Chronic Crisis of the Egyptian Economy

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Chronic Crisis of the Egyptian Economy

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Editorial The pandemic years and their economic fallout had not ended yet when the Russian “special operation” in Ukraine took the world economies by storm, causing rising inflation, spiking energy prices, threatened food and wheat imports to various world countries particularly in the Middle East. Remarkably, Egypt was able to make progress in its economic reform policies in spite of the COVID19- consequences with statistics showing relative tangible improvements in living conditions and microeconomics decision-making. But as the RussiaUkraine war is continuing for an unknown period, the Middle Eastern country is suffering from the same shockwaves that have befallen all world countries, and is threatened with losing its hard-won achievements. This prompted the Central Bank of Egypt to take recent actions regarding interest rates, floating its currency, and mitigating the impact on individuals. Will the country succeed in its mission, should it take further steps to guarantee more stable economic system, and who are its main foreign supporters? In this week’s cover story, Dalia Ziada answers these questions while tracing back the crisis of the Egyptian economy to the 1950s as she highlights the origins of the fragile “hybrid economy”. Ziada addresses the latest achievements and the support the country receives, and recommends more comprehensive reforms for sustainability. On the issue of American and European sanctions on Russia, Mohamed Ali Salih reviews opposing opinions by prominent American experts as they address the effectiveness of the sanctions from non-military aspect. In the Art section, Bryn Haworth writes about surrealists while he delves into the world of Salvador Dali who went from being a left-wing in his youth, but in the Thirties, at the beginning of a so-called ‘a low dishonest decade’, he was already suspected of ‘Hitlerian’ sympathies. Turning into the far right, Bryn wonders if this “gives us some reason to wonder if (Dali) could still be considered a Surrealist at all.” Read these articles and more on our website eng.majalla.com. As always, we welcome and value our readers’ feedback and we invite you to take the opportunity to leave your comments on our website.

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A Weekly Political News Magazine

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A Weekly Political News Magazine

46 Here’s How We Can Build a Sustainable Metaverse

Issue 1900- April- 15/04/2022

22 Economically Squeezed

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36 India’s No-Halal Move

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Ramadaneya: Community Sport 56 Dawrat in the Holy Month of Ramadan 5

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napshot

Christian worshippers take part in Palm Sunday Christian worshippers take part in a traditional Palm Sunday procession in the Iraqi town of Al-Qosh, 50km north of Mosul city, on April 10, 2022 )AFP Photos(

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napshot

Trees decorated with thousands of Easter eggs A woman takes a picture of tree decorated with Easter eggs in the kindergarten in Seduva, Lithuania April 11, 2022 )Reuters Photos(

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LEBANON

EGYPT A knife-wielding man mortally wounded a Coptic priest in an attack at the popular seaside promenade in the northern city of Alexandria on Thursday evening, Egypt’s interior ministry said. The ministry said the priest died while being treated for his wounds. It said the suspected attacker had been arrested. The priest was identified by the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria as Arsanious Wadid, 56. It said he had served at a local parish. Christians make up more than 10% of Egypt’s mostly Muslim population. Sheikh Ahmad al-Tayyeb, who heads Egypt’s Al-Azhar — the highest institution of Sunni Islam in the Muslim world — condemned the attack, warning that such acts “might instigate religious wars.”

At least one person was killed and seven were injured in an explosion at a scout centre affiliated with the Shi'ite Amal Movement near Sidon in southern Lebanon, officials told Reuters early on Tuesday. The blast demolished the building and army personnel were searching through the rubble for any further casualties, sources added. The explosion also damaged the town hall nearby. One security source told Reuters the explosion was not an act of sabotage, without disclosing further details. On Dec. 10, a large blast rocked a Palestinian camp in the southern Lebanese port city of Tyre, injuring about a dozen people, according to rescue workers on scene and a Palestinian source inside the camp.

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Saudi Arabi the Haj pilg the key eve kingdom af restrictions Pilgrims to 65 and fully the ministr statement c Participants year but mu PCR test, an observed, i

UDI ARABIA

ia will let up to 1 million people join grimage this year, greatly expanding ent to participants from outside the fter two years of tight COVID s, state media said on Saturday. Mecca this year must be under age y vaccinated against the coronavirus, y of Hajj and Umrah said in a carried by the SPA news agency. s from abroad will be allowed this ust present a recent negative COVID nd health precautions will be it said.

UAE South Korea's central bank said on Wednesday it has agreed with the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates (CBUAE) to extend a currency swap agreement for five years. The renewed 20 billion UAE dirham (US$5.5 billion) currency swap deal between the Bank of Korea and CBUAE, first signed in 2013, is effective from Apr 13 and can be extended by mutual consent.

KUWAIT Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will develop a disputed gas field despite Iranian objections, while urging Tehran to engage in negotiations, a statement said Wednesday. The Gulf allies will honour their deal, branded "illegal" by Iran, to develop the Arash/Dorra maritime gas field, the Saudi foreign ministry said. "Saudi Arabia and... Kuwait affirm their right to exploit the natural resources in this area and that they will continue working to enforce what was agreed upon," it said. But the two countries also issued a new invitation for Iran to negotiate over the boundary of the gas field, the subject of a dispute which goes back decades.

IRAN Iran's supreme leader said on Tuesday that his country's future should not be tied to the success or collapse of nuclear talks with world powers, Iranian state media reported, adding that the negotiations to revive a 2015 nuclear deal "are progressing well". Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the last say on all state matters such as Iran's nuclear program, made the comments about a month after almost a year of indirect talks between Iran and the United States stalled. Both countries blame each other for the lack of "political will" to settle the remaining issues.

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A WEEK ACROS MEXICO.

U.S. President Joe Biden told Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi that buying more oil from Russia was not in India's interest and could hamper the U.S. response to the war in Ukraine, U.S. officials said. Starting an hour-long video call U.S. officials described as "warm" and "candid," Biden and Modi both publicly expressed growing alarm at the destruction inside Ukraine, especially in Bucha, where many civilians have been killed. Biden stopped short of making a "concrete ask" of Modi on Monday, an official said, noting India has concerns about deepening ties between Russia and China.

Mexico will hold its first presidential recall referendum on Sunday, promoted by President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, on whether he should complete his six-year term -- an exercise that has split public opinion. With an approval rating of nearly 60 percent, the midterm popularity test appears unlikely to result in Lopez Obrador's early departure. The president argues that submitting himself to the recall referendum is important for democracy, but critics see it as little more than an expensive propaganda exercise. The 68-year-old self-styled anti-corruption, pro-austerity crusader was elected in 2018 vowing to overhaul Mexico's "neoliberal" economic model. Lopez Obrador has promised not to seek reelection in 2024, following accusations by opponents that the referendum is a step towards changing the rules to enable him to stay in power beyond then.

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FRANCE.

French President Emmanuel Macro launched a scathing attack on far-right rival Marine Le Pen on Wednesday saying her true "authoritarian" intentions were showing after she banned a team o reporters and did not rule out a ret to the death penalty. Macron, a pro-European centrist, became president in 2017 after eas beating Le Pen when voters rallied behind him to keep the far-right o of power. This time, he is facing a much tougher challenge.

SS THE WORLD

of turn

sily d out

UKRAINE. CHINA.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Wednesday that Russia was using phosphorous bombs in Ukraine and he accused Moscow of deploying terror tactics against civilians. Adressing the Estonian parliament, Zelenskiy said: "The Russian army is using all types of artillery, all types of missile, air bombs in particular phosphorous bombs against residential districts and civilian infrastructure. "This is clear terror against the civilian population." He did not provide evidence and Reuters has not been able to independently verify his claims.

INDIA. India has allowed some state utilities to sell up to 25% of the coal allocated to them to other producers and urged states to import coal for blending with local grades to avert power cuts this year, a government statement said on Wednesday.

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China must not relax COVID-19 control and prevention measures, President Xi Jinping said during a visit to the southern island of Hainan on Wednesday (Apr 13), state radio reported. His comments came as China's commercial capital, Shanghai, reported more than 25,000 new cases. It is under huge pressure to contain China's biggest COVID-19 outbreak since the coronavirus was first discovered in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019. Xi said China must continue with its strict "dynamic COVID clearance" policy, while striving to minimise the impact of COVID-19 measures on the economy and society, state radio reported.

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Chronic Crisis of the Egyptian Economy

Macroeconomic Policies and Two Pillars of Foreign Support Proved Crucial in Hard Times

By Dalia Ziada

Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in February, the Egyptian economy has been weathering a significant amount of pressure, that poses a serious threat to the hard-earned gains of the economic reform program, that was launched seven years ago. The sharp decline in eastern European tourists turnout to the Red Sea resorts, the disruption of food supply chain, especially in relation to wheat imports, the soaring energy prices as a result of the western economic sanctions on Russia, and the spike in the exchange rate of the Egyptian pound against the U.S. dollar after international policies were made to contain unprecedented inflation rates; are some of the features defining the current economic crisis that Egypt has fallen into

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because of a war happening in a far-off geography. Over the past few weeks, urgent changes to monetary policy by the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE), crucial government interventions to suppress surging prices of basic commodities, and generous investments poured into the Egyptian market by the Arab Gulf countries, have effectively participated in protecting the Egyptian economy against the shockwaves of the ongoing global standoff. But they are not enough! Such temporary actions are crucial for mitigating the influence of the crisis on the microeconomic level, on the short-term. However, they are not doing any good to the advancement of the macroeconomic system, on the long-term. Rather than pushing the Egyptian economy outside of the bottle’s neck, where it has been stuck for seven decades, they are keeping it comfortably stable in its miserable shape and context.

Egyptian man waits outside a currency exchange office with a large-scale image of the US dollar in Cairo, Egypt, 22 March 2022. EPA/KHALED ELFIQI

A flawed hybrid economic system kept the Egyptian economy running, but dramatically hindered its potential to grow and prosper, or even adapt to constant changes in the international economy, over the years.

ROOTS OF THE CHRONIC ECONOMIC CRISIS

by Nasser and his counterparts in most Arab states.

Economic crises are not new to Egypt. In fact, we could comfortably claim that Egypt has been living in a prolonged economic crisis that started with the fall of the monarchy and the establishment of the republic, in early 1950s. To be honest, the Free Officers coup (July 1952) was unavoidable. Egyptians had been suffering under the corruption of the latest royals of the Muhammad Ali dynasty (1805-1952) and the British occupation. That, perhaps, explains why the Free Officers movement was widely supported by the vast majority of the grassroots citizens, especially the youth, at that time. However, the lack of planning to the day after removing the king made the new republic start on the wrong foot, in both political and economic terms. The core theme of the 1952 coup’s propaganda was to empower the poor against the capitalist rich, who had enslaved them to magnify their own wealth. In doing so, a “revolution leadership committee” was formed to seize the finances and the properties of the wealthy and reallocate them into state budget to serve the poor. Four years later, when Gamal Abdel Nasser became a president, he took the country several steps further away from capitalism towards his dearly embraced ideology of socialism/communism. He started by distributing the farms seized earlier from the capitalists on the poor farmers, who used to work in them under the capitalistic era. In parallel, he started a campaign to nationalize major industries and services that defined the pillars of the Egyptian economy at that time; starting from food and beverages factories, and cinema production companies, up to international trade corporations, and the multinational authority that was responsible for managing the Suez Canal. Sadly, neither the farmers were able to appropriately manage the farms given to them, nor the state was successful in running the nationalized facilities and businesses. Eventually, that led to a severe economic regression, that magnified after the Egyptian military found itself involved in a cluster of wars against the western super powers of that time, either in defense of its own territory or in defense of other Arab countries under the umbrella of Arab nationalism, which was, also, another ideology dearly embraced

When former President, Anwar Al-Sadat, took power after Nasser’s death, in 1970, Egypt was already going through severe political and societal transformations, that had a negative impact on his ambitious project to substitute Nasser’s failing socialist system with a liberal open market economy. As a result, a hybrid economic system that constitutes an odd combination of the distorted socialist project of Nasser and the incomplete liberalist project of Al-Sadat, had to be born. Such a flawed system kept the Egyptian economy running, but dramatically hindered its potential to grow and prosper, or even adapt to constant changes in the international economy, over the years. When Mubarak came in power after Sadat’s assassination, in 1981, he did not make an effort to reform the economy or change the system as long as it was working for his advantage. Mubarak made the best use of this hybrid economic system to hypnotize the citizens against the ordeal of his rule, and thus kept himself in power for thirty years. Mubarak depended mainly on the high revenues of tourism and the Suez Canal, as well as the annual military aid from the United States (US$ 1.3 billion), and the under-the-table inducements by corrupt businessmen, to feed the state budget. Meanwhile, he avoided applying taxation on a wide scale or firming tax collection policies in a way that may stir the anger of the middle class and make himself accountable to them. At the same time, he exaggerated in subsidizing basic food commodities, especially the bread, and made regular annual raises, labeled as “almenha” (the president’s give away), to blue-collar labor and civil servants who resemble the majority of grassroots citizens. However, as the flawed economic system became the norm, under Mubarak, corruption found its way to both public and private sectors. That further complicated Egypt’s chronic economic crisis, which got even worse after a popular revolution, supported by the military, overthrew Mubarak in 2011, followed by another uprising in 2013 against the short rule of the Muslim Brotherhood regime, and a state of unbearable instability and lack of security that lasted until the end of 2015. Nevertheless, the economic reform program (2016-2020) that

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was launched by the current President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, with the support of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), brought hope that the chronic problems of the Egyptian economy could be fixed, before it got thwarted, once again, by unexpected global troubles.

