Finally . . . Al Jazeera Picks Up the Story

It's about time. Al Jazeera English is finally telling the story of the crackdown from the perspective of detainees' families (similar to our friends Shubbar and Hajar).

Check out this story, which includes footage of the crackdown and an interview with the wife of an abducted man.

AJE also ran some of the first video confirming reports that the government of Bahrain has destroyed over a dozen Shia mosques:



Interestingly, someone in Qatar has decided to start pressing the Obama Administration to protect human rights. We'll see if this shift convinces the Obama team to press their allies in Manama a bit harder. There may be a voice for the voiceless Shia in Bahrain after all.

Human Rights Abuses in Bahrain on Al Jazeera?

The Washington Post published a story on Friday that mostly supports the view that the Al Jazeera TV network is largely ignoring the crackdown in Bahrain. After their extensive coverage of uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, their relative silence on Bahrain has been deafening. 

Perhaps in response, Al Jazeera English ran this story on Friday's hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives Tom Lantos Commission on Human Rights (a non-legislative committee):

Three things are striking about this story. First, CNN interviewed all three of the same witnesses quite some time ago (see earlier posts on this blog). Second, the CNN stories, reported by Amber Lyon, carried some gruesome video and eyewitness accounts, but this one was confined to footage of the U.S. Capitol building: hard-hitting vs. dry, academic policy debate. Third, the CNN stories made the Bahraini government look bad, but this one makes the U.S. government look indifferent or hypocritical. Either way, Al Jazeera's approach is quite tepid and its target misplaced.

While the Post story suggests that Al Jazeera English has been tougher than the Arabic version, a quick comparison with CNN demonstrates that even the English version has avoided criticizing the Bahraini regime.

Al Jazeera's motto is "a voice for the voiceless." But that should be amended to read, "--except for the voiceless in the Arabian Gulf."

Tiananmen on the Gulf

It's not very often that Bahrain, a country our family lived in for a year, makes the top headlines. But, sadly, it did today.

In the middle of last night (late night on the East Coast of the US), Bahrain's security forces cracked down on a peaceful encampment of protestors at the Pearl Roundabout in Bahrain, shooting tear gas, shotguns, and rubber bullets into the crowd. At least three people were killed and hundreds injured, some of them seriously.

Yet again, al Jazeera's coverage is a bit behind the story, while CNN offers better reporting--including images that remind one very much of the Tiananmen Square massacre in China. Armored personnel carriers were seen rumbling down one of the main highways toward the site of the now-disbanded demonstrations.

The question now is whether the opposition forces will respond with more protests. They have already announced a day of protests on Monday, but I also think that people will pour out into the streets tomorrow after midday Friday prayers.

Toby Jones, a historian at Rutgers University and a family friend of ours, offered an insightful analysis on last night's PBS NewsHour program. Even as he was being interviewed, the security forces were mobilizing to crack down on the peaceful demonstrators. Toby noted, as I did in my previous post, that this is now very serious. The seriousness has multiplied after last night's crackdown.

I continue to be very concerned about the dangers of the situation in Bahrain--and across the region. If things get uglier in Bahrain, as seems likely, this will have implications for the Shia population across the straits in eastern Saudi Arabia, which is the primary oil-producing region in the country. Kuwait, too, has a Shia minority (roughly 25% of the population) with ties to those in Bahrain. Meanwhile, across the Gulf, the Iranians are watching closely, as they feel a kinship with their fellow Shia. Libya, Algeria, Yemen, and Jordan are also facing unhappy young people who demand an end to corruption and a start to political power-sharing.

We are seeing a wave of revolutionary pressures that rivals 1848 or 1989. And it's not clear when that wave will crest or whether peaceful protesters can win out. As China showed, sometimes violent repression can keep a regime in power. The Al Khalifa family of Bahrain is banking on that, but they may overdraw on their account. I pray that they will see the wisdom of power-sharing and a peaceful end.

Egypt's Crisis: Tunisia, Tumult, or Tienanmen?

For much of the past three days, I've been glued to al-Jazeera's English-language live streaming video feed, watching Egypt unravel. Their Cairo bureau has been shut down by the government, but they continue to broadcast the most detailed reports from the streets that I've seen. As I note briefly in the book, al-Jazeera is a great example of globalization, allowing English speakers to get a sense of how the Arab world frames events. Right now, this TV network based in Qatar is far ahead of the rest of the world's media outlets on the Egypt story, helping us understand what's really going on. (For the record, I've found New York Times coverage to be a solid second best.)

Egyptians have taken instant inspiration from Tunisia's ouster of Ben Ali due to a quick-moving media cycle, which now includes cellphones, text messaging, Facebook, and Twitter. Although Mubarak's regime tried to clamp down by shutting off virtually all Internet servers and mobile phone service in Egypt on Friday, people were still watching al-Jazeera, which was much harder to shut down (unless they turned off all electricity, and even then people could power up generators). And you can imagine how angry people were without internet or cellphones.

