Status/الوضع

Last May, Donald Trump unilaterally violated the 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran, the United States, and 5 other world powers, and followed this up by reimposing harsh economic, trade and financial sanctions against Iran- Back in July of 2015 Iran, the US, along with Russia, China, and the European Union had agreed to a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA.) Under this agreement, Iran would be protected from economic sanctions in exchange for accepting to subject its nuclear research program to international inspections. This agreement was widely seen as a crowning achievement of former President Barack Obama’s foreign policy but was vociferously opposed by Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Zionist forces and their allies in the US. Once in power, the Trump administration decided to violate and terminate this hard-won accord, calling it a “bad deal” and it has since ramped up a new “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran, a maneuver aiming to strangulate Iran’s economy which now extends as far as bribing Iranian tanker captains to surrender control of their ships to the US. With so much attention given to the war of nerves between Iran and the US, how are the US’s back-breaking sanctions impacting the Iranian population and the Iranian economy in general? To get some clarity on these issues, Malihe Razazan spoke with Iran expert and journalist at the NY Times, Farnaz Fassihi.

Omar Shanti looks back on the raucous, rebellious, and symbolically rich life of the late Rachid Taha, including a never-before published interview with the Algerian musician in May 2018, only four months before his untimely death.

In the summer of 1988, thousands of political prisoners were systematically executed in Iran. The killings were horrific, not only in scale, but this was done in total secrecy. To this day, the Iranian regime has never openly acknowledged these executions.

In this interview, VOMENA host and producer Malihe Razazan speaks with Iranian historian Nasser Mohajer, who researched and documented the horrific events of the summer of 1988, which are also the subject of his upcoming book, "Voices of a Massacre: Untold Stories of Life and Death in Iran, 1988."

Courtesy of VOMENA.

Every year, the Arab television industry releases many new soap operas (musalsalat) during the month of Ramadan. But how has the Syrian conflict affected its film industry, which still sometimes releases dozens of shows per year. Mira Nabulsi asked Christa Salamandra, professor of anthropology, about how writers and directors are navigating the unstable political landscape.

Yemen’s southern secessionist forces appear to have taken effective control of the port city of Aden, seat of the internationally recognized government of President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi. In this latest conflict, fighters loyal to Southern Transitional Council (STC), which seeks an independent south Yemen, began an offensive against the government forces on August 7. Both sides have been part of a military coalition, dominated by Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates (UAE), which intervened in Yemen in March 2015 against the Houthis and their allies after they removed Mr. Hadi from power earlier that year. The separatist fighters involved in the recent showdown are UAE trained while the government forces appear to be backed by the Saudis.

What is the significance of this recent confrontation? How will it impact the ongoing war in Yemen? What do we need to know about South Yemen and its history? Who are the secessionist in Yemen today? Does the showdown in Eden signal a schism in the Saudi-UAE coalition?

To answer these questions, we turn to Sheila Carapico, a Professor of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Richmond in Virginia. Professor Carapico is the author of Civil Society in Yemen: The Political Economy of Activism in Modern Arabia. More recently, she edited a volume entitled Arabia Incognita: Dispatches from Yemen and the Gulf.

Courtesy of VOMENA

This interview is on the recent waves of deportations, detentions and relocations of migrants and refugees in Turkey, the majority of whom are Syrians. This wave is accompanied by rising xenophobia, systematic harassment of and discrimation against the Syrian population in Turkey, who are blamed for the increasingly complex political and economic problems of the country. We discussed the precarious legal category of “the temporary protection status,” which in part allowed for the recent shift in Turkey’s official refugee/migrant policy to an explicitly national security-oriented one, as well as the repercussions of internal relocations for Syrian families who have been rebuilding their lives in Istanbul since 2011. We also discussed local efforts to build solidarity with all refugee and migrant communities in the country against the backdrop of an increasingly hostile environment, and the aspirations of the new generation of Syrians who have been growing roots in Istanbul.

Note: Shortly after this interview was recorded, the governor of Istanbul extended the relocation deadline for refugees registered in other cities to from 20 August to 30 October.

Further reading/resources:
Jadaliyya article:
https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/39957/Racism-and-Syrians-in-Turkey-The-Political-Economy-of-Discrimination

We Want to Live Together Initiative:
https://www.facebook.com/birlikteyasamakistiyoruz/
https://twitter.com/biraradayasamak?lang=en

Osama Esber, host of "In Their Own Voices", speaks with the Algerian poet Onfuwan Fouad about themes in her writing.

Osama Esber, host of the Status Hour program "In Their Own Voices", speaks with the Palestinian poet Mariam Shareef about themes in her writing.

Interviewed by Osama Esber | Arabic

In this talk, based on her recently published book, Dr. Maha Nassar argues that despite the double-erasure that Palestinian citizens of Israel faced from the state and from the Arab world, intellectuals within this community insisted that they were a part of regional and global cultural projects of decolonization.

Through a critical examination of a wide array of Arabic writings, Nassar demonstrates the importance of Arabic newspapers and literary journals in traversing national boundaries and creating transnational and transregional communities of solidarity. More broadly, she argues for the need to expand our conceptual understanding of decolonization as not only a series of national liberation projects, but also as a global project of cultural and intellectual emancipation.

Courtesy of the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies.
www.international.ucla.edu/cnes/article/202863

In this talk, based on her recently published book, Dr. Maha Nassar argues that despite the double-erasure that Palestinian citizens of Israel faced from the state and from the Arab world, intellectuals within this community insisted that they were a part of regional and global cultural projects of decolonization.

Through a critical examination of a wide array of Arabic writings, Nassar demonstrates the importance of Arabic newspapers and literary journals in traversing national boundaries and creating transnational and transregional communities of solidarity. More broadly, she argues for the need to expand our conceptual understanding of decolonization as not only a series of national liberation projects, but also as a global project of cultural and intellectual emancipation.

Courtesy of the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies.
https://www.international.ucla.edu/cnes/article/202863