Audience of the Female Voices conference

Emna ben Arab (Assistant Professor, University of Sfax) and Laryssa Chomiak (Director, Centre d’Etudes Maghrébines á Tunis – CEMAT) participated in a Hollings Center Regional Policy Dialogue entitled, Economies of the Arab Spring(October 2011).  They were interested in carrying the discussion a step further by examining how conservative parties on the rise in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco are dealing with women’s integration into socio-economic life. Thus was born the Female Voices conference concept.

Debating the Politics, Economics and Gender of Islamism: Female Voices from Ennahda, Freedom and Justice Party and Attawassoul took place in Tunis on April 12, 2012.  The conference brought together women members of parliament and party officers from Egypt, Mauritania and Tunisia.  Sanem Güner was in Tunis to attend the conference and interviewed the organizers and speakers on how they see the matter of women within Islamist politics.

Interview with Female Voices speakers

Laryssa Chomiak, CEMAT and Yaye Coulibaly, Attawassoul Party

Güner: Could you tell us how you developed the idea of the conference?

Laryssa Chomiak: Dr. Ben Arab and I met at a Hollings Center dialogue in Istanbul last October, just a few days after the Tunisian elections of October 23, 2011, and we had our first conversation about the conference then.  We debated the meaning of the Tunisian elections in the context of so many changes in the region.  Having this dialogue in Turkey, we of course discussed the question of the Turkish model, a debate that resonated in public space in Tunisia, especially regarding the question of women in politics.  We also spoke of the role of gender in the new political contexts across the region.  Will the role of women change in post-revolutionary Tunisia and across the region? What are the economic advantages and challenges for women?  What about social changes and new opportunities? Here at the Female Voices conference in Tunis, we are fortunate to have a dynamic group of women from Tunisia, Egypt and Mauritania discuss these very questions.

Güner: Ahead of the conference you conducted a survey to identify crucial issues relating to the rise of Islamist political parties. What were some of the results?

Emna ben Arab, University of Sfax

Emna ben Arab:  We asked questions about how respondents see the situation of women in political, economic, social and cultural areas and what their future expectations are. We saw that there is a high rate of uncertainty in social issues.  People are undecided about how mentalities will be affected and how this will reflect on women’s social position under an Islamist government.  Respondents believe that women will ask for more economic participation compared to the pre-Arab Spring period.  A majority of the respondents said that women’s seemingly high participation in public life under the former regime was a façade so that Ben Ali could cover up his otherwise bad performance. We held the survey among 1800 postgraduate students in three universities – Tunis, Sfax and Manouba – in February 2012. Average respondent age was 26, and we got a high 92 percent response rate.

Güner: Ms. Labidi, how does your party – Ennahda – see the role of women?

Mahrizia Labidi, Vice Chair of the Tunisian National Founding Assembly, making a press statement after the conference

Mahrizia Labidi (Vice Chair, National Founding Assembly, Tunisia): Ben Ali’s dictatorship succeeded in marketing the image of a liberated Tunisian woman. However the question we should ask is, what do women want in reality? For us, women’s public role in Tunisian, Arab and African societies are interlinked. Women should not be passive consumers; they should go back to their Islamic points of reference to find the encouragement to be active. If a woman is in politics, she has to prove she can be able to swim with the big fish.

Güner:Ms. Mohamad and Ms. Salama, as women in political life, how would you describe your own journeys?

Nermeen Mohamad, Freedom and Justice Party

Nermeen Mohamad (Researcher, Freedom and Justice Party, Egypt): I always felt that Arabs are very defensive and I did not like that rhetoric of powerlessness and exceptionalism. I decided that I can beat this and become a powerful person, and that for me meant becoming a member of Congress. I don’t think I even knew what that entailed, but I started living my life with this aim. I was politicized in high school and adopted an Islamic form of existence. I never saw myself less than a man. I always thought that I could be or do anything I aspired to.

Noha Salama (Self assessment trainer, Freedom and Justice Party, Egypt): At the conference, even before introducing myself, I began my presentation by describing the day that I walked to Tahrir because it made me who I am today. I walked for four hours alongside a woman carrying her baby on her back. I thought, “How can she be thinking of anything else but to feed her baby?” The whole world was expecting that people would revolt out of poverty in Egypt. But Tahrir proved to be beyond that. People were asking for their freedom as much as for their economic rights. When you start asking for your freedom, you become a politician.

Güner:What checks and balances are your parties proposing in their programs so that people don’t fear a reversal of their rights?

Noha Salama, Freedom and Justice Party, and Rafiaa ben Mohamed, Ennahda

Rafiaa ben Mohamed (Officer, Ennahda, Tunisia): The democratic constitution that we are now working on will be the guarantee for everybody’s rights. At Ennahda, we believe in citizenship rights – that is, equal rights for men and women – and we don’t like separating the one from the other. As for people’s fears, all I can say is that it is not possible that we’ll bring dictatorship back.