THE UNPAVED PATH TO ECONOMIC REFORM In January 2022, the majority of the Egyptian citizens started to report tangible improvements in their living conditions, and greater flexibility in their microeconomic decision-making in general. That was the first sign that finally Egypt started to harvest the fruit of the tough, but successful, economic reform program, which the government launched in 2016 with a loan and

The recent success of the Egyptian government in applying comprehensive economic reform and managing consequences of the COVID- 19 is dependent on two foreign pillars of support: IMF and long-term investments by the Arab Gulf countries.

technical support from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Around the same dates, Egypt was reaffirmed by the three Credit Rating agencies (Fitch, Moody’s, and S&P Global) at B and B+ with a stable outlook. In December 2021, an IMF report expected that Egypt, by the end of 2022, will become the second largest economy in Africa, after Nigeria, and the second largest economy in all Arab countries, after Saudi Arabia, with a record Growth Domestic Product (GDP) that exceeds US$438 billion. A great part of this success has to do with how the government handled the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on its emerging market. Even during the hard hit of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Egypt was able to make progress on the economic reform program. By the beginning of 2021, Egypt was among a handful number of countries, worldwide, to see a growth rate in their economy. According to data made available by the World Bank and IMF, Egypt as an emerging market achieved a growth rate of 3.6% during the fiscal year 2019/2020. Compare this to developed countries with advanced economies, which suffered sharp contractions under the stress of the pandemic. One reason for the Egyptian economy’s resilience during the COVID-19 crisis, and the relative affluence that Egyptians enjoyed in the year after, is the unprecedented success of the government’s macroeconomic policies in targeting poverty and unemployment rates, on a wide scale. National programs, like “Hayah Karima” (A Decent Life), participated effectively in giving the poor access to better housing conditions and health services. Meanwhile, the national infrastructure development program, which targets the urban as well as the long-ignored rural cities, has successfully created tens of thousands of jobs that eventually lowered unemployment rate to 7.4% compared to 13.05% in

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Central Bank of Egypt. (Ibrahim.ID via Wikimedia Commons)

A handout photo made available by the Saudi Royal Court showing King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia (R), receiving the Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi at Al Yamamah Palace, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 08 March 2022. EPA

2015, before the comprehensive economic reform program had started. In addition, the successful foreign policy, adopted by the Egyptian leadership, towards Egypt’s immediate neighbors in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, has opened new doors of resourcefulness to enhance the Egyptian economy. Egypt is not one of the lucky countries when it comes to natural resources. Therefore, exploring untrodden areas was the only option for the current leadership to create new sources of income. Between 2015-2017, the Egyptian President, El-Sisi, worked extensively on signing maritime treaties with Egypt’s neighbors in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea to clearly identify Egypt’s exclusive economic zones (EEZ), so Egypt can use the wealth of seabed resources. Thanks to this effort, by the year 2018, Egypt has emerged as a hub for Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) in the Mediterranean. Since the last quarter of 2021, Egypt started to export regular shipments of LNG to Turkey and southern Europe. In January 2022, for the first time ever, Egypt started shipping LNG to countries as far as Netherlands, in northwestern Europe. Meanwhile, in the Red Sea, Egypt partnered with giant European and Gulf companies on managing its newly established fields of crude oil. In June 2021, the Egyptian government announced that the Egyptian oil trade balance achieved a surplus estimated at US$174.9 million, during the first half of the fiscal year 2020/2021, compared to a deficit of US$773.3 million during the same period of the fiscal year 2019/2020. That is in addition to the fact that the hydrocarbon resources from the sea have been used to increase Egypt’s production of electricity to 54 Giga Watts creating a surplus after decades of domestic consumption suffering severe deficit in electric power. In February, only one week before the eruption of the Russia-

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The question that the Egyptian government and its safety network of regional and international supporters should focus on, is about how to avoid the crisis after the current crisis. Ukraine war, the Egyptian Minister of Planning celebrated, in a press conference, the news that Egypt successfully achieved a growth rate of 8.3% during the second quarter of the current fiscal year 2021/2022, compared to a growth rate of only 2% during the second quarter of last year. Meanwhile, the foreign reserves in the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) exceeded the benchmark of US$40 billion and the inflation rate remained stable roughly between 5% and 7%. Yet, unfortunately, the burdens of the RussiaUkraine war on the Egyptian economy are quickly swallowing this hard-won progress.

BENDING IN THE WIND OF WAR Despite being geographically distant, the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine is leveling a huge pressure on the Egyptian economy, especially with the looming uncertainty about when this war is expected to end. The so-called “military operation,” which

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the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, unjustifiably launched in Ukraine, on February 24th, with the hope to seize Kiev over one or two nights, is now extending to weeks of field combat that invited unprecedent global standoff between the western superpowers and Russia. The defining component of this standoff is using the weapon of economic sanctions, that ultimately forced the whole world to share the cost of the war, including the countries that applied the sanctions on Russia. Hence, the fragile Egyptian economy, which is hardly trying to stand tall, found itself obliged to bend in the wind of the war happening in another continent. The Russia-Ukraine war is directly hitting two of the most important economic sectors in Egypt; food and tourism. Some western analysts expected that the stress of the Russia-Ukraine war on the Egyptian economy may re-invent the Arab Spring revolutions or lead to public riots and outrage similar to what happened during the last years of

The economic reform that was launched by President Al-Sisi, with the support of the IMF, brought hope that the chronic problems of Egyptian economy could be fixed, before it got thwarted by unexpected global troubles.

Mubarak’s rule. In 2008, Egyptians went to streets in massive rallies to protest the shortage in bread production. The event was a shock for the Mubarak regime which had to seek help from the military, which autonomously runs a parallel economy to the civilian government, to fill in the gap. Egypt has been among the top three importers of wheat, in the past few years. The Egyptian population of more than onehundred million citizens consumes average four million tons of wheat per year. In 2021, Egypt produced only 20% of its needs and had to import the remaining 80% from Russia (50%) and Ukraine (30%). According to government statements, current reserves of wheat can only cover the demand of the market for the coming three months. Therefore, the government is allocating 36 billion Egyptian pounds (about US$ 2 billion) to purchase six million tons of the local harvest, this Summer. Meanwhile, the General Authority for Supply Commodities (GASC) is reaching out to European suppliers, such as France, Germany, Lithuania, and Bulgaria, to secure purchases from their future wheat harvests. In early March, the Egyptian Minister of Finance said that Egypt will need about fifteen billion dollars above its stipulated annual budget to handle this quick surge in prices. In parallel, the Egyptian tourism sector, which is barely recovering from the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Arab Spring aftermath, is also terribly affected. A Large percentage of the tourists pouring into Egypt, every year, comes from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus during the winter season. When the flights between Russia and Egypt were suspended in the period between 2015 and 2021, the Red Sea resorts had been suffering to keep their business. The Egyptian economy also suffered, as tourism accounts for 9% of Egypt’s GDP and is the only resource for foreign currency besides the bank transfers by Egyptians liv-

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A plant’s gas tanks are seen at the desert road of Suez city north of Cairo, Egypt August 14, 2016. Picture taken August 14, 2016. REUTERS/ Amr Abdallah Dalsh/File Photo

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) logo is seen outside the headquarters building in Washington, United States, September 4, 2018. REUTERS/ Yuri Gripas

ing abroad. Given the uncertainty of when and how this war is expected to end, the Egyptian tourism sector is doomed to go through a similar period of sluggishness, that will eventually echo in other sectors of the Egyptian economy. Towards the end of March, after the United States Federal Reserve had to raise the interest rates to help the central bank deal with the soaring inflation rates, the inflation rates inside Egypt jumped above 10%, all of a sudden. As a result, the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) had to make some urgent monetary policies to mitigate the effects of such quick change. CBE decisions included floating the currency, allowing the Egyptian pound (EGP) to retreat by 15% against the dollar, and raising interest rates by 1% (100 points). At the same time, the CBE allowed national banks to sell medium-term investment certificates in EGP with annual interest rate of 18%. Magically, the three parallel decisions effectively controlled the inflation and preserved the value of the Egyptian pound by stabilizing its exchange rate against the US dollar; as most citizens became logically more inclined to investing in the high-rate EGP certificates, rather than buying and saving US dollars. Beside the brave financial decisions taken by the CBE, the Egyptian government took unprecedented measures to control potential mishaps on the microeconomic level. The Egyptian government continued to sell wheat to bakeries with the pre-war prices, in order to prevent them from raising the prices of the subsidized and the non-subsidized bread on the final consumer. In parallel, the government allowed the Armed Forces to open temporary food shopping marquees at central locations in several governorates, where citizens can buy basic food products for fair prices, especially during the holy month of Ramadan. Nevertheless, it seems that the Egyptian government is having

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difficulty controlling the consequences of the crisis on foreign trade. In early April, Egypt’s Ministry of Finance, Investment Authority, and the Union of the Chambers of Commerce announced that they are considering the feasibility of forcing local and foreign shipping agencies to deal in Egyptian pound (rather than US dollar) for all transactions related to shipping and customs inside Egypt. The goal is to keep the US dollar reserves in the Egyptian banks for as long as possible, and also to raise the value of the Egyptian pound by increasing the demand on it. Meanwhile, the Chairman of the Egyptian Businessmen Association (EBA) said that the Egyptian exporters who trade with Russia are keen to keep their business running, despite the western sanctions on the Russian economy. Therefore, they are asking the Egyptian government to allow them to open bank accounts in Ruble (the Russian currency) to receive payments for their goods. In order not to affect the Egyptian economy further, the EBA Chairman suggested using the earned Rubles to pay for importing from Russia. Although such a proposal sounds unrealistic and inapplicable at the time being, the Egyptian government might be obliged to look into it if the Russia-Ukraine war, and the global standoff around it, prolong. On the bright side, the current standoff between Europe and Russia may enhance Egypt’s gas industry in impressive ways. There is a catch, though. For Egypt to hunt this ripe opportunity, it has to cooperate with its North Africa neighbors, Libya and Algeria, on liquifying and selling their hydrocarbon extracts in the Egyptian offshore plants, the same way it is currently cooperating with Israel. Yet, that is almost impossible in light of the ongoing conflicts and the security situation in both countries. In Libya, the extreme divisions among the political are delaying the government funds needed to operate natural gas facilities and keep

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reserves and production at stable levels. In Algeria, the renewed conflict with its neighbor Morocco over the Western Sahara led to the abrupt termination, in November 2021, of the contracts governing their use of the Maghreb-Europe pipeline, and thus affected the volumes of gas flow from Algeria to Europe.

FOREIGN PILLARS OF DOMESTIC SUCCESS The success of the Egyptian government, over the past seven years, in applying the comprehensive economic reform program (20162020), and then in managing the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2021) were strictly dependent on two foreign pillars of support. One of them is the support of the west, including individual countries and international organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The other more important pillar of support is the generous long-term investments in the Egyptian market and US dollar deposits in the Central Bank by the Arab Gulf countries. In 2016, Egypt received an IMF loan of US$12 billion, over three years, through the IMF’s Extended Fund Facility (EFF). The loan and the technical support attached to it, provided a tremendous buffer for the Egyptian economy against the challenges of the reform program, especially those related to the first shocks of inflation and currency floating. When the COVID-19 pandemic outbroke, in 2020, the IMF intervened with two financial support instruments to support the Egyptian economy against the consequences of the pandemic. In May 2020, Egypt received US$2.8 billion in emergency financial assistance through the IMF’s Rapid Financing Instrument (IRF). Then, in June 2020, the IMF’s Standby Arrangement (SBA) availed US$5.4 billion for Egypt to withdraw over 12 months. The initial loan and the subsequent interventions by the IMF participated effectively in ensuring the success of the comprehensive reform program, as well as keeping the economy resilient to the shockwaves of the pandemic. Therefore, when the effects of the Russia-Ukraine war started to reflect on the Egyptian economy, the first instinct of the Egyptian government was to knock the doors of the IMF once more. Some financial experts said that Egypt has already exhausted all the loans and financial assistance opportuni-

In January 2022, there was the first sign that finally Egypt started to harvest the fruit of the tough, but successful, economic reform program, which the government launched in 2016.

ties it could get from the IMF, over the past five years. However, a press statement by the IMF, on March 23rd, showed that the IMF is willing to help Egypt this get out of the current crisis, too. “[IMF] Staff is working closely with the [Egyptian] authorities to prepare for program discussions with a view to supporting our shared goals of economic stability and sustainable, job-rich, and inclusive medium-term growth for Egypt;” the IMF Press Statement noted. Knowing that this is going to be a long process that comes with a load of conditions that the domestic political system and the monetary policymaker would need to adapt to first, the Egyptian leadership gave priority to activating the second pillar of support; the Arab Gulf countries. Since President El-Sisi took power in 2014, the wealthy countries of the Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which believe that Egypt’s political stability is central to preserving regional security and stability, have been generously supporting the Egyptian economy, either through direct investments in the market or by keeping long-term and medium-term deposits in the Central Bank (CBE). In 2021, the UAE was declared as world’s largest foreign investor in Egypt, with direct investments exceeding US$15 billion. In 2019, the Sovereign Fund of Egypt and the Abu Dhabi Sovereign Fund (ADQ) signed a strategic cooperation agreement to use joint investments of US$20 billion to enhance crucial sectors and assets of the Egyptian economy. Currently, there are more than one thousand UAE companies working in Egypt, including in vital sectors of food industry, energy (oil and gas), and logistical services of the Suez Canal. Also, at that time, the UAE was the holder of the largest deposit by a Gulf country in the Central Bank of Egypt, amounting to US$ 5.7 billion. According to the latest periodic External Position Report, released by CBE, in November 2021, the total of long-term deposits by Arab Gulf countries reached US$15 billion in June 2021, including US$5.7 billion by the UAE, US$4 billion by Kuwait, and US$2.2 billion by Saudi Arabia. However, in early April of this year, these figures dramatically increased as Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar decided to pour tens of billions of dollars in the Egyptian economy in the form of long-term deposits and direct investments. On the last week of March, after a visit by the Egyptian President to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia decided to push the maturity of its deposits in the CBE to 2026. In addition, Saudi Arabia announced making a new deposit of US$5 billion at the CBE to support the Egyptian economy during the current crisis. Then, on March 30th, the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) signed an agreement with the Sovereign Fund of Egypt to invest US$10 billion in the Egyptian market and in governmental health and educational services. One day before that, on March 29th, senior officials from the Qatari government met with the Egyptian Prime Minister in Cairo, wherein they agreed that Qatar will invest US$ 5 billion in the Egyptian market in the next period. It is important to mention, here, that Qatar has already been one of the largest foreign investors in Egypt’s energy sector, especially after the two countries reconciled in early 2021. In December 2021, the state-owned Qatar Energy purchased

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Tourism accounts for 9% of Egypt’s GDP and is the only resource for foreign currency besides the bank transfers by Egyptians living abroad. (Photo: Flickr)

17% of Shell’s project rights for oil and gas exploration in the Egyptian exclusive economic zone in the Red Sea. Last week, on April 12th, the Abu Dhabi Wealth Fund (ADQ) acted on a deal, that was discussed earlier with the Egyptian government, to acquire state-owned shares of five Egyptian companies. ADQ invested US$1.8 billion in buying the stakes of the Egyptian state in the following companies: Abu Kir Fertilizers and Chemical Industries (21.5%), Misr Fertilizers Production Company - MOPCO (20%), Alexandria Container and Cargo Holding Company (32%), Commercial International Bank Egypt SAE (17%), and Fawry for Banking and Payment Technology Services (12.6%). The national banks; Banque Misr (BM) and the National Bank of Egypt (NBE) acted as the sellers of these stakes.

One reason for the Egyptian economy’s resilience during the COVID- 19 crisis, and the relative affluence that Egyptians enjoyed in the year after, is the success of the government’s macroeconomic policies in targeting poverty and unemployment rates.

