PEOPLE POWER IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Artículo de “The Economist” del 08/03/2005
Por su interés y relevancia, he seleccionado el artículo que sigue para incluirlo en este sitio web. (L. B.-B.)
Two years after the invasion of Iraq, the Arab world is beginning to show
tantalising signs of change. But it is too early to talk of a year of
revolutions, as the three prime exhibits being used to make the case for
democracy—Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine—are in many ways special cases
SINCE the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003, many of those who vehemently opposed it have mocked America’s neo-conservatives for having believed that the Iraqis would greet their foreign liberators with flowers and gratitude. Now it is the turn of the neo-cons to mock. A lot of people in the anti-war camp predicted that the war would cause upheavals across the Middle East, fanning hatred of the West and tipping friendly regimes into the hands of Islamist extremists.
It hasn’t worked out that way. On the eve of the war’s second anniversary, the Middle East does indeed seem to be in the grip of some sort of change. But, right now, much of the change seems to be pushing in a welcome direction, towards a new peace chance in Palestine and the spread of democratic ideas around the Arab world.
Arabs everywhere were affected by the spectacle in January of Iraqis defying terrorists to cast their vote and elect a new government, and of Palestinians managing to hold a free election even while under Israeli occupation. The past couple of weeks have brought even more transfixing scenes, as Lebanese thronged the streets of Beirut with their flags in an unprecedented show of “people power”, forcing the country’s pro-Syrian government to resign and Syria to announce a phased pull-out of its troops. At the same time, Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s president for the past 24 years, has astonished his countrymen by calling for constitutional changes to allow rival candidates to vie for his position for the first time.
To the instigators of the Iraq war, all this is manna from heaven. Having failed to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, George Bush and Tony Blair have been forced to emphasise instead the gift of freedom their toppling of Saddam Hussein delivered to its people. This “gift” was hardly free: chaos and murder continue to stalk Iraq. Last week alone, at least 120 people were killed in a single suicide bombing in Hilla. And yet the Iraqis do still seem impressed by the novelty of being able to vote a government out of power.
In Bratislava last month, Mr Bush drew a link between Iraq’s vote, Czechoslovakia’s “velvet revolution” of 1989, Georgia’s “rose revolution” at the end of 2003, and Ukraine’s recent “orange revolution”. He would say that. But a growing number of Arab voices are chiming in, too.
In a widely noticed interview, Walid Jumblatt, the leader of Lebanon’s Druze, told the Washington Post that Iraq’s election was the Arab equivalent of the fall of the Berlin wall. Hisham Kassem, a former publisher of the Cairo Times, called the elections the “start of a ripple effect”. Khaled al-Meena, the editor of Saudi Arabia’s Arab News, says that if elections can be held under foreign occupation in Iraq and Palestine, it should be much easier to hold them in Arab states said to be “free”.
How far-reaching is this new spirit? The Arab world is large and diverse, so there is always a risk of connecting the dots in a way that produces a distorted picture. One oddity is that Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon—all three of the prime exhibits being used to make the case for democracy—happen to be under foreign occupation, by America, Israel and Syria respectively. Each is in many ways a special case.
The foreign occupation of Lebanon began in 1976, when Syria’s dictator, Hafez Assad, sent his army to intervene in Lebanon’s brutal three-cornered civil war between Maronite Christians, Muslims and Palestinians. The mass protests that forced Lebanon’s pro-Syrian government in Lebanon to resign last week would probably not have happened but for a powerful shock: last month’s murder of Rafik Hariri, the country’s former prime minister and most popular politician. This was the catalyst for a chain reaction: amid intense international pressure on Syria, including from fellow Arab states, Assad’s son and successor, President Bashir Assad, announced on March 5th that Syria would withdraw its troops in two stages, beginning immediately, though no deadline for completing the pull-out has yet been given. For the Lebanese, what some are calling a “cedar revolution” and others a “peaceful intifada” carries the promise of an end not just to Syrian occupation but also to a corrupt spoils system that has long sapped the country’s talent and morale.
Broad-based popular movements such as this are unlikely to emerge soon in other countries. Lebanon’s experience is in many ways unique. Famously fractious, the Lebanese are well educated and politically sophisticated. Their central government is weak, meaning it lacks the instruments of control enjoyed by other Arab states. It cannot co-opt enemies with oil money, because it has none. It cannot suppress protests effectively, because it lacks even a trained force of riot police. And it cannot silence dissent, because Lebanon’s vibrant press has remained in private hands. The enthusiastic, non-stop coverage of the Beirut intifada on opposition TV channels emboldened tens of thousands of ordinary citizens to ignore government bans, and take to the streets.
Just now, something else distinguishes the Lebanese: they have a focus for their anger. Mr Hariri had come to embody the country’s post-war reconstruction. His assassination united Lebanon’s multiple factions in outrage. A beleaguered minority movement, led by Christian and Druze politicians who once fought each other, was reinforced by members of Mr Hariri’s own Sunni Muslims, as well as thousands of others whose indignation transcended the old sectarian loyalties.
