The “New Human Rights Politics” in the Middle East

Call me jaded but I expect the article’s author, Shadi Mokhtari, has become the poster child for the “new veneer” of Western Human Rights agenda that strangely resembles a Wooded Horse I once saw in Troy named “NGO”. Polly Anna lives for another day. The BICI Report Shadi claims as progress for Human Rights was and still is a misdirection created by forced collaboration between the State Department and Bahrain’s bloody MOI to save 10s of millions in Military Contracts from a roving “pack of liberals” back in the US.

The “New Politics of Human Rights” in the Middle East made Tom Lantos Commission on Human Rights another White House doormat. To date noting substantial from the State Departments BICI has been acted upon and the systematic elimination, murder and imprisonment of “anti-regime” elements seems nears completion. The imprisonment of Nabeel Rajab and Zainnab al-Khawaja has cleared the way for the restoration of “opposition regime reformers” who have patiently waited on State Department-Regime mop-up activities to contain the Revolution.

Shadi’s references to the elimination of Hosi Mubarak as a small victory; under the bus he went to the cheers of all of us as Obama made his bid in the back-halls to hang on the CIA trained Military that has become the steering committee for the New Democratic Egypt. Sorry, at the moment it hard for me to hear the optimism of New Human Rights in the Middle East. It sounds like spinning a train wreck as an opportunity for the scrap metal dealer…. Phlipn Out.

The New Politics of Human Rights in the Middle East
By Shadi Mokhtari – 30 October, 2012 – Foreign Policy

For decades, “human rights in the Middle East” was a subject of scrutiny, debate, and mobilizations spearheaded from outside of the region. Western governments including successive U.S. administrations frequently took up the region’s dire human rights conditions and funded a variety of human rights initiatives to remedy them, in many ways as a substitute for forgoing economic and military alliances with highly repressive regimes. These foreign governments’ human rights talk was heavy in its emphasis on women’s rights and other violations for which backward cultural and religious belief were designated as the key culprits and light on its emphasis on civil and political rights violations. During the post-9/11 era, as highlighting the Middle East’s deplorable human rights conditions added a veneer of moral purpose to military interventions in the region, the “human rights in the Middle East” line of inquiry took on a life of its own and created a cottage industry of Western-driven human rights assessments and prescriptions. All the while, local voices promoting human rights were largely silenced by authoritarian rulers simultaneously paying lip service to human rights and undermining it by arguing that it served foreign, Western, imperialist agendas. Cumulatively, there dynamics resulted in minimal Middle Eastern agency in defining the nature and scope of its own predicament vis-à-vis the human rights paradigm.

Today, the region’s myriad of human rights mobilizations and contests are increasingly being spurred from within the Middle East, not abroad.

Domestically, where there have been uprisings (not facing crippling state violence) human rights have emerged at the fore of calls for political change and local human rights activists long relegated to the realm of the out-of-touch Westernized elite, have gained considerably in their legitimacy, numbers, and influence. These strengthened human rights forces now insert their voices into virtually every unfolding political contest — openly bringing past and present abuses to light and pushing human rights stances into constitutions-drafting processes, parliamentary agendas, and socio-economic policies. Where they have not been able to substantially realize their demands, they have often compelled authoritarian rulers to go to increasingly greater lengths to showcase purported commitments to rights, the most notable examples being the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) and the prosecution of Hosni Mubarak.

At the same time more meaningful human rights engagements are taking shape at the regional level. Using Cairo and Tunis as venues for considerably less fettered activism, protesters and an expanding cadre of activists are posing human rights challenges across borders within the region. For instance, Egyptian NGOs put out statements on Saudi abuses, an NGO banned in the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) moves to Tunisia, activists and ordinary citizens protest in front of Syrian embassies throughout the region, and Tunisian activists hold a “Friends of Bahrain” conference to show support for the Bahraini revolution in reaction to the “Friends of Syria” conference in Tunis, while Yemeni activists gather to support the hunger strike of a prominent Bahraini activist. …more