Dakar, Senegal (IRIN) – Aid agencies in northern Mali are debating how or whether they should negotiate with newly installed rebel groups such as the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) and Ansar Dine, which is affiliated to Al Qaeda, to reach people in need.

There are layers of complexity. Agencies have divergent approaches to securing humanitarian access – some refuse to use armed escorts under any circumstances, others see them as necessary in extreme situations; some US agencies cannot negotiate with terrorist-affiliated groups, others are already doing so. IRIN spoke to humanitarian agencies operating in the north to find out how they are delivering aid.

Prior to the March 2012 rebel fight for the north, northern Mali had for years been a volatile operating environment, mainly because of kidnapping and banditry. Most agencies leave all non-African and expatriated staff in the capital, Bamako. Some, such as Catholic Relief Services (CRS), which operates in Gao, work only through local partners. Others, such as the World Food Program (WFP), have for years used private transport companies to deliver aid.

When rebel groups succeeded in taking power in the north in early April 2012, aid agency operations were made more complicated, initially as each was forced to scramble to rebuild their stocks and equipment after widescale looting of their northern offices. CRS estimates that “several million” dollars, which would have gone into launching a large-scale food security operation from April to June in the region has been lost, and only last week two of their warehouses full of food were pillaged.

Agencies have to establish how they will approach rebel groups now in control, so as not to lose more time. There are some 75,000 people internally displaced in northern Mali; while thousands more were already facing food insecurity due to poor harvests, lack of pasture and high food prices. Alassane Maiga, a teacher at the Yanna Maiga intermediate school in Gao, told IRIN: “People are getting hungry – there are volunteers to provide first aid to the injured, but that’s all.”

Operating modes

Approaches vary when it comes to negotiating with rebels. CRS, which is largely US-funded, will not do so and relies on others in the humanitarian community to deliver aid. The International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (ICRC) – in some ways the ‘guardian’ of the humanitarian principles of neutrality, independence and impartiality – will, but is taking a thorough, gradual approach said its spokesperson, Stephen Ambrose. This has not stopped them from working – they have been fueling Gao’s generator to ensure the city’s water supply, and have kept Gao and Timbuktu hospitals supplied with medicines – but nowhere near as much as they would like.

Several aid agency representatives told IRIN that the MNLA are relatively open when it comes to discussing access, but Ansar Dine spokespeople change regularly, making it difficult to rely on agreements already made. They have also officially called for only Malian agencies to work in the north.

A few agencies, including the Malian Red Cross and French medical NGO Medecins du Monde (MDM), have already approached all the groups to discuss access. “We give the same information to all but we remain fully independent in the way that we operate,” said Olivier Vandecasteele, head of MDM, which focuses on health and nutrition work.

“You need to spend a lot of time on the phone, and verify through all of your different contacts how a convoy will pass – so far, we have never had a convoy that was stopped,” he said. MDM staff say so far they have had no major access problems in Kidal or Gao.

Vandecasteele said this is partly because MDM has been in the region a long time, many locals have participated in its activities, and it has widespread acceptance. MDM owns none of its own cars and rents vehicles locally, so it lost none during the looting.

Being absolutely rigid in its approach to independence and impartiality will help the agency operate in the long term if conflict flares up again, which it well could, said Vandecasteele. ECOWAS has announced it will take all measures “including use of force” to ensure the territorial integrity of Mali. Vandecasteele believes that aid groups might be surprised if they tried to negotiate humanitarian access. “They might just find they get it,” he told IRIN.

The Mali Humanitarian Country Team, made up of UN and some NGO agency heads, is working out an access strategy based on the importance of upholding impartiality, said David Gressly, regional humanitarian coordinator for the Sahel. While some UN agencies are already operational, security concerns mean that UN Refugee Agency UNHCR has very limited access to assess the needs of the displaced, said its spokesperson Fatoumata Lejeune-Kaba.

Armed escorts

One area of contention is the use of armed escorts. Humanitarian agencies generally shun the use of armed escorts or armed protection for their warehouses and other property, so as to avoid affiliation with one side or the other in a conflict. While some agencies – like MDM – will never use them, others – like WFP – will do so in extreme circumstances, said its acting representative, Martine Ohlsen.

“It is partly a question of scale – as the volume goes up, so do the risks,” said Gressly. Vandecasteele told IRIN he recognizes the temptation for some agencies to use armed guards, particularly with highly valuable stock at stake, but that “it sets a dangerous precedent.” As one agency head put it, an armed escort can become an active belligerent in a conflict overnight.