EYEING THE CRISIS AFTER THE CRISIS The former experience of the current Egyptian leadership in managing various types of economic crises, in a relatively short period of time, will definitely help the Egyptian economy survive the current crisis. That is even more possible thanks to the generous deposits and investments by the Arab Gulf countries, and the continued support of the International Monetary Fund. Yet, we have to keep in mind that all these efforts are only going to provide a temporary fix to a pressing issue. They will not provide a real solution to Egypt’s chronic economic crisis. In that sense, the question that the Egyptian government and its safety network of regional and international supporters should focus on, is about how to avoid the crisis after the current crisis. In other words, how to get the Egyptian economy liberated from the painful roller coaster of extreme stress followed by short recovery that has not stopped for seventy years. The continuity of the comprehensive macroeconomic reform program, that was

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launched in 2016, is only one step in the direction to achieve this goal, but it cannot be seen as a goal in itself. Rather, the end goal should be to ditch the existing outdated economic system, which in its essence is a distorted hybrid of Nasser’s failed socialism and Sadat’s incomplete liberalism; in order to establish a modern economic system, that is in perfect harmony with the changing nature and priorities of the global economic system. Malaysia and Singapore are two interesting case studies to examine for that purpose. It is not going to be an easy mission, neither for the government nor for the citizens, but its prospected fruit is worth the pain. * Dalia Ziada is an Egyptian author and Director of the Liberal Democracy Institute. Her work covers military affairs, political Islamism, and geopolitics in the Middle East and North Africa. Tweets at @daliaziada.

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Economically Squeezed Egyptians Bear Burnt of Russian-Ukrainian War By Menna A. Farouk Egyptians are bearing the brunt of the RussianUkrainian war which broke out in February as food and other commodity prices are soaring. According to the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS), the annual urban consumer price inflation increased in March to 10.5 percent, its highest in nearly three years, compared to 8.8 percent a month earlier.

The inflation increase is mainly due to food shortages following the Russian war and experts expect that the rate will continue to grow in the coming months. In order to deal with the crisis, many Egyptians have started to consume less or resort to converting their savings to investment certificates at banks which offered high interest rates last month. “We have largely cut off our consumption in order to be able to satisfy our needs,” Hala Mohamed, a

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housewife, told Majalla.

In March, the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) surprised the markets with an extraordinary meeting of the Monetary Policy Committee, four days before its official date, during which it decided to increase the overnight deposit and lending rates by 100 basis points to reach 9.25 percent, 10.25 percent, respectively. The credit and discount rate was also raised by 100 basis points to 9.75 percent.

We have been already struggling because of the coronavirus pandemic with job losses and soaring prices. This war is going to make it worse and worse. That is why we are rushing to any solution.”

In tandem with the announcement of the interest rate decision, the Egyptian pound was floated, in the first two days reaching its lowest level since January 2017 and recording 18.45 pounds for purchase and 18.55 pounds for sale.

prices. This war is going to make it worse and worse. That is why we are rushing to any solution,” Ahmed Ibrahim, a civil servant, told Majalla, while waiting at an Egyptian bank in eastern Cairo.

“For example, I am now buying less cooking oil and not buying chicken and meat like before,” she added.

According to the CBE, the decision to raise interest rates aimed at confronting global inflationary pressures that have begun to reappear due to the developments of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, the noticeable rise in global prices of basic commodities, supply chain disruptions and high shipping costs, in addition to financial market fluctuations in emerging countries. Two Egyptian women shopping in a supermarket in Cairo, Egypt, December 1, 2019. Picture taken December 1, 2019. REUTERS/ Shokry Hussien

Goldman Sachs Bank, the famous institution for providing financial and investment services, stated that the CBE’s decisions to reduce the pound by 11-10 percent and raise the main interest rate by 100 basis points, increase the attractiveness of the Egyptian market to international investors and global investment funds.

LONG QUEUES The two largest government banks issued annual savings certificates, the return on which is distributed monthly at an interest rate of up to 18 percent. Long queues were seen at Egyptian banks following the announcement as many holders of bank accounts are seeking to weather the tough consequences of the war. “We have been already struggling because of the coronavirus pandemic with job losses and soaring

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Hoda Ali, another civil servant, shared Ibrahim’s worries. “I will be losing money by turning my investment certificates which I bought at an interest rate of 11 percent into certificates with an interest rate of 18 percent. But I do not have any other choice,” she said. Before the Ukrainian crisis, things were going well in the local economy with a recovery in the tourism sector, a steadily rising cash reserve even if in small amounts, exports rising to the highest level thereby breaking the LE30 billion barrier, and the inflation rate stabilizing at the target limit of 7 percent. Now, all these achievements seem to be coming to an end. But experts have lauded the Central Bank’s decisions to increase interest rate and float the Egyptian pound against the US dollar, saying that they will soothe the harsh effects of the war. Mohamed Abdel-Aal, a banking expert, said that the central bank’s decisions were made under circumstances beyond the control of the Egyptian economy, and their aim was to protect the gains of the economic reform program and to absorb any new inflationary pressures stemming from the RussianUkrainian crisis. Abdel-Aal added that moving the dollar exchange

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rate achieves gains for the Egyptian economy, by encouraging the remittances of Egyptians working abroad and increasing the attractiveness of the pound to indirect foreign investment after the interest rate and exchange rate improved.

general budget. It also limits the government’s objectives to reduce the budget deficit and control the public debt as well as the unemployment rate, and increase the contribution of the private sector to the economy.

These decisions, according to Abdel-Aal, will make the pound maintain its attractive position among the list of currencies that achieve a real return among the currencies of emerging countries.

In turn, Minister of Finance Mohamed Maait confirmed in a recent press conference that his ministry seeks to reduce the debt to below 90 percent by the end of the current fiscal year on June 2022 ,30.

It will also support Egyptian exports by giving exports greater competitiveness against similar goods, he said. However, the interest rate hike exacerbates the burden of financing the public debt on the state’s

Goldman Sachs Bank said that the CBE’s decisions to reduce the pound by 11-10 percent increase the attractiveness of the Egyptian market to international investors and global investment funds.

The government lowered its forecast for economic growth for the next fiscal year 2023-2022 to 5.5 percent, compared to a previous forecast of 5.7 percent before the outbreak of the Ukraine war, according to the Ministry of Planning. Despite the difficult challenges to the public treasury, the government announced a package of financial and social protection measures worth 130 billion Egyptian pounds to deal with the repercussions of global economic challenges and mitigate their effects on citizens. This package included the provision of 7.2 billion Egyptian pounds to include 450,000 new families as beneficiaries of “Takaful and Karama,” and an earlier date for annual bonuses to start - from April, not June, as usual. The government tried to absorb the impact of

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A customer exchanges U.S. dollars to Egyptian pounds in a foreign exchange office in central Cairo, Egypt December 27, 2016. REUTERS/ Mohamed Abd El Ghany

A file photo of Egyptians queuing in front of a bank in Cairo. Credit: Amr Abdallah Dalsh/ Reuters

interest and the dollar on the private sector, so it reintroduced the customs dollar at 16 pounds for basic commodities and production requirements, as a substitute for the average bank dollar rate, with the state’s public treasury bearing the value of the real estate tax due on the industrial sectors for a period of 3 years, at a value of 75.3 billion Egyptian pounds.

ATTRACTING INVESTORS The government also included a set of additional tax incentives to support the capital market and increase the demand for trading as well as for listing companies on the stock exchange, exempting a percentage of the profit attained by shareholders equivalent to the credit and discount rate issued by the CBE at the beginning of each calendar year, and deducting 50 percent of the value of capital gains realized upon an initial public offering on the stock exchange for a period of two years, to be reduced to 25 per cent thereafter. Mohamed Abdel Wahab, an economist, said that floating the pound aims to control the withdrawal of indirect foreign investments from the Egyptian market in light of great competition in the bond markets after the US Federal Reserve raised interest rates with expectations of raising it more than once during the current year.

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Despite the difficult challenges to the public treasury, the government announced a package of financial and social protection measures worth 130 billion Egyptian pounds to deal with the repercussions of global economic challenges and mitigate their effects on citizens. Abdel Wahab believes that these decisions will attract foreign investors, especially Arabs, in light of the crisis in Russia and Ukraine which is casting a shadow over the global economy, especially in light of investors’ confidence and security in the local market, more so than in Western markets at the present time. Abdel Wahab bases his prediction on a wave of freezing Russian investments in Arab countries, estimated at billions of dollars, allegedly linked to the Russian President’s regime, which made many investors see that emerging markets are safer.

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The Next Sino-Russian Split?

Beijing Will Ultimately Come to Regret Its Support of Moscow By Odd Arne Westad From within a war, it is hard to think about what comes next. Rarely has this been more true than for the current Russo-Ukrainian war. Our thinking is necessarily clouded by the suffering that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression has inflicted on the people of Ukraine. It is also hindered by lack of experience with this kind of warfare. Together, these make it hard to imagine where we go from here, especially amid the dangers of the era of great-power rivalry that this invasion has brought into being. It will be a time of intense competition and menace—much less stable than the Cold War and much riskier than any time since that conflict ended.

Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling has already shown how high the stakes are in what comes next. Irrespective of how this war ends, the relationship between Russia and China will determine whether the world can avoid great-power war. If China continues to support the Putin regime in its attempts to subdue its neighbors by force, it is highly likely that the world at some point will stumble into a confrontation between Russia and Europe supported by the United States. If China reins Putin in or abandons its coalition with him altogether, a return to a more stable competition among great powers may be possible. As many observers—including some in China— have pointed out, this could be China’s moment on the international stage to do good for itself and others.

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Yet so far, China has failed to seize that opportunity. Instead of trying to prevent the aggression against Ukraine, it gave Putin the green light to invade, asking only that the assault be postponed until after the Beijing Olympics. Right up to the moment of the invasion, China’s Foreign Ministry parroted Russia’s lies about the planned aggressive war being a figment of the West’s febrile imagination. On the eve of the invasion, the Chinese accused the United States of “heightening tensions, creating panic, and even hyping up the possibility of warfare.” The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson added, “The Russian side has said on many occasions that it does not intend to start a war.” When Russia did invade a few hours later, China stood aside and did nothing, except appeal to high-minded notions of nonintervention and accuse the United States and its European partners of being responsible for Russia’s actions. Ukrainians and other eastern Europeans listened with incredulity as Chinese leaders went on about “Russia’s legitimate concerns on security issues” and the “historical complexities” of their countries’ situation. As Russia’s missiles hit Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Mariupol, causing almost ten million civilians to flee their homes so far, China accused “the U.S.-led NATO” of having “pushed Russia-Ukraine tension to the breaking point.”

BURNING BRIDGES IN EUROPE Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, China February 2022 ,4. Sputnik/ Aleksey Druzhinin/Kremlin via REUTERS

The image of China that this rhetoric has created, especially in Europe, is that of an accomplice to Russia’s mass murder in Ukraine. It is not what China has done that has horrified Europeans—most expected Beijing to abstain when Russian actions were condemned in the UN Security Council and General Assembly. It is the callousness of the language China’s diplomats have used that has been so profoundly shocking. If “Russia’s legitimate concerns” can lead China to condone the invasion of a neighbor with whom it has had friendly relations up until the assault happened, who can trust China’s friendship? And the patter about “historical complexities” is even worse: Europe is full of historical complexities, which empires have used in the past to violate treaties and invade smaller neighbors. Is Ukraine so “historically complex” that it does not really deserve its own territorial integrity or even its statehood? As Putin’s assault rolls on, the image of China in Europe and in the United States is in free fall. Granted, it was in decline before this happened, and tensions were on the rise. But, especially for the Europeans, Ukraine has been a remarkable eye opener. “China’s silence on the Russian atrocities speaks volumes,” says Die Zeit, one of Germany’s leading newspapers. What

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As Russia’s missiles hit Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Mariupol, causing almost ten million civilians to flee their homes so far, China accused “the U.S.-led NATO” of having “pushed Russia-Ukraine tension to the breaking point.” China says and does about Ukraine from now on will influence Chinese relations with Europe and with other countries for at least the next decade, if not longer. Is there a chance that China will pull the plug on Putin or at least facilitate real negotiations between his regime and the Ukrainians, negotiations that start from the premise of recognizing Ukraine’s right to self-determination? At the moment, this seems very unlikely. Putin and China’s leader Xi Jinping noted in their joint statement just before Putin started the Ukraine war “the significance of the efforts taken by the Russian side to establish a just multipolar system of international relations.” Presumably this is what Putin is now doing in Ukraine. There is, of course, the possibility that Xi will get cold feet if the Russians destroy more cities or use weapons of mass destruction. But even that is unlikely given China’s pro-Russian rhetoric since Putin’s attack began. The main reason for China condoning Putin’s war of aggression is, of course, Chinese self-interest. In standing by its partner in spite of Putin violating most principles of international relations that the Chinese say they believe in, Beijing hopes to tie Russia to China for a long time to come. Xi had, of course, preferred the Russian offensive to succeed smoothly and effectively, but even after the Ukrainian defenders made a mockery of that supposition, Xi seems to believe that Putin’s military problems will in the long run work to China’s advantage. They will create a Russia evermore dependent on China, as will Western sanctions. By saying very little and blaming the West, Beijing expects a positive outcome for itself.

CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR In terms of Chinese interests, this might not turn out to be quite as successful a strategy as Xi assumes, at least

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not in the long run. If Putin succeeds in subjugating Ukraine, his appetite might not stop there. If he fails, there will be years of tension on Russia’s southern border. In either case, Russia will be a wild card, rather than a reliable partner for Beijing. It is true that Russia under Putin, a bit like North Korea under Kim Jong Un, will have nowhere else to turn than to China. But that dependency of a weak regime, locked in forever quarrels with its neighbors, might not serve China well, in spite of Russia’s tempting riches in energy and minerals. There are lessons here, for both China and Russia but also for the West, from the last time Beijing and Moscow tried to set up an alliance that aimed to confront the United States. Back then, in the 1950s, Mao and Stalin were brought together by communist ideology as well as security needs. At that time, China was the weaker partner, just as Russia is now, and that inequality by itself created fissures in the relationship. And even though today’s Sino-Russian alliance will not be driven apart by an ideological split, as happened in the post-Stalin era, there are plenty of other causes of conflict, some of which are strikingly resemblant of the late 1950s. For China, its relationship with the United States and with Europe will always be more important than relations with Russia. Like the Chinese in the 1950s, Russians will easily get the impression that their partner is negotiating with Washington, Brussels, or Berlin above their heads and will be suspicious and resentful when Moscow’s interests are not fully taken into consideration. China has a powerful position in the global economy, and Russia does not. Financially, China has a lot

The main reason for China condoning Putin’s war of aggression is Chinese self-interest. In standing by its partner in spite of Putin violating most principles of international relations that the Chinese say they believe in.

of lending power, but it will not necessarily lend to a Russian economy in steep decline, even if sanctions are removed. The differences in the two countries’ overall global positions create plentiful causes for acrimony. Relations with third powers also complicate the picture, just as they did in the 1950s. India is a friend of Russia and, disappointingly for the West, has gone out of its way not to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But India is also an antagonist and a rival of China. In the late 1950s, one key Chinese accusation against the Soviets was Moscow’s continued closeness to India, even after the first Indian border clashes with China. The same power dynamic is problematic today. And it is not just India. Vietnam, Mongolia, and the Central Asian states will come under increasing pressure by China and will look to Russia to back them up. Finally, there is the outcome of the war in Ukraine. Just as the Chinese looked to the Soviets for support in the Korean War in the 1950s, Russian leaders today will look to the Chinese to support them in Ukraine, especially if matters get worse for the Russian military. And if Russia loses the war or has to go back to status quo ante, as Mao had to do in the Korean War, resentment at a partner for not having supported the war effort enough to win will simmer. Putin may do what Mao did in Korea: declare the status quo a victory and have enough Russians believe him for nationalist reasons to secure the survival of his regime. But the thought that China did not back Russia to the hilt will gnaw at the relationship. The biggest lesson from the last Sino-Russian alliance

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Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (R) shakes hands with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping before a reception to greet high-ranked foreign guests prior to the 2014 Winter Olympic Games opening ceremony in Sochi, February 7, 2014. REUTERS/ Alexei Nikolsky/RIA Novosti/Kremlin

is probably this: the development of the relationship is much more dependent on the domestic dynamics in the two countries and on the relationship between them than on anything the United States can do or say. The best strategy for the United States is to watch and wait but be ready to explore cracks in the alliance as soon as they appear. The West will punish Russia for its war of aggression and will continue to rival China while seeking common-sense arrangements with it, not least in economic terms. As a long-term strategy, this is probably about the best we can do. For Russia and China are not natural partners. There are just too many issues that drive them apart. Today, Putin’s foreign policy intellectuals hold forth about how Russia has made a fundamental decision on partnering with China now and in the future. But anyone who has spoken with them can sense, underneath, their many concerns about that choice. To them, the alliance with China is there because of a need to spite the West, not because of any natural cohesion between the two powers. Putin himself may think differently, but, if so, given Russia’s increasing weakness, he might get more than he bargains for when linking with a rising power next door.

A BROKEN BLOC A significant argument against this interpretation, especially in Washington these days, is that there is more long-term cohesion in the present-day Sino-Russian alliance than meets the eye. Some observers see the current war in Ukraine as the first shot in a new Cold War, which pits two power blocs against each other. Like the original Cold War, this view holds, today there are ideological divides between the two blocs as well as differences in economic systems. The new Cold War battle is therefore between democracy and authoritarianism and between market-oriented and state-centered economics. But China and Russia today have very different political systems and very different economies. China is a communist state where the party rules in what is claimed to be a meritocratic manner on behalf of the people. Russia is a personalized kleptocratic dictatorship that masquerades as a democracy. Both economies are increasingly controlled by the government, but that does not ensure any commensurability. On the contrary, the Cold War shows that state-directed economies are usually less compatible with each other than are capitalist economies. Moreover, in government-controlled economies, everything becomes political, often complicating bilateral relations further. In the Russian-Chinese case, profound cultural differences add to the picture. Given all of this, the broader historical parallel that

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The new Cold War battle is therefore between democracy and authoritarianism and between market-oriented and state-centered economics. comes to mind is not so much the Cold War as it is Germany and Austria at the beginning of the twentieth century. Germany then, like China today, was a rising great power with a rapidly increasing industrial and technological potential and a set of complaints about the existing international order. Germany’s ally Austria was, like Russia today, an empire in decline, with plentiful quarrels with its neighbors and lots of internal conflict. Up to the summer of 1914, German leaders believed that they could manage Austria to their own advantage. Instead, what they got was a sequence of events in which Austrian concerns drove Germany toward war. China should be very careful not to repeat that cycle of events. Sometimes looking after your own interests means defining those interests more fully, especially when opportunities arise to link with sizable but troubled empires next door. While Beijing sizes up its options, what should the West do now? Some actions are obvious. It should arm itself better, as Europe is now beginning to do. It should support the Ukrainian resistance. It should strengthen relations with friends along Russia’s and China’s borders. It should put maximum pressure on the Putin regime, short of engaging his forces in combat. In communicating with Chinese officials, it should underline that Western policymakers see them as at least partly responsible for Putin’s misdeeds. Appeals to principle will not help with Beijing. Even significant international embarrassment for China, which Putin’s lies and indiscriminate killing produce daily, will not do much. Ramping up pressure against Russia while showing China how its close association with Putin works against stabilization of Sino-American or SinoEuropean relations is the best we can do. It might not be enough to save Ukraine from further destruction. But it may make great-power war less likely by convincing at least some Chinese policymakers that Putin’s interests and their own are not as easily compatible as both sides now seem to believe. This article was originally published by Foreign Affairs.

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Are Russian Sanctions Effective?

Opposing Views of Two Prominent Figures: Noam Chomsky vs. White House Economic Advisor

By Mohammad Ali Salih – Washington American led international sanctions on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine were but a continuation of earlier sanctions that started in 2014 when Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea. Belarus has also been sanctioned for its cooperation with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The sanctions were imposed mostly by the US, the European Union and many international organizations. Russia responded with sanctions against several countries, including a total ban on food imports from Australia, Canada, Norway, Japan, the United States and the EU. Last week, the Washington Post said that the sanctions were a “double-edged sword” with good and bad consequences for both Russia and the West. With the help of world maps, the newspaper showed that 141 countries initially voted in support of Ukraine at the UN at the beginning of March. But last week, 93 countries supported the removal of Russia from the UN Human Rights Council, with many counties in Central and South America, Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia either absent or abstaining. World-wide, only seven countries, besides the EU, have imposed official sanctions against Russia. The headline of this WAPO report, “US Widens Sanctions Against Russia as Questions About Effectiveness Mount,” illustrated a debate in the US about this subject which is just beginning. As the war seemed to be continuing for a long time, with the sanctions’ ‘double-edged sword,” the debate seems to be shifting to the non-military aspects of the war. Following are two opposing opinions about the sanctions, from their authors’ respective tweets, websites and state-

ments to the media. On one side, Noam Chomsky (93 years old), the veteran progressive language-scientist and activist, known for his courageous opinions opposing the US support of Israeli expansionism, the invasion of Iraq and other aspects of the US-led Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). On the other side, Brian Deese, White House National Economic Council Director. Before this job, he was a White House senior economic adviser during the Barack Obama administration, and later a senior official at BlackRock, a New York based multinational investment corporation.

CHOMSKY: “US IMPERIALISM” “Imposing harsh sanctions on countries that refuse to go along with Washington’s commands is a long-established tactic on the part of the U.S. Even scholars living in countries under sanctions have been treated as undesirables. In fact, even inside the US, scholars who deviate from Washington’s command have been treated as also undesirable – including myself … During decades, it has been shown that the political culture in the U.S. is not too keen, at all, on permitting dissident voices to be widely heard in the public arena. This is too large a topic to take up here. And much too important for casual comments. But it’s worth remembering that, once again, it is nothing new. We all recall when the august Senate changed French fries to “freedom fries” in furious reaction to France’s impudent refusal to join in Washington’s criminal assault on Iraq. We may see something similar soon if President Macron of

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Noam Chomsky

Brian Deese

France, one of the few reasonable voices in high Western circles, continues to call for moderation in words and actions and for exploring diplomatic options … The easy decline to scaremongering goes back much further, reaching comic depths when the U.S. entered World War I and all things German instantly became anathema. The plague is not confined to U.S. shores. To take one personal example, I recently heard from a colleague that an article of his was returned to him, unread, by a highly respected philosophy journal in England, with a notice that the article could not be considered because he is a citizen of a country under sanctions: Iran. The sanctions are strongly opposed by Europe, but as usual, it submits to the Master, even to the extent of banning an article by an Iranian philosopher. Putin’s great gift to Washington has been to intensify this subordination to power. I can add many examples right here, some from my own personal experience, but it should not be overlooked that the malignancy spreads well beyond … On the current military situation, there are two radically different stories. The familiar one is provided by Ukraine: Russia’s attempt to overthrow the Ukrainian government has failed, so Russia is now retreating to the occupied south and east of the country, planning a “Korean scenario.” On the other hand, Russian military leaders are telling a very different story: A rendition of George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq, though without the dramatic trappings… Since Ukraine rejected diplomacy, it was necessary to extend the operation to “demilitarization and denazification” of Ukraine. Two tales, same ending -- with or without the sanctions.”

BRIAN DEESE: “EFFECTIVE SANCTIONS” “Anyone who looks at the Russian economy right now and thinks they’re bouncing back or showing some signs of life is I think missing the forest for the trees … The Russians are completely ostracized. The sanctions are working despite these criticisms, pointing to projections that the Russian economy could contract by as much

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Chomsky: “Imposing harsh sanctions on countries that refuse to go along with Washington’s commands is a long-established tactic on the as 15 percent this year. That would be the single biggest decline in the Russian economy since the start of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989. They have also said inflation in Russia has risen at roughly 2 percent a week, which would translate into roughly 200 percent inflation if compounded over a year … Sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its European allies on Russia are having a crippling impact on the Russian economy, but will need time to continue to make an impact … We need to have patience and perspective when it comes to the impacts on Russia of this unprecedented and crippling sanctions regime that we have now put in place. We have just announced a new raft of sanctions against Russia, on the heels of a recent rebound in the Russian ruble that followed earlier rounds of sanctions. The newest sanctions are meant to work across different categories to impose an economic cost on Russia and target key sectors of its economy … About the rebound ruble is an expected temporary development. Soon the ruble will face the contorted capital control regime the Russian central bank and the Russian government are having to put in place, which is in and of itself bleeding them of resources. The latest sanctions will include full blocking sanctions on two large Russian banks, Sberbank and Alfa Bank. Sberbank holds about one-third of the Russian banking sector’s assets, while Alfa Bank is the country’s largest privately-owned bank. Also several state-owned Russian enterprises, including an aircraft and shipbuilding corporation; the adult daughters of President Vladimir Putin; and family members of Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Also included is a ban on inbound investment by Americans in Russia …

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The Myth of the Missing Cyberwar

Russia’s Hacking Succeeded in Ukraine-And Poses a Threat Elsewhere, Too

By David Cattler, Daniel Black After Russia invaded Ukraine, many observers initially expected cyberattacks to steal the limelight as a major instrument in Russia’s arsenal. But after a month of

fighting, a host of prominent scholars and analysts of cyberconflict have reached the opposite conclusion. Russia’s activities in cyberspace, they claim, have been paltry or even nonexistent. They have dismissed the role of cyber-operations, variously proposing that digital

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preparations for the invasion in Ukraine never occurred, were haphazard or lacked any real impact, or were mere continuations of Russia’s long-term cyber-activity against Ukraine that fell below the threshold of outright war. This is a dangerous misdiagnosis. All available evidence indicates that Russia has employed a coordinated cybercampaign intended to provide its forces with an early advantage during its war in Ukraine. The apparent disconnect between these observed incidents, on the one hand, and the public analysis that Russian cyberoperations have been minimal, on the other, is jarring. Preconceived notions of the role of cyberattacks on the battlefield have made it hard for analysts to see cyberoperations in Ukraine for what they are and for the role they play within Russia’s military campaign. Leaning on these preconceptions will only lead to future policy and intelligence failures. Cyberspace is still a nascent domain of operations, and events in Ukraine will have outsized implications not just for any appreciation of Russian cyberpower but for an understanding of the nature of cyberconflict itself.

OPENING SALVO

Photo credit: (Kacper Pempel / Reuters)

The belief that cyber-operations have played no role in Ukraine does not stem from a lack of real-world impact. To the contrary, the magnitude of Moscow’s pre-kinetic destructive cyber-operations was unprecedented. On the day the invasion began, Russian cyber-units successfully deployed more destructive malware—including against conventional military targets such as civilian communications infrastructure and military command and control centers—than the rest of the world’s cyberpowers combined typically use in a given year. The cumulative effects of these attacks were striking. In the hours prior to invasion, Russia hit a range of important targets in Ukraine, rendering the computer systems of multiple government, military, and critical infrastructure sectors inoperable. Forensic analysis by Microsoft, the cybersecurity company Symantec, and the Slovak firm ESET has found that these attacks affected numerous government agencies, military institutions, civil emergency services, and a range of other critical infrastructure sectors such as defense industrial base manufacturers, information technology services, and energy companies directly relevant to Ukraine’s military capacity. Cyber-enabled sabotage also knocked offline the satellite Internet provider KA-SAT, which Ukraine’s military, intelligence, and police units depend on. Victor Zhora, the deputy chief of Ukraine’s State Service of Special Communication and Information Protection, has characterized the satellite outage as “a really huge loss in communications in the very beginning of war.” U.S. defensive cyberspace operations prevented further Russian attacks from disrupting the railway networks that were

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The belief that cyber-operations have played no role in Ukraine does not stem from a lack of realworld impact. To the contrary, the magnitude of Moscow’s pre-kinetic destructive cyberoperations was unprecedented. being used to transport military supplies and help millions of Ukrainian citizens evacuate. Russia continues to draw from its wartime arsenal of cybertools, deploying additional destructive malware on a weekly basis. Cities under siege from Russian shelling, including Kharkiv and Kyiv, have experienced cyber-enabled disruptions to Internet services. Ukraine’s national cyber-authorities continue to expose intrusion attempts by Russian and Belarussian cyber-units. All of this has occurred against the backdrop of a series of website defacements, denial-of-service attacks, and other destabilizing cyber-operations intended to produce chaos and further exhaust Ukraine’s cyberdefenses. If observers see this cyber-offensive as a series of isolated events, its scale and strategic significance get lost in the conventional violence unfolding in Ukraine. But a full accounting of the cyber-operations reveals the proactive and persistent use of cyberattacks to support Russian military objectives. The misperception that Russia has been restrained or ineffective in the prosecution of its cyberwar on Ukraine likely stems from the fact that Russia’s cyberoperations have not had the standalone, debilitating effects that assessments before the war imagined they would have. But those assessments pose an unrealistic test of strategic value. No single domain of operations has an independent, decisive effect on the course of war. Nevertheless, the lack of overwhelming “shock and awe” in cyberspace has led to the flawed presumption that Russia’s cyber-units are incapable, and even worse, that cyber-operations have offered Russia no strategic value in its invasion of Ukraine.

