Najaf and the Five Modern Arab Crises

by Rami G. Khouri

BEIRUT, Lebanon -- Hundreds of millions of Arabs are pained to wake up every morning and learn of more inhuman, incomprehensible behavior by different actors in the Middle East. Iraq and Palestine epitomize the problems and distortions that make this violent region so dangerous for its own citizens and for foreign armies and individuals alike.

The reality throughout most of our lands is defined by troubling, persistent trends:

* citizens who cannot choose their governments, or who vote for their leaders in farcical elections where outcomes can be predicted years in advance;

* recurring civil wars and internal violence among political, ethnic, religious or socio-economic groups that have never worked out a national compact that defines power-sharing rules or citizenship rights and obligations;

* ethnic cleansing and refugee flows that make the Middle East the world's single biggest producer of refugees;

* rich and poor governments alike that spend a quarter of their national budgets on guns and security, without any meaningful civilian oversight or accountability -- or real security for state or citizen;

* constitutions, laws, and judicial systems that are routinely ignored, or changed at the snap of a finger when personal political power or economic interests are at stake, making a mockery of the rule of law;

* massive imbalances among and within countries, in wealth, natural resources, and basic human needs;

* a terrifying suppression of fundamental moral values and human decency by hundreds of millions of Arabs who often no longer even attempt to condemn the vulgarities that permeate our lands -- torture, kidnappings, beheadings, humiliation, occupation, murder, urban terror, imprisonment without trial, and Arab and foreign tanks and helicopter gunships bombing local holy shrines in Iraq and Palestine;

* foreign military occupations, interventions, and threats that only aggravate our indigenous ailments;

* and we are all to blame for this ugly picture of what we have become.

Governments, terrorists, foreign and regional occupiers, sponsored and freelance militias, local thugs, high class official criminals, aspiring street gang leaders, ageing presidents, religious demagogues, a massively numbed citizenry, and various others in the Middle East all play their part in these shameful trends that define the last two generations, and five decades, of our history.

These cumulative problems have spawned this region's ultimate moral blight: the development of a small but active terrorism industry that attacks targets at home and around the world. As the terrorists become more active and gruesome in their butchery, the vast majority of Arabs watch it all on television without uttering much more than a perfunctory, and therefore meaningless, condemnation.

Our blight is two-fold: the terrorists whose deeds demean our cultures and countries, and we Arab citizens who watch the bombers at work, our silence reflecting a twisted sort of passive acquiescence that borders dangerously on accepting terrorism as the inevitable revenge of our dehumanized masses. Our last defense against barbarism -- our strong human and moral values -- are now also dangerously threatened by our quiet acceptance of both foreign colonialism and native Arab terror as fixtures in our landscapes.

All this has been aggravated by the response from Washington. Simplistic leaders like President George W. Bush and his ilk have reacted to this region's terrorism with a misguided double-barreled strategic policy: faulty analysis of the root causes of our violence, and militaristic counter-attacks that have only made things worse. The romantic American war to liberate Iraq and make it an example for Arab democracy has, in the short run, only highlighted the five core crises that I believe plague the contemporary Arab world. Those who wish to repair our fractured, violent societies -- and stop the terror train -- should grasp and address these crises that brought us here.

The five fundamental problems that define and plague this region are inter-related, and have developed over decades of erratic statehood. They must be addressed seriously, systematically, patiently, and as an integrated whole.

The five are:

1. A crisis of sustainable human development: early progress in expanding basic services has been replaced since 1980 by stagnation and disparity in many sectors, including water, jobs, nutrition, education, and health.

2. A crisis of sensible and stable statehood: few Arab countries are immune from civil war, rebellions, border conflicts, terror, and widespread emigration impulses.

3. A crisis of citizenship rights: public power is exercised by small groups of unelected, unaccountable people who use force at will, leaving the ordinary citizen unclear about his or her place or rights in society.

4. A crisis of identities: the modern state, pan-Arabism, Islam, other religions, tribalism, ethnicity, regional affiliations, gangsterism, commercialism, democracy, resistance, terrorism, and other transnationalisms all compete for authenticity and supremacy, spawning allegiance and identity confusions at the personal, communal and national levels.

5. A crisis of coexistence with Israel, other regional powers (Turkey, Iran), and Western powers (mainly the U.S. today), without a consensus on whether these are friends or foes, or both.

All five of these basic crises -- human needs, statehood, citizenship, identity, and inter-state relations -- are powerfully echoed in Najaf. The two-week-old confrontation there between the American-Iraqi interim government and Moqtada al-Sadr and his ragtag band of followers is about modern Arab history as much as it is about the future development of Iraq. But how Iraq and other Arab lands evolve will depend heavily on how their own people -- rather than sophomoric ideologues in Washington, frenzied generals in Tel Aviv, or vulnerable and dependent Arab leaderships -- come to grips with these five chronic regional crises. I will explore these five crises in more depth in next week's column.


Rami G. Khouri is executive editor of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.

Copyright © 2004 Rami G. Khouri ---------------- Released: 25 August 2004