Inflation and Rising Food Prices Lead to Riots in Haiti, Cairo, Next, Revolution?

There is no faster way to make someone angry than to reach into their wallet. To add fuel to the fire, steal the money that would have paid for their dinner, and catastrophe ensues.

A downright frightening facet of the global economic downturn is rising inflation. Some people—wealthy, the middle class in industrialized countries—can deal with the spike in the price, say, of rice. However, most of the world, lest it be forgotten that more than ten billion live on less than $2 a day, cannot simply buy a 36-inch instead of a 42-inch flatscreen television to balance the budget. The proof?

Food riots.

In the streets of Haiti, the most destitute state in the Americas, exactly such a disaster is taking place right now. In Cairo, where corruption had already mangled the bread industry, rising food prices have set off unrest there as well. Both countries are desperately poor; while there are nice hotels in Cairo, more than 74 million Egyptians live on less than $1 a day. People have also gone from wits end to violence in Cameroon and Cote d'Ivoire. Protests have hit Uzbekistan, Yemen, Bolivia and Indonesia.

The venerable World Food Programme of the United Nations, which feeds more than 70 million people every day, is now starved for cash and suppliers. World Bank President Robert Zoellick, after asking rich countries to go above and beyond for another $500 for WFP, said, "While many worry about filling their gas tanks, many others around the world are struggling to fill their stomachs."

Remember that unreasonable bread prices was an instigator of the French Revolution. From "A Popular History of France," by Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot, "We could see the French flying over the roads, across fields and through hedges, in such numbers that the sight must have been seen to be believed.  There were in the outskirts of our town and in the neighboring villages, so vast a multitude of knights and men-at-arms tormented with hunger, that it was a matter horrible to see. They gave their arms to get bread."

A riot of desperation may unsettle Port-au-Prince, and Haitians are targeting President René Préval. From the Associated Press, "We heard the speech, but the speech is empty," said student protest organizer Herve Saintiles, 37. "We are going to hold the president responsible for all these problems." Holding officials responsible is one thing, revolution is quite another.

Perhaps the scarcity of resources, as a Malthusian demand of people around the world, has now become one of the defining characteristics of this globalized planet, one that stands in stark contrast to the French aristocracy two centuries ago.

And if revolution came in Cairo, in Port-au-Prince, or in Yaoundé, would we even want to see where it was headed?

UPDATE: Hait's Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis has resigned; Zoellick has said that 33 countries are at risk; Wall Street Journal front page: biofuels "appalling."

[Photo of the 18th-Century France from Gutenberg.]

Brand America Wears Thin

Cairo, the cultural capital of the Arab world, is a loud city. Car horns mix with calls to prayer from the city's minarets. When I visited earlier this year, what I heard from Egyptians sounded like a broken record. Conversations went like this: "Where are you from?" "New York," I always said first. "Oh, you're an American!" "Well, yes," I muttered. "See, I like you. I like Americans. It's the American government that is terrible."

Karen Hughes would probably sympathize. She was the State Department official encumbered with the task of boosting the image of the U.S. in the Islamic world who announced her resignation last week. A former NBC reporter and director of the Texas Republican Party, Hughes served President Bush for five years when he was governor. She was appointed two years ago, and other than her prior service to Bush, one has to wonder about her credentials. She had no experience as an ambassador, and more confounding, she speaks no Arabic.

According to a recent Pew survey of 7,200 people across the Middle East, America has an image problem. The U.S. is "wildly unpopular," and perceptions of the country are "abysmal." Indeed, we've come a long way since the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when the Middle East held candlelight vigils to show their solidarity with our grief. It's almost hard to believe how bad things have gotten, until you remember the arrogant bungling foreign policy that led us to war.

The war has instigated a rebellion at home, too. Hughes' colleagues at the State Department are revolting against forced service in Iraq. Resignations could be imminent. At a raucous, hour-long town hall meeting last week in Washington, veteran diplomat Jack Croddy stood up and said to a State Department official, "It's one thing if someone believes in what's going on over there and volunteers, but it's another thing to send someone over there on a forced assignment. I'm sorry, but basically that's a potential death sentence, and you know it."

The Cairenes I met know that reconciliation with the U.S. won't come from more of the same. The world won't be safe for our diplomats--let alone for the folks at home--until our administration fully grasps that.

There's a difference between diplomacy and deceit. The Egyptians know this. It's time for Washington to learn.

(Also published in Metro.)

Sudanese Refugees Band in Gangs on Cairo Streets

The streets of Cairo today are witnessing a confluence of American gang culture and strife in Sudan.

According to a Reuters report, there are nearly a million Sudanese refugees living on the streets of Egypt's capital city, regularly considered the cultural hub of the Arab world. And the ensuing strife sounds like Los Angeles in the early 1990s, only the rival gangs are not the Bloods and the Crips. In Cairo there are the Outlaws and the Lost Boys.

And they hack each other to death, as Abigail Hauslohner reports, with machetes.

According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, this population wave comes not from the genocide in the western Darfur region of Sudan, but from the ostensibly resolved two-decade old war with Christians in the south. As the war ended, UNHCR shifted their policy and the displaced lost their refugee status. Now the millions of Sudanese on Egyptian streets face racial discrimination and violence. They cannot find work and have joined gangs loyal to particular Cairene neighborhoods.