Some aid groups have already accepted armed escorts. Hearing of people’s needs in the north, local group Cri du Coeur (Cry of the Heart) collected money and aid donations from Bamako residents and sent a convoy north, accepting MNLA escorts between Douentza in the Mopti region and Gao. “We established contacts with MNLA and Ansar Dine, and they demanded they secure the convoy themselves, and that they supervise the distribution of food,” Tidiane Guindo, the public relations officer of non-profit Cri du Coeur told IRIN. When they arrived, a distribution committee made up of prominent local citizens were in place to distribute he goods, he said.

In Timbuktu, local resident Moulaye Sayah told IRIN, the food and medicines sent there are “distributed under the very close supervision of Ansar Dine.” Some say it is better to have aid delivered that way than not at all.

Others however, worry that it has dangerous repercussions, including contributing to a war economy. “They [the guards] don’t do it for free; and then there is their fuel to cover,” said the agency head. “Aid can be delivered through armed convoys, but don’t call it humanitarian.”

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– Provided by Integrated Regional Information Networks.

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United Arab Emirates David Rosenberg / The Med – Islamic bonds (sukuk) are set to become the big hit of the Middle East’s financial markets this year as low costs, a contracting European banking industry and a rising tide of religion across the region spur interest from borrowers and investors alike.

Dubai gave the segment a lift last week when investors climbed over themselves for two issues of sovereign sukuk worth $1.25 billion. The strong demand was reflected in pricing of 4.9 percent for the five-year bond, a record low for dollar-denominated bonds issued by the emirate, and 6.45 percent for the 10-year issue.

Sukuk issues were already on the ascent in the first quarter when the global total grew to $43 billion from $21 billion in the final three months of 2011, according to figures from Saudi Arabia’s National Commercial Bank (NCB). In the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, the value of sukuk issues reached $8.6 billion in the first quarter, up from $3.3 billion in the previous quarter, it said.

NCB says the best growth is yet to come. “Global sukuk issuance this year appears on track for another all-time record, with last year’s $85.4 billion set to be comfortably exceeded even under the more cautious projections. In view of current trends it appears likely that aggregate issuance will clearly exceed $100 billion this year,” it said in an April 22 report.

Malik Muhammad M. Al-Awan, an adviser to Malaysia’s Hong Leong Islamic Bank and Hong Leong MSIG in Malaysia, told a conference this month that sukuk financing could reach as much as $125 billion in 2012.

Sukuk (Arabic for “legal instruments’) are securities that comply with Islamic law, or sharia, by not paying interest. They mimic the cash flow of conventional bonds by paying holders the equivalent of rent together with a promise by the issuer to buy back the principal amount. Malaysia is by far the world leader in sukuk issues, accounting for about two thirds of the global market, but the Middle East is catching up.

One reason, said Capital Economics’ Middle East economist Said Hirsh, is that Europe’s financially troubled banks are paring back lending in the Gulf. He estimates they provide about 10 percent of total credit to non-bank borrowers in the Gulf, much of it short-term debt that they are unlikely to roll over as they retrench. Local banks will be able to pick up only part of the slack, he said.

“Sukuk issuance could therefore become an attractive option, given the low yields and strong demand from investors,” Capital said in a report last week. “The rapidly growing sharia-compliant fund management industry is still struggling to find suitable assets to invest in.”

Malaysia has emerged as the world leader in sukuk financing, with the GCC countries a distant second, despite their being the home of Islam and enjoying a combined economy many times larger than Malaysia. Saudi Arabia hosts the world’s biggest Islamic banking industry.

NCB attributes Malaysia’s leadership to the fact that Kuala Lumpur both encourages sukuk and regulates it, with a central sharia-compliance board, favorable tax treatment and well-developed trading markets. By contrast, GCC countries have taken a much more laissez faire approach – no regulation of sharia compliancy and no specialized regulations for the market – that has slowed development of new products, says NCB.

Trading in the organized secondary markets in the Gulf region is small. Saudi Arabia’s Tadawul market, the biggest, saw only six transactions worth 369.8 million Saudi riyals ($98.6 million) in the first quarter, which was nevertheless almost five times its level in the previous three months. But Saudi Arabia is taking the lead in sukuk as the government encourages companies to raise investment funds, overtaking the UAE in the first quarter of 2012.

The kingdom issued its first sovereign-backed bond – a $4 billion fundraising for its state aviation agency in January – and private companies tapping the market. Last week, Saudi Electricity Company (SEC) completed a $1.75 billion dual-tranche sukuk issue in what was called the largest international debt bond ever out of the kingdom. Earlier this month, Banque Saudi Fransi, a Saudi Arabian lender part-owned by France’s Credit Agricole SA, set up a $2 billion Islamic bond program as part of plans to diversify its sources of financing.

