The name Frantz Fanon has become inseparable from both the horrors of colonialization and the history of liberation movements. He inspired generations of militants to fight colonialism. Since the 1961 publication of The Wretched of the Earth, which has been called the “Bible of Decolonialization,” Fanon — the Black West Indian psychiatrist who fought for Algerian independence — has been idealized by activists in the global south and beyond. For them, Frantz Fanon is the uncompromising prophet of revolution.

In The Wretched of the Earth’s infamous first chapter “On Violence,” Fanon described colonialism as a pathological system — the complete imposition of violence by the settler on the natives, who are given a “colonial identity,” ”reduced to the state of an animal,” and thereby dehumanized. The colonist uses a “language of pure violence” and “derives his validity from the imposition of violence.” The colonial system, Fanon emphasized, was itself founded on “genocidal acts of dispossession and repression.”

Since Hamas‘s brutal October 7 attack, Fanon has been frequently invoked, seeming more popular than ever. Quoted in essays and social media posts, Fanon’s provocative ideas have been used by supporters of Palestine to contextualize or justify Hamas’s horrific assault as well as to castigate Israel’s colonial subjugation and genocidal obliteration of Gaza and its people. The Israeli bombardment has slaughtered more than 33,000 Palestinians with uncounted more buried under the rubble and has wounded over 75,000 people while starving the surviving population.

The ongoing calamity for Palestinians is not limited to the besieged Gaza Strip —  it also afflicts those in the occupied West Bank, which has been all but shut down since October 7. Road closures, checkpoints, and the increased risk of military and settler violence have kept West Bank Palestinians restricted to their towns and villages. As Israeli soldiers carried out a mission of dispossession, U.N. data showed that 2023 had been an especially deadly year for Palestinians, with Israeli forces killing more of them — 499 — than in any other non-conflict year since 2005. According to Hamas‘s leaders, this provided motivation for their attack. The pure violence of the Israeli Occupation has never been more clear.

“Colonialism is not a thinking machine,” wrote Fanon. “It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.” The way out of colonial oppression and the colonized person’s “inferiority complex and his despairing attitude,” is through the “cleansing force” of violence. Fanon believed that violent resistance would restore the humanity of the colonized, elevate them psychologically to a position of equality, and deliver social justice: “The native discovers that his life, his breath, his beating heart are the same as those of the settler. He finds out that the settler’s skin is not of any more value than a native’s skin.”

Fanon’s concepts have become integral to the rationalization of Hamas‘s terrorism. On X, TikTok, and Instagram, Fanon quotes proliferated after October 7: “Decolonization is quite simply the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men” and “Decolonization is an inherently violent phenomenon” among many others.

H/t Wikimedia.

An article in the Middle East Eye declared, “Don’t ask Palestinians to condemn Hamas – they are already condemned to live in hell on Earth” and concluded “those bearing the brunt of the onslaught today aren’t caught up in the semantic trap of condemnation. For Palestinians in Gaza and beyond, for the wretched of our shared earth, as for Fanon, ‘to fight is the only solution.’”

In a statement titled “Oppression Breeds Resistance,” Columbia University students began by mourning “the tragic losses experienced by both Palestinians and Israelis” but concluded with a Fanon quote: “When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.”

Many of Fanon‘s contemporary admirers have apparently not read past the first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth; or, they have ignored the final chapter “Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders” — a series of disturbing case studies that depict the debilitating and long-lasting effects of violence. By regurgitating his provocative phrases alone, Fanon’s devotees portray this complex and challenging thinker as nothing more than a sloganeer of political violence. In a timely new biography — The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon — author Adam Shatz, an editor at the London Review of Books, rescues Fanon from reduction while still agreeing that he wrote “some of the most memorable catchphrases of the liberation struggle.”

The Rebel’s Clinic elaborates the drama and contradictions in Fanon’s life story and political writings, striving to explain why he is such a compelling figure more than 60 years after his death. Significantly, Shatz points out that Fanon’s “practice as a healer” who pledged to do no harm contradicted his practice as a revolutionary, who advocated violence which is harmful to both the victim and perpetrator.

As a psychiatrist, Fanon believed that the violent struggle of the colonized for liberation was a kind of shock treatment that would “restore confidence to the colonized mind” and “overcome the paralyzing sense of hopelessness induced by colonial subjugation,” but “was only a first step toward the birth of a new humanity.” The Rebel’s Clinic provides a comprehensive perspective on Fanon — one that social media slogans cannot suggest. As for Fanon’s advocacy of violence, Shatz calls it “alarming” at one point but emphasizes the humanist side of Fanon — “a dashing and sophisticated intellectual who earned the admiration of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.”

Though Fanon would eventually identify with the powerless, he was a child of empire — born into a middle-class family on the island of Martinique, a French colony. A fervent French patriot, Fanon eagerly joined the Free French Army. He fought against the Nazis in North Africa and Europe, even sustaining a shrapnel injury. Experiencing racism in the Army, his relationship to France and his own racial identity underwent a radical change – from French patriot who fought for empire to Black West Indian who rebelled against it. His first book Black Skin White Masks, published in 1952, diagnosed the pathological symptoms of racism in everyday life.

After completing his studies, Fanon directed a psychiatric hospital in colonial Algeria, where he discerned the many ways that French colonialism itself was the main cause of his patients’ psychological ailments. Algerians — like Palestinians today — were violently uprooted, their lands were confiscated, while their culture, language, and religion were denigrated. These experiences of dispossession, violence and alienation constituted a profound psychological trauma. Mental illness could never be divorced from racist social conditions, writes Shatz, so Fanon “approached psychiatry as if it were an extension of politics by other means.”

He turned against French colonialism, joined the revolt orchestrated by the National Liberation Front (FLN) in 1954, and fought for Algerian independence. Subversively, Fanon used the hospital as a hideout for anti-French fighters as well as a treatment center for all walks of colonial Algeria, including FLN militants who had been tortured by French forces.

The Martiniquais philosopher later incorporated his insights and experiences as a psychiatrist and a revolutionary into what would be his final book. The Wretched of the Earth was published in 1961 as Fanon, 36, lay perishing from leukemia in a Maryland hospital in the heart of the American empire he despised as “the country of lynchers.” He would never see a free Algeria, dying three months shy of its liberation in March, 1962. The Wretched of the Earth was the culmination of his thinking about anti-colonial revolution and, writes Shatz, “one of the great manifestos of the modern age.”