THUNDER RUN Analysts should assess the use of cyberpower in its proper context. Evaluating Russia’s cyber-operations in Ukraine is impossible without accounting for the multiple tactical and strategic errors that have bedeviled other aspects of Moscow’s military campaign. Russian planners expected

olitics

a swift victory in Ukraine, but their strategy failed for multiple reasons: inadequate coordination and preparation, the underestimation of the strength and resilience of Ukraine’s military, and various intelligence lapses. Russia’s missteps and struggles have almost certainly hurt its ability to fully employ its cyber-program in support of its conventional forces. But even with those limitations, Russian cyber-units successfully attacked a range of targets in accordance with Russia’s war plans. Russian cyberattacks on government and military command and control centers, logistics, emergency services, and other critical services such as border control stations were entirely consistent with a so-called thunder run strategy intended to stoke chaos, confusion, and uncertainty, and ultimately avoid a costly and protracted war in Ukraine. Indeed, Russian cyber-units have demonstrated their ability to succeed without a great deal of advance warning and direction, and despite the overarching difficulties hampering Russia’s military effort. The reason for this relative success lies in the unique nature of competition and conflict in cyberspace. Unlike troop buildups or other forms of military mobilization that are infrequent and highly visible, cyber-operations are the result of operational cycles that occur covertly and continuously through peacetime and wartime. The targeting of sensitive networks during peacetime lets attackers lay the groundwork for malware intended for wartime use. The methods attackers use to establish initial footholds for espionage activities are indistinguishable from those that precede cyberattacks. For cyber-units, war does not fundamentally change the way they prepare or start to fight. Russia’s cyberattacks prior to the invasion suggest methodical preparations, with the attackers likely gaining access to Ukrainian networks months ago. This stands in stark contrast to the evident lack of preparation across

Russian cyber-units will probably continue to be in a state of permanent readiness and capable of supporting tactical and strategic objectives on short notice, either in Ukraine or beyond, as the war persists.

Moscow’s other military instruments, including on the ground, in the air, and in its frequently used influence operations through media and social media. Russian cyberunits did not need direct military orders to prepare for the invasion or to generate new capabilities for the war. The operational realities of cyberspace required them to be ready well in advance. Russian cyber-units will probably continue to be in a state of permanent readiness and capable of supporting tactical and strategic objectives on short notice, either in Ukraine or beyond, as the war persists. The emerging consensus that claims Russian cyberoperations were ineffective misses the bigger picture. Russia’s strategy failed to capitalize on the full capabilities and numerous operational successes of its cyber-units. For instance, Russian cyber-units have not yet shut down electricity or Internet connectivity on a massive scale in Ukraine. That does not mean Russia is incapable of such attacks, as some observers have suggested, but that it envisioned a swift victory and did not see the need for such widespread, indiscriminate disruptions. In all likelihood, Russian military units were reliant on Ukrainian civil infrastructure for their planned seizure of Kyiv and could not risk blowback to their own operations. Russia is almost certainly capable of cyberattacks of greater scale and consequence than events in Ukraine would have one believe. Moscow has significantly improved its ability to conduct comprehensive cyber-operations in recent years and has actively invested in its cyber-capabilities, developing new and harder-to-detect variants of its more advanced malware and operational infrastructure.

NO RESTRAINT The war in Ukraine is not over. Russia has been forced to change its operational approach, and Western intelligence points to Moscow shifting toward a strategy of attrition. With the likelihood that the conflict will become a protracted war, Russia will probably not exercise restraint in its use of additional disruptive and destructive cyberactions. Russian President Vladimir Putin is most likely to double down on early cyber-successes and seek to further disrupt and undermine government, military, and civilian infrastructure, as well as defense industrial base enterprises. Russia’s recent attempts to strike the same targets it hit on the day of the invasion with additional destructive malware indicate this new phase of the conflict is well underway. Although less visible than cyberattacks, cyber-enabled espionage—the theft of sensitive information, in this case from Ukrainian networks—is also likely to play a grisly role in the Russian offensive. Russia’s Federal Security Service has allegedly used personal information stolen

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Photo Credit: ( Cyberwar via Shutterstock)

from Ukrainian federal databases to draw up kill lists of people who could lead a Ukrainian resistance movement in the event of a Russian victory. And as the war carries on, Russia may be increasingly tempted to tap into the latent strategic potential of hacking collectives aligned with the Kremlin that specialize in ransomware and can unleash chaos at a moment’s notice. Western policymakers should also be prepared for cyberoperations to spread beyond the confines of Ukraine. Several Russian cyber-operations since the invasion have already had spillover effects into NATO countries, affecting critical sectors and civilian Internet connectivity across Europe. Russia knowingly accepted the risk that its cyberattacks would cause collateral damage and has a history of similar reckless behavior. The U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s Annual Threat Assessment released in March judged that “Russia is particularly focused on improving its ability to target critical infrastructure … in the United States as well as in allied and partner countries.” Active Russian preparations for future cyber-operations indicate that this not an idle threat. Cyber-operations have been Russia’s biggest military success to date in the war in Ukraine. They will continue

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The war in Ukraine is not over. Russia has been forced to change its operational approach, and Western intelligence points to Moscow shifting toward a strategy of attrition. to provide Moscow a flexible tool capable of hitting a range of targets in Ukraine and beyond. Disregarding their unprecedented use will only leave policymakers and analysts unprepared for what’s next. A clear-eyed view of the role cyberwarfare has played so far in Ukraine and a better understanding of its place in modern warfare are imperatives for NATO’s collective security and for managing the risks of escalation looming in cyberspace. This article was originally published by Foreign Affairs.

eport

India’s No-Halal Move A Cosmetic Right-Wing Trick? By Meera Ravi In 2019, India came in at No.2 among the top 5 nations exporting Halal food to Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) countries. By exporting a meaty US$14.4 billion worth of halal meat and halal foods that year, the country’s food sector has laid the foundation to increase its share of the global halal market, which Techanavio, a market research company, has projected will grow to USD 388.11 billion by 2025. Indeed, Indian companies are scrambling to get their products ‘halal certified’ regardless of whether it is meat or cosmetics

or toothpaste. Parallel to this growth in halal certification, though, a peculiar economic boycott and bullying of India’s minority Muslims is taking place. For starters, let us understand that India has the third-largest Muslim population in the world - totaling 209 million (14.2 percent of the national population). Over 47 percent of India’s Muslims are concentrated in the states of Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, and Bihar. Naturally, the demand for halal meat is higher in these states and the slaughterhouse aspect and sale of the meat trade is naturally dominated by Muslims. But ancillary industries such as rearing livestock, sale and

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A man roasts mutton and chicken while waiting for people to purchase it for Iftar meal during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, at a busy street in Mumbai, India, April 2022 ,7. REUTERS/ Niharika Kulkarni

use of horns, hooves, bone and hair for making buttons and handicrafts and transportation of animals and meat – attracts other communities too. In India, halal is a religious attestation. The government neither mandates halal certification, nor does it provide a unifying regulatory law. The Food Safety and Standard Authority of India’s (FSSAI) standard certification is the requirement for consumer edible products. Meat dealers and exporters seek halal certification from the many globally recognized Halal certification bodies including The Halal Council of India, Halal India Private Limited, Halal Certification Services India Private Limited, Jamiat UlamaE-Maharashtra, to endorse their halal compliance. Non-Muslims did not find anything wrong with the practice before 2014 when the Hindu right wing BJP swept into power. The first discriminatory blow fell as far back as April 2017, when two months after assuming office, the chief minister, the saffron-clad monk-politician Adityanath, of one of India’s largest states, Uttar Pradesh (UP), ordered a state-wide closure of mechanized abattoirs, including government-run facilities, and “unauthorized” meat shops. It was his fulfilment of an election manifesto promise, a move met with protests and anxiety for thousands of families who made a living selling meat or processing animal bones and other by-products. It was also a fact that the worst affected were the state’s Muslims, who controlled the meat industry. Undoubtedly the UP government’s sweeping measures were spurred by many years of careless (non) supervision which had led to a sprawling “informal meat industry” which lacked hygiene and pollution control standards in what was India’s largest meat producing state. However, what hurt the industry most was the lack of an alternative modern infrastructure despite the High Court in the State passing an order to the State Government to make provisions and build modern slaughterhouses and abattoirs for the meat industry. In much of India, government-run meat slaughterhouses have supported small-time dealers by professionally slaughtering animals for a fee. The advantages went beyond the traditionally low cost because unlike the present private company-run abattoirs, the livestock owner got to keep the whole animal, including internal organs, offal and also bones, horns, fat and hair which were all sold to make up the profit. Despite five years having passed

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Objection to halal meat is confusing – claims range from lack of hygiene, animal cruelty in slaughtering to the bizarre explanation that the different bodies officially certifying halal items are using the fees to foment anti-Hindu activities. since the so-called “upgrade” of the meat industry in UP, the infrastructure remains woefully inadequate, especially in small towns and rural areas. The fact is the halal industry – whether food or cosmetics or anything else – is a convenient whipping post for India’s right-wing politicians who have little understanding of what it means. Their actions are confused by the competing need for the big profits in the global halal industry and the TRP-fueled visuals that hate politics generates when halal meat shops are attacked. For instance, in 2019, India’s Minister of Commerce, Piyush Goyal had requested Indonesia to allow export of halal meat (specifically Indian origin halal buffalo meat) from India without quotas and restrictions. On January 5, 2020, India’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MOCI)/Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority, the Indian authority responsible for promoting farm product exports, removed the word ‘halal’ from its Red Meat Manual stating that “the animals are slaughtered according to the requirement of the importing country.” The move was trumpeted as a “welcome” effort to make the meat trade more inclusive for non-Muslims. However, insiders say the move is cosmetic and will hardly impact India’s flourishing halal meat trade especially to Islamic countries. Contrary to what is being projected, halal meat, food and cosmetics manufacturers are hardly going to jeopardize their profits by throwing painstaking halal arrangements out of the window. Indian exporters still have to meet rigorous halal certification export to countries with mandatory halal import requirements. Buffalo meat, for instance, is India’s second biggest food export after Basmati rice and is exported

eport

mainly to the Islamic nations of Malaysia, Egypt, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and UAE. Closely following these countries are the non-Islamic countries of Vietnam, Hong Kong, Myanmar, Philippines and China. These countries too prefer to trade in halal-certified meat. Market sources indicate that with Indonesia and Malaysia, two key export markets restricting their food and cosmetic product imports from India to only halal certified ones, Indian industry is being spurred to obtain halal certification to open and maintain access to key Muslim country markets. Given that

What hurt the industry most was the lack of an alternative modern infrastructure despite the High Court passing an order to the State Government to make provisions and build modern slaughterhouses for the meat industry.

the whole chain of slaughter, preparation, processing and packaging has to be certified ‘halal’, most businesses find it cumbersome and uneconomical to have a halal and a non-halal operation and prefer to invest in halal processes regardless of whether the importing country is Muslim or not. Individual halal certification agencies are approved directly by the respective importing countries and no Indian government agency plays a role in issuing halal certificates. Objection to halal meat is confusing – claims range from lack of hygiene, animal cruelty in the slaughtering process to the more bizarre explanation that the different bodies officially certifying halal items are using the fees to foment anti-Hindu activities in India. Until recently, the Southern states stayed out of the controversy. However, seeing the potential for quick populism, many small-time streetside politicians with aspirations to bigger roles, have mobilized around issues that clearly bait Muslims. In Karnataka, a state in South India which has an ancient Islamic heritage and more recently, a cosmopolitan global reputation as India’s Silicon Valley (Bengaluru), the Hindu right-wing BJP government in power banned Muslim girls from wearing the hijab to educational institutions, declaring that it was not mandated in the Koran and was unnecessary. The State government went so far as to ban Mus-

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Halal Certification in Little India Restaurant in 2017. (Donald Trung via Wikimedia Commons)

FILE PHOTO: A farmer feeds lettuce to his buffalo during a -21day nationwide lockdown to slow the spreading of coronavirus disease (COVID19-), at Bhuinj village in Satara district in the western state of Maharashtra, India, April 2020 ,1. REUTERS/Rajendra Jadhav/File Photo

lim businesses from operating near Hindu temple premises. Now, as Hindus celebrate Navaratri, a nine-day festival with ritualistic vegetarian foods, gangs of politically inspired men have been assaulting meat vendors, insisting that they should sell non-halal meat too. Considering that most of the meat vendors attacked are Muslim and observing Ramadan fasting, the matter has stirred up panic. Even more alarming is that in the capital Delhi, a municipal council has declared its wards “meat-free” for the nine days of the Hindu festival. This gives troublemakers the chance to roam marketplaces, declare any suspicious food item as containing meat (like soya granule biryani, for example) and collecting ‘protection money’ or indulging in violence. Clifton D’ Rozario, national convenor of the AllIndia Lawyer’s Association for Justice, says these incidents are a coordinated effort to dictate food choices in a country where over 70% of the population are meat-eaters. T Satyanath, a professor at Delhi University who researches food habits, says that the basic notion that Indians are inclined towards vegetarianism, which the BJP uses to politicize dietary choices, is false. “Non-vegetarianism is only on the rise,” Satyanath says, pointing to data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which shows that Indians consumed a whopping six mil-

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India will continue to provide authentic halal certification for exports to Islamic countries, say trade bodies and the hullabaloo over halal is just a political game. lion ton of meat in 2020, a 16.67 per cent rise compared to 2015.” Alongside these skirmishes, the ‘no-halal bullies’ have turned their sights also on a top cosmetics and wellness company, Himalaya, which was established in 1930 by a Muslim. Although other similar companies like Reliance, Dabur, Adani and Patanjali too have sought the all-important halal certificate to become more attractive to Muslim consumers globally, trolls identifying with the right wing have started a campaign targeting Himalaya. Rights activists have voiced concern that the government has not said anything officially to curb this targeted attack on Muslim dietary preferences especially during the Holy Month. Although ultimately the case will probably be decided on commercial merit, its sting will burn the secular image of India.

pinion

Are We Beyond the Past?

By Saif Al-Abri

Wary of not falling into the trap of idealizing the past, as we all only have stories of it. We still can safely conclude that modern men have undeveloped in some respects .

