THE SICK MAN OF THE WORLD

Washington Post
March 28, 2004

Throughout the 19th century, the “Sick Man of Europe” was a phrase used to describe the 500-year-old Ottoman Empire. Decaying, unable to protect its territories, the ruling Sultans resisted changing their old ways. The Ottoman subjects on three continents—Arabs, Turks, Greeks, Kurds, Armenians, Kurds and Serbs; Muslims, Christians and Jews—clamored for change to no avail. Instead of reform, the Empire simply grew more repressive. In its last 100 years, it had become an ideal type of Oriental despotism.

Much of what is happening in the Middle East today is reminiscent of the Sick Man of Europe. Notwithstanding slips of historical analogies, most of the thirty-odd countries of what American officials are calling the Greater Middle East have been sociopolitically stagnant for decades. This is not for lack of popular desire for change. Saudi women defied the puritanical Wahhabi traditions and broke a stifling taboo by driving their cars in the streets of Riyadh 14 years ago. For one thing, American female soldiers were driving all kinds of vehicles all over the Kingdom during Desert Storm. For another, the Saudi women wanted to expose the prevailing hypocrisy and double standard in their society, i.e., how could they have learned to drive, except with Saudi men while traveling abroad?

Thousands of political prisoners have been rotting in Syrian, Tunisian and Egyptian detention compounds for years without trials. Numbers and sacrifices are an eloquent answer to those Arab rulers who met recently in Riyadh and Cairo and were hard at work, not so much to propose plans for reform, but to circumvent such plans rumored to be coming from the U.S. and Europe (The New York Times, March 4, p. A9). Egypt’s President Mubarak seems to be taking the lead in resisting democratization of his country and the region. He was quoted in the same report from Cairo as saying, “If we open the door completely before the people, there will be chaos.” Never mind the condescending tone vis-à-vis his own people, how about keeping the door ajar, as the opposition parties have pleaded with him for twenty years? In a joint statement with King Fahd two weeks earlier, the two Arab leaders rejected any attempt to impose reform from “the outside.” This is quite understandable for people who suffered from colonization. What about persistent demands from within? Let us examine the record.

On November 18, 2002, Egypt’s five major opposition parties and ten civil society organizations formed the Committee for Defense of Democracy (DDC), and drafted an elaborate but graduate plan for constitutional and political reform. Since its establishment, the DDC has sought audience with President Mubarak to present or argue the case for the overdue reforms, some of which were promised by the late President Nasser in March 1968, following massive demonstrations by university students, but which he did not live long enough to implement. In February, 1974, the late President Sadat renewed the promises for democratic reform in a document called “The October Paper.” On June 18, October 22, and December 25 of last year, the DDC organized rallies in the court of the Press Syndicate, at the Tajjamoua Party and in Tahrir Square. All three rallies braved their way out of police cordon and marched to the Abdeen Presidential Palace to present demands for reform. Not even a Presidential aide would see them. The farthest the DDC got with the Mubarak regime was on last February 15, as the President disdainfully allowed the fourth march to hand a “petition” to the guards of the outside gate of the Palace.

The last major force to join the chorus for change is the Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest, indeed, the mother of all Islamic movements in the world, from Indonesia to Morocco. On March 3 of this year, the newly sworn-in Supreme Guide of the Brotherhood declared his full endorsement of the same list of demands contained in the DDC Manifesto. How much more authentic and endogenous can popular demadns be for Fahd, Mubarak, Asad and Ben-Ali to yield?

Like the antique Ottoman Sultans in the last decades before their final fall in 1924, most Middle Eastern leaders have been eager for western aid, trade and investments. They have accepted conditionalities put on them in return, by the IMF, World Bank, Club of Paris and other outside creditors. They don’t invoke “national dignity” or express resentment of the “outside,” except when the advice is to share power with their own people. Democratic governance was deemed a prerequisite for further socioeconomic progress in the region by the authors of the UNDP’s Arab Human Development Report (AHDR) three years ago. To ward off the anticipated objection of Arab rulers to “outsiders” telling them what to do, the UN commissioned an all-Arab team of internationally renowned scholars to prepare the AHDR. Secretary General Kofi Annan and several world leaders on both sides of the Atlantic made frequent public references to it. But Arab rulers ignored it completely, as if it were about another region on another planet.

Another eminent Arab public figure, Ismail Serageldin, is convening yet one more NGO conference in mid-March at the newly reborn Library of Alexandria. The pan-Arab gathering has only one agenda item: reform. Let us hope that Arab rulers, for a change, listen to these 300 Arab insiders meeting in Alexandria.

Of course, Palestine and Iraq will be invoked time and again, and they should be. The Arab and Muslim world has historical and legitimate grievances that must be settled simultaneously if democratization is to strike roots and be sustainable. But it should be clear to all concerned that it will not be tyrannical regimes that settle these grievances. For half a century, they held their peoples and democracy hostage in return. And everything got worse. So for a change, let us give democracy a fair chance.