The Wretched of the Earth spread across the planet within a few years of its appearance transforming Fanon into a hero among leftwing and developing-world revolutionaries and inspiring radicals in the national liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It was translated widely — Che Guevara commissioned a Cuban version — and “cited worshipfully by the Black Panthers.” Huey Newton, for example, spoke of Black people as an occupied colony in imperialist America whose only option was revolutionary violence. According to Shatz, Fanon’s book helped galvanize the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa, Latin American guerrillas, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Islamic revolutionaries of Iran, Black Lives Matter activists, and “not least the Palestinian fedayeen in training camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.”

Helping to propel the book’s proliferation, especially in the West, was Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 movie The Battle of Algiers. Though not an adaptation, The Battle of Algiers functioned as a filmic depiction of The Wretched of the Earth. A strikingly realistic, politically radical film that sympathized with the revolutionaries, The Battle of Algiers reconstructs the oppressive colonial social conditions, the French brutality in response to anti-colonial demonstrations, the FLN attacks on French policemen, the torture of Algerian civilians, and the terror bombings that marked the four-year insurgency in the streets of Algiers leading to independence.

Summoning Fanon in support of Hamas implies that the war in Gaza is the battle of Algiers of our time. However, the Gaza catastrophe is less a reenactment of The Battle of Algiers, more Hotel Rwanda or Apocalypse Now. Israel cannot extinguish Palestinian resistance through indiscriminate violence any more than Palestine can win an Algerian-style war of liberation. “Palestine today is not Algeria in 1956,” notes Al Jazeera, “which was Fanon’s most important reference point. There will be no long-fought war of independence resulting in the vast majority of Jews” being evicted “from a reconquered Palestine.”

Further, the outcome in Algeria does not provide a model for a free and democratic Palestine. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon stressed that mere violence as an end in itself, disconnected from any wider achievable political and social goal, would only reproduce the power relations of the colonizer. He suggested that liberation movements can become new oppressors once they attain power, thus exchanging one barbarism for another.

Though Fanon did not live to see it, Algeria descended into one-party rule built on state terror and religious fanaticism. Fanon’s warnings about the obstacles to post-colonial freedom: corruption, autocratic rule, religious zealotry, the enduring wounds of colonial violence, and the persistence of underdevelopment and hunger came to pass and still haunt liberation movements today.

“The militant who confronts the colonialist war machine with his rudimentary resources realizes that while he is demolishing colonial oppression he is indirectly building up yet another system of exploitation,” wrote Fanon. “Such a discovery is galling, painful, and sickening. It was once all so simple with the bad on the one side and the good on the other. The people discover that the iniquitous phenomenon of exploitation can assume a Black or Arab face.”

In a passage that none of his latter-day followers have cited, Fanon warned that “racism, hatred, resentment, and the legitimate desire for revenge alone cannot nurture a war of liberation — one does not endure massive repression or witness the disappearance of one’s entire family in order for hatred or racism to triumph.” Fanon — the authentic revolutionary — shows himself more doubtful of violent resolutions than his less courageous social media acolytes, who indulge in easy revolutionary talk from positions of comfort.

The social media application of The Wretched of the Earth to Palestine eliminates the aspirational aspects of his anti-colonial prescription. Fanon’s advocacy of anti-colonial violence cannot be separated from his belief in a revolutionary humanism, emancipated from colonialism and empire. He wrote that the overthrow of the colonial oppressors will inevitably lead to a “new humanism written into the objectives and methods of the struggle.”

Fanon asserted that a violent uprising by the native people would be the first step in a transformative process that would lead to a postcolonial society based on universalist ideas of freedom and equality for all — a society that might very well include the former colonizers. Palestine, however, is a long way from this social transformation that would deliver a political solution rooted in equality, dignity and justice for both Palestinians and Israelis.

The Caribbean thinker perceptively diagnosed the disease of colonialism that Israel continues to propagate as it replicates its primary pathology: the obliteration of Palestinians. As a new UN report states: “Israel’s genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure. For over seven decades this process has suffocated the Palestinian people as a group – demographically, culturally, economically and politically – seeking to displace it and expropriate and control its land and resources.” Fanon, the psychiatrist, did not enunciate a enduring cure for this vengeful colonial pathology.

Surprisingly, Fanon concluded The Wretched of the Earth in the same place as John Lennon in his utopian song Imagine, which conceives of “no wars and a brotherhood of man.” Fanon ended The Wretched of the Earth with an idealistic challenge to imagine a new world: “For humanity, comrades, we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new man.” But Fanon did not clarify how we would arrive at this new, more equitable reality.

Despite this apparent disconnect, we read Fanon today for his startlingly prescient analysis of contemporary ills: the enduring trauma of racism, the persistent plague of white supremacy and xenophobia, the scourge of authoritarianism, and the savagery of colonial domination. Poetic, enraged, and insubordinate, Frantz Fanon gave voice to the anguish of the colonized voiceless and his words continue to resonate with a new global “wretched of the earth.”

What struck me in their report is how unhappy the Middle East is. The only Middle Eastern country in the top twenty is Kuwait (for the first time in this cycle). Kuwait has oil wealth and is a compact country with lots of social interaction. The high score may reflect Kuwait’s lively labor movement. That sort of movement isn’t allowed in the other Gulf States. The United Arab Emirates came in at 22, and Saudi Arabia at 28.

These countries are all very wealthy and their people are very social and connected to clans and other group identities, including religious congregations.

But everyone else in the Middle East is way down the list.

As usual, Gallup found that the very happiest countries were Scandinavian lands shaped by social democratic policies. It turns out that a government safety net of the sort the Republican Party wants to get rid of actually is key to making people happy.

Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden take the top four spots. Israel, which also has a Labor socialist founding framework, is fifth. The Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland and Luxembourg fill out the top nine.

The Gallup researchers believe that a few major considerations affect well-being or happiness. They note, “Social interactions of all kinds … add to happiness, in addition to their effects flowing through increases in social support and reductions in loneliness.” My brief experience of being in Australia suggests to me that they are indeed very social and likely not very lonely on the whole. Positive emotions also equate to well-being and are much more important in determining it than negative emotions. The positive emotions include joy, gratitude, serenity, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and altruism, among others.

Benevolence, doing good to others, also adds to well-being. Interestingly, the Gallup researchers find that benevolence increased in COVID and its aftermath across the board.

They also factor in GDP per capita, that is, how poor or wealthy people are.

Gallup Video: “2024 World Happiness Report; Gallup CEO Jon Clifton”

Bahrain comes in at 62, which shows that oil wealth isn’t everything. It is deeply divided between a Sunni elite and a Shiite majority population, and that sectarian tension likely explains why it isn’t as happy as Kuwait. Kuwait is between a sixth and a third Shiite and also has a Sunni elite, but the Shiites are relatively well treated and the Emir depends on them to offset the power of Sunni fundamentalists. So it isn’t just sectarian difference that affects happiness but the way in which the rulers deal with it.

