Homeless Citizens of Iran Seek Shelter in Empty Tombs

Norway's Radical Military Experiment

A Weekly Political News Magazine

A Syria Policy for Trump

Astana and Iran’s Agenda

Why the Eurozone Still Backs Its Common Currency the Case of Estonia’s «Cyber War I«

Issue 1630 - January 27/01/2017

Homeless Citizens of Iran Seek Shelter in Empty Tombs Harrowing Images Shock Iran and Spark Widespread Outrage

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A Weekly Political News Magazine

Issue 1630 January 27/01/2017

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Homeless citizens of Iran 04 seek shelter in empty tombs Harrowing Images Shock Iran and Spark Widespread Outrage

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Homeless citizens of Iran seek shelter in empty tombs Harrowing Images Shock Iran and Spark Widespread Outrage Photographs emerging of homeless people in Iran, scared and disheveled, have sparked unprecedented reactions on social media and foreign media outlets. Yes, those people are homeless, and yes they seek shelter from freezing winter nights in empty graves.

The first media outlet to publish those images was the Shahrvand Newspaper, a publication affiliated with the Iranian Red Crescent Society, along with a report revealing that graveyard of Naseerabad in Baghestan in the countryside of the industrial city of Shahriar, west of Tehran, contains empty tombs. At least 50 homeless people among which are men, women and children, sleep in of them.

Social media rage It only took a few hours for the report to go viral.

Journalists and charities subsequently rushed to the cemetery to follow up the conditions of the dwellers up close, but they did not find them there. It was later revealed that police forces had expelled them out of the cemetery and beaten them.

However, the photographs and Shahrvand’s report left a mark after being circulated.

Asghar Farhadi, the famous Oscar-winning director, wrote a damning open letter to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on the poverty and plight of children, women and men who sleep in cemeteries, ones who are forced to sleep under trees of public parks and reside under bridges.

“Today, I read the shocking report on the lives of men, women and children who are living inside graves of a cemetery near Tehran,” Farhadi wrote.

“Reading it filled me with utter shame “.

Farhadi noted that “The report indicated that a homeless man identified as Arman,whose name means hope in Persian, is sleeping in a tomb, left outside in cold winter nights and facing death..

Arman is a lost hope that was found inside a tomb.”

In his reply to Farhadi, President Rouhani said: “Who can, in a great country like Iran, accept that some of their fellow countrymen, who have been affected by social harm, take shelter in graves due to helplessness?”

The report further drew the attention of foreign media like Reuters, BBC, CBS, eurosnews, Al-Arabiya, arabnews, gulf-times and other prominent news outlets.

Reports and photographs taken by Syed Ghulam Hussain, that were published by CBS revealed that 50 men, women and children, many of whom are drug addicts, were sleeping inside empty graves 12 miles west of Tehran.

A pressing issue for 20 years Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem-Shirazi, a “source of emulation” for many Shia Muslims, said: “Enemies have recently provoked a wide controversy on social networks on the topic of inhabitants of tombs in Iran, while hundreds of

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Tehran:

Fairoza Ramadan Zada

thousands of people in the United States itself sleep in cardboard boxes and some of them live in sewers.”

Living in empty graves in Tehran is not a new phenomenon; citizens have been found years ago staying next to graves and tombs of deceased imams in various Iranian cities.

Nima Sarvestani, a Swedish-Iranian filmmaker and documentary filmmaker producer, directed

a documentary film in 2001 entitled: “Naked and Wind”. The film includes interviews with a number of young men who slept in tombs containing dead people in a city, downtown Iran.

This issue has been a pressing one for two decades, and Shahrvand’s report just brought it back to the surface. The disaster of living in tombs of the deceased does not only exist in Tehran but also in some other cities across Iran.

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Homeless people outside the region of Kerman in Iran. (getty)

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Iranians walking in the poverty-stricken town of Ghaleh in South West Tehran. (getty)

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Mir Taher, a retired teacher in Tehran, says: “The phenomenon of inhabitants of tombs has been noticed in Zahedan and its outskirts, and the situation is definitely worsening in the countryside of Tehran province in the areas of Ghrara, Varamin, Saveh, Jajrood, and Shahriar.”

Mir noted that “The middle class is greatly shrinking as most of its members fell below the poverty line”. He adds “people have no options in terms of housing and the government helps people in only special cases, due to insufficient resources”.

He went to say that “It is an unsuccessful government; it takes money from people to live as some institutions in Iran like Tehran›s municipality, the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij have great capital. Such disparity will not be resolved through media.”

He added: “I watched footage today on the residents of the Saveh neighborhood; all of them were barefoot, they had no winter clothes on, and had no water nor electricity… shameful”

Graveyards as destinations of solace Reza, a student and a blogger residing in the city of Garmsar, said: “We have not witnessed a real phenomenon of grave inhabitation yet.” He clarifies, “Some people who write supplications are actually advised to sleep either a night or a few nights in a grave in order to solve their problems as it is believed that sleeping in graves has a spiritual reward, but the sleeping in graves due to homelessness is a different issue.”

He added that: “Poor people were living in areas near tombs, as they were built in neighborhoods close to cities or towns. They were far from residential districts, so inhabitants of slums use these areas as they want to take advantage of vows made by people for the sake of their deceased. Or if somebody wants to help the poor, he heads to slums near tombs as people live there.”

Ashkan, a student of statistics, said: “When President Hassan Rouhani visited Germany, the Europeans gave him a report on the economic situation in Iran. The report showed that there are three million billionaires in Iran. Thus, this group (billionaires) manages all purchases and sales in local markets. The billionaires will neither

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buy aircraft (Boeing) nor construct railways or roads, but they control all the country’s vital ports through their enormous wealth which they obtained overnight. The number of women sleeping in cardboard boxes is very noticeable and regrettable.” Such report highlighted the disparity of wealth in Iran and how it affects the well-being of citizens with the lowest income.

A news agency in July 2015, quoted a deputy president for women affairs that out of the 15,000 people who sleep in cardboard boxes, 5000 of

Rouhani's government is unsuccessful; it takes money from people to live them are women.

Moreover, in an interview with the ministry of planning, the head of a reconstruction organization of Tehran Municipality Abdullah Fath-ellahi said that there are between 150,000-200,000 people sleeping in cardboard boxes in only one area in Tehran.

Following the publication of the report on inhabitants of graves in Naseerabad, publishing news on the poor in Iran, including dwellers of cardboard boxes, had bigger reactions on many Iranian media outlets than the previous report.

The media published a report on a worker of Tehran Municipality, who lives in the area surrounding the tomb of the Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini.

Paradise of Zahara Saman, a journalist in Tehran and who was banned by the government from writing, said: “Many people have been living in the cemetery of Tehran (Tehran Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery Paradise of Zahara) for many years. They were eating food, fruits and sweets leftover on graves.”

Saman added: “When Gholamhossein Karbaschi was serving as the mayor of Tehran, I went with a teacher of my school to (Tehran Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery - Paradise of Zahara) and I saw

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families living in tombs. I remember that drug addicts were resorting to graves in 1992 to protect themselves from cold and to get what they want to eat there”.

“In 2002, I used to go to Khomeini›s mausoleum, where dwellers of graves spread to nearby areas.

But they were seeking to enter the shrine to avoid being dismissed out of the place”.

“This social problem which has continued over two decades has been topping Shahrvand Newspaper.

The problem appeared after doors of mosques had been closed. And then drug addicts and homeless people did not find a place to live in.”

“Money is being spent on many empty mosques.

