Voices of the Middle East and North Africa

VOMENA Nov 17 2021- Megan Mylan's SIMPLE AS WATER doc and Laila Lalami's Conditional Citizens by VOMENA Team at KPFA

vomena nov 15, 2021- the protests against the coup in Sudan- part 2 by VOMENA Team at KPFA

Last month, a military coup took place in the Sudan, barely two years after a popular uprising forced the removal of dictator, Omar al-Bashir, who had ruled the country for 30 years with an iron grip with the support of the military and Sudanese Islamists.

The 2019 protest movement was not able to exclude the military from national politics entirely. In August of that year, a power sharing arrangement was reached among the military leaders, a coalition of groups and organizations called the Forces for Freedom and Change and a joint ruling body, named the sovereign Council, which was established to govern the Sudan for a little over three years until elections could be held.

Following last month’s overthrow, coup leader, Gen Burhan, declared the dissolution of the Sovereign Council as well as that of the transitional government of Prime Minister Hamdok. Meanwhile, across the Sudan, millions of people have engaged in protests, acts of civil disobedience and strikes to denounce the military’s power grab at the peril of their lives.

GUESTS

Khalid Medani is an associate professor of political science and Islamic studies at McGill University and author of the new book Black Markets and Militants: Informal Networks in the Middle East and Africa. In this book, Khalid Mustafa Medani explains why youth are attracted to militant organizations, examining the specific role economic globalization, in the form of outmigration and expatriate remittance inflows, plays in determining how and why militant activists emerge. The study challenges existing accounts that rely primarily on ideology to explain militant recruitment. Based on extensive fieldwork, Medani offers an in-depth analysis of the impact of globalization, neoliberal reforms and informal economic networks as a conduit for the rise and evolution of moderate and militant Islamist movement

Elsadig Elsheikh is the Director of the Global Justice Program at the Othering & Belonging Institute, where he oversees the program’s projects on corporate power, food systems, forced migration, inclusiveness index, Islamophobia, and human rights mechanisms; and manages the Shahidi Project, and the Nile Project.

For most of a century, the region including north Africa and large swaths of west Africa all came under one and the same flag: the red white and blue of the French colonial empire. Following the loss of Louisiana in the early nineteenth century, which at the time encompassed about one third of what we know today as the United States of America, and partly to compensate for that tremendous loss, France began colonizing large swaths of North and West and central Africa, bringing under its rule close to a third of the continent’s total area.

Two hundred years later, and more than half-a-centruy after its former colonies regained their independence, France is struggling to deal with its problematic legacy in that part of the world, finding itself embroiled once again in a bloody conflict six thousand kilometers from home that shows no signs of resolving itself. Operation Barkhane, launched in 2014 by then-president Francois Hollande ostensibly to restore order in Mali and protect France from the consequences of out-of-control terrorism south of the border has become a major strategic embarrassment for the once undisputed master of that land and is proving a costly challenge to a now mid-size world power that is no longer able to spread its wings as far as it once did.

Against that backdrop, locally, the Malian state has to date proven incapable of asserting its authority over large areas of its own territory and this power vacuum has caused serious problems for Mali’s neighbors, including its neighbors to the north, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Libya, and turning the area known as the Sahel into an incubator for terrorist and insurrectionist movements of all stripes.

Today, we talk to professor Bruno Charbonneau at the Royal Military College Saint-Jean about the recent developments in Mali and how this thorny situation is affecting the Maghreb, France and neighboring areas of West Africa.

guest:

Nabil Salih, Iraqi journalist and photographer

After more than a year of sustained weekly demonstrations, in March 2020 the covid pandemic came to the rescue of a contested government seen as illegitimate by many in Algeria, forcing the popular Hirak movement to suspend its protests throughout the country in the interest of public health and safety.

One year and a half later, the north African country is now beset by multiple deep crises, after a series of devastating fires swept across the country a month ago, exacerbating the political and health crises that preceded them.

Khalil Bendib speaks with Algerian activist, Hamza Hamouchene in London about the way these multiple catastrophes are affecting the country and how people are coping.

Hamza Hamouchene is a London-based Algerian researcher-activist, commentator and a founding member of Algeria Solidarity Campaign (ASC), and Environmental Justice North Africa (EJNA)

Last month Tunisia’s president Kaies Saeid decided to consolidate power around himself by suspending parliament, firing his prime minister, and assuming leadership of the defense, interior, and justice ministries. The country is now teetering over the edge of a possible return to the one-man rule Tunisians had rejected ten years ago. This week, we’ll get an update on the political crisis in Tunisia from Tunisian scholar and political analyst Mohamed Dhia Hammami-

Later in the program, we will speak with Elham Fakhro, a Senior Analyst at the International Crisis Group about the Abraham accord: On August 13th the United States brokered a normalization agreement between Israel and The United Arab Emirates, which was soon followed by Bahrain Sudan and Morocco.​​

The 1988 Executions of Iranian Political Prisoners - Interview with Nasser Mohajer by VOMENA Team at KPFA

Professor Cihan Tugal Examines The Structure Of TheTurkish Regime and its Evolution by VOMENA Team at KPFA

This week, we bring you the second part of our conversation with Iranian scholar and researcher Nasser Mohajer about his new book Voices of a Massacre; Untold Stories of Life and Death in Iran, 1988.

Later in the program, we speak with Lara Bitar, the editor in chief of The Public Source, a Beirut-based independent media organization about the economic crisis in Lebanon and the one-year anniversary of the Beirut port explosion that killed more than 200 people.

Additional resources:

https://thepublicsource.org/disability-justice-beirut-blast

https://thepublicsource.org/aug4/

https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/news/nr/beirut-explosion-what-happened-impact-force-analysis-investigation-engineering-blast-study-1.916971

https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2021/05/01/lebanon-sinking-into-one-of-the-most-severe-global-crises-episodes

https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/08/03/they-killed-us-inside/investigation-august-4-beirut-blast