Libya, which is more or less a failed state after the people rose up to overthrow dictator Moammar Gaddafi, nevertheless comes in at 66. There is some oil wealth when the militias allow its export, and despite the east-west political divide, people are able to live full lives in cities like Benghazi and Tripoli. Maybe the overhang of getting rid of a hated dictator is still a source of happiness for them.

Algeria, a dictatorship and oil state, is 85. The petroleum wealth is not as great as in the Gulf by any means, and is monopolized by the country’s elite.

Iraq, an oil state, is 92. Like Bahrain, it suffers from ethnic and sectarian divides. It is something of a failed state after the American overthrow of its government.

Iran, another oil state, is 100. Its petroleum sales are interfered with by the US except with regard to China, so its income is much more limited than other Gulf oil states. The government is dictatorial and young people seem impatient with its attempt to regiment their lives, as witnessed in the recent anti-veiling protests.

The State of Palestine is 103, which is actually not bad given that they are deeply unhappy with being occupied by Israel. This ranking certainly plummeted after the current Israeli total war on Gaza began.

Morocco is 107. It is relatively poor, in fact poorer than some countries that rank themselves much lower on the happiness scale.

Tunisia is one of the wealthier countries in Africa and much better off than Morocco, but it comes in at 115. In the past few years all the democratic gains made during and after the Arab Spring have been reversed by horrid dictator Qais Saied. People seem to be pretty unhappy at now living in a seedy police state.

Jordan is both poor and undemocratic, and is ranked 125.

Egypt is desperately poor and its government since 2014 has been a military junta in business suits that brooks not the slightest dissent. It is 127. The hopes of the Arab Spring are now ashes.

Yemen is 133. One of the poorest countries in the world, it suffered from being attacked by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates from 2015 until 2021. So it is war torn and poverty-stricken.

Lebanon ranks almost at the bottom at 142. Its economy is better than Yemen’s but its government is hopelessly corrupt and its negligence caused the country’s major port to be blown up, plunging the country into economic crisis. It is wracked by sectarianism. If hope is a major positive emotion that leads to feelings of happiness, it is in short supply there.

Some countries are too much of a basket case to be included, like Syria, where I expect people are pretty miserable after the civil war. Likewise Sudan, which is now in civil strife and where hundreds of thousands may starve.

Poverty, dictatorship, disappointment in political setbacks, and sectarianism all seem to play a part in making the Middle East miserable. The role of the United States in supporting the dictatorships in Egypt and elsewhere, or in supporting wars, has been sinister and certainly has added significantly to the misery. For no group in the region is this more true than for the Palestinians.

( Waging Nonviolence) – On June 27, Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old French boy of North African descent was murdered by a white police officer in a Parisian suburb. Since then, anger has erupted almost everywhere in the country, especially in poor neighborhoods. Young people are taking to the streets to protest against police violence and state racism. Their anger is eruptive. 

Recently, I helped organize support and solidarity for another uprising in France: Soulèvements de la terre, or Earth’s uprising. This movement, created in 2021, is fighting against large and useless infrastructure (like highways, giant tunnels under the Alps, etc.), transnational corporations and other sources of pollution and environmental destruction. At one recent action against a giant water-reservoir designed to support industrial farming, two protesters ended up in comas — the result of explosions from police grenades banned in most European countries, but not France. 

Since then, several spokespersons and coordinators of Soulèvements de la terre have been arrested and interrogated by the counter-terrorism service. A couple of weeks ago, the government decided to outlaw the group. Now, anyone claiming to be a member of the movement is committing a criminal offense. 

The near simultaneous occurrence of these two uprisings is more than a coincidence. It begs the question: Are these not actually two sides of the same coin, two moments in one larger uprising? 

As an activist trained in nonviolent direct action, I’m obviously partly unsettled by the eruptive protests following Nahel’s murder. Burning public libraries, crashing a car into a mayor’s house and trying to set it on fire, looting shops, and destroying buses and tramways doesn’t belong to the action repertoire I follow. If someone would mention these as potential tactics for a protest I would organize, I would vehemently counter-argue or simply not take part in such a protest. I feel more comfortable pushing through police lines to block a coal mine or disrupt a meeting of executives from the fossil fuel industry.

But my preferences don’t matter at all here, for several reasons.

First, alliances are not built upon tactical discussions. Debates and disputes over tactics tend to steal the whole conversation when we’re strategically lost. There’s always plenty of time later to agree to disagree. Alliances emerge from something else: a shared experience (or a shared anger); a set of demands that can be articulated in a way that makes them stronger; a common horizon; or a shared political project.

As for the second, and most important, reason why arguing over tactics is a bad idea: Just like Soulèvements de la terre, the ongoing uprising is about habitability and land.

French activist Fatima Ouassak explains that people living in poor neighborhoods are “landless.” People who originally migrated from Africa to France are, according to her, “deprived of land.” Henceforth, what is at stake when they organize is to claim the right to land. Interestingly enough, the French language offers only one word for both land and Earth: “terre.” The Earth’s Uprising would as well be the Land’s Uprising. 

At a protest to support the Soulèvements de la terre, feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial activist Françoise Verges explained that the system that the Earth’s uprising is fighting against (a vision of nature as a bottomless pit of resources one can indefinitely extract) started in the colonies, under the slavery-plantation system. Indeed, the “system” change that we’ve been demanding for many years is, first and foremost, about achieving full decolonization. Those facing, on a day-to-day basis, state racism and police brutality are therefore on the frontline of this fight.

The fact that I feel unsettled when I see people burn a library or a public transport infrastructure is as much a disagreement over tactics as it is a manifestation of my own background: I had the privilege to be trained in nonviolent direct action. I was taught how to channel my anger into a strategic plan, whose horizon shall remain the famous Gandhian “constructive program.” I feel privileged to experience the current state of the world without erupting and bursting out in rage — and to instead think about strategies, alliances and campaign goals. 

This is precisely why the current manifestation of anger shouldn’t be dismissed as illegitimate, or as something not smart or disciplined enough for a good campaign. After all, the climate movement is currently debating whether or not we should “blow up pipelines.” We would therefore be hypocrites to criticize those setting fire to the very French institutions oppressing them.

Ultimately, we are not facing two consecutive uprisings, but rather one, two-sided uprising. One side is about the habitability of the Earth, the other is about the habitability of France for Black, Indigenous and people of color. With this understanding comes quite a few strategic consequences. 

For starters, we should demand full amnesty for anyone who has recently been (or will be) arrested, whether they were taking part in the popular neighborhood uprising or in a protest organized by the Soulèvements de la terre. This is key: Since this is about dismantling the existing colonial matrix of power, we won’t return to an appeased situation without breaking with the cycle of violence. It has to begin where the cycle of violence has started: police brutality and repression. 