They are the best option to be a shelter for all homeless people in Iran. After the revolution,

abandoned concrete building in the middle of Jitaker Park for 40 years. Population staff took some aerial photographs of these people suffering from lack of gas, water and cellular phones.

Some media outlets published a report about a father and his daughter, from Shirvan belonging to North Khorasan province, that have been living in a stockyard of cows for 20 years.

Slogans of the Iranian Revolution The Iranian Revolution’s slogans are “achieving justice, financial development and prosperity, and eliminating all forms of discrimination”.

“As one of the most important objectives, we have noticed that 18 million people in Iran have been living in inappropriate places and slums close to the city after 38 years of the revolution.

This reflects the extent of the deprivation being experienced by dwellers of poor slums and shanty towns in Iran.”

Speaking on shanty towns in Iran last June, Interior Minister Abdel Reza RahmaniFadli said: “About 600,000 Iranians are sentenced in prison every year, 11 million are living in slums. We at the same time have 3.3 million unemployed people and 1.5 million addicts.”

Official statistics indicate that dwellers are living either in shanty towns in mountainous areas or in valleys.

Other dwellers have to use discarded cardboard boxes, bags and waste to create themselves a place to sleep. Some homeless people live in brick kilns, mats houses and rooms, which are all examples of shanty towns spreading in most cities in Iran.

Slums are broadening greatly in the city of Mashhad which is located near the tomb of Ali ibn Musa Al-Ridha, the eighth Imam of the Shia.

Astan Quds Razavi foundation, which is the fourth major economic institution in Iran, is supervising the shrine.

Tehran suffers from income inequality, sexual discrimination, and poor health and education services mosques have transferred into military bases.

Saman went to say that: “Dealing violently and shamefully with drug addicts has pushed them to resort to graves instead of shelters belonging to municipalities. Shelter centers send addicts to drug addiction treatment institutions that deal very violently with them. A drug addict sometimes dies because of being beaten. Drug addicts have no dignity in these centers. Their families neither follow up the matter in case of the death nor submit a complaint to the concerned institutions in this case.”

One of my relatives vomited blood in a center of drug addiction treatment, north of the country, a few years ago and died. Therefore, drug addicts refrain from going to these centers.”

Shahrvand Newspaper published on 7 January 2017, a report on 12 families containing one hundred members who have been living in an

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The city’s population is 2.7 million, more than 900 .000 of them are living in the slum areas.

Drug addiction, theft, sexual exploitation and unemployment are increasing in this city. These problems are the most important challenges facing the Razavi Khorasan Province.

Mahnaz, a worker living in Mashhad, says: “The number of homeless people and addicts increases every year with the onset of cold, rain and snow

in cemeteries and abandoned houses in the city of Sabzevar located in Razavi Khorasan Province, for drug use freely without being observed by police.”

There are aggravated social problems, like the spread of slums, poverty, income inequality, sexual discrimination, and poor education and health services in Iran, at a time when the Republic has vowed to achieve the global benchmark of sustainable development by 2030.

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A kid playing with dust in the povertystricken town of Ghaleh in South West Tehran. (getty)

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Norway's Radical Military Experiment

The experiment attempts to increase the share of female soldiers and officers in the Norwegian military Two years ago, -19year-old Mari Gillebo reported for duty as a professional soldier in central Norway. Far from being a minority in her air defense battalion, she had joined a unit that was 50 percent female. And the female soldiers were treated exactly like their male colleagues, even sharing sleeping quarters with them.

Gillebo didn’t mind the mixed-gender bedrooms. Like most Norwegian children, she had grown up doing virtually everything in a coed setting: playing on mixedgender sports teams and learning woodworking and home economics in secondary school together with both boys and girls. “But I was very skeptical about the 50/50 split,” she told me. “I don’t really like female quotas.” Women should be given positions based on ability, not gender, Gillebo argued.

Gillebo’s battalion, the Norwegian Air and Missile Defense Battalion of the 138th Air Wing at Orland Main Air Station, is an experiment that comes after years of failed attempts to increase the share of female soldiers and officers in the Norwegian military. Together with Israel, Norway was the first country to completely abolish gender barriers in the armed forces, opening all combat positions to women in 1988. Since then, the armed forces have waged a valiant fight to attract women, not just targeting them in recruitment campaigns but launching open-house weekends for those curious about military life. And it has promoted female officers to the highest level: three years ago, Major General Kristin Lund of the Norwegian Army became the United Nations’ first female peacekeeping commander.

Even so, after nearly 30 years, only ten percent of Norway’s soldiers and officers are women. And according to a report

by Forsvarets Forskningsinstitutt (the government-run Norwegian Defense Research Establishment), more than 12 percent of female troops between 20 and 24 years leave the armed forces, while the rate among male troops is less than eight percent.

In 2014, the Norwegians thus resolved to try a radical experiment, turning the Air and Missile Defense Battalion into a 50 percent male/50 percent female unit, in which the men and women carry out the same duties and have the same living arrangements, including shared bedrooms.

The armed forces reasoned that a setup in which women were no longer a small minority would change the way a fighting unit operates. The female share is typically much higher among support functions such as medics, but this seems to be a result more of habit than of ability: because there are so few women in combat units, it feeds the notion that females are not as good at fighting. The women selected for the Air and Missile Defense Battalion had to meet the same standards as the men.

Defenders of the experiment point out that “young people today are used to being together in school and going about their hobbies before they come to us,” as Lieutenant Colonel Stein Maute, the Air and Missile Defense Battalion’s commander, told me. “It’s just us in the armed forces who look at this as something new.”

And for them, it really is quite new. It wasn’t until 1988 that Norway lifted its ban on women in combat roles.

Before that, female soldiers were confined to supporting roles, such as medics, which usually kept them apart from male soldiers. Israel lifted its own ban in the same year.

The United States and the United Kingdom did so only last year. Although most countries now allow women in

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By Elisabeth Braw *

combat, full gender integration is still far off. Male and female soldiers typically sleep in separate bedrooms and use separate shower rooms; when they sleep in tents, there are partitions.

The main argument against full integration is that it brings the risk of romantic entanglements and sexual harassment and undermines effectiveness. According to a RAND study, in 4/9/2014 percent of female U.S. soldiers

and officers reported having been sexually harassed. A Norwegian Armed Forces survey from 2015 showed that 18 percent of female and two percent of male service members had experienced sexual harassment, although only one percent considered the harassment to be serious.

To those concerned about sexual harassment, full gender integration would be a recipe for more trouble. At Harvard University, which has coed dorms for undergraduates, a

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A Norwegian female soldier.

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2015 survey showed that 31.2 percent of women have experienced sexual harassment ranging from touching to rape; 75 percent of the rapes and rape attempts took place in dorms.

But the provision of separate facilities also requires additional effort and expense and, as the Norwegian Armed Forces reasoned, isolates the female soldiers. “The fact that the boys and girls share rooms, exercise together, eat together, and work together leads to less harassment and more cohesion between the genders,” Maute said.

Only a handful of the female soldiers experienced sexual harassment, and even in those cases it didn’t go beyond insensitive jokes. None of the women considered it a serious matter. And, Gillebo told me, “many girls ended up doing a lot of sports and exercise with the boys, probably more than they would have done if they had been more to themselves.”

Indeed, the entire point of full integration was to make male and female soldiers think of each other as just soldiers. “What surprised me was that gender didn’t seem to exist in the unit,” Nina Hellum, a social anthropologist at Forsvarets Forskningsinstitutt, told me. “It exists,” she clarified, “but it hardly plays any role at all.” Hellum observed the 50/50 unit for the entire two years and documented her findings in an October 2016 report.