Saudi Basic Industries Corp. (SABIC), one of the world’s leading manufacturers of chemicals, got approval last December for a sukuk issue of up to $5 billion. It issued its first sukuk bond only in 2006.

Elsewhere in the Gulf, sukuk issues are on the way as well. In Dubai, Emirates Islamic Bank, a unit of Emirates NBD, sold $500 million of securities in January and a month later the mall and hotel operator Majid Al-Futtaim Holding sold $400 million. But Capital Economics doubts that Dubai’s government-related companies will be able to tap the sukuk market even though they have some $12 billion in debt coming due this year because investors are skeptical about their restructuring plans.

Outside the Gulf, the appeal of Islamic finance is growing in the rest of the Middle East and North Africa as Islamists increase their political powers in elections, according to a report last months by TheCityUK’s Islamic Finance Secretariat.

Egypt, where Islamists dominate the newly elected parliament, is weighing issuing a sovereign sukuk worth some $2 billion as it tries to plug a financing gap, while Tunisia, where the Islamist Ennahda Party won elections last year, has set up a working group to study how to develop Islamic finance in the country and may issue a sovereign sukuk bond to help cover a budget deficit.

The Banker magazine estimates that only 12 percent of Muslims worldwide use Islamic financial products, with the percentage as low as 4-5 percent in Egypt and Turkey.

“Leading countries for Islamic finance should provide fertile ground for future growth, although the long-term impact of political unrest on development of Islamic finance in some Middle Eastern countries, such as Egypt, remains to be seen,” the TheCityUK report said.

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Washingon, D.C., United States (AHN) – Recovery? Not so fast.

The Commerce Department reported Friday that gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the U.S. economy, grew at a slower-than-expected 2.2 percent annual rate in the first three months of 2012, down from a 3 percent growth rate in the prior quarter, and less than the 2.5 percent rate forecast.

Growth at the tepid rate is viewed as too weak to lead to the hiring needed to employ the millions of Americans out of work and searching for jobs.

Retail sales were a bright spot in the first quarter, and job growth started out strong, with a robust growth spurt experienced in January. However, by March, unemployment numbers began inching up.

Also, home construction that had increased during the start of 2012 has since fallen off.

Inflation that worried Americans earlier in the year amid soaring gas prices has since moderated.

Consumer spending rose 2.9 percent, with auto sales enjoying a big pick up. Durable goods spending increased 15.3 percent in the quarter.

The mediocre report has led many economists to conclude that the mild winter afforded the economy only a temporary boost since the start of the year.

Even the Federal Reserve maintains its cautious stance, with Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke saying at this week’s FOMC meeting that the U.S. economy still faces “significant risk to the recovery.”

Friday’s numbers are the first from the Commerce Department and will be revised twice in the next several months.

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Bangula, Malawi (IRIN) – Dorothy Dyton, her husband and seven children used to make a living farming just over a hectare near the town of Bangula in southern Malawi’s Chikhwawa District.

Like most smallholder farmers in Malawi, they did not have a title deed for the land Dyton was born on, and in 2009 she and about 2,000 other subsistence farmers from the area were informed by their local chief that the land had been sold and they could no longer cultivate there.

Dyton and her neighbors did not immediately accept the devastating change in their circumstances. They had already been removed once from the land during former President Hastings Banda’s regime in the 1970s and had not been allowed to return until Banda’s regime ended in 1994 and the cattle ranch established there by his political ally, John Tembo, had ceased to function.

After receiving the go-ahead from the district commissioner, they continued to farm the land for another season. But in 2010, as they prepared to plant, they were met by a police van and the chief, Fennwick Mandala, who warned them not to come back. The next day, the farmers again set out for their fields, but this time they were met by tear gas and rubber bullets and that night six of them were arrested and charged with trespassing.

Since that time, said Dyton, “life has been very hard on us.” With a game reserve on one side of the community and the Shire river and Mozambique border on the other, there is no other available land for them to farm and the family now ekes out a living selling firewood they gather from the nearby forest. The three oldest children have had to drop out of school to help their parents.

“People aren’t getting enough to eat,” said Isaac Falakeza, another community member. “Some are doing piece work on other people’s gardens, others are harvesting water lilies. You can see how malnourished the children are.”