Nermeen Mohamad: I want everyone to feel safe that what happened before will never happen again. We have to guarantee freedom of choice for everyone. I also don’t see the issue as men against women. Women and men are equal in dignity and responsibility but they are not identical. In any balanced society men and women must have clearly defined roles, but our party does not prescribe strict roles to anyone or try to limit anyone. Approximately 50 percent of Muslim Brotherhood members are women.

Reflections on the Female Voices conference

The Female Voices conference was a good opportunity to discuss how women’s demands fare within the broader context of post-Arab Spring politics.  The conference was also an occasion for a debate across supporters of Islamist parties and secularists (or ‘modernists’ in Tunisia).  Both sides have strong preconceptions about each other but have not engaged in political dialogue, mainly because the Islamist camp was not allowed to be in politics before the Arab revolutions.  At the conference, the secularist group was very skeptical of the abundant references to Islam in the discussion.  One member of the audience noted that women’s rights (or human rights for that matter) could not be tied to any religion and ideology and that there needed to be universal norms.  Others in the audience asked questions about much-debated issues in Islam such as inheritance rights, polygamy, divorce and adoption—they were curious to hear what conservative women had to say about these matters.  The responses from the party representatives were always very diplomatic, avoiding a stand-off.  Some in the audience saw this as sidestepping difficult issues or as evidence of a hidden agenda.  Others interpreted this as pragmatism, a sign that conservative women in politics have developed an interpretation of Islam that is more in line with the zeitgeist and less ideological.

Ultimately it is too soon to tell whether conservative governments will expand or erode women’s social, political and economic rights. Consider the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey, one of the inspirations for this conference.  For some, AKP has proved itself a unifying party that is both the voice of devout Muslims but that also speaks for liberal and democratic values.  Yet others are concerned that AKP—like many other parties—has fallen short in developing policies for women’s political and economic participation.  In times of political transition, there are ultimately no easy answers to dilemmas of political representation.  But the Female Voices conference indicates that debates in the years ahead in Tunisia, Egypt and Mauritania will be at once more difficult and more democratic.

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Joanie Meharry and Shaharzad Akbar shooting on site at Darulaman Palace. Photo by Jake Simkin.

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To many, Afghanistan is a war-torn country doomed to conflict. For those who have discovered its true identity and potential, however, there are many stories to be told about it besides war. Shaharzad Akbar and Joanie Meharry are two young women who are up for this task. They met at the Next Generation Dialogue on Afghanistan – U.S. Relations: Development, Investment and Cultural Exchange organized by the Hollings Center, and they decided to organize an oral history project to document  efforts to preserve Afghanistan’s cultural heritage. The Hollings Center supported this project through its Small Grants Program. Below readers can learn about the project and read a fascinating interview with Akbar and Meharry about their experiences in the field and how the project influenced them.

The Story of “Untold Stories”

Shortly before the exhibition Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World went on display at the British Museum in March, 2011, Carla Grissmann – a stunning and stoic woman who had spent a better part of her life protecting Afghanistan’s cultural heritage – passed away. With her went innumerable untold stories about the protection of the country’s cultural heritage from those tremendous years of political turmoil during the Soviet occupation, Mujahideen civil war, and Taliban era. Joanie Meharry had interviewed her in person once in her London flat two years earlier, but not on a recorder and certainly not on video. She regrets not having recorded that interview because anyone who knew Grissman knew what a tremendous loss it was for the recent history of Afghanistan’s cultural heritage.  This experience inspired her to undertake the oral history project.

Shaharzad Akbar, on the other hand, was interested in researching Afghanistan’s cultural history because she saw it as an opportunity both to learn oral history methods but  perhaps more importantly to learning about the cultural heritage of her own country.

Akbar and Meharry conducted five interviews in total with people who have made significant contributions to the field of cultural heritage in Afghanistan. Three interviews were conducted with Afghan cultural specialists: Omara Khan Massoudi, Director of the National Museum; Omar Sultan, Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Information and Culture; and Abdul Wasay Najimi, an architect for the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (Babur’s Garden) and a professor at Kabul University. Two interviews were conducted with international specialists: Laura Tedesco, who at the time of her interview served as Cultural Heritage Program Manager for the United States Embassy to Afghanistan; and Nancy Hatch Dupree, Director of the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University.  The first three interviews were conducted in Dari and the latter two in English.

Shaharzad Akbar interviewing Nancy Hatch Dupree. Photo by Joanie Meharry.

Due to time and budget limitations, as well as manifold security issues, Akbar and Meharry limited their field work to Kabul. They then created a list of potential respondents/interviewees and arranged interviews with the five individuals per their availability and interest in the project.

They published four interviews in Dari in 8 AM, the major daily newspaper in Afghanistan. The fifth interview, by Mr. Najimi will be soon released. In English, they have published the interview with Mr. Sultan with the Popular Archaeology website, and are currently coordinating the publication of the remaining interviews. The first video, Who is the Museum Director?, was released in December on the Kabul at Work website.  The video of the interview with Nancy Hatch Dupree will be released shortly, and the remaining videos will be released throughout the year.

