MER Article Hearts and Minds in Kurdistan For the people of Şirnak, a Kurdish town of 15,000 located at the foot of the Cudi Mountains in southeastern Turkey, the grave of 16-year old Zayide is something of a shrine. A guerrilla fighter with the separatist Workers’ Party of Kurdistan (PKK), Zayide was killed five years ago in a skirmish in Aliza Marcus • 6 min read
MER Article Report from Paris: The Kurdish Conference “There’s not much talk about the Kurds because we have never taken any hostages, never hijacked a plane. But I am proud of this.” So wrote Abd al-Rahman Qassemlou, the Iranian Kurdish leader who was assassinated in Vienna last July. The Kurdish Institute of Paris and France-Libertes, a human rights Sami Zubaida • 4 min read
MER Article Human Rights Briefing Since the regime of King Hassan is a long-time ally of the United States, what little attention Morocco’s human rights record receives in this country is usually hidden under a haze of comparisons with egregious violators like Iran and Iraq. Yet Morocco detains hundreds of political prisoners. Some (Author not identified) • 4 min read
MER Article The Lesson of Romania Editorial from the English-language Kuwaiti paper, Arab Times, December 26, 1989: The proverb says, “When your neighbor shaves his beard you should prepare your beard also for shaving.” Similarly many leaders should prepare themselves to face the same fate as the deposed Romanian leader. People of (Author not identified) • 1 min read
MER Article Al Miskin Satanic Comics A Tunisian writer’s attempt to spread the message of the Qur’an in comic book form has incurred greater wrath than he could have anticipated. Youssef Seddik, a Tunisian academic living in Paris, has been branded “a new Salman Rushdie” by the head of Islamic jurisprudence at Kuwait Uni Al Miskin • 3 min read
MER Article Toward a World Literature? The Prix Goncourt, always the biggest literary event of the year in France, became even more so in 1987, when the venerable Goncourt Academy named Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun as its eightieth laureate. In French literary circles, reaction to the selection of Ben Jelloun’s novel, La Nuit saerde Miriam Rosen • 12 min read
MER Article Western Sahara Conflict Impedes Maghrib Unity In early 1989, the movement toward Maghribi integration, coupled with signs of a peaceful resolution of the conflict in Western Sahara, generated a great deal of optimism. The reality a year later is far less rosy. The major factor is Morocco’s procrastination in moving forward with the UN peace pla Yahia Zoubir • 4 min read
MER Article Tunisia's Uncertain Future The first months after Habib Bourguiba’s overthrow in November 1987 witnessed an ambiguous honeymoon between the new regime and the Islamists. Bourguiba himself was under a form of house arrest in Monastir, his native town. Squares named after his birthday, August 3, 1903, were renamed November 7, t Fred Halliday • 9 min read
MER Article State and Gender in the Maghrib Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco constitute a geocultural entity. They all went through a period of French colonization and they became independent during roughly the same period in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Despite the similarities, though, the three countries engaged in markedly different polici Mounira Charrad • 12 min read
MER Article Chadli's Perestroika Until October 1988, the most severe challenge to Algerian President Chadli Benjedid’s perestroika came not in industrial plants or in party forums. Instead, it came in the form of street protests by masses of disaffected, unemployed and marginalized young people refusing to be manipulated by the sta Rachid Tlemcani • 11 min read
MER Article Algeria's Facade of Democracy Mahfoud Bennoune, a contributing editor of this magazine, is a veteran of the Algerian war of independence and currently teaches at the University of Algiers. He is the author of The Making of Contemporary Algeria, 1830-1987 (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Nabeel Abraham spoke with him in Detroi Nabeel Abraham • 12 min read
MER Article North Africa Faces the 1990s The startling changes that have transformed the political landscape of Eastern Europe in 1989 may have no equivalent in the Middle East exactly, but that region has seen some remarkable developments nonetheless. The Arab versions of perestroika, or restructuring, while less profound in comparison wi Joe Stork • 11 min read