Although eight soldiers began dating, they only fraternized off base. The one time Hellum found a man and a woman in the same bed, they were watching a film fully dressed.

In confidential interviews with the soldiers, she heard of only one case of sex on base.

Others are similarly positive about the experience. It took a while to get used to sharing bedrooms with men, Gillebo told me, but she added that both female and male troops thought it made sense since they spent so much time working together anyway. What about sexual harassment? “Sure, some boys commented on some girls’ looks,” Gillebo told me, “but not more than you’d get in civilian life.” Hellum added: “Military life is not very romantic. You work hard all day, and you see each other in very unattractive situations.” Mixed sleeping quarters can help female soldiers feel part of the group—and help male soldiers accept them as such. “This way you’re more friends with the boys,” one of the female soldiers told Hellum. “If there had been a separate girls’ room they would probably have been more curious.” Gillebo told me the atmosphere was very “buddylike,” more like “a sibling relationship” than anything else.

The 50/50 division was key: with the men no longer in the majority, their behavior didn’t set the tone. All cavorting on base is banned, as are locker-room talk and pinup posters. The female soldiers interviewed by Hellum told her that for them, the cohort of women was positive. If there had been only a handful of females in the battalion, one of them told Hellum, “I would have had to become one of the boys.” When Hellum individually showed male and female troops pinup posters, their reaction was, “That would never be allowed here.” Hellum also observed less crude joking about women than she has seen in other Norwegian units; indeed, immigrants were more often the subjects of insensitive jokes. Among the men there was some joking about women, Gillebo told me, “but the girls sometimes joked about the boys, too.”

Hellum concluded that constant exposure to the other gender challenges stereotypes and suggests that an increase of female troops can reduce “unwanted masculine behaviors” across the armed forces. That’s especially important given that last year Norway became the first NATO country to introduce gender-neutral conscription.

The 50/50 experiment is now over, of course, but the female share of the battalion’s soldiers—who are now conscripts—remains high at 45 percent.

There are, of course, military units that may never reach gender parity—namely, the Special Forces or the infantry,

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Together with Israel, Norway was the first country to completely abolish gender barriers in the armed forces

greater numbers in certain units rather than spread them thinly everywhere,” he said. “But then again we fall into the issue of abilities and capabilities, which can prevent the implementation of this policy.” Another question is how to treat soldiers who, for religious reasons, don’t want to sleep in mixed-gender bedrooms. In Sweden, where Muslims make up around five percent of the population, some city councils have made special arrangements for Muslim students, for example giving them the option of not spending the night during school trips, as well as the right to use individual shower stalls after sports lessons.

There is also, of course, what is ultimately a more important consideration: Are units with 50 percent women and mixed sleeping quarters better at fighting?

Several serving male officers in NATO countries expressed doubts. One of them, who is currently serving in Afghanistan, pointed out that “living together and fighting together are two different things.” There must be no risk of emotional or sexual distraction, he said, because “on occasion, you have one second to decide.”

Courtesy Norwegian Special Forces Command (FSK)

which require massive physical strength. But all in all, the Air and Missile Defense Battalion’s findings could profoundly change military planning. No longer would armed forces have to provide separate sleeping quarters for women, which adds time and expense to logistic planning.

But can the experiment be exported to other countries? A female colonel in the French army told me that in France, for one, it wouldn’t fly. “Single-sex rooms are better, as morning and evening are the only moments when it’s possible to have some privacy,” she said. Besides, she added, France doesn’t have a recruitment problem, so “if the military does not recruit more women, it’s probably because we don’t need more.” (The colonel declined to speak on the record, as she was not commenting on behalf of the French Armed Forces.) But that privacy means women are marginalized from the unit’s male majority and risk being seen as a separate, second-rate team.

Indeed, for countries that need to beef up their share of female fighters, 50/50 units and full gender integration is the best way forward, argued Professor Robert Egnell, head of the Department of Security, Strategy, and Leadership at the Swedish Defense University. “They should focus on selected units where you can really raise the female share, rather than putting a few women here and there,” he told me. Giampaolo Di Paola, Italy’s defense minister from 2011 to 2013, agreed. “It’s better to have women in

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Maute : troops are performing better due to simply being treated like soldiers, with neither men nor women thinking of the latter as a weak link But at the Air and Missile Defense Battalion, Maute reported having observed his troops performing better as a result of simply being treated like soldiers, with neither men nor women thinking of the latter as a weak link. “We’re not seeing any difference between women and men during exercises with live ammunition,” Maute told me. “And we’re not seeing any difference between the genders in NATO-standard evaluations. We’re just seeing soldiers, and they are very good soldiers.”

* ELISABETH BRAW is a Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council. This article was originally published on (ForeignAffairs) .

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Astana and Iran’s Agenda

Iran interested in a military solution that facilitates its regional plan to create a Shiite crescent During the Astana negotiations, Kazakhstan Foreign Minister Kairat Abdrakhmanov read out a statement saying that the delegations of Iran, Russia and Turkey decided to “establish a trilateral mechanism to observe and ensure full compliance with the cease-fire, prevent any provocations and determine all modalities of the cease-fire.” He added that the three countries will also continue joint efforts to fight ISIS and the al-Qaeda affiliated Jabhat Fath al-Sham group, formerly the Nusra Front.

The statement did not specify how the mechanism would work to monitor the cease-fire that began Dec. 30. It was just a statement to assure the role of these three countries in any future solution for Syria. As Iran is one of the main countries included, the statement did not refer to any military involvement of Iran and its Shiite militias in Syria.

The agreement is not likely to make a real difference on the ground for two reasons. One, there will be no independent forces on the ground to monitor the mechanism – whatever it was – in order to ensure the ceasefire. But more significantly, this statement – by ignoring Iran’s Shiite militias in Syria - suggests a very dangerous scenario: one that will maintain Iran’s role in Syria, not as a peacekeeper, but as an agent of aggressive sectarian tension.

Another shortcoming is that there are no clear details of how this “mechanism” is going to stop Iran from violating the ceasefire, as it has been doing since the ceasefire was signed earlier in January. Iran can still do whatever it needs to do and no one seems to be able to stop it, with or without a mechanism.

That is why the opposition refused to sign on this draft and instead presented an alternative one that highlights Iran’s negative military role, and that any mechanism should be able to cover Iran’s vilations as well. Moscow is supposed to get back to the opposition groups on their proposal, backed no doubt by Turkey.

What does Iran Want?

There are no doubts that Russia and Iran started to differ on a number of issues related to the future of Syria, and the political solution being discussed. Besides using Syria as a platform of power, Russia is in Syria for Russia’s interests only. In addition to a seat at the table with the US, Putin wants recognition from Western powers, sanctions lifted over his seizure in Crimea and incursion in Ukraine, and NATO to step away from Russian borders.

Iran is Russia’s ally, and they both support Assad and his regime; however, as they met over conflict, they’ll diverge over political solutions. While Russia is pushing for a political solution that guarantees its interests, Iran is

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Khameini, Putin and Assad

By Hanin Ghaddar *

more interested in a military solution that will strengthen its agenda by force.

Russia wants Syria as one country where Assad will have to share power with his opponents, while Iran prefers a divided Syria where its plan for the region can be manifested. Iran’s plan to divide Syria allows easier demographic changes within the “Useful Syria” that stretches from the Alawite coast all the way up to Homs, the Suburbs of Damascus to Qalamoun and the Lebanese border. This stretch is part of Iran’s regional plan to create a Shiite crescent from Iran’s border to Iraq all the way up to the South of Lebanon.