Ever since the dawn of time, we humans have struggled with one thing: our ego. This struggle is evident and emphasized in religious scriptures, language (e.g., We are humans instead of animals) and how we perceive. The modern narrative is that we have evolved from such narcissism through the various scientifical blows. Firstly, the copernicium revolution, where humans understood that they are not the center of the universe, then Darwinian evolution, and lastly, understanding that most things happen in the unconscious mind. Yet, with the same ink, we still perceive that humans are endowed with “Rationality” and can comprehend an objective, unchanging, independent world (truths) as if we are ‘wanderers above the sea of fog’ looking down from Friedrich’s painting. With such ability to make “objective” knowledge claims (on what truth weighing that’s a mystery), we have tarnished and diminished the wonders of our past. And labelled our ancestors with words such as pre-modern, primitive, archaic, savage and gave them economic terms such as ‘mere subsistence economy’, ‘limited leisure’ and the list goes on. To truly become enlightened, we have to skeptically analyze moral claims such as rationality, advancement and progress, but that’s impossible to do in a mere article. So let’s just take a look, for instance, at pre-historic times of hunters and gatherers; this’s commonly scrutinized and is associated with diseases, subsistence levels, savagery, and primitive. However, when one looks at the lives of such times, another story seems to appear. The theory of original affluence stated by Marshall Sahlins mentioned that hunters and gatherers lived an affluent life if we dismiss our narrow sense of affluence. Firstly, he says inadequacy of economic means is the first principle of the world’s wealthiest people. The famous problem of scarcity summarizes this: “we have unlimited wants and finite recourses”, creating this inadequacy of economic means. By analysis of hunters and gatherers like the

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!Kung Bushmen the paper concludes that they lived in affluence. Such content lies in their undemanding of material needs except for what can be made by easily extracted surroundings. ‘Want not, lack not’, you might say; such attitude is not because they lack free time, as most ethnographic studies indicated hunter-gatherers don’t even know what to do with half their time. This content came from wealth being a burden to their nomadic life. The ultimate value of such nomadic life “is freedom of movement”. Western scholars called such content “their undeveloped sense of property” or “lack interest in developing their technological equipment”, such orientalist phrases. Researchers on hunters and gatherers were surprised by how they treat their possession as if they assign no value to them. In our modern terms, we would say such an attitude of the ‘uneconomical man’ didn’t allow him to ‘develop’; it seems his problem is that his wants are scarce, and his means are plentiful! It is hard to imagine that what is perceived as natural features or impulses of humans is amplified by its institutionalization. The values of the ‘uneconomical man’ have been present in different religions and philosophies. “Serving the body is granting it whatever it seeks of pleasures and desires and what it lusts, but in this is the destruction of the soul” by Rashidun Ali, “Greater in battle than the man who would conquer thousand-thousand men, is he who would conquer just one — himself. Better to conquer yourself than others. When you’ve trained yourself, living in constant self-control.” by Gautama Buddha, this denial of desires or refinement of the self is seen in the life and philosophy of Pythagoras, in pagan ascetic-philosophical traditions, in monotheism etc. Wary of not falling into the trap of idealizing the past, as we all only have stories of it. We still can safely conclude that modern men have undeveloped in some respects and that we are not a part of some comprehensive progress.

A Weekly Political News Magazine

Issue 1900- April- 15/04/2022

Macron and Le Pen: Two Different Visions for France www.majalla.com

eature

Tekeya App: Best App for Charity During Ramadan Double Benefit – To Charity and the Environment By Maryam Raafat In an attempt to save surplus food and reduce its wastage, Menna Shaheen launched the Tekeya application in 2019, which allows food providers from restaurants, hotels and supermarkets to offer surplus food for free to charities and non-governmental organizations, or sell it at a lower price of up to %50 off to the consumer. The idea sparked in Shahin›s mind when she was having her lunch in one of the sushi restaurants and she found that the restaurant was throwing its daily surplus food, when she asked them if she could buy this food they refused.

But at the end, Shahin succeeded in striking a deal with a number of supermarkets, restaurants and hotels. Tekeya was launched on a small scale in Cairo Governorate, and now it has reached 5 governorates, Cairo, Alexandria, Giza, Sharkia, and Aswan as well as Dubai and Saudi Arabia. A third of the food prepared is wasted. In Egypt, an individual wastes around 73 kilos of food annually, and in

Shahin recognized the huge amount of food wasted around the world. She then made her research that came out with the fact that around two thirds of the world›s food end in trash instead of reaching people.

TURNING POINT That was the moment Shahin thought of setting up the Tekeya application, which helps in delivering the surplus food to the poor and protects the environment. «Our main purpose is to protect the environment from the harms of the wasted food. Until this moment we were able to provide 40,000 meals from the surplus food which equals 100,000 kilos of carbon dioxide,» Shahin said. «At the beginning I faced difficulties in persuading the restaurants and hotel owners to sell their surplus food to “Tekeya», or to give it up to it in favor of charities that distribute it to the poor,» Shahin added to Majalla.

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Shahin recognized the huge amount of food wasted around the world. Her research came out with the fact that around two thirds of the world’s food end in trash instead of reaching people. «The food we present to people are not wasted food, it is surplus food and it is clean and with very good quality,» Shahin confirmed.

CHARITY Throughout the first week of Ramadan, many restaurants that dealt with Tekeya have donated more than a thousand meals.

Menna Shahin, Tekeya›s founder during one of her talks. (Supplied)

the Middle East 250 kilos annually, according to statistics. Tekeya works to provide an easy way to donate, and also to increase the work of restaurants and provide services to the community.

SOCIAL IMPACT «The Tekeya team believes that the more social impact we achieve the bigger we grow, and so we are always working to reach more people and to save the environment more,» Shahin explained. During the Covid19- crisis, many restaurants were shut off, Tekeya dealt with these restaurants to prepare meals that they bought and deliver to charities and to those affected by the coronavirus crisis from daily workers, and the medical sector workers. «We were delivering around 500 to 1000 meals every day,» Shahin added to Majalla. Tekeya has a quality control section which is responsible to check that all the meals are clean and not expired, they also contract with the restaurants to write the expiry date on each meal.

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“We agreed with a large number of restaurants to prepare an iftar meal, which we called the Good Meal, as well as “Shantet Al-Khair” (bag full of food and drinks products) from the supermarket, we display these meals on the application at a low price, allowing consumers to buy quantities of them, and Tekeya will work to distribute them to the needy,” Shahin explained to Majalla. One of the difficulties that Tekeya faced at the beginning of its work was finding a working team that believed in the idea, in addition to raising the people›s awareness of the harms of wasting food, and how it affected the environment, according to Shahin. But now things are better. «My husband and I are the co-founders, and we have our team of 12 people,» Shahin said. «There are also influencers and public figures who believed in our idea and how it is important and joined us in our awareness campaigns that are directed at both people and food providers,» Shahin added. Tekeya aims to expand the idea, spread it nationwide, as well as in the Middle and Far East and to co-operate with a larger number of restaurants and hotels. «The number of the application’s registered users reached 45,000 - we aim to provide more than 50 million meals through the next five years,» Shahin concluded.

echnology

Here’s How We Can Build a Sustainable Metaverse

We Need an U.N.-Like Body to Develop Protocols for Every Platform By Tiffany Xingyu Wang

A 30$ TRILLION OPPORTUNITY

Every day, we read about another brand or technology investing in the metaverse. Virtual worlds like Decentraland—3D digital societies free of physician impediments—will revolutionize how we socialize, shop, seek entertainment, and more, and promises to be a major economic driver around the globe. Less talked about is the metaverse’s digital sustainability. Web 2.0 taught us devastating effects that emphasizing growth over safety when building platforms have on the lives of people. Fortunately, a growing number of smart brands and platforms realize that trust is a strategic growth driver and brand differentiator. In other words, safety, privacy, and inclusion, the three pillars of digital trust, are not only for good but also for growth.

It’s safe to assume that the metaverse will be a major economic driver all over the world. Early predictions suggest that, within ten years, the metaverse will grow into a 10$ trillion to 30$ trillion industry over the next decade. But, if there’s one thing we’ve learned from Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, it’s that early predictions are vastly underestimated. Once human creativity and innovation are turned loose, it’s impossible to see where it will take us. That’s why it is so important that we don’t squander this opportunity by repeating the mistakes made with Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. Sadly, we are already seeing similar problems arise, including racist NFTs and abuse in the metaverse. Within a week of Meta,

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the parent company of Facebook, allowing beta users to test its virtual reality platform, a woman reported being sexually harassed. We’ve seen how abuse in social media can lead to life-altering consequences for its victims. In the metaverse, it will be worse. “[Virtual] reality plunges people into an all-encompassing digital environment where unwanted touches in the digital world can be made to feel real and the sensory experience is heightened,” The New York Times warned at the end of last year. It’s a warning we must heed: The more our identity and interactions occur in this immersive experience, the more severe the impacts of toxicity will have on our well-being.

NEEDED: A UNITED NATIONS FOR THE METAVERSE

Photo credit: (TNS)

The Second World War taught us the horrors of allowing terrible societal ills to go unchecked, including hate speech and othering. We vowed never again, and established the United Nations, which in turn developed protocols that promote societal and economic benefits and equality for all. These important protocols include the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and the UN Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech. While adoption is voluntary, these protocols, written by experts who came together to share best practices, serve as guardrails that each nation can adapt to its own society. We need an U.N.-like body to develop protocols that augment the trust and safety policies for every platform in the metaverse.

ASSESTS IN OUR FAVOR I am extremely optimistic that we can create a metaverse that is built on trust, privacy, and equality, because we have many advantages in our favor, chief among them is the wisdom of hindsight. Web 2.0 showed us precisely where the dangers lie, and that gives us the opportunity to address them in a holistic manner. We also have a relatively small, but extremely knowledgeable cadre of professionals with deep expertise in trust and safety, privacy, and ethical technology. As I told Time, the January 6th insurrection was the result of not putting guardrails into place 15 years ago. We know today that guardrails are crucial. We didn’t know that in the early days of Web 2.0. We are clear on that today. What’s more, we have a commitment to do better. In 2021, I cofounded the OASIS Consortium, which is a think tank made up of trust and safety experts from community platforms, industry organizations, academia and non-profits, government agencies, and advertisers. (Recently, the OASIS Consortium established the first-ever User Safety Standards. More than a dozen companies— including Agora, Dentsu, and Grindr—have committed to these standards.)

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We need an U.N.-like body to develop protocols that augment the trust and safety policies for every platform in the metaverse. These individuals realize the entrepreneurs who will power the metaverse don’t necessarily have the expertise to build safetyby-design, fairness-by-design, and privacy-by-design into their platforms. That’s okay; we will provide that expertise to them.

GUARDRAILS FOR WEB3 User Safety Framework built around the 5Ps: priority, people, partnership, product, and process, as all will play a vital role in safeguarding the people who will enter the metaverse full of hope and trust, as well as safeguard the trillions of dollars that will be invested in it. Priority. This recognizes that trust and safety is mission-critical to the organization and establishes it as a central tenet of the platform. This requires a C-suite level trust and safety officer with the authority and resources required to ensure all users are safe and welcome. People. This refers to the teams who will develop and maintain clear community guidelines, as well as moderate user behavior. It’s important that the people who will develop all policies are representative of all users, regardless of who they are and where they’re located. Partnership. As mentioned above, there is a growing community of trust and safety experts and professional organizations (like OASIS) who are willing to share their insights and develop safety standards for the industry to leverage. Partnerships also include technology providers that can augment human moderation efforts. Product. Safety-by-design, fairness-by-design, and privacy-bydesign are essential to digital sustainability. Platforms need to deploy up-to-date technology that proactively enforces safe and welcoming behavior outlined in the platform’s community guidelines. Process. Platforms need to define comprehensive processes for an effective trust and safety operation. The trust and safety community has generously shared a tremendous amount of insight that platform providers can leverage to ensure their digital sustainability. Our vision is an ethical internet built with safety, privacy, and inclusion at its core, where future generations trust they can interact, co-create, and exist free from online hate and toxicity. I believe we can make this a reality. This article was originally published by Fast Company.

Insufficiently Surreal? Was Salvador Dalí a real Surrealist? By Bryn Haworth In 1936, Francis Bacon offered some of his works to the International Surrealist Exhibition, but they were rejected as ‘not sufficiently surreal.’ One suspects Bacon would have taken the rebuff in his stride – he always claimed that his pictures were depictions of reality, not sur-reality. The same cannot be said of Salvador Dalí. With his mad moustache modelled on Velázquez’s, his ridiculous antics and his conspicuous consumption, Dalí became synonymous with Surrealism. ‘Avida Dollars’ (as André Breton liked to call him) had started out broke. When, in 1929, he made a film called Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog) with Luis Buñuel, they had to get funding from Buñuel’s mum. What resulted must have severely tested his mum’s maternal loyalties. In the very first moments, she would have watched her burly son sharpening a cutthroat razor before slitting open a woman’s eye. (The eye actually belonged to a dead calf). Later, a man is seen fondling a young woman’s breasts under her clothing. As if this wasn’t bad enough, the clothing suddenly disappears to show his hands on her bare breasts. Mrs Buñuel must have been in a state of shock by now, but even as she was thinking things couldn’t possibly get worse, the bare breasts turned into naked buttocks. Then the blouse reappeared and the young woman repelled the man’s advances. It would have come as small comfort to learn that her son had not provided the hands in that scene. In this short film, the two Spanish artists managed to bottle the essence of Surrealism at its most polymorphous perverse. Buñuel’s description of the working relationship between himself and Dalí closely resembles the way Breton describes working with Philippe Soupault. The two Spaniards adhered to a rule: “Do not dwell on what required purely rational, psychological or cultural explanations. Open the way to the irrational. It was accepted only that which struck us, regardless of the meaning ... We did not have a single argument. A week of impeccable understanding. One, say, said: “A man drags a double bass.” “No,” the other objected. And the objection was immediately accepted as completely justified. But when the proposal of one was liked by the other, it seemed to us magnificent, indisputable and was immediately introduced into the script.”

