Waves of Resistance and the Call for Fundamental Change: What’s Habitat Got to Do with It?
On last International Housing and Land Rights Day (Habitat Day), 3 October 2011, HIC-HLRN reported in detail the dramatic prominence of habitat issues since we commemorated the date in 2010. Not only has it been revealed that the polar ice cap is melting at a far more-rapid rate that previously estimated, but an unexpected uprising in a region of entrenched despotism has uprooted long-standing dictators and their brutal regimes. For long a repressive bulwark reassuring Western interests as the preferable alternative to equitable democratization, authentic national self-determination and allegedly radical Islam, those regimes now are toppling as so many dominos, teetering on the brink of collapse and/or reforming frantically to salvage their control over the State: land, people and institutions. The political map has transformed dramatically since last year. In this transitional light, one might well ask the musical question: “What’s habitat got to do with it?”
The social-movement landscape also has replicated itself in some form beyond the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), where mass demonstrations even in privileged societies have called for fundamental change: an end to avaricious neoliberalism, accountability for the looting of national resources, more jobs and affordable housing. As every year, HLRN commemorates this occasion with a review of its monitoring efforts—especially the findings from the HLRN Violation Database—to analyze the current trends in housing and land rights violations in relation to the issues of the day.
Tunisia
Let us begin where is all started, Tunisia. Here erupted the common citizens’ demand for dignity, democracy, equality, human rights and a definitive end to corruption. As of 17 December 2010, when the police-abused vegetable vendor Muhammad Bū `Azīzī immolated himself in remote Sidi Būzīd, countrymen and -women from all walks of life rose up and called for change. The target was a regime headed by a corrupt family that imposed control over, and exacted tribute from every sector of Tunisian society and economy. Among its repressive tools were the political police, a propagandistic press, the systematic use of torture and a judiciary “harmonized” with the executive branch. Parallel to these were widespread corruption in real estate, favoring the ruling family and its supporters with sweet land deals and dispossession of public and private properties for personal enrichment at the people’s expense. A tour of the HLRN Violation Database informs the user about the dimensions of this form of corruption in Ben `Ali’s defunct regime, and so many others.
After the deposed president fled Tunisia on 14 January, a list of names came to light of families close to the regime who benefited from extraordinary land deals in which the government turned over vast properties, some valued at tens of millions of dollars. The rural poor across Tunisia have since sought reparations for their dispossession. In February 2011, a story broke about the residents of Jumna, in the southwestern Qabaly Governorate, protesting for the return of their agricultural lands confiscated for the benefit of an industrialist close to the deposed president. Other cases have come to light in which torture and land seizure combined as tandem measures to repress critics of the decayed former regime. In one report, a witness of prime land grabbing by the former Tunisian first lady’s family characterized the practice by analogy: “They took the people`s lands, she said. The Trabelsis are like cockroaches. They fed on everything. When the people eventually rose up against the larcenous clique, some even sought immediate vengeance against their privatizations, looting and burning the ill-gotten properties of the newly fallen elites.
Egypt
Egypt, under former President Husni Mubarak, also underwent massive land fraud at the expense of public and private land and habitat. . The dispossession of the peasantry and the forced eviction of the urban poor were two prominent features of the Mubarak era. Loyal politicians and cronies of Mubaruk lavished upon themselves vast tracts of state lands at fictitiously low prices. Some of those illicitly obtained public goods, some also in the hands of corrupt businessmen, are gradually being restored; however, a great need of reparations for victims still remains. In the context of the Egyptian Revolution, a collective response with demands from HLRN Members articulates the nexus between habitat-rights violations and the call for fundamental change.
As HLRN’s MENA Program has reported previously, the implementation of Egypt’s notorious neoliberal Law 96, cancelling all protected rural land tenure contracts, enabled a wave of concentrated land privatization that consequently robbed peasants of their lands and livelihoods, despite a promise in the law of adequate replacement lands. In addition to this and other administrative weapons to dispossess small farmers of their lands, the Mubarak regime also used violence to enforce arbitrary evictions against those poor Egyptians. The process is explained in the 2010 report of HLRN’s MENA Program on “How People Face Evictions.” After the revolutionary downfall of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP) government, measures began to restore some level of justice for the dispossessed. Even in the former president’s home territory, Manūfīyya, members of his hated NDP reportedly subjected villages to attacks by hired thugs, who forcibly seized agricultural land owned by the peasants under the threat of firearms and bladed weapons.
The Ministers of Agriculture and Housing were particularly implicated in these nepotistic crimes of crony capitalism. For instance, investigations this year revealed that former Egyptian ministers of agriculture had allocated many thousands of feddans of land—ostensibly allocated for young graduates—to 160 senior officials, ministers, members of both houses of parliament and their relatives.
Forced eviction of the urban poor form a corollary of rural dispossession, as displaced citizens seek alternative livelihoods in those population centers favored by public and private investment. In the current review period, the HLRN Violation Database has recorded major forced evictions conducted without alternative housing in Abū Ragaila (Cairo), Qal`at Kabsh (Cairo), Alexandria, Qursaya Island and Mahala, while HLRN notes also many more small-scale and incremental evictions in neighborhoods elsewhere.