This corridor – in addition to acting as a geographical Shiite bridge from Iran to Lebanon – it also provides Tehran a platform of power that will give them a more

have to compromise. Iran is wary about Trump’s policy in Syria and also regarding the Iran Deal. Not much has been said on that in Washington, but still with Obama gone and a Republican president in, Iran cannot be very confident.

Iran also knows that Russia is no friend. Russia is in Syria for Russia, and will let go of Iran if Putin decides that the Russian interests are better with the US, or even with Turkey.

Iran is starting to realize that they have to compromise or else be compromised. Maybe that is why Iranian Foreign Minister Jawad Zarif’s recent statement was softer towards Saudi Arabia, as an attempt to test the waters or maybe reach out. Of course with Iran, it all goes back to their plan for the region that they will never compromise. Whoever

Iran, Russia and Turkey to establish a trilateral mechanism to enforce cease-fire

strengthened position in the Middle East and certainly more leverage against its opponents.

Challenges to Iran’s Plan This plan is not going to be easy to implement or maintain for two reasons: One, Russia does not see eye to eye with Iran on Syria, and two, this region will be surrounded by a majority of Sunni people and Sunni powers that are not going to allow it without some kind of resistance or diplomatic action, even with a ceasefire agreement.

Iran does not hold the main seat on the table anymore, although the Iranian regime hoped it will after signing the Iran deal with the US. Russia today does and Iran will

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is going to touch the Shia crescent will be an enemy.

So far, Russia is allowing it, and we don’t know how Trump’s administration is going to deal with it yet, but we do know that this is not something that Iran will bargain.

Another challenge that Iran will face during or after Astana is that the US presence as an observer does not mean that the US is not going to consult with its regional allies before taking a stance or acting. This might not sound great for Iran as this kind of consulting will probably include Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other GCC countries. But again, that’s’ not for Iran to decide and that’s probably why they opposed the participation of the US representative.

On the long run, Iran’s and Russia’s interests will diverge more as time goes by, or as a political solution is on the negotiating table. Russia might have to push Iran further to the side of the table if cooperation with US and Turkey looked more beneficial.

The trick is of course to make this kind of cooperation beneficial for Russia without losing sight of the main issue at hand, that Assad still has to go, and that Iran cannot win and maintain their “Useful Syria.”

* Hanin Ghaddar is the Friedmann Visiting Fellow at The Washington Institute.

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A Syria Policy for Trump Simply fighting the caliphate may not be enough for President Trump President Trump's most complicated foreign policy challenge will be what to do about Syria. Under President Barack Obama, Washington’s Syria policy has focused on fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). But with ISIS teetering, the government of Bashar al-Assad gaining ground, and outside powers such as Iran and Russia becoming ever more involved, simply fighting the caliphate may not be enough for the next leader of the United States.

In order to destroy ISIS and uproot the extremism that has been generated by the Syrian war, the United States will need to help stabilize opposition-controlled areas of the country while pressuring Iran and Russia to move toward a viable political settlement. To get there, President Trump will need to be more willing to put pressure on Moscow and Tehran than he has so far indicated. That means he should be ready to impose penalties on both if they do not fulfill any commitments they make.

A FRAGILE EQUILIBRIUM Today, ISIS and the Assad regime each control roughly one-third of Syria. Thanks to help from Russia and Iranian-backed Shiite militias, the Syrian government has established control over what it calls “essential Syria”: the urbanized, north–south spine of the country that connects Damascus to the country’s largest city, Aleppo, which Assad is now on the verge of reconquering. But if he is successful, what happens next is unclear. Assad claims he will reassert control over the entire country, but he lacks the manpower to take and hold Sunni-dominated territory in northwestern, eastern, and southern Syria. He could

only do so by importing more Shiite militiamen from abroad, which could provoke Syria’s neighbors to increase their involvement and fuel the local Sunni insurgency.

Eastern Syria has, for the last two years, been split between ISIS and the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), part of the Syrian wing of the Turkish Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which Ankara considers a terrorist group. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a U.S.-backed alliance made up mostly of YPG troops interspersed with Sunni Arabs and minorities, has so far been Washington’s only option for fighting ISIS in the region. But in late August, Sunni Arab and Turkmen rebels, backed by Ankara and supported by the Turkish military, entered northeastern Syria as a part of Turkey’s Operation Euphrates Shield.

These units rapidly capturing ISIS-held areas near the Turkish border.

Ankara’s entry into the Syrian war is the most significant (and potentially destabilizing) development since ISIS’ breakout in 2014. The move is designed to crush two enemies at once. First, Ankara wants to prevent the YPG— which the Turkish government sees as an extension of the terrorist PKK—from uniting the Kurdish-held areas in the east, around the town of Manbij, with those in the west in the canton of Afrin. Second, the Turks want the area to serve as a potential staging ground for further military operations against ISIS. Some speculate that Turkey intends to attack from north of the SDF-held Syrian city of Tal Abyad, the northern gate into ISIS’ capital city of Raqqa. As a result, both the SDF and Ankara have issued a flurry of announcements, with each side claiming that it will be the first to liberate Raqqa.

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U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a visit to the Department of Homeland Security (Getty)

By Andrew J. Tabler and Dennis Ross*

The best-case scenario is that either the SDF or Turkey will be able to wrest Raqqa from the caliphate, delivering a much-needed blow to ISIS. The Kurds have the advantage of U.S. support and unity of purpose, but are relatively few in number and have little desire to take and hold Raqqa, which is largely populated by Sunni Arabs who distrust or even despise the Kurds. Euphrates Shield has the advantage of Sunni Arab foot soldiers and the backing of a NATO army, but it has received little support from Obama and his ISIS czar, Special Envoy Brett McGurk.

But the worst-case scenario is that the SDF and the Turkish forces fight each other instead, leaving ISIS in control of the east and Assad secure in the west.

WEST OF EDEN In the west of the country, a similar territorial division persists, this time between the Assad regime and assorted

non-ISIS rebels. The rebels control the northwestern canton of Idlib and areas of Aleppo province, as well as cantons in the southern provinces of Dara’a and Quneitra.

Each rebel-held canton is a mix of local militias, jihadists, and non-jihadist Salafists. The most notable of the jihadist groups—outside of ISIS—is Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (JFS), the Syrian al Qaeda affiliate formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra. As anti-regime Syrians have come to doubt Washington’s commitment to removing Assad, more and more have opted to join JFS. The rapid growth of JFS in the northwest has caused many, including Secretary of State John Kerry, to advocate for a deal involving synchronized U.S.–Russian air strikes against the group, which if carried out would seem to benefit Assad. But his regime is now estimated to have only about 25,000–20,000 deployable troops. That is enough to surround east Aleppo and some rebel-held suburbs of Damascus, but only with help from Hezbollah and other

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President Trump will need to be more willing to put pressure on Moscow and Tehran

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Shiite militiamen from Afghanistan and Iraq. To pursue its siege-and-starve strategy elsewhere in Syria, the regime will need to import more Shiite fighters from abroad.

These militias, however, are often poorly trained and have trouble operating in the rural Sunni parts of Syria.

The United States will be lucky if the rebels can somehow resist Assad’s siege of Aleppo and the Trump administration can convince the Russians to resume the cessation of hostilities agreement, which fell apart in September. But that is unlikely. More probably, the Assad regime, aided by the Russians, will continue bombing east Aleppo, thereby worsening the flow of refugees into Syria's neighbors and sending Assad’s opponents further into the arms of JFS and other extremists. Such an outcome would bolster Moscow’s case for making Assad the basis for a solution in Syria. It could also expand Russia’s role in the eastern Mediterranean for years to come.