Akbar and Meharry are hoping to publish a Dari/Pashtu and English booklet of these interviews provided they can find interested publishers.  They will also present the project interviews at universities in Kabul at the beginning of spring 2012 term.

Q&A with Shaharzad Akbar and Joanie Meharry

Akbar and Meharry responded to Sanem Güner’s questions on some of the up close and personal details of their project.

Güner: Joanie, as an American, how did you become interested in Afghanistan and its cultural heritage?

Meharry: There was a sense of purpose that was punctuated by a series of defining moments. While studying political science as an undergraduate, I was assigned Jason Elliot’s adventuresome travelogue, An Unexpected Light. Another student who had been given the book remarked in passing, “it makes you want to go to Afghanistan, doesn’t it?”  It certainly does, I thought, so I began wading my way through all manner of books on Afghanistan.

Then in the summer of 2008 I went to visit the Hidden Treasures exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Somewhere between the 20,000 pieces of Afghanistan’s Begram ivories, Tepe Fullol bronzes, and Bactrian gold, I decided I needed to understand how modern politics interacted with this ancient culture. I was already planning to start an MSc in Middle Eastern Studies in the United Kingdom that year. And as an American, with thousands of my compatriots fighting in Afghanistan, it could be a way to contribute, to some degree, to the redevelopment of the country’s national identity.

Joanie Meharry in Darulaman. Photo by Jake Simkin.

The following March, I was invited on a trip to Afghanistan by Turquoise Mountain Foundation, a Scottish charity. There I met with the American cultural heritage specialist, Nancy Hatch Dupree, affectionately known as “Afghanistan’s grandmother” for her decades of dedication to cultural work. “You know what we need,” she dangled in front of me, “we need a work horse to document the history of the National Museum of Afghanistan.” So in 2009 that’s what I did.

Güner: What were your expectations and what were the realities when you went into the field to interview people for “Untold Stories”?

Meharry: I had expectations in broad strokes, and then let the spaces fill in as I went along. I knew that with such a project it was important to get to know the people in the community, build trust, listen, and be patient and flexible – and that all of these components would be entirely different things to grapple with in practice. The reality is far more complex than any book has ever adequately captured. For everyone has a story to tell, and what you cannot fully expect but quickly come to realize are the range of human qualities and experiences embodied in nearly everyone you meet. You can detect hints of this in the interviews.

Güner: Shaharzad, how did hearing the stories about the survival of Afghanistan’s cultural treasures affect you as an Afghan?

Akbar: I found this project and the interviews truly inspiring. The main take-away for me as a young Afghan who has grown up in periods of great instability was the value of preservation and importance of having a vision. Many development and other initiatives in Afghanistan are implemented in a spirit of emergency and without much thought given to their sustainability. Many of us Afghans currently think about daily survival, and fear planning for the years to come. Uncertainty has become a defining element in our personal and social lives, and influences the programmes and initiatives targeting the development of the country. As a development worker, I witnessed and suffered from the lack of vision affecting development programmes. In interviewing the cultural specialists for this project, I learned about the difficult history of Afghanistan from a different perspective, and I was inspired by the perseverance and dedication of the people who tried to save and/or saved the cultural heritage of Afghanistan, amidst war and destruction, never losing hope for a better future, and never undervaluing the importance of cultural heritage because of emergency, war or destruction. Their commitment to cultural heritage of Afghanistan, their hope and belief in a better future, and their courage in protecting what was important to Afghanistan and to them, never losing sight of history and the possibility of a better future, has inspired me to think more positively about future of Afghanistan and hopefully work more passionately to preserve the treasures of my country for coming generations and a better future.

Güner:  What particularly memorable experiences did you have while conducting the oral history project?

Shaharzad Akbar at interview with Nancy Hatch Dupree. Photo by Jake Simkin.

Akbar:For me, every interview is memorable in its own right. I learned new things inevery single interview and felt inspired by them. My visit to the museum, I must admit with embarrassment, was my first visit in many years. Speaking to Nancy Dupree was awe-inspiring in light of what I had heard about her and read from her.  But the most touching moment for me, was in Babur’s Garden. When Mr. Najimi was narrating his visit to the garden during the Taliban period, I was visualizing that description and comparing it with the current state of Babur’s Garden, and my heart was overwhelmed with both joy and concern. I felt grateful for the reconstruction of the Garden, and as a woman, for the ability to visit this historical place freely in such a beautiful day.  I was also worried at the prospect of future instability and its likely impact on something that was rebuilt with so much effort and hard work.  Destruction takes less than an hour, but the effort to re-build this garden and the love that was behind it could not be easily matched. Babur’s Garden in that moment symbolized to me every home, street, and structure that had been rebuilt or built with hope in the past 10 years and the fragility of all these monuments in the face of war and destruction.