Yes, there’s a lot of anger and rage, and some of it is expressed in ways that are, to say the least, challenging. This is precisely why the cycle of violence has to stop — and it won’t stop in a sustainable and fair way unless the state does its part. It would be unfair and short-sighted to put the responsibility of breaking with the current cycle of violence on those who are protesting, expressing their anger and desire to not be victims of state racism any more.

People are rising up to defend a habitable world — some from the countryside, on the frontline of the extraction of natural resources, and others in dense urban areas, on the frontline of the extraction of the lives of oppressed and colonized people. 

We should then try and seek inspiration from movements that have tried to connect similar dynamics. One obvious example is the Breathe Act, developed by the Movement for Black Lives. This visionary bill aims to defund the police, develop community-owned ways of ensuring safety, and promote environmental and climate justice. In the words of one of its creators, Gina Clayton Johnson, “We know the solution has to be as big as the 400-year-old problem itself.” 

This visionary proposal combines the necessity of dismantling the institutions that are making the world inhabitable and the vision of what needs to be done in order to restore the conditions for justice. In other words, it seeks to preserve the habitability of the world. This could be a way for the French left to finally address the issue of structural racism and break with its color-blindness. Opening eyes to the reasons behind this side of the ongoing uprising is a first step toward supporting the fight for a habitable world for everyone.

Nicolas Haeringer is working at 350.org, where he coordinates partners engagement and works on global mobilizations. Based in France, he’s been involved in the global and climate justice movements for the last 20 years and has written on strategies for social transformation for two decades.

The decision was a recognition that the Baath government of Bashar al-Assad had won the civil war, albeit with help from Iran, Hezbollah, Iraqi Shiite militias, and the Russian Aerospace Forces. Although al-Assad has a great deal of blood on his hands, so do many Arab League member governments, so squeamishness about a poor human rights situation was never the issue here.

The London-based Al-`Arab reports that the move was led by Saudi Arabia and garnered support from Egypt, Iraq and Jordan. Although this newspaper says that the decision was made possible by a softening of the US position against Syria, I don’t see any evidence of it. Rather, I would say this initiative was undertaken in defiance of Washington.

This newspaper is right to underline, however, that this development is one result of the March 10 agreement in Beijing by Saudi Arabia and Iran to restore diplomatic relations and turn down the level of tension between the two. Iran’s backing for al-Assad and Riyadh’s for the Salafi “Army of Islam” had helped polarize the region. Now, Saudi Arabia is seeking its own, new, relationship with Damascus and no longer insists that it break with Iran. It is no accident that pro-Iran Iraq was one of the brokers of this deal.

Al-Assad’s fragile victory has left the country a basket case, a situation exacerbated by Turkish military intervention both against Syria’s Kurds and in favor of its remaining fundamentalist forces (in Idlib Province).

The foreign ministers who readmitted Syria spoke specifically of wanting to forestall any threats to Syria’s national sovereignty.

They also spoke of an Arab League role in resolving the Syrian crisis, which has left the country split into three zones: The majority of the country, ruled by al-Assad; the Kurdish northeast, which is currently autonomous; and Idlib Province, where rebels of a fundamentalist cast have gathered as refugees (among hundreds of thousands of displaced noncombatants who perhaps are not so ideological despite having taken a stand against al-Assad).

The United States protested the move and rejected it. Washington has imposed strict Caesar Act sanctions on Syria, which critics maintain are interfering with rebuilding the country and harming ordinary people more than they do the government.

The decision will be formally ratified at the full Arab League summit in Riyadh at the end of May, which a Syrian delegation is expected to attend.

Algeria had stood by al-Assad all through the Civil War. Among states that broke off relations, the move to rehabilitate al-Assad was begun by the United Arab Emirates, led by Mohammad Bin Zayed, who restored diplomatic relations and opened an embassy in Damascus in 2018. Tunisia, under dictator Qais Saied, recently followed suit. Saudi Arabia is said to be on the verge of restoring diplomatic ties with Syria, as well.

Sunday’s decision had been opposed by Qatar, Kuwait and Morocco. They, however, were too few to block the League’s decision. Morocco has no love for the Syrian rebels, who gradually turned to forms of Muslim fundamentalism, some close to al-Qaeda but most rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood. Morocco does, however, entertain deep suspicions of Syria’s ally, Iran, and as a conservative Muslim monarchy does not think well of Baathist socialism. Kuwait and Qatar both supported the 2011 youth revolt and went on supporting the rebels once the revolution turned into a Civil War. Both countries are concerned about the fate of the four million people bottled up in Idlib Province, who had supported the overthrow of the government. Qatar says it will decline to restore diplomatic relations with Damascus until some key issues are resolved. This is likely a reference to the fate of the Qatar-backed groups in Idlib.

At the time of Damascus’ suspension, the Arab Spring governments were influential. Egypt, Tunisia and Libya all had interim governments after youth street protests had overthrown their dictators, and Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh was just three months from stepping down in favor of a national referendum on his vice president becoming president. These new governments sided with Syria’s protesters. There was an odd conjunction of these Arab Spring transitional states and some of the Gulf monarchies, which deeply disliked al-Assad’s strong alliance with Iran and his government’s intolerance of Sunni fundamentalism. Thus, Saudi Arabia wanted al-Assad gone as much as Tunisia or Egypt did.

Now, the Arab Spring is a dim memory. Dictatorships have returned in the countries that saw youth revolts. Al-Assad and his corrupt, genocidal government is not going away. Henry Kissinger said that diplomacy is a game that is played with the pieces on the board. Now it transpires that the Arab League states, too, are Realists.

Algeria had been ruled by France from 1830 until 1962, when it became an independent country after a deadly decade of guerrilla war and popular mobilization. Like many postcolonial countries, Algeria jumped from the frying pan of a racist, colonial regime into the fire of a post-colonial one-party state. The leaders of the National Front for Liberation (French acronym FNL), having organized the revolution of 1962, settled into ruling the country for decades.

By the late 1980s, however, the military officers and state oil company managers and other FLN cadres came to see a downside in one-party rule. The people knew exactly whom to blame for everything that went wrong. Moreover, Algeria’s oil wealth had created a wealthy class connected to the FLN that was able to afford the latest French fashions and flaunted its new riches.

In 1986 the bottom fell out of the world oil market, with the price hitting less than $10 a barrel. The government suddenly couldn’t afford to perform all the services for people that it had previously. A stark cultural divide grew up between the urban wealthy, who spoke French fluently and were comfortable with European styles of life, and the Arabic speakers of the hardscrabble villages, who resented the newly rich elite and its Westernized ways while they could barely make ends meet, and who thought that stricter Islamic ways would help solve the country’s problems.