USING THE BIG STICK Until now, U.S. policy has remained committed to the unity of Syria under UN Security Council Resolution 2254, which reaffirmed the “sovereignty, independence, unity, and territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic.” But Syria has been divided for half a decade, and to deal with it, the United States will need to uproot extremists and provide humanitarian protection to the country’s component parts, with an eye toward putting them back together again. To achieve that, there are five major tactical options that the Trump administration could apply to Syria: no-fly/ safe zones; anti-regime airstrikes to enforce the ceasefire; arming of the vetted opposition; sanctions; and diplomacy. Whatever the combination, these tactics should be employed to reduce U.S. vulnerability to extremism and migration (which is driven by the conflict), recognizing that doing so may require a willingness on Washington’s part to tolerate the risks associated with using force.

The first option, the establishment of limited no-fly/safe zones, has already received some support from both Trump and Vice-President-elect Mike Pence. Announcing the intention to establish no-fly/safe zones would signal to Assad that the new administration does not believe he can actually retake “every inch” of Syrian territory. Of course, a no-fly zone over the entire country would require the United States to attack Syrian and Russian air defense systems—something no president is likely to do given the

threat of war with Russia. However, limited no-fly zones along Syria’s borders with Turkey and Jordan already exist, and Turkey’s de-facto safe zone north of Aleppo is an example of how these areas can be blocked off without military confrontation. A smart U.S. strategy would involve deploying special forces to shore up safe zones on the ground and using air strikes and cruise missiles to target regime aircraft and artillery.

Another similar military option would be to use longdistance air strikes to enforce the ceasefires that have repeatedly fallen apart. Ceasefires only work when the parties have positive incentives to negotiate, and sufficiently strong negative incentives not to break the ceasefire. Thus far, Assad and the Russians have been able to punish the opposition, but not vice versa. The United States could help even out the balance of power by punishing the regime with cruise missiles, or airstrikes on regime airfields. This risks inadvertently killing Russian soldiers, but the concentration of Russian forces in a few geographical areas ensures that there are multiple targets within the country—runways, artillery positions, and exposed jets and helicopters—that could be safely attacked by the United States from outside Syrian air space.

Alternatively, the United States could provide qualitatively new weapons in larger amounts to the vetted Syrian opposition—something the Obama administration has been unwilling to do. Controlling territory requires manpower, and given the Assad regime’s limited numbers and the growing influence of extremists, it is important to

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Washington’s focus on ISIS has given Russia and Iran a free hand to change the balance of power in Syria

A man cycling past the rubble of buildings destroyed in a town in Syria.

support the remaining elements of the non-jihadist rebels.

Such support would only work, however, if the United States commits to fighting the Assad regime, an option that Obama has sought to avoid and that Trump at this point looks unlikely to pursue.

The United States can also consider deepening sanctions.

Doing so would help the United States gain much-needed leverage in future negotiations, allowing Washington to raise the penalties faced by Assad and create incentives for him to accept a real political transition in Syria that would unite the country. This is particularly important given the regime’s desperate need to rebuild infrastructure and the urban areas that it has destroyed. A missing but vital aspect of this diplomacy should include prosecution for war crimes, particularly for the use of chemical weapons.

A final option is diplomacy, whether coercive or otherwise.

U.S. diplomacy has so far come up short in terms of forcing Assad to step aside. It has also failed to give the Russians and the Iranians a reason to jettison their client. Military force and sanctions would strengthen the negotiators’ hand, but more targeted diplomacy with allies, as well as hardnosed negotiations with adversaries, would provide a much-needed shot in the arm to fortify efforts to end the war.

THE ART OF THE DEAL Apart from its terrible humanitarian consequences, Washington’s decision to focus on ISIS but not Assad has

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given Russia and Iran a free hand to change the balance of power in Syria. For our Arab and Israeli partners in the region, it has also raised questions about whether the United States cares about the power struggle in the region between the Gulf Arab states and Iran, in which Moscow has chosen to back Tehran. Continued passivity from the Trump administration will reinforce the image that the United States is prepared to acquiesce to Russia and Iran’s regional plans. And as long as this remains the case, it will be difficult for the United States to convince its Sunni partners to fight ISIS, which they see as a far more manageable threat than Shiite Iran.

Yet the United States still has some leverage: only its strategy can reunify Syria. By bombing Aleppo, Russia likely hopes to force the rebels to accept a de-facto partition of the country that leaves Assad in power. But such an outcome is unlikely to be the basis for national reunification. Putin must be made to understand that the United States will only go along with a genuine ceasefire, one that is tied to all the elements of UN Security Council Resolution 2254—the lifting of all sieges, the creation of humanitarian corridors, the drafting of a new constitution, and Assad’s consent to an -18month transition period.

But Putin must also understand that if Assad violates any of these principles, the United States would be willing to carry out punitive military strikes. This alone would signal to the region that the Trump administration means business.

If anything, Trump should send a clear message to Putin: if Russia continues to back Assad, even as he fails to fulfill his commitments under Resolution 2254, Russia may become trapped in an increasingly costly war that it cannot win. In presenting these options, the United States should underscore the fact that there is no whole-country political solution as long as Assad remains in power—too much blood has been spilled, too many crimes have been committed, and too much pain has been endured for the opposition and their regional supporters to accept such an outcome.

* ANDREW J. TABLER is Senior Fellow at the

Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the author of In the Lion’s Den: An Eyewitness Account of Washington’s Battle with Syria. DENNIS ROSS is Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. This article was originally published on (ForeignAffairs).

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the Case of Estonia’s “Cyber War I”

Russian Hackings Shouldn’t Be Seen as a Novelty: In January 2017, the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence (which is a coalition of 17 agencies and organizations including the CIA, FBI and the NSA), released a report that explained the Russian campaign to influence the US presidential election. According to the report, American intelligence agencies believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin did, in fact, order efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election.

“Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. . . . Moscow’s influence campaign followed a Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operations – such as cyber activity – with overt efforts by Russian government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or ‘trolls.’”

This news shocked many Americans. Of particular concern is the fact that Russian hackers leaked confidential information belonging to Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party to WikiLeaks. The United States hasn’t been a target of such scandalous Russian meddling before. But this type of behavior from Russia shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, the Russian government has already tried and tested cyber-warfare quite successfully.

The 2007 Cyber-attacks on Estonia: “Cyber War I” Nine years before the 2016 US presidential race, Russia was involved in another major scandal, involving Estonia.

Estonia, a small European state previously a part of the USSR and now member of both the EU and NATO, is a champion of e-governance. Under the framework of “e-Estonia,” the country has morphed itself into an “e-society,” meaning all government business and banking are paperless. Even voting is done online. This country of only 1.3 million was the first ever to make internet access a human right. In %99.6 ,2016 of banking transactions were done with e-banking services, and %96 of people declared their income electronically.

But Estonia’s aspirations to revolutionize e-governance also exposed the country to unprecedented vulnerabilities. In 2007, as a part of its attempt to eschew its Soviet legacies, the government decided to relocate a Soviet war memorial away from Tallinn city center. Russian outrage and threats of sanctions followed the move. Hooligans attacked the Estonian ambassador in Moscow, and soon the websites of Estonian government agencies, newspapers, and banks began to go down. The cyber-attacks lasted three weeks and came in waves which practically paralyzed Estonia.

The hackers sent large amounts of information to the targeted websites simultaneously, causing them to overload and freeze. It was reported that the hackers infected up to a quarter of the world’s computers (turning them into “zombie computers”), and they used software robots to flood Estonian websites with bogus information on a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack (an attack that is an attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources).