What does this have to do with globalization, you might ask. Drawing on Jan Aart Scholte's definition, we can say that globalization is the process of increasing simultaneous and instantaneous interactions. We are more and more able to track events as they happen, right along with the people living through them. Knowing people who live and work in Egypt, and having been there three times, I am stunned to imagine what they are going through and I feel like I am almost there.

Being a political scientist, though, I have to speculate about what might happen next. Will this be another Tunisia? Or something else?

Everyone's comparing Egypt's protests to Tunisia's recent Jasmine Revolution. But Egypt's masses seem much less organized, reflecting Egypt's larger, more atomized, and more oppressed society. So far there is still no credible opposition leadership, whereas Tunisia had labor unions and student groups that pulled together cohesive demonstrations. Egypt's protests seem more chaotic and leaderless. That could change, but so far I don't see this looking like Tunisia's successful revolution.

Instead, tumult has erupted. The last two nights have seen looting, as the police evaporated from the streets. Either the government has started to collapse or the withdrawal of police was a deliberate strategy by the authorities, with the hope that they could sow enough chaos to justify a military crackdown. Although the military has appeared on the streets, to the welcome of the crowds, they have held back so far (apart from protecting key government ministry buildings). Whether intentional or unintentional, the breakdown of law and order is a deeply disturbing development. Cairo, a city of 18 million people, was chaotic and crazy even when the state kept a strong hand. Now there's a good chance that all hell will break loose. It's not clear that any government will have an easy time of restoring control there.

So could this be a Tienanmen Square situation? In response to widespread student protests there, the Chinese government on June 4, 1989 ordered tanks to open fire and kill civilians, brutally crushing the reform movement and stopping any steps toward democracy.

It's hard to imagine Egypt's military attacking its own people. Plus, it's hard to imagine that this would work. The anger at the regime is much more widespread than what China had in 1989. Apart from students, most Chinese citizens were willing to put up with their government, which delivered rising living standards. Unlike China's regime, however, Egypt's is weak and ineffective. Any attempt to use force would probably be inconsistently applied, thereby provoking more frustration. And attempts to limit media coverage also won't work. The news will get out, even if in a trickle.

If Mubarak's regime thinks it can pull off a Tienanmen-style crackdown, I think they will be disappointed. And if they try it, they will only provoke a greater popular backlash, as well as international isolation, thereby contributing to Mubarak's eventual demise. Repression might stretch the crisis out for a while, prolonging the regime, but it will only shed blood for naught.

It could be a messy few weeks or months, but Mubarak will be out of office relatively soon. I pray that all this will happen as quickly and peacefully as possible--and that peace will be restored to the streets of Cairo with ease.

Al Jazeera News as Globalization

Robert Kaplan of the Atlantic Monthly is one of my favorite journalists--even when I disagree with the gist of his stories. He travels incessantly, writes passionately, and speculates widely, about all things global. And now he's just published an interesting piece entitled "Why I Love Al Jazeera." Good stuff.

After summarizing recent news coverage at the English language version of Al Jazeera International, he discusses the benefits of getting one's news from a more globally minded source. Like a good journalist, he also raises some concerns about AJ--describing its influence as "insidious"--but he suggests that he'll be watching them more often than American media outlets to get a true picture of world events.

In the book, I briefly mention Al Jazeera International as an example of the complex media environment produced in a globalizing world:

"A small indicator of the complexity of cultural globalization is the fact that one can now view the Arabic network al-Jazeera’s news programs in English in the United States" (p. 10).

The program is produced in the small Gulf state of Qatar, broadcast in English, and beamed around the world via cable, satellite, or internet video.

According to Kaplan,

Over just a few days in late May, when I actively monitored Al Jazeera (although I watched it almost every evening during a month in Sri Lanka), I was treated to penetrating portraits of Eritrean and Ethiopian involvement in the Somali war, of the struggle of Niger River rebelsagainst the Nigerian government in the oil-rich south of the country, of the floods in Bangladesh, of problems with the South African economy, of the danger that desertification poses to Bedouin life in northern Sudan, of the environmental devastation around the Aral Sea, of Sikh violence in India after an attack on a temple in Austria, of foreign Islamic fightersin the southern Philippines, of microfinancing programs in Kenya, of rigged elections in South Ossetia, of human-rights demonstrations in Guatemala, and of much more. Al Jazeera covered the election campaigns in Lebanon and Iran in more detail than anyone else, as well as the Somali war and the Pakistani army offensive in the Swat Valley. There was, too, an unbiased one-hour documentary about the Gemayel family of Christian politicians and warlords in Lebanon, and a half-hour-long investigation of the displacement of the poor from India’s new economic zones.

Compare this coverage of the globe--by a globalized network--to the coverage by U.S.-based networks: I didn't notice a single story in Kaplan's list about Hollywood celebrities!

P.S. If you think Kaplan's off his rocker, then check out the archived blog posts on Al Jazeera by George Washington University professor Marc Lynch, aka Abu Aardvark. Professor Lynch has been tracking Arab media for years, keeping tabs on Al Jazeera and female Arabic pop music stars (he had a crush on Lebanese singer Nancy Ajram).