Posts tagged : "Middle East"

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: On Friday, Iranian families will mark the winter solstice, the longest, darkest night of the year. Yalda festivities are usually a time to recite poems and feast on cured meats and fresh fruit, especially the pomegranate. But this year sanctions have kept the precious fruit on vendors’ shelves – its price is out of reach for many grappling with the flailing economy. In the northern Iranian city of Rasht, fruit vendor Farshid says families are unable to afford a decent quality of life or to spend money on recreation, manifested in their reluctance to buy fruit for the solstice. “Yalda night is a time of the year we sell more, but this time, it seems that there’s no trace of increased sales. The...

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: While more countries across the world gear up to recognize the historic city of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict appears to be as insoluble and intractable as ever. After the United States moved its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, countries such as Australia, Czech Republic, Honduras, Romania and Paraguay also signaled their willingness to follow the U.S. example. Guatemala has already opened its new embassy in Jerusalem in May. The relations between Israel and the United States warmed up significantly under President Trump and there's no trace of sporadic skirmishes between the two governments that would come to surface from time to time when Barack Obama was in...

Kourosh Ziabari - Fair Observer: Invisible Women of the Middle East: True Stories is a 2018 book by Moroccan author Sana Afouaiz, exploring the deepest layers of women’s lives across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region under the shadow of patriarchal culture. The book, which narrates true stories based on the life of several women in different MENA countries whom the author interviewed during her trips to these nations, illustrates how women grapple with misogyny and discrimination in various forms, and how gender realities are shaped across the region. Afouaiz is a gender expert and public speaker on women issues in the Middle East and North Africa, who touches upon a number of themes in her book and depicts the...

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: Reports by the international organizations indicate that Saudi Arabia continues to remain a major human rights violator. In 2018, Saudi authorities carried on with their campaign of arbitrary detention, trial and conviction of peaceful protesters. 146 executions were carried out this year and the kingdom's involvement in the military campaign in Yemen claimed numerous innocent lives. A distinguished human rights lawyer tells the Organization for Defending Victims of Violence that despite introducing social reforms, Saudi Arabia remains a serial human rights violator and doesn't welcome criticism of its actions and policies. "The Saudi government is an authoritarian regime and doesn’t tolerate dissent of...

Kourosh Ziabari - Fair Observer: Since the 1979 revolution, women in Iran have been denied entry to sports stadiums. The reasons cited by authorities are mostly religious. In a theocratic state like Iran, they are worried about “ethical values” in society which, they believe, might be undermined if women are allowed to do certain things, such as play athletics or watch football in stadiums alongside men. Now, after almost 40 years of debate and resistance by authorities, religious figures and activists, an important development has taken place: Iranian women were allowed to watch two FIFA World Cup matches featuring the Iranian national team. Thousands of Iranians packed the Azadi Stadium in Tehran, the biggest in the Middle East,...

Kourosh Ziabari - International Policy Digest: 70 years after the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began in its current form following the 1948 exodus and what came to be known as Nakba, the international community still appears to be unable to find viable answers for many questions arising from this conflict. Several UN resolutions, Security Council meetings, statements and peace-making committees, fact-finding missions and literally millions of newspaper articles, hundreds of TV documentaries and thousands of hours of negotiations have failed to bring an end to the humanitarian crisis in the offing in Palestine and the political dilemma between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Israel is on a quest for recognition, consolidated...

Kourosh Ziabari - International Policy Digest: In his latest interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in February 2017 in Munich, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif made it clear that he doesn’t agree with the description that the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is the “Milošević of the Middle East.” Slobodan Milošević was the first President of the Republic of Serbia charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) with war crimes in connection to the wars in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo. The Yugoslav politician finally died in his prison cell in The Hague in 2006 without being convicted. Now, a politician who is facing a whole load of similar accusations, including war crimes and...

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: Saudi Arabia has recently been severely reprimanded over its human rights violations by international organisations, mostly the Human Rights Watch, which has offered a disappointing picture of the situation in this country. Aside from its heavy involvement in the wars in Yemen and Bahrain, Saudi Arabia is still failing in several areas, including in criminal justice, women's and girl's rights and migrant workers. It's reported that over 9 million migrant workers fill manual, clerical and service jobs in the Persian Gulf country, constituting more than half of the workforce, but many of them suffer different sorts of abuse and exploitation, "amounting to conditions of forced labour." In January 2018, UN human...

Kourosh Ziabari - International Policy Digest: The March 2018 presidential election in Egypt decided that the incumbent Abdel Fattah el-Sisi will be in office for another four years. Many human rights groups, critics and journalists described the poll as “farcical,” saying that Sisi cannot be the true representation of Egyptian democracy. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi had no serious rivals but only a mid-ranking politician who was himself a Sisi supporter. Moussa Moustafa Moussa was able to win no more than of 2.92% of the votes. The Civil Democratic Movement boycotted the election and there were allegations of electoral fraud. Nezar AlSayyad, an Egyptian historian and the former head of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the...

Kourosh Ziabari - International Policy Digest: Thanks to a royal decree, Saudi women will be allowed to drive cars and motorbikes beginning in June this year. The decision to give the women in Saudi Arabia the right to drive was announced in September 2017 by King Salman and is considered a major step in the course of the normalisation of life in Saudi Arabia, a highly-conservative kingdom in which women have very limited rights and almost no representation in major decision-makings. A patriarchal society in which women are sometimes even treated as commodities with no role to play in social and political walks of life, Saudi Arabia has been incomprehensibly resistant to such changes as giving women the right to drive. Saudi Arabia...

Kourosh Ziabari - Fair Observer: When Saudi Arabia and a coalition of its regional partners embarked on a military campaign against Yemen in March 2015, it was hardly predictable that the war would drag on for more than a year and morph into a humanitarian crisis. The emergency is characterized by massive civilian casualties, displacement of citizens, nationwide water and fuel shortages and deepening poverty in the already-impoverished country. Saudi military engagement was a response to an uprising by the Shiite Houthis in northern Yemen trying to push the government of Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi from power. In late March, UNICEF warned that some 320,000 Yemeni children faced the risk of life-threatening malnutrition, while 82% of...

Kourosh Ziabari - Middle East Eye: An opinion article recently published in Middle East Eye drew an analogy between the self-proclaimed Islamic State (Daesh), and my country, Iran. The author argued that Daesh’s ideology, worldview and modus operandi closely resonate with those of Iran. The argument went that if the people who are alarmed by the atrocities of IS would like to imagine what will happen if this death squad establishes a real, fully fledged “state”, they’d better look at Iran. I am familiar with the previous works of the author and can confidently assert that he is an accomplished and well-spoken writer and analyst. He has penned many interesting articles, including on such crucial issues such as Islamophobia,...