Additionally, the hackers were joined by ordinary people who obtained instructions from Russian websites on how to carry out a DDoS attack. Some sites were set up to redirect

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Russian President Vladimir Putin

By Maia Otarashvili

Back in 2007, Anne Applebaum wrote that “the attacks [were] Russian ‘tests’ of the West’s preparedness for cyber-warfare in general and of NATO’s commitment to its newest, weakest members in particular.” At that time, the West failed the test, as in the end, Russia managed to get out of trouble unscathed. The applicability of NATO’s Articles IV and V were too unclear for this type of situation that no retaliation was possible.

Nonetheless, the international community did learn a few lessons from Estonia’s “Cyber War I.” At its Bucharest

US office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report explaining Putin’s efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election

In 2007 Russia was involved in a major cyberattack which paralyzed Estonia

users to images of Soviet soldiers and quotations from Martin Luther King about resisting “evil.” These attacks were coupled with disinformation, as other hacked sites spread false news that the Estonian government had asked Russia for forgiveness, promising to return the statue to its original place.

The Estonian government likened this three-week-long cyber-attack to terrorist activities. These attacks were seen as the first cases of “cyberwar,” a term, which along with “cyber-terrorism,” was a novelty back in 2007.

While Estonian officials were able to trace some of the initial hacker IP addresses to the Russian government and presidential administration, they had difficulty proving that the Russian government carried out the attacks. Yet Estonia made a formal request to NATO to invoke Article 5, which obligates NATO to retaliate for attacks on any of its member states. The incident revealed important vulnerabilities of the international rules-based order. It turned out that the rules weren’t designed to handle 21st century challenges, such as cyber warfare. The anonymity of this type of cyberterrorism proved convenient for Russian officials, who denied involvement.

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Summit in 2008, NATO created a Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence in Tallinn, Estonia. It also created a new Cyber Defense Management Authority in Brussels. Over the following years, NATO’s work towards improving the cyber security of its member states was deeply shaped by Estonia’s experience. This has enabled Estonia to continue the digitalization of its government and society without further disruptions. The country is currently one of the leading NATO member states in e-governance and cyber security.

“Cyber War II?” In view of continued Russian cyber-threats, Applebaum’s 2007 warning still resonates today: “[B]ut there the affair will end – until whoever forced the Estonian government out of cyberspace comes back online, better armed for the next battle.”

Russia has, indeed, come better armed and prepared this time.

Its earlier “cyber war” formula has now turned into a more sophisticated “hybrid war” approach to exerting influence in the West. The first widely publicized Russian involvement came in the form of Brexit. Here, Russian propaganda, which began as early as 2015, was directed towards inciting hatred of immigrants and fear of terrorism— sentiments, which in the end, played a deciding role in the “leave” vote.

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In a recent article, Clint Watts and Andrew Weisburd documented the steps Russia had to take to rig the US presidential elections without directly falsifying the votes.

“In the U.S., Russia’s blending of semi-overt and covert social media accounts use common hashtags and phrases to create what appear to be conservative Trump supporters or alt-right cheerleaders. These social media personas, whose bios are littered with words like “country,” “Christian,” “America” and “military,” then push pro-Trump hashtags loaded with skewed and fake news at American audiences, helping generate organic Trump support and distrust of the U.S. government.”

Watts and Weisburd also explain how Russia helped Brexit supporters: “The United Kingdom observed a similar campaign. Dating back to the earliest parts of 2015, Russian media outlets incited fear of immigration and promoted Brexit advocate Nigel Farage’s accusations of American manipulation to foster popular support for the British to leave the EU.” In early November 2016, Weisburd, Watts, and JM Berger published a comprehensive report which studied Russia’s

further popularize ideas that advance its interests. There is no real evidence that can prove this without comprehensive and expensive investigations like those conducted by Watts and his team. Even then, international laws are not designed to punish such behavior. It is not illegal to create fake Twitter accounts and spread false news on social media.

Thankfully, Estonia’s experience has enabled the international community to develop strong capabilities of tracing trolls and identifying hackers. After gathering enough evidence to prove Russia’s liability in the DNC hacks, President Obama sanctioned Russian intelligence officials, expelled 35 Russian diplomats suspected of being spies, and shut down two Russian facilities in the United States.

Going Forward In her January 17 speech, Samantha Power, US ambassador to the UN, encouraged Americans “to fight misinformation with information; fiction with facts.” Estonia’s experience taught the West how to deal with cases of cyber-attacks.

But right now, the new Russian cyber warfare tactics have an online propaganda component, which is not properly countered at the moment. Amb. Power reminded Americans that the Russian government had spent up to 1$ billion a year on propaganda tools like the television channel RT. Western nations will have to make meaningful financial investments in their anti-propaganda efforts to catch up with Putin’s sophisticated propaganda machine.

The National Intelligence Agency’s January 2017 report also assessed that “Moscow will apply lessons learned from its Putin-ordered campaign aimed at the US presidential election to future influence efforts worldwide, including against US allies and their election processes.” The US allies whose election processes will be targeted next are France, Germany, and Holland, among others. All three of these countries have national elections coming up in 2017, and in all three places, Russian funding of far-right nationalistic parties, as well as active Russian media propaganda, have been reported and are to be expected. Thus, the West now has a chance to learn and adopt quickly and prove that it has learned its lessons from the painful experiences of 2016

Russia used a sophisticated “hybrid war” to influence Britain's Brexit vote and the US elections. trolling practices in the West. After spending 30 months closely watching Russia’s online influence operations and monitoring some 7,000 accounts, the team’s main message is frightening: “Trump isn’t the end of Russia’s information war against America. They are just getting started.”

As the case of the US presidential elections illustrated, Russia’s goal is no longer to freeze web-sites and paralyze governments and banks like it did during the test-run in Estonia. The real damage is now conducted through information wars. Hacking into databases and leaking classified documents allows Mr. Putin’s government to manipulate opinions and actions of people in other countries. Taking advantage of social media helps Russia

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Western nations must make meaningful financial investments in their antipropaganda efforts to catch up with Putin’s sophisticated propaganda machine

‫تدشن موقعها الجديد باللغة اإلنجليزية على اإلنترنت‬

‫‪.com‬‬

‫‪The View From The East‬‬ ‫األفكار خلف األخبار‬

‫نافذة باللغة اإلنجليزية على السياسة العربية والشرق أوسطية‬ ‫يكتبها ويحررها نخبة من أبرز الكتاب الغربيني‪.‬‬

‫> هيكلة جميع األقسام في املوقع لتسهيل عملية تصفحه‪.‬‬ ‫ً‬ ‫> خدمات جديدة جعلت املوقع أكثر تفاعال مع زائريه‪.‬‬ ‫خدمة صوتية ومرئية لألخبار العاجلة وتقارير‬ ‫> ‪Live‬‬ ‫وحوارات بالصوت والصورة من قلب الحدث‪.‬‬ ‫> نقل آخر وأهم التغريدات العاملية املؤثرة‪ ،‬والتفاعل معها عبر املوقع‪.‬‬ ‫> أعمق التحقيقات والتقارير الحصرية‪ ،‬وأدق التحليالت وأبرز‬ ‫ً‬ ‫التعليقات وأكثرها واقعية وتميزا‪.‬‬

‫شؤون سياسية < قضايا < حتقيقات < تقارير < ثقافة < آراء ووجهات نظر < مقابالت < فنون < أحداث مصورة < بروفايل < سيلفي < صحة وطب بديل < مذكرات < فنون < رياضة < ذاكرة املكان‬

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Why the Eurozone Still Backs Its Common Currency Europeans do not back the euro simply because they fear the alternatives..The status quo offers them real rewards The euro, which arrived on the streets of Europe on 1 January, 2002 recently celebrated its 15th anniversary. The currency’s longevity is probably a surprise to the many observers who have predicted its demise. Yet most citizens of the eurozone—in both the creditor countries of the north and the debtor countries of the south—favor maintaining the euro over returning to their former national currencies.