To share the political pain around more, the FLN decided to hold free municipal elections in 1990, which were won in about half of constituencies by the Islamic Salvation Front (French acronym FIS). Despite this strong signal of popular discontent, President Chadli Bendjedid forged on with parliamentary elections late in 1991.

The first round, for the lower house, proved to be a political earthquake. The ruling FLN only got 15 seats. A supermajority looked likely to be gained by the Islamic Salvation Front. About half the races went to a run-off, but the writing was on the wall.

The Algerian officer corps, the majority of whom had a background as secular leftists, put their feet down and cancelled the run-off elections to be held in January 1992. One problem the country’s elite worried about was that the Algerian constitution allowed a super-majority of parliament to amend it. A triumphant Islamic Salvation Front could just have turned the country into an Islamic Republic like Iran with a simple up and down vote. The more secular-minded officer corps and the country’s economic elite decided they could not permit that outcome.

The officers forced President Bendjedid to step down, since this whole elections idea had been his. They created a commission to run the country, and brought in a political exile, Mohammed Bou Diaf, to run it, but he was promptly assassinated. They then turned to Ali Kafi. Algeria cut off relations with Sudan and Iran, which its leaders accused of meddling to help FIS.

In February 1992 the officers dissolved the Islamic Salvation Front and banned it as a party.

As a result of the officers’ reversal of the 1991 election, Algeria was thrown into a bloody civil war, some of which took the form of urban versus rural, though of course it was more complex than that. Militant Muslims, radicalized by the coup, began attacking unveiled women. A branch of al-Qaeda became established and active– the Armed Islamic Front. There were assassinations and counter-assassinations. The government flew attack helicopters at night against villages and city quarters known as Muslim fundamentalist strongholds, committing one massacre after another, with dozens or even hundreds mown down in each one. Prominent anti-clerical secularist figures were assassinated.

By the time the civil war wound down about 2002, something on the order of 150,000 people had been killed. Algeria’s politics has been fragile —that is, authoritarian and sullen — ever since.

So that is what can happen in a highly polarized society when the results of an election are arbitrarily cancelled. That is the sort of chaos into which Trump could have thrown us on January 6 if his minions really had hanged Mike Pence and other politicians, and if the US officer corps had remained neutral or backed Trump — as many seemed to have done in refusing to intervene against the Capitol insurrectionists. We know that many local police forces in the U.S. are infested with Trumpists, and that they could not be counted on to resist such a coup.

While the U.S. Right glories in its gun ownership, and the gun nuts were out in force on Jan. 6, it should be remembered that anyone can go to a Walmart and buy an assault rifle and that semi-automatic weapons don’t require marksmanship or long familiarity to be deadly. With 300 million guns, the U.S. is a powder keg that could blow sky-high if a truly polarizing event like a political coup were attempted.

This danger to the Republic is one reason that Trump must be prosecuted, since it is clear that if he won the presidency again, it might be the last presidential election in the United States. At the same time, the irresponsible insurrectionists in the Republican Congress must be punished, as well. They have no idea what a tiger they are riding, and are made over-confident by the backing of the super-wealthy. In history, the super-wealthy haven’t actually been much help in a fight. They tend to run away to other countries with their bank accounts. Or the people rise up and expropriate them. So I wouldn’t count on them carrying the day for the Jim Jordans and Scott Perrys.

The United States has been a relatively stable country since the end of our Civil War. But it isn’t inherently stable. It is made stable by political compromises and by the people’s faith in the integrity of the system. Destroy those two things, and Americans would be no different from the Algerians of the 1990s.

(The Conversation) – If you cross the Seine in the centre of Paris at the iconic Pont Saint-Michel and walk along the promenade, you may glimpse a small plaque on your way towards the steps that lead down to the riverbank. Placed not on the actual bridge itself, but on a wall to the side, the plaque was mounted in October 2001 to mark 40 years since Parisian police, led by a Nazi war criminal, massacred hundreds of Algerian demonstrators on October 17 1961.

France and Algeria were gripped in a bloody war that would eventually lead to Algerian independence in 1962. On October 17, a demonstration organised by the Algerian National Liberation Front (Front de libération nationale – FLN) took place in the centre of Paris. The demonstrators were made up of Algerians – men, women, children, the elderly – who were living and working in Paris, mainly on the outskirts of the capital.

Importantly, as the FLN had insisted, this was a peaceful demonstration, protesting against a curfew imposed on Algerians living in Paris. As demonstrators marched in the heart of the French empire’s metropolitan centre, they were met with indiscriminate violence on the part of the Parisian police.

Chief of police at the time was Maurice Papon who, in 1998, was convicted of complicity with Nazi Germany in crimes against humanity following his role in the deportation of Jews during the second world war. While the Parisian police downplayed the violence meted out to Algerians that night in October 1961, it is generally agreed that between 100 and 300 Algerians were killed.

The commemorative plaque was unveiled in 2001 by mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, but no government official attended the unveiling ceremony. Its inconspicuous location and lack of state presence at its inauguration demonstrates the long period of silence and forgetting in France surrounding the massacre of 17 October 1961 and the Algerian war of Independence (1954-1962) more broadly.

Agenda for reconciliation

More recently, French politicians have moved to acknowledge this difficult past. In 2012, then president François Hollande belatedly acknowledged the massacre and paid “homage” to the dead. In 2021, current president Emmanuel Macron attended a commemoration ceremony and admitted that “inexcusable crimes” had been committed by the republic on that date.

These official recognitions in the past decade reflect the extent to which October 17 and the Algerian war have become a regular and important part of political and public debates around how France comes to terms with its colonial past.

Indeed, Macron has made this – and particularly the Algerian war – a key aspect of his political agenda. So much so that he gave renowned French-Algerian historian Benjamin Stora the task of submitting a report on how the war – and France’s colonisation of Algeria – have been remembered.

Underlying the report was the desire for reconciliation between French and Algerians. It was published in January 2021, part of a conciliatory drive which included Macron making an official visit to Algeria in August 2022.

Emmanuel Macron in Algeria: France and Algeria to set up committee on colonial rule • FRANCE 24

But while attention was focused on the memorialisation of colonialism and the war, Macron’s visit was also about more present and pressing concerns. For example, France may well look to its historical ties with Algeria to draw on its considerable oil and gas reserves – especially in light of the European energy crisis.

France has other motivations for the recent drive for reconciliation. Algerians have historically constituted one of the country’s largest immigrant populations. As a result, a significant number of French citizens – and therefore the French electorate – have Algerian roots. When Macron commissioned the report and planned his state visit, he would have had one eye on the election in April 2022 (which he won). So his agenda of reconciliation was not necessarily all about coming to terms with France’s complex past, but at least partly motivated by present political concerns.

