for an autonomous Kurdish region in the north), local tribal forces that emerge and vanish as the situation demands, Turkish and Iranian groups and allies, American and other foreign special forces that occasionally strike inside Syria, half a dozen foreign air forces that attack half a dozen different groups in the country, and another half a dozen supply routes from regional countries that funnel money, arms, logistical support, and occasional fighters into Syria’s wars.

All this happens alongside equally important dynamics beyond the country’s borders: The United Nations leads a heartfelt negotiating effort in Geneva that aims to initiate a political transition that the main parties clearly cannot possibly agree on today; the United States and Russia meet regularly to define some major elements of a desired diplomatic end to the war, without any certainty that the warring parties on the ground will fall in line; and Saudi Arabia continues to put together a pan-Islamic military force from several dozen countries to fight against terrorism threats in the region, presumably including IS in Syria and Iraq.

These and other elements constantly adjust and rebalance themselves, leaving the country in some state of equilibrium that—to date—has prevented any one party from fully defeating its multiple foes. The resulting state of constant war, often localized or low intensity, has ravaged the country and doomed it to perhaps decades of tension, underdevelopment, and human suffering and dislocation. The warring parties seem not to care, and keep fighting, aiming to hold their positions and maintain their incumbency to the greatest extent possible.

The recent Russian military moves and the liberation of Palmyra clearly reinforce the Assad government’s sense of confidence and strength; these are real in the immediate sense, but they are also illusory because they fully depend on the massive external support Damascus enjoys. Presumably, sophisticated analysts among Tehran, Moscow, and Hezbollah understand that artificially propping up a weak Syrian government with massive external military and economic aid is not a realistic long-term option, which makes the diplomatic option more attractive. But diplomatic breakthroughs are out of the question now if they require Assad to accept his phased departure and a more inclusive and democratic governance system that ends nearly half a century of Baathist-Alawite-Assad family-dominated rule. The path to long-term stability in Syria requires a process of national self-determination that allows the citizens of the country to freely express how they wish to configure their sovereignty and be governed, which is beyond reach today given the nature of fragmented power, constant warfare, and the many external players involved.

So we should probably expect continuation of the current trend of Syria’s ever changing kaleidoscopic warfare and diplomacy, with the likely exception of a major military effort to break up IS’s home base in northern Syria that would set off a wild scramble for control of that region, and another turn of the kaleidoscope.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. On Twitter: @RamiKhouri.

Copyright ©2016 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

The complex situation across all of Syria has become ever more challenging with the recent announcement by major Kurdish parties that they are moving ahead with a plan to unite several disconnected areas across all of northern Syria into a semi-autonomous area within a federal system. The idea has been widely rejected by most other Syrian parties, including the government and the mainstream opposition, and the Arab League has now weighed in with its own opposition to the move, claiming it would result in the partition of Syria.

The specificities of Syria and its people are fascinating in their own right, but the wider issue at play here that impacts all the Arab world is the vexing matter of why no Arab state has been able to credibly reconcile such fundamental concepts as national identity, statehood, citizenship rights, ethnic and sectarian group identities, and national integrity. These issues remain unresolved—even unaddressed—in virtually every Arab country, a century since the birth of the modern Arab world.

Syria grapples with finding a formula that would maintain the external boundaries of the state while renegotiating internal territorial divisions, citizen rights, and identities. This occurs five years since the start of a violent series of conflicts that make it very difficult to return to the pre-war norm of a central government that dictated life, values, and power in every corner of the land. Similar situations pertain in Libya, Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan, and Somalia.

The Syrian Kurds now control three non-contiguous areas in the northern border areas adjacent to Turkey, where several different Kurdish groups operate in association with a variety of local and foreign allies. The Democratic Union Party (PYD) is organizing the discussions among Kurdish and other minorities in the area who wish to govern the desired semi-autonomous entity that would be part of a federal system in post-war Syria. The United States and Russia have largely backed the Kurdish aims, just as the United States helped to bring about the Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq a few decades ago.

The Kurds probably have more right to an independent state than most existing countries in the Middle East, on the basis of a distinct national identity within a defined historical homeland. Their struggle for self-rule these days occurs exactly a century after great power machinations denied them that goal around World War One. I suspect the Kurds will continue to enjoy their autonomous status in northern Iraq and Syria for years to come, and eventually some formula will be found that allows the Kurds in Turkey and Iran to feel they are associated with their fellow Kurds in these Arab countries. Iran and Turkey are much more formidable and durable nation-states than Syria and Iraq have proven to be, so they will not lightly or easily accept their own Kurdish citizens and territories breaking away to govern themselves.