Given the euro’s recent difficulties, what explains the overwhelming public support for it? The standard answer is that people do not want to abandon the euro because they fear the costs and uncertainties of reverting to the currencies used before its introduction. This explanation holds up, but it also overlooks the positive reasons for the euro’s popularity: the single currency has brought its users material benefits and helped to create a common European identity. Europeans do not back the euro simply because they fear the alternatives, but because the status quo offers them real rewards.

SEPARATION ANXIETY Observers outside the eurozone have long had a dark view of the euro’s prospects. Five years ago, in January 2012, the American economist Martin Feldstein—who argued in 1997 that the single currency would bring conflict to Europe—wrote in Foreign Affairs that “the euro should now be recognized as an experiment that failed.” A few months later, Paul Krugman wrote that the euro could fall apart “in a matter of months.” The list of prominent scholars who have either predicted or called for the breakup of the eurozone has lengthened since then. In 2016, Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of

England, argued that “leaving the euro area may be the only way to plot a route back to economic growth,” and Joseph Stiglitz claimed that “Europe may have to abandon the euro to save … the European project.” Such gloomy views are not only held by leading economists: they are shared by many scholars of EU politics, such as Andrew Moravcsik, who similarly believe that the euro has divided the continent and brought economic stagnation and high unemployment to the southern eurozone.

At first glance, these analyses—together with the rise of Euroskepticism across the continent—seem to suggest that the euro is a broadly unpopular project. In fact, throughout the eurozone, public support for the single currency has remained high over the past ten years, despite Europe’s economic crises. In 2007, some 70 percent of eurozone citizens had a favorable view of the currency, according to the Eurobarometer survey. That number fell to a low of 62 percent in 2013 after the first scare over Greece’s potential exit from the eurozone, or Grexit—but by November 2016, the most recent date for which data are available, it had returned to 70 percent, the historic high. In Greece, which experienced the worst of Europe’s economic tumult, support for the euro climbed from 47 percent in 2005 to 70 percent in 2015, right after the second Grexit scare. In contrast, in EU states outside the Eurozone, support for the euro declined over the same period, from 56 percent to 37 percent—a clear sign that people within and outside the currency union perceive the euro differently.

To be sure, some of the eurozone’s support for the single currency comes from fear of the consequences of abandoning it. One of the first scholars to delve into that subject was American economist Barry Eichengreen, who

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By Miguel Otero-Iglesias*

outlined the problems that countries exiting the eurozone would face in a 2007 working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research. In Eichengreenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s telling, the costs of exit were frightening. Debtor states such as Italy would have their credit ratings downgraded if they left the currency union, raising the interest they would have to pay

on new debt to prohibitive levels and making default nearly unavoidable. To make matters worse, in many cases, the devaluation brought about by reverting to the old currency would fail to meaningfully stimulate domestic demand or boost exports, as creeping inflation triggered by higher import costs and wages would probably offset any gains

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The sculpture displaying a giant Euro sign is seen in front of the European Central Bank (ECB) headquarters (AFP)

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in competitiveness. These economic problems would be compounded by political ones, as other EU governments would lash out at the state attempting to leave the eurozone, perhaps even forcing it out of the EU entirely. Quitting the euro would also require expensive legal and technical maneuvers—from introducing a completely new currency and redenominating contracts in it to imposing controls to limit capital flight. The result could be a massive financial crisis in the country abandoning the euro. No wonder so many people in the Eurozone don’t want to leave it.

THE EURO’S SOCIAL GLUE Yet the eurozone’s citizens also want to stay in the currency union because it offers them benefits. Despite the recession, many Europeans in the southern eurozone believe that the EU and the euro offer a measure of democratic stability and security that their national institutions cannot. In this region, most citizens appear to attribute their countries’ economic problems to domestic sources, such as incompetent elites, weak education systems, and a lack of meritocracy and official transparency, rather than to the common currency itself. Although popular regard for EU institutions fell in the aftermath of the eurozone crisis, trust in national institutions in the southern eurozone has fallen even lower. What is more, in states such as Greece, Portugal, and Spain, which transitioned to democracy relatively recently and suffer more from inequality and corruption than their northern European peers do, the euro’s requirements serve as a straitjacket on predatory domestic elites.

Perhaps no feature of the euro appeals to people in the southern eurozone as much as its stability does. Before the euro’s introduction, many citizens of the Mediterranean countries stashed much of their wealth in stable foreign denominations, such as the U.S. dollar and the deutsche mark, if possible overseas, because they feared that fluctuations in the value of their own countries’ currencies would undercut their savings. Some did so again at the height of the euro crisis in 2011 and 2012, when the risk of the euro’s redenomination was at its peak as Spain and Italy came under stress. Yet the euro has remained mostly stable despite the crisis, generally lifting the pressure on Europeans to hold foreign currencies. The euro’s stability has helped guarantee the savings of retirees, as older

currencies could not. It has obviated businesses owners’ concerns about devaluations. And it has enabled members of the middle class to have a strong currency in their pockets when travelling abroad, just like their American and British peers. These are all reasons to support membership in the monetary union.

In the northern eurozone, too, citizens prize the stability that the single currency offers. Exporters there no longer need to fear that their Italian and French competitors might benefit from the devaluation of the lira or the franc.

Middle-class tourists from countries such as Germany do not have to fret about currency conversion when travelling to Italy or Greece.

So citizens in the northern and southern eurozone value

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The euro has been a kind of social glue

of their peers outside the currency bloc. This might help explain why the eurozone’s outsiders often struggle to understand the its insiders.

The euro has been a kind of social glue even though many Europeans disagree about the EU’s management of the common currency. Indeed, German political scientist Thomas Risse has found that parliamentary debates and media organizations covered similar agendas across Eurozone countries during the euro crisis—a sign that people throughout the currency bloc experienced economic traumas together. Confrontation is inherent to any political community, and even disagreements over euro policy can help construct bonds, since they help to Europeanize public debate. The single currency has created tensions between Europe’s south and north and its political left and right, but this is not necessarily a bad thing.

Many Europeans believe that the EU and the euro offer a measure of democratic stability and security

euro notes

the currency’s stability for different reasons. But in both areas, they regard the euro as the most tangible symbol of European integration. Indeed, currencies are not simply economic phenomena; they are also cultural ones, and they can help build common identities. By acting as the medium for millions of daily exchanges, the euro has gradually become a shared code. As the political sociologist Giovanni Moro has put it, the euro is “the only existent common language” in a union characterized by linguistic cacophony. Eurozone citizens’ experience of economic crisis in the years since 2009 has strengthened this bond, uniting them against what many felt were attacks by foreign speculators. People who use the euro are thus citizens of the EU in a way that differs from that

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Ultimately, the resilience of the euro’s value despite its exposure to an existential crisis might have strengthened popular trust in the currency—not just in the southern eurozone, which is used to currency fluctuations, but also in the north, where people have long feared that the euro would grow weak. In an uncertain world, stable money can be a powerful symbol of social trust and security. Europeans are not in love with the euro, but despite the proposals of populist challengers such as Marine Le Pen and Beppe Grillo, they do not want to get rid of it, either—and there are plenty of positive reasons why that is so.