User rights only

In Malawi, like most other countries in the region with the exception of South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe, more than 60 percent of land is customary, meaning that it is mostly untitled and administered by local chiefs on behalf of the government, with local communities merely enjoying user rights.

The system has led to many abuses, with some government officials and chiefs selling off customary lands and dispossessing smallholder farmers who are already competing for dwindling arable land as Malawi’s population increases.

“There’s nothing [they] can do because they’re not protected in any way by the law,” said Blessings Chinsinga, a lecturer at the University of Malawi’s Chancellor College, who is researching the political economy of land grabs and land reform in the country.

In a research report co-authored by Chinsinga, he notes that the issue of “land grabs” in Malawi dates back to Banda’s transferring of large parcels of land from smallholder farmers to the estate sector, largely to the benefit of political elites, men like John Tembo who helped sustain his regime.

Stalled land reform

Following the ousting of Banda and the transition to democracy, the government set up a Commission of Inquiry on Land Reform the findings of which formed the basis of a new land policy in 2002. The policy attempts to address smallholder farmers’ lack of security of tenure by allowing them to register their customary land as private property, but the legislative changes needed to implement the policy have not gone through parliament and the land reform process has effectively stalled.

“Politicians own massive tracts of land; they benefited from the previous system, so they’re reluctant to adopt a new legislative framework that would correct the land imbalances,” commented Chinsinga.

In recent years, the government of recently deceased president Bingu wa Mutharika focused public investment on boosting the productivity of smallholder farmers through its farm input subsidy program. The program was credited with several years of bumper maize harvests, but as Malawi went into financial crisis last year, the sustainability of the program was called into question and the number of beneficiaries was reduced.

Critics of the program, like international NGO Grain, point out that “all the fertilizers and seeds in the world cannot make much difference for the great mass of farmers in Malawi, who do not even have enough land to grow the food their families need.”

Green Belt Initiative

A 2010 report by Grain, noted that Malawi’s lack of land reform had resulted in increasingly inequitable distribution of land, with large tracts of farmland ending up in foreign hands. In 2009, the government allocated 50,000 hectares of farmland to the government of Djibouti, reportedly in exchange for assistance constructing an inland port in Nsanje. The details of this and other such deals are shrouded in secrecy, according to Chinsinga who has focused his research on land transfers relating to the government’s Green Belt Initiative (GBI).

Another program championed by Mutharika, the GBI aims to acquire 340,000 hectares of irrigable land along Lake Malawi and the banks of the Shire river with the goal of increasing agricultural production and national food security. Several foreign companies have acquired land under the auspices of the program which, according to Chinsinga’s paper, “views customary land as an unlimited reservoir that can be targeted for conversion for privatization”.

Rather than increasing food security, the paper suggests that, “land transfers under the GBI could have tremendous negative implications on livelihoods, food security and social justice”.

Illovo Sugar

Chikhwawa District is already dominated by sprawling sugar plantations owned by South African sugar giant Illovo Sugar. According to several sources, Illovo is intent on expanding its presence in the area and enjoys government support because of the much needed foreign exchange it generates.

The 2,000 hectares of land once farmed by Dyton and her neighbors is now owned by a company called Agricane, which is leasing it to Illovo for sugar cane production. Agricane’s country director, Bouke Bijl, explained that his company bought the land from a bank which had acquired it from John Tembo after he defaulted on a loan.

Like Chief Mandala, he described Dyton and other farmers who complain they have been dispossessed, as trouble-makers with no ancestral claims to the land. “There was a directive from the District Commissioner that they shouldn’t have been there and should make way for development but they chose not to understand that,” he said, referring to the 2010 standoff between the farmers and security personnel.

Ironically, Agricane’s core business is providing technical support to clients, many of them international donors who are implementing community development projects. Bijl noted that the company’s biggest challenge in carrying out such projects was the issue of land tenure. “We’re seeing a lot of projects collapse because the communities have never been prepared sufficiently to deal with it,” he told IRIN.

He added that once the land outside Bangula starts generating a profit, a trust fund will be established to support community development in the area, and donors will be approached to fund irrigation schemes that would benefit local smallholder farmers.

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– Provided by Integrated Regional Information Networks.

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New York, NY, United States (AHN) – U.S. stocks opened higher Tuesday as investors await earnings from Apple, the world’s most valuable company, after the close.

Just after 10 a.m. on Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 102 points, the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index rose 6 points and the NASDAQ was up 5.

In addition to corporate earnings, investors were also weighing data that revealed that the housing market recovery is still ailing.

Tuesday kicks off one of the busiest weeks for corporate earnings, which have been coming in better than expectations.