Cultural interpretations

So, if the state-sponsored approach to remembering the past, imposed from above and seeking easy reconciliation, is insufficient, where do we turn for more nuanced understandings of the complexity of these dark, violent past events?

Literary representations of the war go further back than the relatively recent political debates. A number deal with the events of October 17 in diverse ways. The first prominent text to do so was Didier Daeninckx’s Meurtres pour mémoire (translated into English as Murder in Memoriam, a crime novel originally published in 1984.

The novel mainly deals with that other shameful period in French history, namely the collaboration with Nazi Germany during the second world war. However, the initial chapters of the text comprise a re-imagining of the demonstration and massacre that followed as experienced by a group of young Algerians living in Paris.

Opening the novel in this way, in a text that depicts the extent of French collaboration in the deportation of Jews to extermination camps, also draws attention to other silenced, shameful and more recent, events in French history.

Leïla Sebbar’s La Seine était rouge (The Seine Was Red), which was published in 1999, places the 1961 massacre at the centre of its narrative. In this short novella, not only is state silence evoked, but also inter-generational silence.

The teenage protagonist, frustrated that her Algerian mother and grandmother have never passed on their memories of October 17 to her, retraces the footsteps of the demonstrators in central Paris. This takes her to important Parisian landmarks which glorify moments in French history. To the side of one such landmark, a commemorative plaque remembering the resistance in the second world war, she spray-paints her own ad hoc commemoration to the Algerians who resisted colonial rule on that October night.

Prefiguring the Black Lives Matter movement, this act invites parallels with the defacement of statues in 2020 in France, the UK and elsewhere, of historical figures involved in the slave trade and colonial exploitation. The message we are left with in Sebbar’s novel is of the uneasy coexistence of memories of resistance and the difficulty of uncovering silenced histories.

Unifrance: “Hidden / Caché (2005) – Trailer (English Subs)”

Austrian director Michael Haneke’s 2005 thriller Hidden also deals with repressed memories of the massacre, and, like La Seine était rouge, suggests that recovering silenced histories is a necessary, though difficult and traumatic task. On being asked what his opaque mystery was about, Haneke replied: “The real question the film raises is, how do we treat our conscience and our guilt and reconcile ourselves to living with our actions?”

What all of these depictions of October 17 end up telling us is that the path to reconciliation is fraught with intricacy and complexity. A state-sponsored agenda that seeks to impose reconciliation will not change that.

Jonathan Lewis, Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies, Bangor University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Globalvoices.org) – On August 29, French President Emmanuel Macron concluded his three-day visit to Algeria with a historic stopover in the city of Oran, during which he visited the fortress and the Church of Santa Cruz, two of the country’s most significant Christian landmarks. Then he headed to Disco Magreb, a renowned music record shop seen as the home of well-known Algerian raï music. After nearly two years of cold relations between the two countries, Macron’s stop was intended to win over the hearts of the Algerian youth.

French President Emmanuel Macron standing with Boualem Benhaoua the owner of Disco Maghreb at his studio Disco Maghreb. Algeria’s city of Oran, 27 August 2022. Screenshot from a video by AFP. Fair use.

It appears that Macron is aware of rai music. He is seen carrying a cassette for Cheb Hasni while in Disco Maghreb. Cheb Hasni was assassinated by two masked assailants in 1994 at the height of his stardom and youth, shocking Algerians.

Emmanuel Macron photographed with a legendary Cheb Hasni cassette, it’s too crazy

Disco Maghreb has an interesting story. Despite being one of the greatest brands where icons of the Algerian rai world, such Cheb Khaled, Cheb Mami and Cheb Hasni recorded songs, it closed its doors nearly 20 years ago.

Disco Maghreb, however had not drawn its last breath yet — quite the contrary, it was reborn after Franco-Algerian artist DJ snake released a music video called Disco Maghreb, that used a mix of chaoui, Al-Nayli, Al-Qasbah, and Al-Rai rhythms. The video pays tribute to Snake’s Algerian roots — his mother is Algerian.

The artist explained in a tweet that he imagined Disco Maghreb to be “a bridge between different generations and origins, linking North Africa, the Arab world and beyond.

DJ Snake – Disco Maghreb (Official Music Video)

Since its upload on YouTube on May 31, the video has garnered nearly 86 million views, and that number is still growing.

A warm official welcome but an indignant public reception

In his journey, Macron aimed to focus on the future while also revitalizing bilateral cooperation and partnership. For his part, Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune welcomed the “positive dynamic” in the relationship between the two countries and emphasized the promising prospects for their special partnership.

The Algerian people had a different opinion despite the warm official reception and the widely celebrated stopover at Disco Maghreb. Hundreds of Algerians gathered around Macron’s car in Oran, shouting insults, slogans like “one, two, three…viva l’Algérie” (long live Algeria), and accusations Macron only cares about Algerian gas.

Macron apparently misunderstood the message, and returned a cheery hand gesture to express his gratitude, after which he had to cut short his impromptu walkabout.

The episode was captured on video, and went viral:

Our people in Oran received the French president, Emmanuel Macron with this slogan “Vive l’Algerie”. We don’t have anyone to kiss his hand and other parts.

This caricature summed up the stopover at Disco Maghreb and the reaction to it:

Cheb #Macron was in Oran on Saturday to visit a Christian shrine and the legendary #Raï Disco Maghreb store. The president tried his luck on an impromptu walkabout, which was cut short for security reasons. Decidedly, Algeria and France, what a beautiful love story.

“Cheb Macron” became the center of mockery by the Algerian youth soon after.

Brilliantly, Algerians have responded with a series of memes to mark the occasion. This one renders the French president into the raï personality Cheb Macron ("released" by Disco-Maghreb) in which he sings of the beauty of Arzew, the site of an oil refinery. 10/10 pic.twitter.com/eigTU3GZrb

— Christopher Silver (@chrisilver1) August 29, 2022

This picture mocks the man who visited Algeria as a president and left it as “Cheb Macron”

He left you a president and returned to you as “Cheb Macron.” You must be proud.

Algeria and France, a thorny “love story”

Macron’s indignant reception by the Algerian people is not at all surprising. From the popular Algerian perspective, France’s relationship with Algeria is not the “love story” that Macron described during his visit. It is more accurately described as tumultuous, tiresome, and thorny, tainted by an atrocious 132-year history of colonization that culminated in an eight-year brutal revolution, which the region unflinchingly refers to as the revolution of 1.5 million martyrs. In 1962, Algeria snatched its independence from the French.