* MIGUEL OTERO-IGLESIAS is a Senior Analyst at

the Elcano Royal Institute, a Senior Research Fellow at ESSCA School of Management, an Adjunct Professor at IE University, and the author of The Euro, the Dollar, and the Global Financial Crisis. This article was originally published on (ForeignAffairs) .

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Saudi Women: Pioneers in a Blooming Saudi Art Scene

Saudi women are currently at the forefront of a radically growing cultural landscape When it comes to Saudi Arabia, the media most often sheds light on either political developments unfolding within the Kingdom or on Saudi social issues, in which case the position of women in Saudi society is a recurring point of interest. What is almost constantly left out of the narrative is the blooming contemporary art scene, whose chief stars are Saudi women. While Saudi is often perceived to be a conservative country wherein women encounter substantial limitations, Saudi women are currently at the forefront of a radically growing cultural landscape. In this article, we review 4 of the most prominent Saudi women artists that everyone should be talking about, while introducing some of their most outstanding artworks.

Arwa AlNeami Arwa AlNeami was born in a military base in the Southern city of Khamis Mushait. A self-taught artist, Arwa was the first female to pursue a photography project inside the second holiest site to Muslims- Al Masjid Al-Nabawi- wherein lies the tomb of the Prophet Muhammad. Awra mostly works with video art and photography. Her art explores sociopolitical issues with a special focus on gender in the Middle East.

One of her most powerful works is the video “Red Liptick” which seeks to provide a new, more nuanced perspective on Hijab than that which dominates mainstream media. This is particularly pertinent given that we live at a time when Muslim garments are stigmatized and used frequently to justify Islamophobic rhetoric, with perilous consequences to the Muslim community.

Raja and Shadia Alem Rajja and Shadia Alem are sisters that were born in Mecca.

Their unwavering and profound connection has brought about one of the most powerful and resonant collaborative artistic projects, not only in Saudi, but also in the Middle East. As they are constantly moving between Jeddah and Paris, it is unsurprising that their work mainly explores varying conceptions and understandings of culture in a context of globalization. Without doubt, “The Black Arch”, which they exhibited at the Venice Biennale, represents one of their most significant collaborative double acts. The installation draws on light and darkness while embodying two perceptions of the world and two cities; Mecca and Venice.

Describing the work, Rajaa says: “I grew up aware of the physical presence of Black all around, the black silhouttes of Saudi women, the black cloth of the Al Ka’ba and the black stone which supposedly is said to have enhanced our knowledge.” Meanwhile, the mirror incorporated into the installation is an immediate reminder of the present.

Manal AlDowayan Manal AlDowayan grew up in the Eastern Province of Saudi, where she first pursued a career in the oil industry. A decade later, Manal entered the Saudi art world, where she established a name for herself in no time. Manal is most famous for her photography and installations. Her work frequently fluctuates between the political and the personal, at times manifesting the inherent link that exists between both. One of her most memorable works is “If I Forget You Don’t Forget Me,” which is a meditation on the past, memory and identity. In this work, Manal seeks to build the collective memory of her father’s generation at an attempt to forge a personal narrative about herself and where she comes from. In a sense the work is about how we constantly seek

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By Joud Halawani Al-Tamimi

«The Black Arch» by Raja and Shadia Alem at the Venice Biennale.

to reposition ourselves in our present through our past. “I wanted to own my past” Manal commented with reference the artwork.

Toward an Alternative Narrative on Saudi Women and Society

At a time when Saudi women are frequently reduced to subservient and oppressed victims on mainstream

Western media, these remarkable women artists highlight the agency of the Saudi woman and the significance of women to the expanding creative output in the Kingdom. The 4 artists we reviewed have exhibited several times at prestigious events and venues around the world, including the Venice Biennale and the British Museum, which is a substantial step towards a more accurate and nuanced representation of Saudi women and society in the media.

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«Bader's Camera', «College Days» and «Muneera' from "If I Forget You Don't Forget Me»

by Manal Al Dowayan

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Foreign language Oscar picks: World of turmoil turns to escapism

International filmmakers turn to marriage, history and even a remote island in the middle of the ocean to make sense of things At a time of global anxiety, fervent populism and enduring conflict, international filmmakers have turned to marriage, high jinks, history and even a remote island in the middle of the ocean to make sense of things.

Those themes were resonant in the Academy Award nominations for foreign language film, which were dominated by European movies that included an eccentric father-daughter comedy, a World War II drama about hidden land mines and the story of a curmudgeonly Swede charmed by his immigrant neighor.

The two other movies among the five nominees were “Tanna,” an Australian-directed tale of star-crossed lovers on a South Pacific island, and “The Salesman,” an investigation of a marriage in turmoil by Iranian

director Asghar Farhadi. Farhadi won the foreign language Oscar in 2012 for “A Separation.”

Europe’s gaze at itself was revealing. Germany’s “Toni Erdmann” sets Eastern European capitalism as a backdrop for the strained relationship between a conformist daughter and her prankster father.

Denmark’s “Land of Mine” raises questions about morality and blame as German soldiers clear land mines on a beach. “A Man Called Ove” from Sweden looks at immigration through the eyes of a suicidal railroad worker.

The nominated films explore the fissures, bonds, expectations and unpredictability of relationships, especially when characters are forced to confront change. “The Salesman” hits all these notes as a couple

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By

Jeffrey Fleishman*

navigates vengeance, fear and the insecurities of home after a wife is attacked by a stranger in the shower. That film, like “Toni Erdmann,” directed by Maren Ade, draws the viewer deep into the intricacies of psychology and emotion.

“It’s in crisis that we reveal our true selves,” Farhadi recently told The Times. “Film to me is like a court trial. The spectator is the judge.”

“Toni Erdmann” has been a favorite of critics, but the way it tests the bounds of family troubles — the father (Winfried) is a rambling jokester who wears oversized fake teeth and an outfit that makes him look like Big Foot — is bracingly unconventional. Perhaps too much for some in the academy. The unsentimental film crystallizes German sardonic wit, yet it movingly plays on Winfried’s act-of-love strategy to embarrass his daughter (Ines) until he frees her from her rigid mask.

“Tanna” summons a different kind existential crisis amid battling tribes in the South Pacific. Unfolding amid thatched huts, grass skirts and a flickering volcano, the film, based on a true story, centers on the fate of two lovers after one of them is chosen to marry someone in an opposing clan to keep peace and preserve island culture. Directed by Bentley Dean and Martin Butler, the film is a picturesque paean to a way of life far from the tug of modern forces.

“Land of Mine” glimpses the dangerous irony of changing

fortunes. It explores compassion, hate and justice along a Danish beach where Nazis had laid 45,000 land mines to prevent an Allied invasion. But the Danish army is back in control and has pressed German POWs into the meticulous task of clearing the mines. Directed by Martin Zandvliet, the movie follows “A War,” about the Afghanistan conflict, as the second Danish film in two years to be nominated for an Academy Award.

Whimsy mixes with Scandinavian stoicism in a “A Man Called Ove,” directed by Hannes Holm, after a laid-off railroad worker and recent widower attempts to hang himself. The title character is a gruff bore who becomes enamored with his Iranian immigrant neighbor in a tender story that speaks to larger questions of culture and diversity that have been agitating Europe in recent years.

“No one should be all on their own,” Ove’s neighbor tells him. “Not even you.”

Scene from the Danish movie “Land of Mine.”

Nomiated films explore the fissures, bonds, expectations and unpredictability of relationships in contexts of change

* This article was originally published on (Los Angeles Times).

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