The week began on shaky ground with all three major U.S. indexes falling on Monday as market participants grew anxious over European political uncertainty and signs of a slowdown in the Chinese economy.

In world markets, with some political concerns abetting, European stocks were mixed in afternoon trading. Asia finished the day slightly lower.

In currencies and commodities, the dollar fell against the euro, the British pound and the Japanese yen.

Oil for June delivery tacked on 89 cents to $104 a barrel, and gold futures added $11 to $1,643.60 a troy ounce.

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The Hague, Netherlands (AHN) – Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s minority government ended on Monday after just one-and-a-half years in power as the collapse of budget deficit talks with a populist party forced him to resign.

Rutte submitted his official resignation to Queen Beatrix in The Hague to pave way for new elections after his ruling coalition and center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy lost support from the anti-euro Freedom Party, which rejected his $17 billion budget cut plan on Saturday.

The spending cut is aimed at keeping the budget deficit to below 3 percent of gross domestic product by 2013 in line with new EU rules and to keep the country’s AAA credit rating from Fitch Ratings. However, Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders believes the Rutte government’s austerity plan is detrimental to the economy, will curtail people’s spending and cause unemployment.

The Netherlands has up to April 30 to submit its budget plan to the European Commission. The government plans to push through with the budget cuts even without a parliamentary majority, according to Finance Minister Jan Kees de Jager.

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Gaza, Palestinian Territory (IRIN) – The demand for microloans has risen steeply in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in recent years, according to data from the Palestinian Network for Small and Microfinance (Sharakeh), which represents 11 microfinance non-profit institutions whose total loan portfolio was US$75 million by the end of 2011.

Between 2007 and 2011, the number of active microloans in the West Bank and Gaza Strip rose from 20,000 to more than 43,000. This trend is likely to continue, said Sharakeh, predicting that by 2015 the number of loans will reach 77,000. The number of active clients receiving loans from microfinance institutions has grown by an average of 27 percent annually since 2007, he added.

“Microfinance is on the rise in Palestine because it serves small businesses which are growing in number and importance,” Shireen al-Ahmad, a division chief at the Palestine Monetary Authority (PMA), told IRIN. Trying to start a small business is one way to cope with the challenges of public sector employment – but it can be a precarious existence given the state of the Palestinian economy.

Demand for microcredit, designed for borrowers who typically lack collateral, steady employment and a verifiable credit history, has spread by word of mouth, said Alaa Abu Halawa, programme coordinator at Sharakeh, adding: “The people realized the benefit of microfinance. And its growing importance is attracting more investors.”

Besides being promoted as a tool for providing the poor with financial access, microloans in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) have become an attractive alternative to normal credit from banks for any small businesses, say Palestinian microfinance institutions.

“Banks require high collateral and complicated loan procedures. We don’t,” Sameer Kraishi, a microcredit manager at the Arab Centre for Agricultural Development (ACAD), told IRIN. “The Palestinian case is special…Our microloans are high compared to developing countries like India, usually about $5,000.”

During his work for ACAD, Kraishi has seen many Palestinians who successfully built up their business with the help of microloans. But equally, he has seen many of them fail. The persistent financial crisis of the aid-dependent Palestinian Authority (PA) and the resulting impacts on the general West Bank economy affect small businesses heavily, he said.

Lack of donor support

According to the PA senior official Ghassan Khatib, the PA’s salaries were once again delayed for several days this month. “The PA cannot fulfil its payment obligations because of a lack in foreign funding. The outlook for this year does not look good,” he told IRIN.

One of the reasons why economic growth in the West Bank slowed down in 2011 was foreign donors’ failure to provide sufficient support to the PA, the World Bank said in a recent report. In 2011, the PA required $1.5 billion in budget support, but eventually only received about $814 million. The budget for 2012 is expected to have a recurrent budget deficit of around $1.1 billion.

“Economic deterioration is a main reason for a rise in microfinance, which together with the PA financial crisis resulted in high unemployment and increased the poverty rate. This, in turn, lead people to look for private projects to earn their living,” said Sharakeh’s Halawa.

But small businesses are dependent on the spending of government employees. “When salaries are cut, the demand for goods and services goes down,” Samer Barghouti, general manager at ACAD, told IRIN, adding: “As a result, our clients often face difficulties paying back their microloans, and this creates risks for them, but also for us, as an institution.”

Failure never far away

One of ACAD’s clients hit by the economic slowdown is 43-year-old Mahmud al-Haj, a vegetable seller in Ramallah’s central market.