The double bass might have become the violin we see a man kicking along the street before smashing it underfoot, though this violin appears in their second film, L’Age d’Or. It’s hard to know for sure, Buñuel did not have the most reliable memory, as he acknowledged in his autobiography (remind me to read it again someday soon) called My Last Breath, in which he confessed that he could no longer be sure if he had slept with… a certain unattainable Hollywood starlet, I forget who, or if he’d merely fantasised about doing so. Similarly, I recalled vividly that the man who is arrested and frog-marched through the landscape by two well-dressed policemen in that film, manages to break free on spotting a priest and then runs across the road expressly to kick the man of the cloth. In fact, I now discover he doesn’t do anything of the kind. It’s actually a blind man he assaults, and the irascible hero does this in order to board the blind man’s taxi. However, other things I accurately recalled, like the scorpions fighting at the start of the film, or the skeletons of the clergy on the cliffs. In later life, Dalí would blame Buñuel for them. And who could forget the moment when the heroine gets so randy, she starts sucking the toe of a classical statue? Back when I watched those films for the first time, it all seemed so exciting. The basic ingredients of the surreal were condensed into a few hours. They were charged with erotic and spooky humour, and far from being wearily familiar, seemed to capture Surrealism at the moment of its inception, gloriously strange, fresh and inventive. At the same time, Dalí and Buñuel had been very conscious of adhering to the tenets of Surrealist theory as outlined by André Breton. In his manifesto, published as recently as 1924, Breton had famously defined Surrealism as: ‘Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.’ Well, there was no trace of moral concern round here. Apropos his earliest film, which was more effective than a thousand manifestoes, Buñuel recalled how “the aesthetics of Surrealism were combined with some of Freud’s discoveries. The film was totally in keeping with the basic principles of the school, which defined Surrealism as ‘Psychic Automatism’, unconscious, capable of returning to the mind its true functions, beyond any form of control

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Heroine Kissing toe in the film “Age of Gold”

by reason, morality or aesthetics.” Given the bomb he was hurling into the midst of bourgeois society, Buñuel was disappointed that the premiere of Un chien andalou did not cause a bigger stir. In fact, the film was a huge success amongst the French bourgeoisie, leading him to exclaim “What can I do about the people who adore all that is new, even when it goes against their deepest convictions, or about the insincere, corrupt press, and the inane herd that saw beauty or poetry in something which was basically no more than a desperate impassioned call for murder?” L’Age d’Or was a longer work. Charged with the same eroticism, it also had a spooky humour sucked directly from the teat of Dada. There was some semblance of a plot, and the use of classical music lent the whole story a ridiculously portentous air. In the opening scene, for example, the scorpions fight each other to the accompaniment of Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave. No explicit connection exists between this passage of natural history and the ensuing events, but later the trivial disputes at a society gathering are accompanied by the melodramatic chords of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. Disconnected from the plot, the final scene shows us de Sade’s depraved characters as they exit the scene of their debaucheries, one of them clearly resembling Jesus. Over the depressing scene pounds a mind-scrambling drum beat that Buñuel remembered from childhood, a beat that would begin on Good Friday and pound day and night in his village, till Christ was risen. Apart from those drums, it is hard to identify which parts of the film belong to Buñuel and which to Dalí. If Breton’s manifesto compared Surrealism to hashish, this was definitely a shared trip.

THE STINK OF ARTIFICE? René Magritte described the moment when he first saw Giorgio de Chirico’s Song of Love as one of the most moving of his life:

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In Dali and Buñuel films’, the basic ingredients of the surreal were condensed into a few hours. They were charged with erotic and spooky humour, and far from being wearily familiar. “…my eyes saw thought for the first time,” he said. For me, I don’t think there was any precise moment of epiphany such as Magritte described. As I was such a latecomer to the surrealist party, I had already absorbed the surreal by a kind of osmosis from the surroundings, and Magritte himself was one of the people responsible for that process. But the strange picture he had beheld with such a wild surmise in his moment of epiphany actually predated the Surrealist movement. It was painted in 1910 by Giorgio de Chirico, who actually saw himself as a metaphysician, though he would later be embraced by André Breton’s boys as one of their own. Even without Magritte’s moment of revelation, I seized on Surrealism as an opportunity to think, rather than dream. I was a teenager with hang-ups and tormented by the big questions. The ‘human condition’ had yet to ossify into a cliché, and its paradoxes dogged my every waking thought. Why am I me? Why here? Why now? It was the last tumultuous shout of the inner child’s incessant “Why?” And surrealism, or metaphysics – it hardly mattered what you called it – served the purpose of demanding “Why?” with more pathos than ever before. It showcased the ongoing melodrama of total self-absorption. This same self-absorp-

tion afflicted a few of the surrealists too, notably their supreme showman, Salvador Dalí, whose work attracted me more than the others. I even read his self-congratulatory biography, though to be fair to my former self, I found it laughable even then. I just couldn’t resist his soft watches limply draped over branches, his crutch holding up the grotesquely extended hind parts of William Tell, the giraffes on fire for no particular reason. Disillusion, as in so many things, followed closely on the heels of my idolatry. One week, a young assistant art teacher turned up. He praised my artistic efforts and we got along. One warm spring day, as we strolled around the school grounds together, he gently suggested I extend my range a little. Had I considered abstraction? I said no, I preferred surrealism, really. That was blindingly obvious, he said. “But the surrealists are so hackneyed, their art is incredibly old hat, don’t you think?” Not in the least, I protested, they’ve been an inspiration. “Who do you prefer then? Ernst?” No, I said, I had to say I preferred Salvador Dalí. At this point, the assistant art teacher rounded on me. “Don’t believe the hype!” he said. “That Spanish ‘genius’ is a self-promoting rogue. He’s a complete charlatan. He’s a strutting poseur with a dodgy political agenda. He’s quite simply the worst example of commercialised aesthetic prostitution since the sentimentalists of the Victorian era. Dalí,” he concluded, with a conviction I’d never imagined possible, “is a prick!” This was by no means an unusual or original view; it just wasn’t a view I’d ever heard anyone express before. The rest of the afternoon I could barely concentrate on lessons. In fact, I brooded over what he’d said for days to come. It was just my luck, really, that I’d arrived at the end of the surrealist adventure. My disdain for abstract art may well date from that moment of outraged idolatry. It threw me into a tailspin of artistic self-doubt. I had to review my entire raison d’être. Clearly, the assistant art teacher had no taste. Who was he to sit in judgement? I had a vast range of rhetorical weaponry at my disposal, but the damage was done – the serpent had entered my surreal paradise. How had the bad odour around Dalí escaped me for so long? The surrealists themselves had seen his flaws, way back before the Second World War, and Pablo Picasso, a fellow Spaniard,

Back in his youth, Dalí had been as left-wing as the next surrealist, but when the Thirties arrived, at the beginning of ‘a low dishonest decade’, he was already suspected of ‘Hitlerian’ sympathies.

wouldn’t even mention his name after Dalí made his peace with Franco – the same Franco whose fascist insurrection had led to the death of the artist’s good friend, the poet Federico Garcia Lorca. Dali had even renounced Surrealism in the end, so bitter were his relations with the main members of the movement. And among his many critics was, of all people, George Orwell, who certainly knew about a bad odour when he sniffed it. Orwell called him ‘a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being.’ As early as 1944, he wrote of Dalí’s autobiography: ‘It is a book that stinks. If it were possible for a book to give a physical stink off its pages, this one would — a thought that might please Dalí, who before wooing his future wife for the first time rubbed himself all over with an ointment made of goat’s dung boiled up in fish glue.’ As so often is the case with Dalí’s confessions, the reader suffers from too much information. Orwell charges the artist with all manner of disgusting proclivities, among them necrophilia, coprophilia, and certain other ‘perversions’ that were more widely frowned upon back in the Forties than they are today. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that he can paint: ‘The two qualities that Dalí unquestionably possesses are a gift for drawing and an atrocious egoism. “At seven,” he says in the first paragraph of his book, “I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.” If this was Dalí’s little joke, Orwell is in no mood to find it funny: ‘And suppose that you have nothing in you except your egoism and a dexterity that goes no higher than the elbow; suppose that your real gift is for a detailed, academic, representational style of drawing, your real métier to be an illustrator of scientific text-

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Bishops on the rocks in “Age of Gold”

In the painter’s autobiography, Orwell wrote, ‘The two qualities that Dalí unquestionably possesses are a gift for drawing and an atrocious egoism.’

Giorgio de Chirico’s Song of Love

books. How then do you become Napoleon?’ He could, Orwell implies, so easily have been trapped by his workmanlike mediocrity. But, ‘There is always one escape: into wickedness. Always do the thing that will shock and wound people… You could even top it all up with religious conversion, moving at one hop and without a shadow of repentance from the fashionable salons of Paris to Abraham’s bosom.’ This kind of vitriol is rarely encountered in Orwell’s essays. He tends to be more understated. But of course, beneath the tirade lies a factor in Orwell’s opinion of Dalí that he doesn’t even have to mention – the Spanish civil war. The Englishman’s participation in that conflict had made him hypersensitive to political betrayal. Like Picasso, Orwell could not forgive Dalí for betraying the Republican cause. Consequently, he also can’t forgive him for being ‘as antisocial as a flea’, for pedalling the bogus excuse of his ‘Arab lineage’ for his sybaritic tastes, for hobnobbing with rich people and avoiding the war at the first sign of danger. But most of all, for being on the wrong side when it came to the destiny of his native land. In short, he stinks, which is about as pungent a verdict as that of the assistant art teacher. Back in his youth, Dalí had been as left-wing as the next surrealist, but when the Thirties arrived, at the beginning of what the poet WH Auden called ‘a low dishonest decade’, he was already suspected of ‘Hitlerian’ sympathies. As early as 1934, Dalí had been subjected to a “trial” by his fellow surrealists and only narrowly avoided being expelled from the group. To this, an unrepentant Dalí retorted “The difference between the Surrealists and me is that I am a Surrealist.” Things got no better as the low

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dishonest decade wore on. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Dalí avoided taking a public stand for or against the Republic. However, immediately after Franco’s victory in 1939, Dalí praised Catholicism and the Falange and was expelled from the Surrealist group. In the May issue of the Surrealist magazine Minotaure, André Breton announced Dalí’s expulsion, claiming that he had espoused race war, and that the over-refinement of his ‘paranoiac critical method’ was a repudiation of Surrealist automatism. Around the same time, Dalí painted a picture entitled The Enigma of Hitler, an acknowledgement of the many times the Führer had appeared in his dreams. Quite possibly some of those dreams, as Breton had suspected, were waking, sexual ones – he had written to André Parinaud confessing homoerotic fantasies: ‘I often dreamed of Hitler as a woman. His flesh, which I had imagined whiter than white, ravished me… There was no reason for me to stop telling one and all that to me Hitler embodied the perfect image of the great masochist who would unleash a world war solely for the pleasure of losing and burying himself beneath the rubble of an empire; the gratuitous action par excellence that should indeed have warranted the admiration of the Surrealists.’ By the time I came across Dalí, this seemed like ancient history. Even the assistant art teacher’s hostility was chiefly focused on his extravagance. Surrealism, in its turn, had become a victim of its own success and was celebrated primarily as having allowed the Unconscious into fine art, its political disputes long forgotten. Freud himself had sat for Dalí in 1936, whispering “That boy looks like a fanatic.” Dalí was delighted upon hearing later about this comment from his hero. The following day, Freud wrote “until now I have been inclined to regard the Surrealists, who have apparently adopted me as their patron saint, as complete fools... That young Spaniard, with his candid fanatical eyes and his undeniable technical mastery, has changed my estimate.” Like Orwell, the grand old psychoanalyst was bewitched by the younger man’s skills as a painter; he was rather less troubled by his dubious politics, if indeed he was aware of them at all. If Surrealism had once attracted Magritte as a vehicle for thought, it had long since surrendered to its other main preoccupation, with dreams, and it was an association which stuck. Hard to say whether the smelliest of the Surrealists (although money doesn’t smell, as the saying goes) was primarily responsible for this divorce of Surrealism from thinking. His theory of the ‘paranoiac

critical method’ had actually come pretty close to the theories in André Breton’s manifesto. Regardless of who was to blame, the style that replaced the movement had lost the political edge it possessed back in the Thirties. We only have to consider the following document from before the Second World War, written by Georges Henein. The Egyptian Surrealists opposed British colonial rule. They also championed equality of the sexes, unlike their notoriously misogynistic colleagues in Paris. Their manifesto was published under the splendid title Long Live Degenerate Art in defiance of Nazi philistinism. It is worth quoting in full, not least because it is so little known outside Egypt: ‘We know with what hostility current society looks upon any new literary or artistic creation that directly or indirectly threatens the intellectual disciplines and moral values of behaviour on which it depends for a large part of its own life – its survival. This hostility is appearing today in totalitarian countries, especially in Hitler’s Germany, through the most despicable attacks against an art that these tasselled brutes, promoted to the rank of omniscient judges, qualify as degenerate. All the achievements of contemporary artistic genius from Cézanne to Picasso – the product of the ultimate in freedom, strength and human feeling – have been received with insults and repression. We believe that it is mere idiocy and folly to reduce modern art, as some desire, to a fanaticism for any particular religion, race or nation. Along these lines we see only the imprisonment of thought, whereas art is known to be an exchange of thought and emotions shared by all humanity, one that knows not these artificial boundaries. Vienna has been left to a rabble that has torn Renoir’s paintings and burned the writings of Freud in public places. The best works by great German painters such as Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Karl Hoffer, Kokoschka, George Grosz and Kandinsky have been confiscated and replaced by Nazi art of no value. The same recently took place in Rome where a committee was formed to purge literature, and, performing its duties, decided to eliminate works that went against nationalism and race, as well as any work

Dali and Lorca in 1925

raising pessimism. O men of art, men of letters! Let us take up the challenge together! We stand absolutely as one with this degenerate art. In it resides all the hopes of the future. Let us work for its victory over the new Middle Ages that are rising in the heart of Europe’ (Cairo, 22 December 1938). Notable by his absence from Henein’s list: the one and only Avida Dollars. There would have been no such righteous indignation from one of Europe’s most prominent surrealists. Indeed, his lurch towards the far right gives us some reason to wonder if Dalí could still be considered a Surrealist at all. Certainly, he himself was no longer so sure. He began to see himself as a ‘classicist’ instead.

Dali’s lurch towards the far right gives us some reason to wonder if he could still be considered a Surrealist at all. He began to see himself as a ‘classicist’ instead. 52

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The Enigma of Hitler - 1939

Georges Henein in one of his less politically active moments

Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire.

Matters came to a head in the spring of 1941, when he exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. Declaring himself no longer a Surrealist, for good measure he announced the death of the Surrealist movement and the return of Classicism. The exhibition included nineteen paintings, among them Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire and The Face of War. In his catalogue essay for the New York exhibition, Dalí proclaimed a return to form, control and structure. Sales, however, were disappointing and the majority of critics did not believe there had been a major change in Dalí’s work. But the paintings were clearly intended to proclaim his continued relevance; there is even a hint at a social conscience in the

Surrealism, in its turn, had become a victim of its own success and was celebrated primarily as having allowed the Unconscious into fine art, its political disputes long forgotten. depiction of war, and the evanescent Voltaire, champion of Liberty, makes perfect sense in the context of a slave market. However, appearances (as anyone familiar with Dalí will know) can be deceptive. He was a kind of Morrissey of the art world, spouting and pontificating at the slightest provocation. After returning to his native Catalonia in 1948, he publicly supported Franco’s regime and announced his embrace of the Catholic faith. He had official meetings with General Franco in June 1956, October 1968, and May 1974. In 1968, Dalí stated that on Franco’s death there should be no return to democracy and Spain should become an absolute monarchy, and by the following year he was boasting: “Personally, I’m against freedom; I’m for the Holy Inquisition.” * ‘Surrealism Beyond Borders’ is at Tate Modern till 29th August 2022.