Lebanon’s anger has a cause as well as a martyred hero: freedom from domination by Syria, whose regime many Lebanese instinctively blame for the crime. Over the years, Syria’s occupation helped to smother the flames of civil war and bolster Lebanon’s resistance to Israel’s occupation of the south. But the war is long over, the Israelis have gone and the Syrians have overstayed their welcome. All the same, Syria still has plenty of friends in Lebanon. Hundreds of thousands attended a rally in Beirut on March 8th to show support for Syria's role in the country and to decry western “interference”. The gathering was organised by Hizbullah, a Syrian-backed Shia Muslim political party-cum-militant group.
Democrats in Palestine
In Palestine, too, the advance of democracy may have been helped by the weakness of the government. The Palestinian Authority (PA), created by the 1993 Oslo accords to run the occupied territories until a final deal on statehood was reached, is missing many of a sovereign state’s usual attributes. Israel controls natural resources, borders, coast and airspace, the currency, the collection of customs duties, and, in most areas, security and internal freedom of movement. Yet Palestine’s political system is vibrant and pluralistic.
Ironic, but no accident: Israel’s occupation is directly responsible. The two intifadas bred a powerful grassroots movement, subverting the Middle East’s usual authoritarian tendency. Yasser Arafat’s periodic attempts to placate Israel by cracking down with his brutal security services alienated the population, as did graft among his officials. In polls done for January’s presidential election by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research, 26% of voters rated corruption and lack of reform as the most serious problem facing Palestinians, only slightly behind the occupation (31%) and poverty (33%).
Arafat’s death has triggered a quiet cascade of mini-revolutions. January’s presidential election delivered a predictably solid victory to Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), his designated successor in the ruling Fatah party, but also a strong showing to Mustafa Barghouti, an independent without any of the benefits of a party structure, previous political jobs or slyly-used state funds.
In the early rounds of the municipal elections, Hamas, the main Islamist party, did unexpectedly well. This July it can expect to win a hefty minority in the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), whose current members smell pretty ripe to ordinary Palestinians after a decade in their seats.
Hamas is popular for its armed efforts in the second intifada, which most Palestinians believe forced Israel’s planned withdrawal from Gaza, and for its broad network of local social services, trumping those of the PA. It also did well because many would-be Fatah candidates grew so sick of the old leadership’s habit of overriding internal primaries and imposing its own people that they ran independently, thus splitting the vote for the party. But these habits are changing: a frightened Fatah is beginning to heed its younger members’ calls for reform.
And there was another upset last month when the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei (Abu Alaa), tried to appoint a cabinet packed with Arafat loyalists. Shrewdly, rather than press Mr Qurei to make changes, Mr Abbas sat back and let him get into a showdown with PLC members who wanted their turn. The end result: a “technocrat” government, made up of politically inexperienced but professional people, and few Arafat cronies or PLC hacks in sight. How well it will govern remains to be seen, but Palestinians love it: shortly after the government was sworn in, a Ramallah street vendor was heard hawking “technocrat bread”.
Reform of the PA has been on the agenda since well before Mr Abbas. Salam Fayyad, the Authority’s determined finance minister, has spent nearly three years cleaning up the books, and says its revenue collection has gone up from $45m to $75m a month, even as the economy has withered under the intifada. Mr Abbas, mindful of Fatah’s plight and the fact that his own poll rating was close to zero before he became the party’s candidate, is carrying on with those plans.
The PA outlined them at a meeting last week in London with donors and Middle Eastern governments. Pension reform will help slim down the civil service, which until recently was a sponge for unemployment, by encouraging desk-jockeys to retire. There will be clear procedures for appointing judges and a shake-up in the court system. The dozen-or-so security services (not even PA officials agree on the exact number), which functioned as private fiefs, will be slimmed down, smartened up and brought under central control. There will be tweaks to fiscal management and business law, and a raft of other changes. In return, donors upped their pledges of support to $1.2 billion for 2005, and Palestine broke a new record for aid money per head of population.
Please may we have independence too?
Palestinians plainly welcome reform for its own sake. Above all they want the occupation to end. Yet Israel insists—and for now the Americans seem to agree—that the Palestinians must put their domestic house in order before they will be allowed to negotiate the final status of their putative independent state. As in Lebanon, therefore, the grassroots appetite for bottom-up democracy and the impulse for independence combine into a potent force.
That is no longer true of many Arab countries, where the kings and “national liberation” parties that took power after the colonial period have clung ruthlessly to office ever since. Yet in the past year or so, even governments of that sort have been making some concessions to democracy. In some cases this has been done for domestic reasons, in others as a response to pressure from the Americans. Morocco’s politics have matured lately into a lively multi-party system, albeit under the supervision of an almost absolute monarch. Another semi-constitutional monarchy, Jordan, plans to devolve central powers to elected regional bodies. Yemen, though still tribally fractious and backward, boasts a rowdy parliament and press.