During this review period, HIC-HLRN joined with Amnesty International and the Egyptian Center for Housing Rights (ECHR) to address Egypt’s then-minister of housing on the importance of participation of the affected communities in the emerging plans for Cairo 2050. Minister Ahmed Maghrabi did not respond. (He is currently serving a prison sentence for corruption and graft.)
Bahrain
UN Habitat and the Kingdom of Bahrain have made much publicity of the repeatedly bestowed a Special Citation of its Scroll of Honour Award to that country’s Prime Minister Shaikh Khalifa bin Salman al-Khalifa since 2007 “in recognition of his visionary leadership in effectively pursuing the Millennium Development Goals…through participatory governance, [thus] the Kingdom of Bahrain has been able to reduce poverty and to bring about social justice through socially inclusive housing policy, housing finance systems and good urban governance.” The 2011 uprising against His Highness’ thuggish governance and award-winning dictatorship has roots in habitat issues as well.
Adequate housing is in critically short supply in the kingdom, especially owing to multiple factors of institutionalized discrimination and an extreme land shortage, both exacerbated by the royal family’s looting of the archipelago’s natural resources.
Among the issues of discrimination in Bahrain is the administrative favoritism extended to Sunni citizens of foreign countries recruited into the security forces. That minority has become automatic beneficiaries of state housing and fast-track nationalization, while Bahraini citizens—in particular, the Shi`a majority—do not similarly benefit. For those Bahrainis who benefit from public housing and ultimately pay off its full price through installments, their title deeds nonetheless recognize that their housing remains the freehold property of the monarch. Even public property such as school buildings are registered in the name of a member of the royal family.
While the usual residents of the squalid slums in the capital al-Manama are Bahraini Shi`a, discrimination on a sectarian basis is also evident in the villages. Sunni villages boast all possible forms of planning, resources and facilities, while neighboring Shi`a villages are conspicuously unserviced, including those lacking paved roads, sanitation services and adequate water infrastructure.
Due to various forms and pretexts of royal-family grabbing, the lack of arable land, and over 40% of the Southern Province is occupied by the United States Navy’s 5th fleet, the land left for Bahrain’s population to live on is reduced to only 10% of the total (ca. 66.5 km2). At 2010, Bahrain’s population totaled 1,214,705, including 235,108 non-nationals. At 1,062.01 persons per km.2, the general land shortage, exacerbated by an inequitable formula of land distribution in favor of the royal family and its supporters, makes Bahrain the seventh most-densely population country on the planet.
For an overview of the land and housing issues related to the democratic uprising in Bahrain, as well as satellite images of the Āl Khalifa’s royal land grabs, go to HLRN’s MENA News.
Yemen
The popular movement for change still rages in Yemen, where land theft and corruption by the ruling elite figure also on the long list of public grievances. Dispossession and use of force have been common implements for intimidating the weak. This year’s uprising has revealed direct links between land grabbing by Yemeni politicians and the loud cries for change.
Meanwhile, severe land disparities mark the legacy of the embattled `Ali Abdullah Salih regime. Reports have revealed, for example, that as much as 63% of the arable land in the Hudaida Province has been taken over by influential persons close to the regime. Thus, land grabbing is not a new feature of popular dissatisfaction with the 33-year-old Salih rule, which led to the formation of a commission to investigate such violations as early as 2007.
Syria
Also ongoing on this Habitat Day is the democratic uprising in Syria against the brutal regime headed by President Bashar al-Asad, culminating two generations of repressive state ideology and governance (succeeding the presidency of his father Hafidh al-Asad, 1971–2000). In the context of the current uprising, corruption and land grabbing also has become a subject of scrutiny and opposition in Syria.
In the urban context, reports from the Province of Damascus have revealed that Syrian businessman Rāmi Makhlūf (a cousin of President al-Asad) has conspired to take over large areas of Old Damascus, containing priceless relics in the form of historic homes, monuments and other real estate, in order to construct a new center of the Syrian capital in the style of Beirut’s controversial Solidere enterprise.
Kurdish housing and land rights have been consistently violated, especially following the September 1961 collapse of the Egyptian-Syrian union, when the conservative interim government issued Decree No. 93, which called for a census to be carried out in a single day across al-Hasaka Province. Anyone in the area not registered as an “Arab Syrian” would be considered as “foreigners” (ajānib). That single process stripped more than 120,000 Kurds of their Syrian citizenship, disqualifying them for land ownership under current law. Premised on their status as noncitizens, Syrian Kurds are unable to own land, housing or businesses, impeding their rights to an adequate standard of living.