Scott Seward Smith

Review and author interview by George Gavrilis, Executive Director of the Hollings Center

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Scott Seward Smith’s book masterfully covers the highs and lows of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan through a narrative that spans ten years and three elections.  With clear-headed analysis and rich insider data, Smith explains how the United Nations succeeded in organizing elections and legitimizing the Karzai government under the most difficult of circumstances but failed to lay the foundations for future democracy in Afghanistan. 

Afghanistan’s Troubled Transition begins with a unique glimpse into the role of the UN in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the late 1990s and its mediation efforts to end the Afghan civil war.  Later chapters discuss a number of pivotal events in Afghanistan’s recent history—the Bonn agreement, the Emergency and Constitutional Loya Jirgas (Grand Councils), and the elections of 2004, 2005, and 2009.  Smith’s chapters also detail the efforts of Afghans and the international community that went into making these events—from the Herculean task of registering millions of voters to convincing strongmen such as Rashid  Dostum to disarm and take part in the elections.  While the book credits many accomplishments in Afghanistan to the UN and to tireless personalities like Lakhdar Brahimi, it argues that the UN’s internal contradictions and the international community’s short-sighted efforts to prop up Karzai turned each and every electoral exercise into a political meltdown.

A substantial part of the book is focused on the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), which sought to advance the terms of the Bonn agreement through logistical, administrative, and political hurdles.  UNAMA staff navigated rubble-strewn roads and snowbound districts to set up regional offices, while at headquarters in Kabul, “tensions were high due to the physical proximity of stressed political officers,Bonn’s tight deadlines, and Brahimi’s exacting management style” (p. 27).

In organizing the Emergency Loya Jirga, UNAMA navigated innumerable political landmines, from international stakeholders who were incredulous that warlords were included, to President Hamid Karzai who was perpetually making political appointments to bolster his interim administration.  Karzai increased the size of his cabinet to over thirty ministries, created two vice presidents, several national advisor positions, and a number of national commissions to accommodate his Pashtun political base.  According to Smith, “even as Karzai entered the tent to announce parts of his cabinet at the final session, he was cornered by various leaders and, apparently, made last-minute changes to his list” (p. 35).

Campaign posters in lead-up to 2010 elections. Photo by George Gavrilis.

After the Loya Jirga, the UN set its sights on preparing for elections. The list of tasks was daunting: money had to be secured from international donors; roads had to be repaired and cleared; population data had to be compiled; district boundaries had to be affixed; electoral law had to be drafted; tens of thousands of electoral staff had to be hired and trained; and millions of voters had to be registered.

For some of these massive tasks, UN staff found minimalist solutions.  For example, the UNAMA election team did a back-of-the-envelope calculation to estimate Afghanistan’s eligible voting population, partly by extrapolating the 1979 census.  Other decisions were simply postponed, including the crucial decision of whether to hold presidential or parliamentary elections first. Afghan voter education teams were dispatched to the countryside to raise awareness but were unable to tell the public whether they would be electing a president or a parliament.

For Smith, the above logistical difficulties were only a backdrop to greater political problems.  The book vividly describes the chasm that developed between UNAMA and the UN’s Electoral Assistance Division (EAD).  For EAD, elections were a process, not an event.  Their value was in gradually building political consensus and democratic behavior. For UNAMA, the first elections were planned as a culminating “free and fair” exercise in good democracy.  As Smith sums it up:

“If all the money required was available immediately, and the Taliban cooperated with the registration plan, and the snowcap disappeared, and millions of Afghans quickly learned to read and write, and nothing that could go wrong did go wrong, the proposed timelines could possibly be met.  Only in the best of all fictional worlds was the plan feasible…It wasn’t a plan, it was arithmetic.” (p. 109)

Afghan election staff count ballots on polling station floor. Photo by George Gavrilis.

The book covers Karzai’s 2004 victory at the ballot boxes, the 2005 parliamentary vote, and the domestic and international repercussions of these elections.  Smith also presents the reader with a detailed discussion of the electoral debacle in 2009 and the controversy it ignited between UNAMA head Kai Eide and his deputy Peter Galbraith. Smith situates the dispute squarely within the book’s analytical context but weighs in with an insider’s view that will not make the Galbraith camp happy.

This book will make edifying reading for seasoned Afghanistan-watchers and non-specialists.  Few people know that Afghanistan had a parliament in the 1960s that, in certain respects, functioned better than the current one.  Even fewer readers will know that Afghanistan’s first female police officers were hired and trained to protect women’s voter registration teams, or that Afghanistan’s voter registration system was based on software developed for tiny Pacific Island states.  Smith also explains the fascinating inside story of how Afghanistan unintentionally wound up with a Parliament that is over 25% female.

Despite its title, this book is far more than a take down of Afghanistan’s first post-Taliban election.  It is a sobering story about the pitfalls of democratization, the impossibly short horizons of the international community, and the limits of even the most well-intentioned peacekeepers.

 Q&A with Author

Scott Seward Smith, a consultant on elections and democratization, was formerly Afghanistan team leader in the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations.  He recently attended the Hollings Center’s Next-Generation Dialogue on U.S.-Afghan Relations.

