Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November/December 2017, pp. 72
Compiled by Nathaniel Bailey
Abdulhussain Abdulredha, 78, died Aug. 11 in the United Kingdom after slipping into a coma. His prominence as a Middle Eastern artist was evidenced by mourners from across the Gulf and Arab world traveling to Kuwait to pay their respects. Following his death, more than two million tweets appeared about him, mostly in Arabic, with heartfelt and emotional praises and hashtags. Abdulredha performed in and produced more than 30 plays and television series over the course of his half-century-long career. His huge personality, biting wit and powerful charisma will be missed as those who knew him and loved his work continue to celebrate his life.
Fadwa Suleiman, 47, died Aug. 17 in Paris after a long battle with cancer. Her death was announced by the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces, an anti-regime group based in Cairo. Suleiman, a Syrian actress known for bridging the gender and sectarian divides of the rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad, was influential in leading protests and sit-ins as the civil war gathered steam in 2011. After receiving a death sentence for her role in the revolution from the regime in the following year, she and her husband fled to France, where she was granted asylum. Like Assad, Suleiman is a member of the minority Alawite sect of Shi’i Muslims, who compose about 10 percent of Syria’s population. Suleiman was vocal about disavowing her sectarian ties, embracing her identity as first and foremost a Syrian.
Ibrahim Yazdi, 85, died Aug. 27 in Türkiye from complications of pancreatic cancer. Born in northwestern Iran, he graduated from the University of Tehran in 1953—the year a U.S.-supported military coup deposed Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. In 1961, Yazdi moved with his wife to the United States, where he completed his postdoctoral studies at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Because the shah’s military court had condemned him to prison for 10 years, Yazdi was unable to return to his homeland. In 1977, he joined Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in France as his interpreter and spokesman. In 1979, after Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was deposed, Yazdi returned to Iran with Ayatollah Khomeini, serving as deputy prime minister and foreign minister until being ousted for expressing differing opinions regarding the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Along with other government ministers who resigned from the cabinet, Yazdi helped found the Freedom Movement of Iran, a pro-democracy, secular movement that often faced repression by the government.
Nancy Hatch Dupree, 89, died Sept. 10 in Kabul following a recent leg injury and failing heart and lungs. An American writer and historian, she arrived in Afghanistan in 1962 and devoted her life to preserving the country’s heritage, writing 5 books and more than 100 articles and pamphlets on Afghanistan. The Afghanistan Center at Kabul University, a state-of-the-art research facility, is her legacy to the country she loved. Born in 1927 in the United States, she grew up in what was then the kingdom of Travancore in British India, now the state of Kerala. After attending high school in Mexico and graduating from Barnard College, she received a master’s degree in Chinese art from Columbia University. She returned to Asia to work for UNESCO and spent the rest of her life in the region.
Cherif Bassiouni, 79, died Sept. 25 in Chicago of complications from multiple myeloma. Known as “the father of international criminal law,” the Egyptian-American law professor helped create the International Criminal Court in 1998, after decades spent investigating human rights abuses in apartheid-era South Africa and the former Yugoslavia. “I was not interested in going after the little soldier who commits the individual crime,” Bassiouni told the Chicago Reader in 1999. “I was after building a case against the leaders who make the decisions.”
Born in Cairo, Bassiouni was studying law in France when the Suez Crisis broke out in 1956, and returned home to fight against the Israeli-British-French attack on the peninsula. He received decorations in Egypt for his service in the conflict, but later found himself imprisoned for speaking out against President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Bassiouni was appointed to many U.N. commissions and was a frequent consultant to the U.S. government, including during the Iran hostage crisis of 1979.
Jalal Talabani, 83, died Oct. 3 in Germany after suffering a brain hemorrhage and a stroke. Born to an influential family in the northeastern Kurdish village of Kelkan, near Suleimaniya, he was a long and ardent supporter of a sovereign Kurdish state in northern Iraq. He made his first trip to the United States in 1988 to report on the gas attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja that killed 5,000 people. Many prominent regional and world leaders have extended their condolences to Talabani’s family and nation, honoring him and mourning Iraq’s loss of their first non-Arab president. The first president of Iraq under its post-U.S. invasion constitution, he was able to skillfully and effectively build bridges among the various groups in Iraq and the wider region.
