A Letter to the Omani Sultan Qaboos

[ \"hand in hand until the lot of Omani people is improved.\" Image from omani1970.blogspot.com/] [ \"hand in hand until the lot of Omani people is improved.\" Image from omani1970.blogspot.com/]

A Letter to the Omani Sultan Qaboos

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following translation from Arabic is provided by Khuloud]

A Statement Regarding the Sultanic Decrees
 

Sunday, February 27, 2011

Your Majesty Sultan Qaboos bin Saeed- Sultan of Oman

In reference to each of the following:

First: The Sultanic Decrees issued on February 26, 2011 to address the preparation of the statute of an independent authority for consumer protection, to study the feasibility of establishing cooperative societies, and to implement some adjustments to the system of student rewards.

Second: The two Sultanic Decrees No. 13/2011 and No. 14/2011 that stipulate amendments to the make-up of the cabinet.

We were extremely shocked to learn of the abovementioned orders and decrees. Out of national duty demanded by true citizenship and its responsibilities, we the undersigned would like to assert the following:

1- Our great disappointment to this weak response to legitimate and clear national demands that affect all aspects of political, civil, economic, and social life in our country. So far, you had received such demands on an individual basis, but you recently received them within a collective document from Oman’s children.

2- That this response confirms people’s claims that sectarian and tribal wings and currents are powerful and in control of national decision-making in the Sultanate; that such decision-making serves their private agenda and is based on maintaining and furthering their own employment and commercial interests even if they conflict with the interest of the homeland and its citizens. For example, nothing resulted from transferring the Minister of Trade and Industry to the portfolio of the Ministry of Transport and Communications, which already had the lion’s share of the eighth five-year plan, or the appointment of the current Minister of Tourism. Both ministers belong to the same current whose control over the nation’s resources has lasted for tens of years. The two decisions confirm this particular current’s control over the country’s sources of revenues and its future projects, as well as deciding how these revenues are spent. Until now, this current has had a tight grip over several ministries, namely that of Finance, Economy, Transportation and Communication, Tourism, and the Central Bank.

3- We condemn the reappointment of the same old faces, and shuffling them between different cabinet portfolios like a boring game of chess that is no longer acceptable by Omanis who are not only becoming increasingly aware of their rights and duties, but have transformed this awareness-derived from the people, not the government- to a strong will to peacefully protest for positive change as the ideal route to reform.

4- We reject conferring the term “charity” on the decisions that are being made regarding public, not private money. Such terms undermine the right of the people to national resources, a right conferred upon them by true citizenship, and thus, they should not be made to feel grateful for these decisions. This rejection further expands when it comes to the decisions regarding basic rights that are at the heart of the government’s national responsibilities towards citizens and which it should have executed but has long ignored.  

5- We reject the short-term policy of “patching up” to resolve the rampant corruption that has spread like cancer in the government’s body. We demand that such policies be replaced by a structured approach that is sponsored by state institutions in partnership with civil society institutions that have proven their competence despite the government’s efforts to curb them or slow down their work.  

6- We demand the formation of a national accountability committee to go after all those involved in corruption and have stood in the way of the government’s reform and development efforts, and we believe you know exactly who each of those are.

7- We demand that all security services, the police, and the military deal in a civil and respectful manner with all Omani protesters, for after all, they are their children and brothers who have lost hope and patience and all they seek is a dignified life, not just for themselves, but for Oman’s next generations.

Your majesty… we the undersigned, in light of the popular uprisings taking place in Sohar, Sur, and Salalah, and before this spreads further in response to the policies that the government and its ministers have adopted so far, we urge you to read these lines addressed to you carefully and with the same attention you have shown us in the past. We look forward to your wisdom to implement real and convincing structural reforms, which will include the regime’s political and economic infrastructure, taking into consideration the Omani people’s declining love for you.  These words may be the last appeal to you from a people exhausted by the poor performance of this aging, servile government which has spared no effort to satisfy its private interests and has completely ignored the demands of this dear country’s people through its narrow-minded policies.

May God bless Oman and make it a safe, free, and independent country.

For a list of the signatories and latest developments on the protests in Oman, please visit this blog or this facebook page.
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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412