George Gavrilis recently sat down with Smith to discuss Afghanistan’s Troubled Transition (available from First Forum Press).

Gavrilis: It seems that the book’s lesson is that in Afghanistan, doing less can often be more.  Is that a fair statement? 

Smith: It’s interesting that you draw that conclusion. I actually feel very strongly that doing less can be more in Afghanistan. It wasn’t a message that I focused on in writing the book, but I’m glad it came through. My very first experience in Afghanistan was running a humanitarian project for a French NGO in 1995. The civil war was going on and there was hardly any international attention to the place. I learned then to appreciate the knowledge and the capacity of Afghans. They had much better ideas about how to help their country than we did. And of course they were hugely stubborn when we wanted to do things that they didn’t think would work. We had no internet in those days and very little contact with the outside world. I remember reading articles about the Balkans in some of the outdated magazines that now and then filtered into Kabul. I remember reading about the aid that was being given to Bosnia and thinking it was unjust because just as many people were being killed in Kabul as were being killed in Sarajevo. And I remember thinking, if only we could get some international troops here and a little bit of financial support. As they say, be careful what you wish for.

But the corollary to “less is more”, is that the “less” in terms of resources and international staff has to be compensated with “more” in terms of internationals who understand Afghanistan. This is easier said than done. The problem is that the Afghanistan that we built after 2001 is a rather different Afghanistan than what existed before. Many Afghans don’t even understand it. I remember an expert once saying about Karzai that he was playing the tribal game he learned on his grandfather’s knee, but the problem was that the rules had changed.

Gavrilis: As I read the book, I felt anxiety about all the crushing responsibilities and deadlines the UN faced.  What was it like to be on the staff of UNAMA?

Smith: Now here’s a point that I did intend to convey. One of the main themes that I was trying to get across was the lack of coherence between decisions that seemed to be taken almost breezily at the political level, but without much thought given to the realities on the ground. Much of the anxiety that comes through is that of mid-level technical experts working like crazy to meet political demands that, at a certain point, didn’t make much sense. You quote in your review one of these moments, when I say that it wasn’t a plan it was just arithmetic. What bothers me is not so much the fact that these political decisions are taken, but that there is a huge resistance to these decisions being revised once it is clear that they are unrealistic.  I describe what I call fetishism over the Bonn timeline: Once certain events had been held according to the timetable, there was a belief that if any future deadlines were missed, the whole process would fall apart. I found this to be tremendously short-sighted.

I end my book by saying that I have told the story from an international perspective, but we also need the Afghan perspective. I refuse to believe that Afghanistan is ungovernable, that Afghans are incapable of living with each other under some form of political order, or that the country is destined to perpetual civil war. But the comportment of this generation of Afghan leaders makes it harder and harder to make the optimistic argument. They have squandered an opportunity of world-historical proportions, and this will make it far easier for the international community to leave under irresponsible but ultimately understandable conditions.

In short, what has changed over time from the perspective of a UNAMA staff member is the sense that once you felt you were putting your life at risk for a project that offered a better future for a people that desperately deserved it. Now, you feel that you are part of an enabling mechanism for a political class that has lost its legitimacy. That is hard on morale.

Gavrilis: Afghanistan has been in the news a lot lately: the killing of UN staff in Mazar-e Sharif, the ongoing saga of the 2010 Parliamentary elections, and political assassinations.  How do these affect what the UN can do in Afghanistan?

Smith: I think that the UN role in Afghanistan now is somewhat diminished. The “transition” plan that was negotiated between ISAF and the Afghan government, and that was agreed to by ISAF heads of state at the Lisbon summit last November, is, I believe, a pretty coherent plan and the best chance to achieve something that resembles success in Afghanistan. But it is largely an ISAF-driven plan. In addition, in 2009 and 2010 the UN had to take decisions on elections that angered President Karzai, who marginalized UNAMA. I think in both elections the UN did what it had to do, but the fact is that we have paid a cost for it in terms of political influence.

The UN now faces a huge dilemma. In the aftermath of the Mazar attack, many UN staff I spoke to said that the problem was that we have built walls high enough to isolate us from the Afghan people but not strong enough to protect ourselves against attackers. For whatever reason, the UN has become a target of the insurgency and neither the Afghan security forces nor ISAF have proven able or willing to protect the UN when it is attacked. Before Mazar there was Herat, where luckily there were no casualties. And before Herat was the Bakhtar guest house attack in Kabul in October 2009, where five internationals were killed. The question forming in the mind of many UN staff, especially those who have been in Afghanistan a long time, is whether the value they add is worth the risks that they face. The value they add depends on access to the population, but access to the population increases the risks that they face. It is a very difficult dilemma that is not made easier by the Afghan government’s fairly constant criticisms of the UN.

Gardez from above. Photo by Scott Smith.

Dr. Udum and Dr. Bleek designed the workshop to cover a range of issues: a) the technology of nuclear energy and weapons; b) the evolution and politics of non-proliferation treaties and norms; and c) views on Turkish and U.S. positions regarding Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Udum and Bleek designed the workshop to bridge the scientific, historical and foreign policy dimensions of nuclear debates and enabled workshop participants to explore the issue from a rich baseline of knowledge.