The Face of War

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Macron and Le Pen: Two Different Visions for France By Majalla Illustration by Jeannette Khouri

Five years ago, Emmanuel Macron contested the presidential election with Marine Le Pen, but he now faces a much stronger challenge from the renewed leader of the far right. The second round of the French presidential elections will be held on April 24, and opinion polls indicate a closeness in the chances of the two parties in the race. When Macron became France’s youngest president in 2017, he crowned a rapid rise that came less than a year after launching a centrist political movement called the Party of the Republic on the Move to counter traditional parties. He easily defeated Marine Le Pen in the run-off of the 2017 elections, receiving 66 percent of the vote. Five years later, at the age of 44, Macron continues to dominate the French political scene, but this time polls indicate that his far-right opponent has a real chance of ousting him from the Élysée Palace. Macron came to power as a little-known figure, a charismatic former economy minister who had never run for elected office before, and offered a more centrist view of France. As a disciple of Socialist President François Hollande with an investment banking background, Macron has put aside old political loyalties. This, for many, is what distinguished him from the ruling class, although he shares with it the background of France’s political elite. The socialists and republicans who ruled France for a very long time are in dire straits now Macron began his public service career in 2004 as a finance inspector for the French Ministry of Economy and Finance. Four years later, he bought out his government contract for €50,000 (approximately $70,000) to enter the private sector, a move that

friends warned would jeopardize any future political ambitions. After Hollande won the presidency, Macron joined his administration as a deputy chief of staff and economic advisor. Macron became the face of France at international summits, and in 2014 he was elevated to finance minister. He promoted a package of reforms known as the Loi Macron (“Macron law”) in an effort to spark the moribund French economy, but the legislation triggered a revolt from the left wing of the Socialist Party. In February 2015 Prime Minister Manuel Valls was forced to invoke Article 49 of the French constitution, a rarely used measure that allows a bill to pass without the consent of parliament on the condition that the government is then subjected to a vote of confidence. Valls easily survived that vote, and Loi Macron (“Macron law”) was enacted. As a result, restrictions on conducting business on Sundays were loosened and some professions were deregulated, but the labor market was largely untouched, and France’s 35-hour workweek remained intact. The Loi Macron (“Macron law”) amounted to a relatively modest reform package for a country grappling with persistently high unemployment and slow growth, but it nevertheless sparked a fierce backlash from both the left and the right. On the other hand, this is Marine Le Pen’s third attempt to seize power, but it represents her biggest chance so far. She made these elections a choice about the future of society and civilization in her country and promised to “restore French sovereignty”. Her family name has been synonymous with the far right in France for decades, but when in 2011 she took over as far-right leader from her father JeanMarie Le Pen, she set out to reform his old National Front party and made it her party.

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Marine Le Pen, a political player in France for years, became a member of the European Parliament before moving to fulfill her presidential ambitions. After being defeated by Emmanuel Macron in the run-off of the 2017 elections, she renamed her party “The National Rally Party.” Her tougher rival Eric Zemmour has drawn defectors from her camp, including her niece. And while making it look less extreme on Islam and immigration, she is now expected to win the 7 percent vote share he won. Marine Le Pen has crafted a coherent anti-immigration and anti-EU message and Emmanuel Macron has described her policies as racist. Le Pen had previously expressed an admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin and relied on a loan from a Russian bank to finance her presidential campaign in 2017. She now condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine while warning of the danger of sanctions on the French economy. The 53-year-old has promised to stop abuse of the right to asylum, by holding a referendum on immigration restriction. She also wants to ban the wearing of the Islamic headscarf in public. She also seeks to transform the European Union into an alliance of countries that does not find a challenge from European laws and to withdraw France from the integrated leadership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Opinion polls give Le Pen a real chance of winning. The second and final round of this campaign will decide whether or not she can do better than the 2017 elections. On the other hand, Macron won more than 27 percent of the vote in the first round of the presidential election, three points higher than in 2017. But he is no longer an unknown figure and many voters who voted for him the first time are tired of him. He remains the favorite to win, but converging polls indicate that the race is still wide open.

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Dawrat Ramadaneya: Community Sport in the Holy Month of Ramadan Al Falaki Tournament in Alexandria is the Oldest Popular Football Competition By Sarah Gamal Sports tournaments in football remain an essential feature of the holy month of Ramadan in Egypt. Why not, since football is the most popular game in the country. Dawrat Ramadaneya (Football Competitions) attract the attention of all segments of society inasmuch as it is held in all governorates of Egypt, including youth centers, clubs, and special playgrounds as it won›t cost you more than a ball, and plenty of time. A Dawra Ramadaneya is a football competition that takes place during the holy month for prizes and most often for a

sum of the money that is used for charity or any good cause. In the past, Dawra Ramadaneya began to be organized within each region and every street. The sidewalk is the touchline, and two bricks are sufficient for you to determine the goal. There is no uniform and the squad is not fixed, but the constant factor is a system that is embraced by everyone out of passion, so the appropriate time for matches is determined at the end of the day, and in all cases it is during the day in Ramadan, because there is no lighting. The scale of the games developed and became more organized, so the search began for a large area of vacant land, and the organizers began to draw the lines of the

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Boys playing street football in Egypt (Via Wikimedia Commons).

stadium with lime, and the goal with wooden widths, and groups were formed to organize matches, dates and crowds of fans. There was no uniform, but it was enough that the colors of each team were similar. There was low participation in the tournament, and the prizes consisted of a sports kit for the winning team. From there, the real Dawra Ramadaneya began, which presented to Egypt giants of players who proved that playing in clubs may be deceptive, as the street is full of talent, and there are many who played football through those competitions and later became stars for their clubs. After that, the interest in Dawra Ramadaneya increased more, and moved to green stadiums, tartan and covered halls. It does not matter where you are, if you are in a city, village, or popular neighborhood, or how much money you have, you can always participate in one of the thousands of Dawra Ramadaneya that are held every year with official sponsorship. This made a number of unions and various government institutions organize special competitions for their members, and the competitions turned into a kind of publicity for members of the House of Representatives, and the games became more organized in addition to awarding huge financial prizes for the winners. Majalla entered the world of Ramadan football tournaments, Dawra Ramadaneya, revealing details that only the its participants know, in which fun, enthusiasm and competition are the main factors, as well as the purpose for organizing it, where prizes do not exceed T-shirts, medals and a trophy cup due to minmal funding. Muharram Bey is one of the most important, beautiful and most famous neighborhoods of Alexandria, in which

Ahmed Al-Kass, a son of Alexandria, the star of Zamalek and the Olympics, the former star of the Egyptian national team, and one of the stars in honor of whom an Al Falaki Tournament was held.

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Ahmed Al Kass, who was among the golden generation of Egypt›s national team participating in the 1990 World Cup, continued: «senior officials in Egypt and the House of Representatives were invited to attend Al Falaki Tournament, as well as sports icons such as Hamada Imam, Muhammad Latif and other stars.» is located the municipal library, the College of Ancient Sciences and the Church of the Virgin. It also includes the largest and most famous football tournament in Alexandria and one of the most important and successful Ramadan football competitions Dawra Ramadaneya in Egypt, the Al Falaki Tournament hosted by Muharram Bey for more than forty years. Over the course of more than forty years, specifically in 1976, Al Falaki Tournament was held and played with the “drinking ball” which was made of sponges, men’s tassels and large quantities of threads. Al Falaki Tournament is the most famous and most prestigious competition, not just at the level of Alexandria, but at the level of the Republic. When the artist Adel Imam was preparing to shoot the movie “The Harp,” he attended the tournament and wanted to film the movie scenes there, but he encountered difficulties due to the location and the severity of the crowding. The matches of the Ramadan Al Falaki Tournament are held at the Lambroso Residences in Hadra Al-Qibliya, Alexandria. Al Falaki Tournament begins with a drinking ball before breakfast and during the day in Ramadan, and is held on the asphalt in one of the housing streets after its organizers plan the asphalt and place the mannequins after the afternoon prayer in preparation for the start of competitions between the various popular neighborhoods in Alexandria. It is called Al Falaki Tournament, in relation to the late Al-Sayyid Al-Falaki, the founder and organizer of this tournament in 1976. The idea of the tournament was to set up a “drinking ball” league between all the neighborhoods of Alexandria throughout the holy month of Ramadan. It also received the Sheikh of commentators Muhammad Latif and the late Hamada Imam, the legend of Zamalek, and the commentator Mahmoud Bakr. Al Falaki Tournament has its own stars, who have not been successful in playing

in the big clubs although they have the skills, most notably Said Erer and Samir Boalino, the drinking football stars in Alexandria. Among the most prominent international referees who arbitrated Al Falaki Tournaments were Captain Al-Sayed Mahmoud, Captain Adel Al-Falaki and Captain Gamal Bashir, in addition to all the rulers of the Alexandria region. “Majalla” met with Ahmed Al-Kass, a son of Alexandria, the star of Zamalek and the Olympics, the former star of the Egyptian national team, and one of the stars in honor of whom an Al Falaki Tournament was held.

«Al Falaki Tournament is one of the arenas that produced great talents for Egyptian football, including great names, led by Raafat Shaheen, the star of the Egyptian national team, who participated in the African Nations Cup in 1986, and Osama Youssef and other stars,» Ahmed Al-Kass said. «I was participating in Al Falaki Tournament in the opening matches only in an honorary way, and I was invited by the organizers of the tournament because I was one of the sons of Alexandria, the Olympic Club and the Egyptian national team, and I was honored to be in that

“Over the course of more than forty years, specifically in 1976, Al Falaki Tournament was held and played with the “drinking ball” which was made of sponges, men’s tassels and large quantities of threads. Al Falaki Tournament is the most famous and most prestigious competition, not just at the level of Alexandria, but at the level of the Republic.”

One of the matches of Al Falaki Tournament in Alexandria (Photo Credit: Ayman Gamal)

The matches of the Ramadan Al Falaki Tournament are held at the Lambroso Residences in Hadra AlQibliya, Alexandria (Photo Credit: Ayman Gamal)

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Public attendance at Al Falaki Tournament in Alexandria (Photo Credit: Ayman Gamal).

tournament,» Al-Kas added. Ahmed Al Kass, who was among the golden generation of Egypt›s national team participating in the 1990 World Cup, continued: «Senior officials in Egypt and the House of Representatives were invited to attend Al Falaki Tournament, as well as sports icons such as Hamada Imam, Muhammad Latif and other stars.» Regarding the difference between the past and the present in Al Falaki Tournament, he said: “Of course, the drinking

“From there, the real Dawra Ramadaneya began, which presented to Egypt giants of players who proved that playing in clubs may be deceptive, as the street is full of talent, and there are many who played football through those competitions and later became stars for their clubs.” ball has disappeared at the present time, and it was the ball that produced millions of talents, unlike now, and we hope that Al Falaki Tournament will produce new players in the future that benefit the Egyptian football in general.” Al-Kass concluded his statements by saying: «The most beautiful thing in Al Falaki Tournament, other than the talent, is the stimulating and motivational matters and gifts that were distributed to players, whether financial or moral, such as cups and medals, which motivate many young people to shine.» There are names that have remained respected and very popular, because they are among the legends of the Ramadan tournaments, and it remains that such tournaments are still the most beautiful opportunity to gather the youth of the region to watch live football that will never be replayed.

A group of young people watching one of the matches of Al Falaki Tournament in Alexandria (Photo Credit: Ayman Gamal).

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ealth

The Worst Habits for Your Brain

These Four Areas Have the Greatest Effect on Cognitive Function

By Matthew Solan Many habits contribute to poor brain health, but four areas can have the most influence. They are too much sitting, lack of socializing, inadequate sleep, and chronic stress. “The good news is that they also can be the easiest to change,” says Rudolph Tanzi, director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit and co-director of the McCance Center for Brain Health at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital.

TOO MUCH SITTING The average adult sits for six-and-a-half hours per day, and all this chair time does a number on the brain. A 2018 study in PLOS One found sitting

too much is linked to changes in a section of the brain essential to memory. Researchers used MRI scans to look at the medial temporal lobe (MTL), a brain region that makes new memories, in people ages 45 to 75. They then compared the scans with the average number of hours per day the people sat. Those who sat the longest had thinner MTL regions. According to the researchers, MTL thinning can be a precursor to cognitive decline and dementia. Do this: Tanzi recommends moving after 15 to 30 minutes of sitting. “Set an ongoing timer on your phone as a reminder.” Make your movements active. Walk around the house, do push-ups against the kitchen counter, bang out several squats or lunges, or take a quick power walk around the neighborhood.

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LACK OF SOCIALIZING Loneliness is linked to depression and a higher risk for Alzheimer’s and can accelerate cognitive decline. A July 2021 study in The Journals of Gerontology: Series B found that less socially active people lose more of the brain’s gray matter, the outer layer that processes information. Do this: It’s been a challenge to stay socially engaged during COVID, but Tanzi says you don’t have to interact with many people to reap benefits. “Find two or three people with whom you basically can share anything,” he says. Make this group your social pod. Text or call them regularly or set up a weekly Zoom cocktail hour (alcohol not required). “You want meaningful and mentally stimulating interactions, so choose people you care about and who care about you,” says Tanzi.

INADEQUATE SLEEP Photo credit: (Andrew Neel/ Pexels)

According to the CDC, one-third of adults don’t get the recommended seven to eight hours of sleep. Research in the December 2018 issue of Sleep found that cognitive skills -- such as memory, reasoning, and problem solving -- decline

Research in the December 2018 issue of Sleep found that cognitive skills -- such as memory, reasoning, and problem solving -- decline when people sleep fewer than seven hours per night. when people sleep fewer than seven hours per night. Do this: Don’t focus on getting more sleep. A better approach is to give yourself more time to sleep. “Make yourself go to bed an hour earlier than usual,” says Tanzi. “This will help cut down on late nights and give your brain and body extra time to get enough sleep.” If you wake up, give your mind time to relax. “Try reading, but avoid watching TV or a laptop, which can be stimulating,” says Tanzi. “Even if you are awake for a while, you still have that extra hour to make up for it.”

CHRONIC STRESS Chronic stress can kill brain cells and shrink the prefrontal cortex, the area responsible for memory and learning. A major stress trigger for older adults is a “my-way-or-highway” approach to everything, says Tanzi. “This high expectation mindset can trigger negative reactions that raise stress levels whenever things don’t go your way.” Do this: Be flexible with your reactions. When you sense you are about to get upset, take some deep breaths and remind yourself that you don’t always know what is best, and accept that other approaches might be fine. Also, calm yourself by repeating to yourself the mantra, “I’m all right, right now.” “Taming your ego can cut off stress before it gets out of control,” says Tanzi. This article was originally published by Harvard Health.

Photo credit: (TNS)

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