March 4, 2003	Tuesday	Zul Hijjah 30, 1423

DOHA (Qatar): In tightly controlled Arab nations whose governments support American policy in this region, large antiwar demonstrations recently have reflected official efforts to alleviate public anger far more accurately than they have grass- roots resistance to a US-led invasion of Iraq, political analysts said Sunday.

“Controlled demonstrations have been allowed,” said Daniel Tschirgi, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. The governments, he said, “wanted to vent some steam.”

Tschirgi and other analysts said countries consider such protests a convenient way to demonstrate their solidarity with their Arab brethren — a strategy that could help deflect the kind of criticism of their sympathies toward the United States that was in evidence before a weekend emergency summit of the Arab League. That meeting, in the Egyptian resort city of Sharm el Sheik, failed to produce any dramatic initiative to resolve the crisis surrounding Iraq.

Regional specialists stressed three points:

The depth of public opposition in these countries to US plans to invade Iraq is far greater than the size of recent protests implied. It is also greater than the strain of anti-American feeling that ran through much of the Arab world before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

“It’s no longer just fringe elements that oppose the United States,” said Fawaz Gerges, a respected Middle East specialist at Sarah Lawrence College. “Now opposition is across the entire social spectrum.”

The protests have followed government calculations that controlled protests would ease, rather than heighten, tensions between official support for the United States and growing anti- American public sentiments.

The level of government control over freedom of expression in Arab nations allied with the United States merely adds to the skeptical reaction — especially among Arab young people — to US contentions that plans to overthrow Saddam Hussein are motivated in part by the need to foster democracy in Iraq.

The largest of these protests occurred on Thursday in Cairo, where a crowd estimated at more than 100,000 gathered in the city’s main sports stadium, chanted “Down with America!” and denounced plans to attack Iraq. In the following days, similar, albeit smaller, protests were held in Bahrain and Yemen. Egypt is both an important ally of the United States and one of the largest recipients of American foreign aid, while Bahrain’s capital, Manama, is the home port of the US Navy’s 5th Fleet. Yemeni authorities have cooperated extensively with the United States in the war on terrorism.

On Sunday, there were demonstrations elsewhere in the Arab world, with a crowd of more than 50,000 taking to the streets of the Moroccan capital, Casablanca.

But in the capitals of Arab nations friendly to the US, the care taken in controlling the protests is a better measure of opposition to the government than is the size of the protests themselves, analysts said.

Cairo, they said, was one example. Although leftist groups and members of the Islamist party the Muslim Brotherhood used the large Cairo demonstration to denounce the United States, the event was the unofficial brainchild of President Hosni Mubarak’s government. Witnesses said civil servants arranged the busing of protesters from outlying areas, state employees handed out T-shirts and flags to the demonstrators, and the government-controlled media gave the event saturation coverage.

In Manama, the capital of Bahrain, more than 4,000 demonstrators marched from prayers at Al Rummana mosque Friday to the local UN headquarters to denounce the war threat against Iraq and to demand withdrawal of US troops from Bahrain. But the government facilitated the demonstrations, diverting traffic from the route of the marchers and deploying hundreds of security forces to ensure order. Newspapers indirectly controlled by the government have reported on such protests but tended to cast the events as peace rallies rather than challenges to official policy.

Like other Persian Gulf emirates, Bahrain has a ruling family that holds the controlling power, and although government spokesman Sheik Mohammed ibn Isa Khalifa described Friday’s public outpouring of war opposition as evidence of his fellow citizens’ newly bestowed freedom of expression, he conceded that the popular push for ousting US forces from Bahrain was unlikely to achieve its objective.

There have been no antiwar demonstrations in Kuwait, where a public subjected to a brutal seven-monthlong occupation by Saddam’s forces 12 years ago tends to back the government’s stance in support of the US. Still, as Britain and the US have massed troops in the country over the past few months, extremist elements there have killed three Americans and wounded another in two separate armed attacks. A deranged policeman shot and wounded two American soldiers in November.

There also have been no public protests in Qatar, where the American military commander of forces deployed in the gulf, US Army Gen. Tommy Franks, has located his forward headquarters.—Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times