Arab Reform
Thomas Friedman's
column
Thursday -- about the
Arab Human Development
Report -- is sobering and good. I find it
appalling that the Bush administration would repress such an incredibly powerful
document. It really was revolutionary when it was first published in 2002, and
its continual publication is crucial in ensuring that the pressure stays firmly
on the governments on the region. I'm posting the article below.
Also found this article about
Hamas' political
participation in the upcoming Palestinian
elections interesting. We are witnessing some pretty significant changes in
terms of political Islamist movements; I think their trend, much like
Hezbollah's, towards participation -- is a harbinger of Islamist movements in
the 21st century. Which also makes al-Qaeda all the more dangerous. If we could
eliminate the resonance of some of al-Qaeda's message by supporting reform and
simultaneously knock them out -- the road would be paved for great things in the
Middle East future.
UPDATE 12/25: Hamas
is apparently doing well in local municipal elections. For the AP story,
check
here ; but I would strongly recommend reading
Helena
Cobban's
post about
it. She also recently wrote a
piece about
Hezbollah that is a great round-up of the
contemporary situation in Lebanon. Actually, both the posts give a good
background on the situation and evolution of both Hamas' and Hezbollah's
evolutions into political parties. Cobban is extremely knowledgeable about the
Middle East, has traveled and researched widely there, and I respect her opinion
tremendously. Give her site -- Just
World News -- a browse.
.آسله
اليكم.
آسمئ
كيت
كيف
خلك؟
I'm still trying
to figure out how to write in Arabic on my computer, it's pretty difficult, so
bear with me, I'm sure this spelling is all crazy and I can't figure out how to
put accents in --.
December 16,
2004
Holding Up Arab
Reform
By Thomas L.
Friedman
DUBAI, United Arab
Emirates
For years now it's
been clear that the Middle East peace process has left the realm of diplomacy
and started to become an industry, with its own G.N.P. of conferences and
seminars. But there is a new industry rapidly overtaking it in the Middle East,
and that is the "reform industry." Every month there seems to be a new
conference on reform in the Arab world. Indeed, I have been attending one here
in Dubai, an amazing city-state on the Persian Gulf that is becoming the
Singapore of the Arab
East.
What the reform process
and the peace process have in common is that neither advances when we Americans
tell the parties in English that they have to change. Progress happens only when
the people here tell themselves in Arabic that they must change. So I took heart
from the blunt manner in which Dubai's crown prince, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid
al-Maktoum, opened his conference by saying, in a speech broadcast by Arab
satellite TV, "I say to my fellow Arabs [in power]: If you do not change, you
will be changed."
I didn't
hear talk like that five years ago. Nor did I hear an Egyptian friend remarking
to me that she had absolutely no problem with Hosni Mubarak's son, Gamal, one
day succeeding his father. Gamal is a good man. She just had one condition, that
Gamal Mubarak succeed his father the same way George W. Bush succeeded his
father: in a free election.
Meanwhile, last Sunday, about 1,000 Egyptians gathered in downtown Cairo, many
wearing over their mouths yellow stickers with the Arabic word for "enough"
written on them, to protest plans by President Mubarak to run for a fifth
term.
Yes, there is definitely
something stirring out here, but it has miles to go before meaningful changes
occur. It is something America should be quietly encouraging, so it is
inexplicable to me that the Bush administration is holding up publication of the
next U.N. Arab Human Development Report. Let me fill you
in:
In 2002, the U.N.
Development Program sponsored a group of courageous Arab economists, social
scientists and other scholars to do four reports on human development in the
Arab world. The first one, in 2002, caused a real stir in this region - showing,
among other things, that the Arabs were falling so far behind that Spain's
G.D.P. was greater than that of the entire Arab League
combined.
That first report,
published in Arabic and English, was downloaded off the Internet one million
times. It was a truly incisive diagnosis of the deficits of freedom, education
and women's empowerment retarding the Arab
world.
In 2003, the same group
produced a second Arab Human Development Report, about the Arab knowledge
deficit - even tackling the supersensitive issue of how Islam and its current
spiritual leaders may be holding back modern education. This was stuff no U.S.
diplomat could ever raise, but the Arab authors of these reports could and
did.
So I eagerly awaited the
third Arab Human Development Report, due in October. It was going to be pure
TNT, because it was going to tackle the issue of governance and misgovernance in
the Arab world, and the legal, institutional and religious impediments to
political reform. These are the guts of the issue out here. I waited. And I
waited. But nothing.
Then I
started to hear disturbing things - that the Bush team saw a draft of the Arab
governance report and objected to the prologue, because it was brutally critical
of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Israeli occupation. This prologue
constitutes some 10 percent of the report. While heartfelt, it's there to give
political cover to the Arab authors for their clear-eyed critique of Arab
governance, which is the other 90 percent of the
report.
But the Bush team is
apparently insisting that language critical of America and Israel be changed -
as if language 10 times worse can't be heard on Arab satellite TV every day. And
until it's changed, the Bush folks are apparently ready to see the report
delayed or killed altogether. And they have an ally. The government of Egypt,
which is criticized in the report, also doesn't want it out - along with some
other Arab regimes.
So there
you have it: a group of serious Arab intellectuals - who are neither sellouts
nor bomb throwers - has produced a powerful analysis, in Arabic, of the lagging
state of governance in the Arab world. It is just the sort of independent report
that could fuel the emerging debate on Arab reform. But Bush officials, along
with Arab autocrats, are holding it up until it is modified to their liking -
even if that means it won't appear at
all.
It makes you
weep.
It certainly does.
Posted: Saturday - December 18, 2004 at 08:37 PM
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