Algerian influencer PIC, expressed displeasure following Macron’s statements when he described Algeria’s relationship with France as “a love story that has its share of tragedies:”

#France and #Algeria, a dramatic love story, sometimes you have to fight in order to come back and reconcile. How can such people be allowed to enter a country where they committed massacres. They call the killing of more than a million martyrs a dramatic love story?

After Algeria gained its independence, Macron was the first French president to come close to acknowledging the French colonization of Algeria, and the brutal methods France used to suppress the revolutions. During a visit to Algeria in February 2017, he denounced colonialism as a “crime against humanity.”

He went a step farther. On July 24, 2020, he commissioned historian Benjamin Stora, who was born in Algeria to submit a report to “commemorate colonization and the Algerian War.” The Elysee, however, refused to apologize for the occupation of Algeria or the bloody war that ended French rule after receiving the report in January 2021. The decision sparked criticism on the streets of Algeria, even as the Algerian government kept silent.

A few months later, in October 2021, a political storm led to a straining of ties between the two countries. It followed statements by Macron in which he questioned whether there had been an Algerian nation prior to the French colonial rule, and stated that the Algerian “political-military system” rewrote the history of France’s colonialism based on “a grudge against France.”

These statements coincided with France’s celebration of the “harki,” the Algerians who fought in the French army to suppress the Algerian revolutionaries. In addition, France decided to reduce the number of visas granted to people from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.

The response of the Algerian authorities at the time was immediate and firm: Algeria banned French planes from using its airspace, reduced trade exchanges, and summoned the French ambassador to Algeria, forcing Macron to finally extend a hand of peace in order to calm things down, but without an official apology.

An ode to Algerian gas

The most recent visit, and the attempts to win the favor of the Algerian people, indicate that there has been a change in Macron’s position on Algeria. His condescending attitude changed to a strong desire to improve relations between the two countries, in the face of a long and harsh winter awaiting Europe, following Russia’s decision to cut off gas, in retaliation for sanctions against its invasion of Ukraine.

Macron’s office insisted that Algerian gas was not a priority on the visit’s agenda; still, the head of the French energy firm Engie, Catherine MacGregor, was on the French delegation. Energy expert Jeff Porter of North Africa Risk Consulting said Macron’s trip had at least two goals: “Feeling out Algeria’s energy sector stability and potential additional export capacity… and trying to woo Algiers away from some of its other diplomatic relationships,” including Russia and China.

Algérie Black Liste summed up the goals of Macron’s visit to Algeria with a caricature of a cassette tape bearing the image of Cheb Macron. The list of songs include: “Harsh winter,” “Give me a lighter,” Russia did not turn around,” and “The gas went to my head,” among others.

Via Globalvoices.org

Written byMariam Abuadas مريم أبو عدس Written byFaizah Falah فايزة فلاح

( Middle East Monitor ) – Whether France is voting, commemorating D-day or debating French identity in terms of Republic Values, Algeria is always present in some way. It is almost impossible to discuss anything of substance in France in which Algeria does not feature and, sometimes, dominates the debate. After all, Algeria was not just another d’outre-mer colony in North Africa whose independence in the 1960s failed to end all the emotional ties to its former coloniser, France. It is one of the few history cases in which the relationship between the former colony and its former coloniser has not been settled once and for all. It just lingers under the surface.

It will be long time before France shakes off its Algerian legacy of brutality and atrocities.

Next July, Algiers will be celebrating 60 years of independence from France, while Paris, this Sunday 24 April, will be voting for its next president by choosing between incumbent Emmanuel Macron and his rival, Marine Le Pen, as the first round of voting failed to produce a conclusive winner. Algeria is present here, too.

In the first round of voting two weeks earlier, voters clearly rejected the traditional left and right that dominated French politics since Charles de Gaulle, in 1958, inaugurated the Fifth Republic. The French left, usually led by the Socialist Party and the traditional mainstream right, led by Le Republic, failed to score enough votes and left to foot a huge expenses bill. To qualify for state refund of half of its campaign expenses, it must win at least 5 per cent of the votes. De Gaulle’s heroic legacy is, in part, built on his Algerian connection.

This great rebuff by the French came after the left-leaning electorates voted for the far left, while the far right voted for a new boy in town, Eric Zemmour, who managed to cut through Marie Le Pen’s traditional support, thus becoming the real far right. His anti-immigration, anti-European, anti-Islam platform seemed to have worked, this time, in drawing away many of Ms. Le Pen’s base voters.

Mr. Zemmour, once described himself as “the blessed fruit of colonisation”, shares in the Algerian legacy as he is a descendent of an Algerian family who fled Algeria shortly before the brutal war of independence broke out in 1954. Millions of European settlers and Algerians, Harkis, who fought with France, fled Algeria and settled in France during and after the battle for Algeria. For Eric Zemmour to get over 7 per cent of the vote in the first presidential round meant that the troubled French-Algerian past still sends its shadows over France.

Ms. Le Pen is also linked to Algeria. Her father, Jean Marie Le Pen, was a volunteer in the Algerian war heading a small unit of French intelligence in what is known as “battle of Algiers”. It is now confirmed that he was involved in carrying out atrocious torture techniques against Algerian fighters, including filling them with water to force confessions. Marine Le Pen expelled her father and renamed the party, but her anti-immigration policies and unfavourable anti-Muslim attitude are rooted in the Algerian experience.

France’s far right politics has been dotted with a long history of near fascist policies that has, over the years, become part of French mainstream politics. And almost all far right policies in France appear to be related to Algeria’s colonial years.

Centuries ago, France led the European rush of colonising the rest of the world; it invaded Algeria, making it just another French colony, starting in 1830. However, within three decades, Algeria – a country that is more than four times the size of France – disappeared, giving way to what became known as “French Algeria”, while most other French colonies were known, simply, as overseas territories or what the French call “d’outremer” territories.

Instead, Algeria was integrated into mainland France more than 30 years before present day Nice, a major city in south of France, became French in 1860. Within fifty years after colonisation, the department, “French Algeria”, dominated the world wine market, despite the fact that Algeria is predominantly a Muslim country. It is estimated that after 1930s, French Algeria was exporting some 1.5 billion litres of wine a year, mostly to ever-thirsty French consumers.”

This in itself made France, and its more than a million European settlers, see Algeria as anything else but a French department, not a colony— not another country forcibly taken over.

French Algeria became part of France in every aspect, including in the way the French bureaucracy handled it. Almost all other colonies did not have this privilege. Official France and its army of European settlers never thought, let alone believed, that Algeria could become independent.

Algeria, at one point, became the jewel in the French “colonial throne”, just as India became the jewel of the British Crown in 1858 – 28 years after Algeria deserved that nickname. Yet, such description was never used in French history simply because Algeria, then, was seen as French – as Marseilles or Lille, rather than a colony.