UNHCR wants the refugees to either return to Sudan or integrate into Egyptian society, but as is the case with so many refugee waves, without a plan for assimilation, the groups end up disenfranchised and do double damage: they lose out on opportunity, and the local region, in this case Cairo, which is a remarkably safe place, now has violence on its streets.

(Photo of downtown Cairo by Andrew Bast.)

 

Cairo Trilogy, Pt. II: Through Children's Eyes

by Andrew Bast

(Also published, in a slightly different form, in Metro.)

CAIRO -- Perhaps the best way to look at a city is to stare into the eyes of its children. Two weeks ago, the day I arrived, I set off exploring and walked across the Nile river, which does indeed bear an emerald sheen. I stumbled on a government complex where patches of green grass provided refuge from the dry sands of the Sahara for couples to chat and kids to play soccer. I sat down to stare, and before I knew it, a crew of young boys—probably around 10 years old—surrounded me, smiling.

What does Egypt have in store for these soon-to-be-teenagers, for these young men? It's an important question in a mostly Muslim Middle Eastern country of 80 million, and in a city that's commonly known as the cultural capital of the Arab world. In fact, Egypt is a young country. One in three here are under the age of 15. And it was fitting that we were all together in front of large government buildings; the bloated, and often corrupt, bureaucracy here employs more than 6 million. This is certainly an option: a comfortable, yet not terribly prosperous profession in the civil service.

Schooling is free through university, yet the prospects don't seem all that good. I spoke to a very intelligent young man named Ahmed who explained that his two years of university education in business only got him a sales clerk job in the souvenir shop of a decent tourist hotel. He said that even if he finished his degree, finding employment worth his education would be very difficult, if not impossible.

Interestingly, the situation for young women is different. While society here is unquestionably male-dominated—outside of my own hotel, in six days I can't remember interacting with a single woman—the veil has actually become a kind of tool for women's empowerment. Over lunch, Max Rodenbeck, the Middle East bureau chief for The Economist magazine explained that in 1980, only one in twenty girls wore a headscarf, while today, 80% of women cover their hair. Only, rather than being a tool of oppression, the trend has actually invited women into society, so to speak. What's more, it has allowed them to take on a job; wearing a headscarf actually opens up doors to a career.

Cairo is a cacophonous city. Horns, hustlers, the call to prayer, screaming from the minarets five times a day all make the city a bustling and exciting place. The boys in front of the government building shouted at me, their faces lit with curiosity. "Assalam aleikum," I said, using the little bit of Arabic I know. "Wa-lakeum salaam!" They roared back.

The boys in the concrete lot, no more than a stones throw away, continued kicking the soccer ball, some wearing a single shoe, some barefoot entirely. And then one boy in a green t-shirt stepped directly to me and asked, with perfect English in a demanding tone, "What is your name?"

"Andy," I said.

He peered at me and said, "Pleased to meet you."

(Photo by Ana M. Bast. Click image for more.)

Nighttime Nile in Cairo

Cairo, Egypt -- April 20th, 2007. Photo by the New York Inquirer.

Cairo Trilogy, Pt. I: En Route to Egypt

by Andrew Bast

I didn’t get my hair cut to go to Egypt, but strangely enough, a lecture I got while sitting in the barber’s chair was much of the reason that I’m leaving for Cairo this week. As my confident coiffeuse unceremoniously snipped away the curly blonde locks I’d been growing for more than a year, she scolded me, “You Americans don’t understand. You are the ones with the passports, and where do you travel? Nowhere. You can go anywhere in the world, and you don’t travel. Ever.”

Fearing what she could do to my hairdo, I bit my tongue. In the last couple of years I have traveled a few times to Europe—Amsterdam, Paris, Florence, Rome, Geneva, London—to Quito, Ecuador, to Jamaica, and to Colombo, Sri Lanka. As she continued her rant, I silently reminisced. Traveling is difficult, and at times quite expensive. The water always mucks up your insides. Duty Free is never worth it. Being a tourist means you will offend someone, if not many. Passing through customs is always intimidating. At the same time, however, traveling has taught me more about the world, and about myself, than any university education ever could.

More than twenty years ago when I was in grade school, I remember a teacher explaining, “If there’s ever another world war, it will be in the Middle East.” A prescient statement, perhaps. Witness the American fiasco in Iraq, ceaseless violence between Israel and its neighbors, tough talk between the US and Iran.
In fact, reading the newspapers, one might be led to believe that the entire region of the world, so rich in history and innovation, is prone only to violence, vengeance, and destruction.

Getting Our Outfit Together for the Middle East, Africa, What Have You

In preparing for the Inquirer sojourn to Cairo, Egypt, yes, we've been reading plenty of dispatches from Michael Slackman. But the Thursday Styles section of the New York Times proved suprisingly resourceful today. (Did it?) Muslim fashion, New York-style.

Yes, we're heading for Africa on April 19th. Africa? Middle East? Former? Latter? Both? Dispatches to come. Stay Tuned. Hell, why not subscribe?