MENA Minorities

Jordan based journalist Madeline Edwards has a nice article at Middle East Eye about the mere chaotic situation in Suwaida, I am briefly cited as well. ' Security chaos': Kidnappings and clashes threaten relative peace in Syria's Sweida   by  Madeline Edwards, Middle East Eye "... When protests broke out across Syria in 2011, they appeared too in Sweida.  Like elsewhere, citizen journalists and activists took to social media to tell the story of the war as it soon began to unfold. Opposition militias also sprang up.  And yet the Syrian government has largely spared Sweida the kind of mass arrests and bombing campaigns it waged elsewhere, seeing the province’s Druze as a politically sensitive minority group with whom it didn’t want to sour relations.  “Even though there was violence in Sweida too, the crackdown of the regime was not on the same scale of brutality as in other parts of the country,” says Tobias Lang, an analyst who has focused on Druze ...

Past weekend marked the 42nd anniversary of the assassination of Lebanese Druze leader and leftist icon Kamal Junblat, who was murdered on March 16 1977. On this occasion I came across two pieces worth checking out: A nice article by Chris Solomon on Syria Comment and an episode of the Lebanese Politics Podcast (which is generally worth listening). Both, the article and the podcast, shine light on some aspects of the legacy of Walid Junblat's father. Kamal Junblat was not just a leader of the Lebanese Druze, rather his political stature can be  c ompared to late PM Rafiq Hariri's in the 90's, as Nizar Hassan argues in the podcast. Junblat was an extremely complex and also contradictory historical figure who was  described with diverse attributes such as  socialist leader,  intellectual,  feudal lord,  Arab nationalist and  even Francophile - all at the same time. Chart featured in the rather commendatory Kamal Junblat exhibition at Beited...