President Bashar al-Asad has continued in this tradition of depriving Kurds of their human rights. In our review period, on 10 September 2008, Asad issued Decree No.49 to amend Law No.41 as it related to wide expropriation of private property in the border areas. Decree No. 49, prohibits the trade of property, mortgages, insurance, concessions, other franchises, or lending arrangements of a duration longer than three years, or that affect any legal rights to lands in the border area, without central government permission. Kurds in Syria are effectively prevented from obtaining the requisite permits. Therefore, Decree 49 has derogated further their rights to housing, equitable land access and agricultural, as well as many other forms of livelihood, leading both directly and indirectly to the deprivation of Kurdish citizens’ rights to adequate housing and to property, especially land as a source of livelihood and culture.
As a further result of repeated droughts, a feature of advanced climate change, many families have migrated from rural Syria to urban centers. In 2009, some 29–30,000 families migrated, and estimates project that number to have increased to 50,000, or higher, in 2010. As a result, some 160 ultimately depopulated villages have ceased to exist. Those Syrians who have moved from the drought-affected regions are mostly small-scale farmers from al-Hasaka Governorate, the overwhelming majority of them are Kurds.
Deepening this depravation with more administrative cruelty, the Syrian government’s subsequent Decree 2715 of 16 December 2010, through the Ministry of Local Administration, has prohibited any officials from ratifying sales or rental contracts for persons residing outside of their “designated domicile.” This measure, ostensibly not specific to any ethnic groups, further complicates and forecloses housing options—and housing rights—for those most vulnerable to the present wave of displacements. Kurdish “citizens” are destined to suffer the first and the most from such official cruelty.
Meanwhile, hundreds of migrant families face demolition in the Qāsiūn neighborhood of the capital. This violates the constitutional right to protection in the home, and the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, which state that such persons have a right to state support to ensure their welfare and housing, return and rehabilitation without negative discrimination. However, Syria’s government has not manifested the necessary political will to uphold those rights and entitlements.
Israel/Palestine
Across the artificial border and occupied territory of the Golan Heights, Israel practices an even-older form of institutional discrimination. Since the beginning of the Zionist movement at the eugenic ending of the 19th Century, the World Zionist Organization and its subsequent affiliated (Jewish Agency and Jewish National Fund) insisted on a privileged “Jewish nationality” status as the basis for benefitting from their activities in the colonization of Palestine. With the 1948 proclamation of the State of Israel, those institutions ultimately inherited the public functions of the State to implement “Jewish nationality” benefits to land (mostly acquired from expelled Palestinian refugees) and housing. The same services and benefits do not accrue to holders of mere “citizenship” (ezrahūt) in the State of Israel, in particular the indigenous Palestinian people who make up some 20% of Israel’s citizenry.
Among the most dramatic violations against indigenous citizens of Israel in the review period has been the repeated demolition and forced eviction of Palestinian villages in the Naqab (Negev) region in the south of Israel. HIC-HLRN’s published report of a high-level international fact-finding mission in the review period lays out the human rights issues involved and the statecraft values at stake in this regionally relevant pattern of housing and land rights violations during the “Revolutionary Spring” this year. Emblematic of the state’s destruction of homes and livelihoods of the “unrecognized” villages in the Naqab is the demolition of al-`Araqīb village for at least the 21st time by Habitat Day 2011. On 11 September 2011, the Israeli Cabinet has approved the recommendations of the Ehud Prawer Report, which calls for the forced removal and dispossession of at least 30,000 Bedouin Arab citizens from their villages for concentration into
For more information on this manifestation of institutionalized discrimination and the mechanisms that implement it, see HIC-HLRN’s international fact-finding mission report: The Goldberg Opportunity: A Chance for Human Rights Statecraft in Israel (2010).
Conclusion
With the case of Israel, as with the case of Syria, the lack of democracy is ensured by a denial of citizenship as the basis for the equal enjoyment of rights and responsibilities within the State. In all these cases from the region, effective material discrimination has been carried out by various iterations of failed governance that generates conflict and, more recently, mass resistance that aspires to be transformational. As a function of HLRN’s monitoring efforts, the Violation Database and other tools chart that process from the perspective of habitat rights and corresponding state obligations.
In the Arab Spring of this past year, indeed as resistance to such violations is for all seasons and regions, HIC-HLRN and its Members—not least in the MENA region—reflect on the common issues and values that bind all of who share our common habitat. The violations of the people’s rights to habitat are motivating social movements and popular resistance wherever such violations are found. Our colleagues in Luanda, Angola; Dale Farm, England; Sulukule (Istanbul), Turkey, Nuba Mountains in the Sudan; or Boeng Kak Lake, Cambodia stand as sterling examples of the struggles against tyranny and for their human rights to adequate housing, equitable access to land, food sovereignty and sustainable environment.
As inspired by the first HLRN Land Forum in the Middle East/North Africa, the Network’s “Landpedia” (in Arabic and English) captures many of these struggles in an interactive tool for HIC Members and the general public. In this season of popular resistance to corruption, neoliberalism and failed governance, these struggles and the cumulative cases entered in the HLRN Violation Database demonstrate what habitat’s got to do with it. It’s physical; it’s logical.
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