These difficult issues of identity, autonomy and independence within the Arab world can best be resolved through a negotiated process that allows citizens to exercise their right to self-determination. Southern Sudan went through such a process, with unhappy results today, due largely to factional and political tensions within the raw southern state. Syria and Iraq, along with Yemen and Libya, offer opportunities for citizens of those countries to devise a credible and legitimate formula that allows the citizens of the land to determine how they wish to relate to one another and, if they so wish, to their single federal or confederal state.

The Arab League has opposed the Kurdish plan for autonomy within a federal Syria because the Arab member states oppose the breakup of Syria, or so they say. That decision should be made by the Syrian people, and by nobody else, when conditions allow them to determine such issues. As the noted Lebanese historian Fawwaz Traboulsi said in public lecture in Beirut earlier this week, in the century since the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 shaped the states of the modern Arab world, the elites of our countries have primarily generated authoritarian states that offered neither credible citizen rights nor sustained, equitable national development.

So for the representatives of today’s mostly authoritarian states in the Arab League to deny Syrians the right collectively to determine their own future seems quite vulgar. This a vote to maintain false unity that has been imposed at the price of Arab citizen rights and genuine national stability anchored in the legitimacy of the governing authority. Syria’s destruction today reveals what happens when legitimacy, self-determination, citizenship rights, and equitable national development are absent—which is why these four elements should be the goals of the ongoing attempt to end the war and transition to a new governance system in Syria. This is the moment to shed the ghosts of 1916 by affirming citizen rights in Arab lands, not to perpetuate them by bowing to the dictates of failed authoritarian powers.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. On Twitter: @RamiKhouri.

Copyright ©2016 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

Low oil prices are heaping added pressure on Egypt’s currency crisis. While common wisdom holds that the finances of fuel-importing nations, such as Egypt, stand to benefit from declining energy prices, the net impact for Cairo’s economy is surprisingly negative. At least in the short term, this trend is exacerbating what was already a full-fledged foreign currency crisis as a result of significant falls in tourism and industrial exports revenues.

In the long run, Egypt should benefit from cheaper oil by spending less on importing and subsidizing gasoline and gas. Indeed, spending on petroleum and natural gas subsidies has decreased from 73 billion Egyptian pounds ($8.2 billion) in 2014–2015 to 55 billion ($6.2 billion) in 2015–2016. This is at least partially due to plummeting oil prices, which may eventually have a positive impact on inflation and allow Egypt to overcome four years of energy shortages. All in all, this may actually be conducive to future economic growth.

Yet there are a number of reasons why depressed oil prices are hurting the Egyptian economy in the shorter term. First, as Egypt’s single biggest export, petrochemicals constitute one of its main sources of U.S. dollars. For a country as dependent on imports as Egypt, access to foreign currency (particularly dollars) is crucial. Egypt is earning fewer dollars from its energy exports, partly due to lower energy prices. Inability to pay energy firms their dues in dollars is also contributing to a declining domestic energy production and, therefore, energy-related dollar revenues. Amid low energy prices, these companies are also curtailing their exploration activities, limiting Egypt’s future production and withholding precious dollars from the local market. According to statistics from the Ministry of Trade and Industry, Egypt’s exports of crude oil and petrochemicals declined 33 percent from $4.5 billion in between January 2014 and September 2014 to $3 billion in the same period of 2015. While more recent figures have not been released, it is likely that this revenue decline has accelerated due to the continued weakening of energy prices. Meanwhile, the country is paying more dollars for energy imports. Egypt’s imports of crude oil and petrochemicals rose in that same time period of January to September 2014 from $6.3 billion to $8.8 billion in 2015, partly because of declining energy grants, credits, and aid from the Gulf.

Second, low oil and gas prices are substantially limiting aid from the Gulf countries, Egypt’s main economic lifeline since the July 2013 military coup. Although it is probable that there are also geopolitical reasons behind declining Saudi and Emirati aid and investments in Egypt, such as Cairo’s pro-Russian stance in Syria and reluctance to send combat troops to Yemen, both Gulf countries continue to support the military regime in an effort to curb growing Iranian influence in the Middle East. Their commitment is more constrained by diminishing oil and gas revenues and the sharp costs of war in Syria and Yemen. Saudi Arabia’s budget deficit expanded from 2 percent of its GDP in 2014 to 15 percent one year later, and foreign reserves plummeted from $737 billion in to $640 billion. As such, assistance to Egypt has sharply declined. While Gulf aid and permissive loans for the Egyptian fiscal budget for July 2013–June 2014 are estimated to be at least $16.7 billion, such assistance plummeted to single digits in the period thereafter, and recent pledges are meager in comparison and lack a strict timeframe.