The science of nuclear matters:  In a morning session, Dr. Haluk Utku (Hacettepe University, Institute of Nuclear Sciences) delivered a lecture on the science of nuclear technology and covered a range of subjects such as plutonium production, nuclear fuel, and types of nuclear weapons.  He fielded questions on the linkage between nuclear energy and weapons programs and explained the technological threshold that a state has to cross to go from one to the other.

Politics of non-proliferation:  In a second session, Dr. Udum delivered a lecture on the evolution of non-proliferation efforts from the 1940s to the present.  This was followed by a debate on the robustness of the NPT and disagreement over the meaning of its articles.  While some participants argued that the NPT had failed to arrest nuclear weapons programs (i.e., North Korea’s), Dr. Udum noted that an underappreciated benefit of the NPT is that it serves as series of shared talking points for the international community and allows states to have a structured, off-the-shelf response when proliferation crises arise.

Turkish and U.S. views on Iran.  In a third session, Dr. Mustafa Kibaroğlu (Bilkent University, Department of International Relations) and Dr. Bleek examined U.S. and Turkish perceptions on Iran’s nuclear program.  Their presentations highlighted the chasm between Turkish and U.S. views on Iran and sparked a debate on whether that chasm is bridgeable.  When it comes to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Turkish views tend to prize diplomacy while discussions in the U.S. are often more skeptical about negotiations and instead emphasize sanctions and the possibility of military action.

Some participants noted that Turkey does not want to harm relations with neighboring Iran especially if there is still doubt about how far Iran intends to go with its nuclear ambitions.  Indeed, Dr. Bleek notes that most Iran analysts “don’t think that Iran [itself] has taken a decision about how far to go.”

Please click here to access the full workshop report authored by organizers Dr. Udum, Dr. Bleek, and workshop rapporteur Aaron Stein.

Joanie Meharry, independent scholar in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies

In an isolated valley in Logar province, located about 25 miles south-east of Kabul, an armed convoy moves in to secure a makeshift landing pad. On board the helicopter is a group of American cultural specialists and international journalists coming from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul to visit the 4^th-5^th century Buddhist monastery of Mes Aynak (“little copper well”). Further down the road, a team of Afghan soldiers guard the entrance to the archaeological site with rocket-propelled grenades.

Logar Valley, Afghanistan

Not long ago, the sight of an American helicopter in Mes Aynak would have been a rare one indeed. Culture had not played a significant role in the U.S. Embassy’s functions in Afghanistan since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. For many years, culture had been handled by short-term officers in the Public Affairs Department, affording little continuity with each handover. And security regulations had inhibited frequent visits to major cultural and historical sites.

Since 2010, there has been a decisive change.  The U.S. Embassy’s recently appointed Cultural Heritage Program Manager, an archaeologist educated at New York University, routinely travels to Mes Aynak to monitor the excavation alongside Afghan officials.

The Mes Aynak archaeological site is scheduled to be razed within the next three years by China Metallurgical Group, a Beijing-based mining corporation, after an initial US$3 billion agreement was struck with the Afghan government to develop a copper mine about a 1,000 yards away. Yet the deal is the beginning of a critical opportunity to expand the untapped mineral wealth of the country – so vast it is speculated by American geologists to be worth US$1 trillion.

The Afghan government agreed to a three-year excavation of the site by a team of Afghan archaeologists from the National Institute of Archaeology and French archaeologists from the Délégation Archéologique Française en Afghanistan (DAFA) to salvage the finds before the site is destroyed. The Buddhist monastery is now also one of the most secure archaeological sites in Afghanistan as a result of the government’s plan to limit further looting.

Mes Aynak's treasures under guard

While Mes Aynak is perhaps the most pressing example of Afghanistan’s endangered cultural heritage, the U.S. Cultural Heritage Manager also makes frequent rounds to monitor equally significant cultural and historical sites in Bamiyan, Ghazni, Herat, and Kabul. The position was specifically created last year to place a U.S. focus on the cultural heritage sector in Afghanistan, which has received increasing levels of attention from policymakers after the looting of the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad in 2003.

Across Afghanistan, thousands of unguarded archaeological sites are threatened by natural deterioration, destruction, and looting. Antiquities that demonstrate the ancient Chinese, Greek, Indian, and Persian influences in Afghanistan are consistently pillaged and smuggled onto the international art market. In many instances, the plunder is overseen by organized gangs, hiring impoverished villagers who are struggling to meet their basic needs.