“Over the last year, I have made less and less profit. Many of my customers are PA employees. They just don’t have enough money when their salaries come too late, so they simply stop buying,” he told IRIN.

Some years ago he had made the equivalent of about $1,600 per month, now his monthly profit barely exceeds $500. He had borrowed US$3,000.

“I hardly sell 200kg of vegetables a month,” he said, adding: “I fear that once the loan is used up, I will not be able to continue. I need to pay taxes to the municipality. I have to take care of my family. I need to pay for my children’s school, for electricity, food, and haven’t even paid back most of the loan I took.”

Almost half of micro-loan projects fail in one way or another, according to Shaker Saadeh, manager of ACAD’s Ramallah field office.

“Many of our clients used to be unskilled labourers in Israel, never acquiring the knowledge necessary to run a business. Others use microloans as a means to change profession, like a carpenter who suddenly starts an agricultural business, but doesn’t really know how to do it,” he added.

Sewing

“Over the last seven years I received 15 microloans from different organizations. I used to be a wage worker, but eventually opened my own sewing workshop,” 48-year-old Na’ma Shamali said, while pulling fabric through a sewing machine in her shop in Ramallah.

Her current loan amounts to $3,000, but past experience has taught her to invest the borrowed money wisely. “At the beginning of every month I set my priorities. What do I really need? So recently I bought a new automatic sewing machine for 9,000 shekels [$2,400]. But at the beginning of every month, I pressure myself to work a lot, so I can pay back the loan,” she said.

Thanks to the growth of her business, she and her husband were able to buy the house they previously rented and send their children to a private school. “I am making 5,000 shekels [$1,320] of profit [per month] today. I am satisfied.”

Whether microfinance provides a mechanism for women’s empowerment beyond mere financial success has been widely debated in the past.

Gender issue

In oPt, real empowerment is often hindered by the traditional roles women are assigned to, said Nisreen Swelem, West Bank regional manager at the Palestinian Businesswomen’s Association (Asala), which is currently providing microloans to about 4,000 Palestinian women.

“It happens often that women continue to do the hard work while their husbands take over the business. We simply cannot control the cultural aspects,” Swelem told IRIN.

In particular in the field of agriculture, women often remain unpaid family workers and as such are invisible contributors to the economy, Asala’s research has shown.

“I try to raise awareness. I ask them, who controls the money?” Swelem said.

“There is still a lot to do on the level of gender awareness. But in one way, the positive impact of the gender meetings is obvious. Many of the women that take the trainings later become trainers themselves.”

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Palestinian Territory David Rosenberg / The Med – With peace talks with Israel long stalled, a widely touted independence drive dead-ended at the United Nations and reunification between the rival Fatah and Hamas movements in perpetual negotiations, the Palestinian leadership is adrift and divided on how to go forward in their quest for a state.

The dilemma facing Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas broke out into the open on Tuesday when his prime minister, Salam Fayyad, refused Abbas’ request to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. The meeting was the first between the two sides in 18 months.

Samir Awad, assistant political science professor at Birzeit University, said no one in the Palestinian leadership has any expectations that the 19-year-old peace process with Israel will advance anytime in the foreseeable future. But, with Abbas committed to a negotiated solution and locked in an ideological struggle with Hamas, which advocates armed struggle, he wants to maintain contact with Israel.

“The meeting took place as a matter of routine, keeping the pretense of peace talks with the Israelis going. I don’t think the Israelis are willing to engage in real meaningful negotiations with the Palestinians,” Awad told The Media Line.

The meeting itself reflected the peace-process malaise that has developed over the past two years.

Abbas was travelling abroad this week, but the office of Chief Palestinian Negotiator Saeb Erekat insisted in the hours before it was to take place that Fayyad would lead the Palestinian side at the meeting. Fayyad’s office refused to confirm he was coming, with media reports quoting unnamed aides as saying he regarded the meeting as a pointless photo op.

With Erekat as the top Palestinian present, the 90-minute meeting was a low-key affair mostly devoted to a five-page letter outlining Palestinians grievances and demands.

Nevertheless, Erekat who took Fayyad’s place, tried to portray it as a step forward. “It was a serious meeting,” he told Agence France Presse. “Netanyahu will study the letter seriously and answer it within two weeks.”

Mordechai Kedar, a former Israeli military intelligence officer and now a researcher at Bar Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA), said the skepticism about peace is shared by the Israeli leadership as well. But Netanyahu, who has a tense relationship with U.S. President Barack Obama, wants to maintain the appearance of a peace process.