In February, Saudi Arabia rejected the Egyptian government’s project proposals that would have brought in $8 billion in Saudi investment. Likewise, Emirati contractors limited their participation in Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s signature projects to build affordable housing and a new administrative capital. The financial pressure these countries feel as a result of oil that sells for approximately $30 per barrel will lead them to reject former blank-check forms of assistance and potentially opt instead for opportunistic investments, such as in the lucrative real estate sector. To be sure, Riyadh has recently hinted at further aid to Egypt, particularly in the energy sector, but this aid is far less generous than in previous years. Osama Kamal, Egypt’s former Minister of Petroleum, recently warned that Saudi Arabia cannot afford to invest in Egypt at the current oil prices.

Third, as oil-producing Gulf countries face their own economic challenges, remittances sent home by Egyptians working in these countries are plummeting. While Cairo’s banks received $22 billion in transfers in 2014, that figure declined to $18 billion in 2015. This is attributed to the Gulf economies’ stagnation and limited austerity measures, as well as the large discrepancy between the Egyptian official exchange rate and that of the black market.

Finally, cheap energy prices are limiting Egypt’s access to foreign currency via the Suez Canal. According to a report by SeaIntel, cheaper oil and cheaper fuel has already pushed many maritime cargo ships to take the longer route around the Cape of Good Hope instead to avoid the now uneconomical canal tariffs. Between October 2015 and the new year, 115 ships have already taken the longer, but now cheaper, route. More ominously, the commodity sector’s global decline has thus far been due to oversupply. If demand also declines due to a slowdown in the Chinese economy or emerging market credit problems, Egypt stands to lose even more dollars from the contraction in international maritime trade, on top of diminishing oil and LNG cargo revenues.

This foreign currency crisis—exacerbated by low energy prices—has broad social, economic, political and geostrategic implications for Egypt. On the socioeconomic front, Egypt faces a growing need to borrow from the International Monetary Fund, which will give it little choice other than to embark on a painful array of structural reforms, austerity measures, and currency devaluation. These will pass tremendous costs to Egypt’s already strained consumers. The current inflation level of approximately 10 percent is likely to increase while the economy slows and jobs become scarcer. Additionally, cutting public spending by taking on the country’s bloated bureaucracy has proven no easy task, as the government confronts a powerful lobby of public employees numbering—according to divergent Egyptian government estimates—between 5 and 7 million. For instance, in January parliament reviewed hundreds of laws that President El-Sisi had passed in 2015, but the only one they struck down was the civil service law, which would have substantially curtailed hiring in the public sector and effectively frozen wages.

The current currency crisis will hit Egyptians across the board. Unusual shortages and price hikes in staples such as rice, cooking oil, and medicine are spreading. Some companies—including General Motors, LG, Air France, British Airways, and Italcementi—have either suspended operations temporarily or considered exiting the market entirely, due to their inability to repatriate earnings or access dollars needed for imports. The government’s recent decision to increase tariffs on a host of imported products to limit the pressure on the Egyptian pound highlights the impact of the dollar problem on manufacturers, importers, workers, and customers alike.

On the political front, President El-Sisi faces the seemingly contradictory challenge of managing the country’s finances while simultaneously forestalling and suppressing manifestations of public unrest. Given the rapid decline in Egyptians’ living standards and welfare benefits, outbursts of public anger may begin from professional syndicates, labor unions, and even government employees. Should these groups openly defy the regime’s security forces, they may quickly be joined by a host of other groups and ordinary citizens. This is already happening with the Egyptian Medical Syndicate, Alexandria bus drivers, Cairo taxi drivers, and labor unions in Alexandria and the Nile Delta. Public criticism of the president and the government, a taboo since El-Sisi came to power, is becoming common on media channels considered close to state institutions. In short, given the economic outlook, Egypt is likely to suffer from disruptive sociopolitical turmoil that will dampen hopes for political stability and further impede the government’s ability to turn the economy around.

This article is reprinted with permission of Sada. It can be accessed online here.

Yasser El-Shimy is a senior teaching fellow at Boston University and the former Egypt analyst for the International Crisis Group. On Twitter @underreported.