So as the largest international force in Afghanistan, how is the U.S. choosing to help protect and promote the country’s cultural heritage? In previous years, U.S. policymakers have suggested funding large-scale, immediate-impact projects in order to help win the insurgency. However, Afghan cultural specialists are adamant that long-term, training-based projects will be of greater benefit to the future of Afghanistan. The embassy is now employing a broader approach towards cultural heritage focused on these essential points:

Assessing need. The U.S. Embassy is funding a wide range of projects to address basic but critical issues. Recent plans have ranged from publishing children’s books for schools in Ghazni, to documenting archaeological finds from Balkh, and erecting signs in Dari and Pashtu at the major cultural and historical sites across the country, which have been hitherto unmarked. Centrally located sites will also have signs with English. In Mes Aynak, the embassy is planning to build a conservation and storage facility in order to house the most recent Buddhist finds. The temporary space will be constructed less than a mile away from the site in order to store artifacts that cannot be transported to the National Museum in Kabul.

Investing Afghan. At the heart of each of these projects there is an emphasis on the training and mentoring of Afghans. Not all of the projects are currently organized by Afghans, yet investing in the education of Afghans, particularly the younger generation, is the surest way to build capacity in the country.

Providing continuity. The Cultural Heritage Manager will be training a replacement before continuing in the position from Washington, DC. In this way, the initiatives the current manager begins are more likely to be carried out by a successor. Making good on promises is the simplest way to build trust with Afghan counterparts.

Thinking long-term. The U.S. is now funding both short-term and long-term projects. In March, the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl W. Eikenberry, promised a minimum US$5 million donation to contribute to the construction of a new National Museum of Afghanistan. The U.S. also pledged at least US$2 million to fund a three-year museum partnership with an American institution in order to facilitate training and capacity building for the National Museum staff. From Afghanistan, the Minister of Information and Culture, Makhdoom Raheen, has promised US$2 million, to be built with the  proceeds from a touring exhibition of the country’s most valuable antiquities. The Ministry of Defense (MOD) has donated the land for the new site. Finally the World Bank is set to contribute US$1 million, with a minimum total of US$10 million to be spent for the new National Museum.

The exhibition, Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World, has travelled to Europe, the United States, and Canada and is presently on display at the British Museum. It has been particularly successful in London; by opening night some 100,000 people had reserved tickets for the spring season. If the plan to build the new National Museum in Kabul is successful, the rare antiquities from Ai Khanum, Begram, Tepe Fullol, and Tillya Tepe will be able to return to Afghanistan as a permanent exhibition. Thus, the new museum will be a valuable future investment as it draws in visitors and creates outreach programs to inspire a greater appreciation for the country’s cultural heritage.

While the above initiatives are encouraging, the future of Afghan cultural heritage preservation is intimately tied to the Obama administration’s strategic vision for US-Afghan relations that will unfold in the coming months.

Lara Friedman, director of policy and government relations for Americans for Peace Now April 15, 2011

In collaboration with Kadir Has University International Relations Department and the Center for International and European Studies (CIES)

What are the commonalities and differences among the uprisings across the Middle East? Who are the winners and losers of the Arab spring? What are the implications of the situation in the Arab world on the United States and Turkey? At this first joint Hollings Center-Kadir Has University event, Lara Friedman answered these questions and made a number of predictions on how recent developments in the Middle East and North Africa might play out.

In her talk, Friedman noted that several common themes define the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Jordan and Bahrain:

-        they are all genuinely indigenous (and have nothing to do with the Bush administration’s democracy promotion agenda),

-        they are strongly nationalistic  at the expense  of pan-Islamist or pan-Arabist tones,

-        they are leaderless,

-        they all brought a sense of lingering and expectant empowerment particularly in countries where the uprisings succeeded in toppling governments.

The differences among these countries are also noteworthy. For instance the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt were born out of very different socio-political dynamics. Friedman lived in Tunis previously and argued that the Tunisian regime’s oppression was met suddenly and unexpectedly by explosive frustration. In Cairo, people already had a tradition of using the street as a venue to show opposition, and the events of January 25 onwards that forced Mubarak out of presidency were a culmination of that existing political protest culture. The state apparatus and structure are also different in all of these states. Friedman described the state structure in Yemen, for instance, as a “gentlemen’s agreement” among the tribes and the President, and once the President is out of the picture, it is anyone’s guess what will transpire.

Friedman was cautiously optimistic about the future of the so-called Arab Spring. She emphasized significant challenges ahead:

-        Public opinion is volatile – in the case of Egypt for instance, there was unified opposition against Mubarak, but once he was gone, people factionalized quickly. The imminent referendum after Mubarak’s departure divided people between those who wanted radical change and thus a complete renewal of the constitution, and those who wanted to go back to stability and would remain content with partial reform.

-        There appears to be little desire or capability for politics. Opposition movements are young and dynamic, but their strength –such as their civil society, leaderless roots– may prove to be their weakness as well unless they shift away from protest modes and create political machinery.

-        There is an unrealistic understanding of the timeline of democracy. Democratization will certainly pave the way for more transparent and participatory rule, but it will not solve all of the problems, especially economic ones like poverty and corruption. Disappointment in the short term is inevitable.

-        With the opening up of the political space, Islamist parties will now have their chance to have a say in the running of their countries. Whether their rise will place religion centrally in politics remains to be seen.