“The whole thing is about posturing for the United States of America. Nobody really means business. The Palestinians cannot delivery anything today because of the rift between the PA and Hamas. Israel doesn’t trust them,” Kedar told The Media Line.

A big push by the Obama administration in its first months in office to resume talks with Israel yielded only a brief round of meetings that broke up over disagreements over whether Israel should extend a moratorium on settlement building.

The PA, meanwhile, adopted a second track toward statehood with a campaign to clean up government institutions and prepare itself for statehood by winning UN recognition. The drive got off to a strong start, with wide international backing, but last autumn it stalled in the Security Council where the Palestinians failed to win enough votes.

Although the PA never officially backed them, many Palestinians and their supporters overseas have organized campaigns to engage in non-violent resistance to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. But those efforts have so far failed to mobilize the Palestinian street or attract the attention of the global media and public opinion.

The high-water mark of the campaign occurred nearly two years ago when Israeli commandos killed nine Turks who had joined a flotilla aimed at breaking Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. It resulted in a widely publicized UN Inquiry and forced Israel to ease conditions for Gaza.

But Israel learned the lessons of the incident and subsequent flotillas were quietly and effectively blocked. Efforts to organize mass protests or storm Israel’s land borders from Lebanon and Syria also failed to gather any momentum and the start Arab Spring unrest in Egypt, Libya and Syria drew attention away from the Palestinian cause.

Over last weekend, a so-called “flytilla” of foreign pro-Palestinian activists arriving en masse at Ben-Gurion International Airport largely failed to achieve its aims. Most of the participants were blocked before leaving their home countries and the few that landed in Israel were quickly and quietly whisked away by police.

Opinion polls suggest that the Palestinian public does not see reaching an agreement with Israel or winning recognition of statehood from the UN as urgent priorities.

A survey taken in March by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 45% of Palestinians gave top priority to “Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders and the establishment of a Palestinian state.” But when asked what were the biggest problems facing Palestinian society unemployment and poverty outranked the occupation by a margin of 28.1% to 25%.

There were majorities for various non-violent strategies to achieve statehood. The only measures that most opposed was a return to “armed intifada and confrontations” (59.3%) and dissolving the PA (56.7%).

Many analysts say the Palestinians’ bitter experience during the second Intifada, which cost thousands of Palestinians lives and decimated the economy, has discouraged them from grassroots action even as much of the Arab world has rebelled against leaders who have failed to deliver.

Few observers are holding out hope that anything will change even after the U.S. presidential election in November. Birzeit’s Awad said a second-term Obama administration might try to restart the process, but if he is defeated the peace process will remain frozen as it has been over the past 18 months.

“If there is going to be Republican administration, we’ll just have more of the same – an American administration backing Netanyahu and his right-wing government,” Awad said. If that is the case, he predicts Palestinians will turn “inward,” seeking to end the rift between Hamas and Abbas’ Fatah movement even at the expense of alienating Israel and the U.S.

BESA’s Kedar said he doubted negotiations will be revived even in a second Obama administration because the Arab Spring has made Palestinian leaders too nervous to risk negotiations.

“It’s a different culture [here], a different pace,” Kedar said. “American culture is to see the opportunity in any change. The Middle East is afraid of the danger of change. It’s a totally different way of how to look at change.”

 

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Washington, D.C., United States (AHN) – Conservative front-group American Legislative Exchange Council announced Wednesday that it would stop pushing non-economic legislation, such as the controversial stand your ground laws and restrictions on voter registration to focus on economic issues.

ALEC is comprised of hundreds of state legislators and private companies. Critics say that the voting law changes the organization support amount to a suppression of voting rights for black people.

People who have been angered by the voting law changes and stand your ground gun laws put pressure on many corporations that supported ALEC, causing some of them to sever ties. ALEC criticized the backlash against it as an “organized intimidation” campaign.

The group, which favors federalism and conservative public policy solutions, has bowed to public pressure that intensified after the shooting death of a black high school student in Florida.

Trayvon Martin, 17, was trying to walk home from the store when he was profiled by a white neighbor who followed him, confronted him and then claimed Florida’s stand your ground law as his defense in shooting the teen to death.

It took more than a month for Florida authorities to arrest George Zimmerman, 28, on charges of murdering Martin.

That delay caused murder charges caused a public outcry that focused attention on the controversial stand your ground laws, as well as on ALEC for its part in successfully pushing them into law in more than two dozen states.

A press release on behalf of ALEC’s Legislative Board of Directors was issued by David Frizzell, Indiana State Representative and 2012 National Chairman of the ALEC.