Not accepting Algeria as a colony became part of the French colonial thinking, and it continues today by manifesting itself in different ways.

Emmanuel Macron, who is widely expected to narrowly win a second term, is the first French President to recognise some of the atrocities committed by France in Algeria, but failed to apologise. In 2021, his office rejected the idea of an apology simply because that would have been completely anti-established French colonial history which never considered Algeria anything but French. He is also credited with being the only French President to authorise official history revisit by delegating the task to historian, Benjamin Stora.

Mr. Stora produced a report on France’s conduct in colonised Algeria but the document, published in January 2021, did not recommend an apology. However, it is seen as a step forward towards more self-searching French initiative to come to terms with that dark history. The report recommended establishing “memory and truth commission” to determine the facts.

However, little has been done so far and, if anything is to happen, it has to wait until President Macron wins his second term in office on Sunday. Should Marine Le Pen win, she is likely to shelf the matter.

French people, across France, are constantly reminded of Algeria. Many streets and public places are named after infamous French war generals like General Thomas Bugeau, who was governor general of Algeria in 1840, is given to an avenue in one of Paris’s elegant neighbourhoods. While the name Charles de Gaulle features in almost every square and avenue in every French town or city—he was the man who agreed to Algeria’s independence. Names of Algerian independence heroes are, also, carried across Algeria today.

Algeria might not be, yet, the ghost in French public life but it will continue to dominate any serious French debate for a long time to come.

Mustafa Fetouri is a Libyan academic and freelance journalist. He is a recipient of the EU’s Freedom of the Press prize.

Via Middle East Monitor

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Over the decades, the Middle East has been an arena of contention over influence and interests between the US and Russia in various conflicts.

This continued until the end of former US President Donald Trump’s presidency. The involvement of the US in the region’s conflicts has declined since Joe Biden took office in the White House in January 2021, since he adopted the strategy of pivoting towards Asia to confront the potential Chinese or Russian threats in that area.

America’s need for energy sources in the Gulf and in the Middle East, in general, has also decreased, while the American administration has adopted the policy of reducing tensions with Iran and distancing itself from the Gulf-Iranian conflicts.

The US seeks to provide some concessions to convince Iran to return to the 2015 version of the nuclear agreement in order to guarantee Tehran does not possess nuclear weapons.

American-Gulf relations witnessed tensions due to human rights issues, the war in Yemen and the imposition of additional restrictions on the importance of some types of weapons and ammunition and banning others. This prompted Saudi Arabia, mainly, and the UAE to some extent, to turn to China and Russia for more military cooperation in various fields.

Moreover, Iran, Egypt, Iraq and other countries turned to strengthening economic cooperation and trade with Russia and China.

Some American decision-making centres view the development of security and economic relations between both Russia and China and a number of Middle Eastern countries as a challenge to US interests in the region.

Over the decades, many Middle Eastern countries endured the consequences of the rivalry over interests by the major countries, especially between the US, the former Soviet Union and the current Russian Federation.

Some of the region’s countries fear the expansion of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and the possible outbreak of a war between the two countries that will lead to instability in the world and in the Middle East, if the US becomes involved in some form.

Meanwhile, other countries in the region, especially the gas and oil-exporting Gulf countries may view the war as an opportunity to improve their relations with Washington, which wants some of these countries to be willing to compensate the lack of Russian gas supply to the European countries, if the Biden administration decides to impose sanctions on Russia or to stop the global energy supply for reasons related to the potential war.

The possibility of stopping gas and oil supply to the European countries is a source of concern for the EU and US, which is trying to take pre-emptive measures to reinforce the European energy security and prevent a major disruption of gas and oil supplies and a disturbance in the prices in the global market because of potential sanctions imposed by the Biden administration.

Such sanctions would prevent these countries from purchasing Russian gas and oil, or the war could lead to stopping the energy flow due to the dangers of transporting it through Ukrainian territories or through the Black Sea to Europe.

Official figures suggest that the EU countries rely on Russia for about 40 per cent of their natural gas needs and that finding alternatives to the Russian gas will not be easy.

During the visit to Washington in late January of the Qatari Emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad, the two parties discussed options for supplying EU countries with Qatari liquefied natural gas shipments in the event that Russia wages a war on Ukraine.

However, observers believe that switching Qatari gas exports to the EU countries will need more time because of its commitments to gas-importing countries in Asia and Africa.

Other gas-producing countries along with Qatar, such as Algeria and Egypt, could contribute to reduce the Europeans’ dependence on Russian gas and provide part of their needs.

Also, oil-producing countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait and the UAE can contribute to reducing the Europeans’ dependence on Russian oil.

Beyond energy, the Middle East and North African countries could be affected by the impact of the war, in the field of agricultural materials, trade and grains production in the Black Sea countries.

This is in addition to the effects of refugees migrating from war zones to EU countries, and the potential pressures this can put on the world aid programmes for refugees that refugees from the Middle East and North Africa benefit from.

Many Arab countries, such as Yemen, Lebanon, Libya, Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria rely on importing first class Russian or Ukrainian wheat to meet local needs. These are countries that generally suffer from living standard crises, and the potential increase in wheat prices due to a decreased supply in world markets will increase their people’s suffering.

The wheat imports from Russia and Ukraine represent about 30 per cent of the supply in world markets, as well as other basic food goods, such as corn and vegetable oils.

Ukraine is considered the fifth largest wheat exporter in the world.

The GCC countries rely on the import of wheat and most other food goods to meet the needs of their people. Meanwhile, countries like Iran and Algeria are in the top ten countries importing wheat in the world.

Egypt imports about 60 per cent of its wheat needs from Russia and 30 per cent from Ukraine.

The Russian intervention in Syria and Libya led to complicating the conflict in both countries, and the Arab countries concerned with the two crises fear that the tensions between Moscow and the European countries and the US will disrupt the international efforts to resolve the conflict politically in both countries.

Most of the Arab governments are trying not to declare political positions towards the crisis between Russia and Ukraine in order to maintain balanced relations with the two countries.

Given the continued tensions between Washington and Moscow regarding the Ukrainian crisis, some Arab governments may find themselves forced to declare a political position, choosing between Russia and the US and EU.

But Arab countries such as Syria, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iraq, Algeria and others, as well as regional countries such as Iran are seeking to preserve their relations with Moscow, given their need for Russian military manufactures and their partnership with Russia regarding maintaining the price of oil in the world market to serve the countries producing it. Syria and Iran are also seeking to do so to enhance their diplomatic influence in their confrontation with the US.

Ihsan Al-Faqih is an Anadolu Agency correspondent.

[Lightly copy-edited for conformity to IC editorial standards.]

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.