As for the winners and losers of the Middle East uprisings and regime changes, Friedman named the following:

-        If the foremost winners are the Arab publics, the foremost losers are the status-quo leaders. Some had to step down and others had to make major concessions.

-        External forces such as al Qaeda are losers.   They were using ubiquitous regime oppression across the Middle East to recruit and rhetorically whip up disgruntled publics..

-        The Muslim Brotherhood is a winner for managing to endure the political embargo of the Mubarak regime, and they will be significantly represented in the upcoming elections in Egypt.

-        Iran is neither a clear winner or loser. Ahmedinejad is given certain plaudits for long being a critic of U.S.-backed governments like Mubarak’s, but many Arab publics see Ahmedinejad as a brutal and oppressive dictator.

The situation in the Arab world has implications for Turkey and the United States. Friedman suggested that the United States is caught in a dilemma–to intervene or not intervene.. On one hand, the more the U.S. meddles with the internal affairs of these countries, the more it will be blamed regardless of the outcome. On the other hand, opposition movements are desperately in need of international support in their struggle against incumbent regimes and some expect outside countries to advocate in their favor. From a realpolitik perspective, Friedman suggested that the United States cannot afford to be marginalized. However, as long as it does not have an effective strategy to deal with the Israeli-Palestinian issue, the US will not be seen in the Middle East as having the moral high ground.

By the same token, Turkey does not want to be an outside spectator of the events in the Middle East, but is facing the challenge of balancing its realpolitik interests with an ideological position. The more it puts itself forward as a democratic inspiration, or a political model in the Middle East, the more it will have to show that it is indeed supporting the Arab street  against unpopular regimes. In this sense the United States and Turkey have the same dilemma.

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Yigal Schleifer recently received a Hollings Center Small Grant to organize a series of workshops for early-career Turkish and American journalists working in Turkey. Yigal has extensive experience as a freelance journalist in Istanbul where between 2002 and 2010 he worked as a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and the Eurasianet website. During this time he covered Turkey and the surrounding region, and his work has appeared in prominent American and international media outlets in addition to his own blog, istanbulcalling.blogspot.com.  Yigal was an active participant in both of the Hollings Center’s Turkey-U.S. Next-Generation Dialogues in Istanbul, and he was awarded a grant in order to delve deeper into some of the issues discussed at the dialogues.

Yigal organized six training workshops, bringing together eleven American and Turkish journalists whose work spans the Turkish media landscape.  Participants heard from experts in the field, shared their own experiences, engaged in critical discussions and created an ongoing support network. Workshop discussions focused especially on the coverage of Turkey-U.S. relations and the challenges of reporting on related topics across the region.

Sanem Güner, Istanbul Representative of the Hollings Center, recently sat down with Yigal to talk about the workshops.

Sanem:  What gave you the idea to organize these workshops for young Turkish and American journalists?

Yigal: The impetus for the workshops arose from the lack of interaction between Turkish and foreign journalists in such an organized and collaborative format.  There is a lack of understanding of how delicate covering the Turkey-U.S. relationship can be, and it seems like sharing information on a professional level would be very beneficial.  I think Turkey-U.S. relations are really key, and I think there is a lot of misunderstanding and a lot of problematic coverage surrounding the relationship in both countries.  Looking at the Turkey-U.S. angle helps to understand other regional issues such as Turkey’s relationships with Syria, Iran and Israel, for example.  There is also really never any time, as a journalist in any country, to just take a break from the daily rush of covering the news and reflect on your work, your coverage, your biases, organizational pressure and how these all affect what your end product looks like.  Since there are not many dialogue conferences like those that the Hollings Center organizes, journalists have few chances to engage directly with colleagues who may hold different perspectives.

Sanem: What were the most interesting issues that arose in the workshops?

Yigal:  It was very interesting for the American journalists to see how their Turkish colleagues arrived at their current positions.  Young Turkish journalists are frequently thrust into positions of responsibility quite early without having a lot of substantive previous experiences, often without having worked as a foreign correspondent or necessarily having traveled much.  On the American side it is quite different. The American journalists gained valuable insight into how the Turkish media operates. Looking at regional coverage it was particularly interesting delving into how American news organizations covered the Iranian elections and how Turkish perceptions differed from American perceptions.  Discussions were very valuable because we had people in the group who were actually directing that coverage, so it was not just theoretical.  We talked about practical decisions made in the newsroom, why those decisions were made and what they mean.

Sanem: What did participants take away from the experience?

Yigal:  It was most useful for the participants, I think, to get sense of how the press operates for their colleagues both at other news agencies and across national lines.  Overall, I feel that workshop participants came away with better nuanced understandings of the Turkey-U.S. relationship, how the relationship can frame reporting on the region, how Turkey’s regional policies affect the relationship with the U.S., how public opinion can shape media coverage, how the media shapes public opinion and gaps that exist in current coverage.  Participants really saw the value in communicating this way about these important issues.  All are very keen on continuing to meet and creating a regular mechanism for continuing their dialogue.  I think this is the most important result.

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