“We are refocusing our commitment to free-market, limited government and pro-growth principles, and have made changes internally to reflect this renewed focus, Frizzell said.

“We are eliminating the ALEC Public Safety and Elections task force that dealt with non-economic issues, and reinvesting these resources in the task forces that focus on the economy. The remaining budgetary and economic issues will be reassigned.”

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Cairo, Egypt David Rosenberg (The Medi – In the Middle East, the middle class is grumpy.

And if the mass protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and Tunisia’s Habib Bourguiba Avenue over the past year haven’t made that clear, a survey of the people who make up the region’s soccer moms and middle managers articulates their angst in ways rallies often fail.

Less than a third of the people surveyed in the three Middle East and North African (MENA) countries of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Morocco said they are “extremely satisfied” or “very satisfied” with their current economic situation, according to the poll conducted by consulting firm Booz & Co. Respondents who said they were “not at all satisfied” and only “slightly satisfied” reached 48 percent.

The survey comes at a time when the region’s leaders – both those who have come to power on the back of Arab Spring protests and those who are trying to head them off – are grappling with how to steer their countries to greater prosperity and freedom. So far, they are stumbling, with most of the region’s economies reeling from political upheaval and the transition to democracy proceeding slowly, if at all.

“There has never been a more critical time for policymakers in the Middle East to focus on empowering the region’s sizable—and politically significant—middle class,” Richard Shediac, Samer Bohsali and Hatem Samman, the authors of the report said. “There is a dire need for change, via a set of economic, social, and political policies aimed at developing a large, dynamic, and sustainable middle class.”

Compared to the West, MENA’s middle class is both undersized and understudied. Indeed, Booz had to develop its own parameters for defining its parameters, which it settled on as families with incomes between 75 percent and 150 percent of each country’s median. Turning that into dollar terms, that works out to an annual household income of as little as $23 a day in Morocco to $149 at the upper end for wealthy Saudi Arabia.

Middle class views on their economic situation vary widely from country to country, according to the poll.

To Moroccans, economic conditions have not changed markedly over the past five years, while Egyptians are the most dissatisfied with the present situation. Saudis, whose economy is booming on the back of high oil prices, overwhelmingly rate their current economic status favorably.

MENA’s middle class is different than its peers in Europe and North America. Booz said it produces fewer entrepreneurs and therefore is less a source of economic growth. That is because the public sector is the main employer of the middle class rather than the private sector.

In Saudi Arabia and Egypt, for example, small and medium-sized businesses account for between 25 percent and 38 percent of employment, respectively, compared with 55 percent in the U.S., and 60 percent in Germany.

The survey gives some insight into why: 44 percent rated “having a secure job” as their most important factor in choosing an occupation while only 3 percent ranked “participating in new business venture” as so important.

Despite relying on it, employer trust in government is low. Less than a third of the middle class gives it a passing grade for disclosing adequate and accurate information, fighting corruption or having a fair and open court system. This figure is below 10 percent in Morocco. Less than a fifth of the MENA middle class trust their country’s court system

The poll also found that the middle class feels the educational system is performing poorly. More than half said it fails to provide opportunities for them or for their children, in terms of work. Nevertheless, more than 80 percent claim to save money for their children’s education, up to a 10th of their monthly income in some cases.

An average of 57 percent for all three countries said that their salary covers basic expenses, with a little for extras. Between 27 percent and 30 percent are barely able to make ends meet, while 3 percent said they could not even do that.

When they have free time, MENA’s middle class prefer shopping malls, restaurants, and amusement parks to nightclubs, pubs or museums. Saudis preferences are, of course, limited since movie theaters and nightclubs are banned in the country, but in Morocco where they are permitted, only 19 percent go to them. Egyptians are heavy cinema goers, with 60 percent saying they buy tickets. Nearly 100 percent of the middle class claims to watch television every day

“To many Westerners, these forms of entertainment may seem superficial and limiting. Yet surprisingly, middle class respondents report overall contentment with their entertainment options.” the report said.

Nevertheless, half of MENA’s middle class claims to be satisfied with their entertainment and cultural offerings, and in Saudi Arabia that number rises to 70 percent, with the highest rating among women. “One explanation for this disparity is that people cannot miss something they have never experienced,” the report suggests, noting that foreign travel among the region’s middle class is not that common.

In spite of the current pessimism, a surprising number of middle class people remain bullish about the future, Booz found. About 70 percent have a positive outlook for the economy over the next five years, especially in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. If only 5 percent said they are “extremely satisfied” with the economic conditions today, 29 percent said they expected it to be “much better” five years from now.

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