Even the absolute monarchs of the Gulf have opened up to varying degrees of citizen participation. Qatar’s emir, the first Arab ruler to abolish his own ministry of information, actually congratulated the Lebanese for toppling their government. Kuwait, which has long had a noisy parliament, is on the verge of enfranchising women, now that Islamists back the idea. In Bahrain, Oman and Qatar, women already vote. And Saudi Arabia is in the midst of electioneering as polling for town councils continues across the kingdom.
Change, and the illusion of change
Needless to say, much of this top-down reform has been hesitant and shallow. In none of these cases has the real balance of power been threatened with change. Essential attributes of an open society, such as full scrutiny of state spending, an unfettered press, truly independent courts and accountable police and security forces remain unachieved. The changes often look less like Mr Bush’s forward strategy of freedom than like a rearguard strategy of regime survival.
Mr Mubarak’s initiative, for example, concedes none of his pharaonic powers, including the right to be re-elected in perpetuity. According to the draft forwarded to Egypt’s rubber-stamp parliament, presidential candidates would have to be proposed by legal parties. The hitch is that Mr Mubarak’s own party controls the legalising process. It may not sanction its most formidable opponent, the Muslim Brotherhood. After 50 years of virtual one-party rule, the political stage has been almost swept clean of potential contenders, aside from the 76-year-old Mr Mubarak and, perhaps, his 42-year-old son Gamal. Besides, Egyptians are so inured to electoral fraud and manipulation that it may prove hard to persuade them of the utility of voting.
The arrest in January of a prominent young opposition parliamentarian, Ayman Nour, underscored the sanitised nature of Egypt’s politics. Mr Nour’s secular, liberal al-Ghad (Tomorrow) party had only recently been legalised. Unlike tamer opposition politicians who had agreed to put off calls for change until after Mr Mubarak’s re-election, Mr Nour had been demanding immediate constitutional reform. For his pains he was accused of forgery, had his parliamentary immunity lifted, and was clapped in jail. He remains locked up, but responded to Mr Mubarak’s initiative by calling off a hunger strike.
The experience of Algeria and Tunisia, which already permit competition for the presidency, is not encouraging. Tunisia’s ruler of the past 17 years, Zeineddine Ben Ali, has twice crushed challengers, but these lightweight rivals were carefully vetted, and forced to play on a steeply tilted field. Algeria’s Abdelaziz Bouteflika handily won a fairer race last year, but with the full support of state media and other government institutions.
Arabs complain that their rulers’ gestures towards reform come more in response to outside pressures than to their own aspirations. Mr Mubarak’s proposal would not have been made but for the supposedly friendly nagging of Mr Bush and Condoleezza Rice, America’s new secretary of state. Yet pressure for reform is also building from within. Hollow or not, each grudging reform has whetted the public’s appetite for further change.
In the past, popular protests often took the form of riots over price rises or localised protests at police brutality. Now “people power” is increasingly being expressed in organised and peaceful movements by civil-society groups. Bahrain’s ruler, for example, brought himself immense popularity three years ago by ending martial rule, inviting exiled dissidents home, and running free elections for half the seats in the national legislature. Many Bahrainis, particularly among the disenfranchised Shia who make up two-thirds of the island kingdom’s native population, are now demanding more.
Jordan’s King Abdullah, likewise, faces a wave of unrest from trade unions angered by new rules that ban syndicates from political activity. In Egypt, Mr Mubarak’s election initiative was greeted not with gratitude, but with demands for wider freedoms and better guarantees that polls will really be clean. A small but vociferous reform movement has gained momentum in Cairo, drawing strength from the coverage of protests by satellite TV channels that are beyond state control, and a proliferation of groups promoting specific issues, such as ending torture.
Even in Syria the feeling that change is inevitable has become palpable. Mr Assad has proved a weak leader, isolated both by the war in Iraq and his behaviour in Lebanon. Many other Arabs still share the Syrian regime’s sense of being under siege, its deep mistrust of the West, and its loathing for Israel. Yet they are also aware that the armed intifada in Palestine and the Iraqi insurgency have lost their sheen. They know that state socialism is a dud, and—after Saddam Hussein’s fall—that dictatorship is ultimately disastrous. Growing numbers are willing to say that Islam is threatened more by its own demons than by the West’s armies.
An Arab democratic opening will be long and tortuous. The regimes that block it are strong, cunning and ruthless. The rhetoric of “resistance”—Islamist, Arab nationalist, anti-American, anti-globalisation, or whatever—retains a powerful grip. Many Arabs still support groups such as al-Qaeda. A huge amount still depends on the outcome in Iraq: a descent into chaos or the failure of the political process there could crush democratic stirrings throughout the region. For all these reasons, it is probably too early for the Americans to crow about an Arab year of revolutions. All the same, the distance between Mr Bush’s talk of freedom and Arab aspirations, which only recently seemed to yawn so wide, may at last be starting to close.