Skip to content or view screen version

How to beat the terrorists: Lessons from a journey across the Arab world

Iraq Solidarity Campaign | 23.07.2005 11:31 | Social Struggles | Terror War

In the last seven weeks I have had the opportunity to make working visits to seven different Arab countries and to engage in political and other discussions with local officials, academics, journalists and opposition activists. The experience has been instructive, and simultaneously heartening and depressing, but has suggested obvious opportunities and dangers in the dual quest to respond to the rights of Arab citizens and defeat the global terror plague.



Based on my visits and discussions in Jordan, Bahrain, Yemen, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Morocco, along with meetings with colleagues from Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria and Kuwait, I sense a common mood across the Arab world: The prevailing status quo is neither satisfying to the majority of citizens, nor sustainable for the rulers in its current state, but neither is it on the verge of revolutionary or violent change.

The obvious overarching trend throughout the Arab world is that of citizenries and ruling elite that are worried by the status quo, but unsure of how to change it. In every Arab society, demons from the past — a harrowing litany of excesses and errors — now haunt the rulers and the ruled alike.

Tens of millions of educated but underemployed, unemployed, restive and frustrated young men and women have given unnatural birth to thousands of active terrorists and anarchists, targeting our own and foreign lands. A deep distortion of traditional Islamic and Arab values is manifested in a desperate, violent, criminal search for revenge against the domestic and foreign forces that have degraded the last three generations of Arabs.

Urban environments are exploding in uncontrollable spontaneous growth, with increasingly negative impacts on water, arable land and other vital natural resource bases. Drug- and corruption-based criminality is our new pan-Arab growth industry, expanding on a regional and global scale.

Tens of millions of armed men and women in official military, police and security establishments have brought neither palatable security nor even the more modest goal of honourable national self-respect to the Arab region as a whole. Some desperate lands in our midst are ruled like private fiefdoms by thugs, killers, former cops and men of very limited abilities, in some absurd cases men who have remained in power for three or four decades without interruption — and in all cases without any formal, credible ratification by their own citizens.

Everywhere in the Arab world, the calm on the surface is tenuous and vulnerable. Pressures for change emanate from within the Arab countries, and equally from external pressures. This is driven by economic stress and a deeper sense of the average citizen's indignity at living in societies where power is neither accountable nor contestable, and where citizen rights are neither codified nor respected.

But these are visceral, not constitutional, societies, and verbal, not digital or parliamentary, societies. Body language rules here more than the eloquence or principles of national founding fathers. So do not look for signs of stress or change in polling data, legislative votes or political party activity. Those superficial imports from retreating colonial European powers three generations ago have little anchorage or meaning in most Arab societies. Here, power relationships are negotiated over coffee, meals, chance encounters and leisurely chats — and they are constantly, perpetually renegotiated and reaffirmed, day after day, year after year, generation after generation.

This is what is going on now in every Arab country. Arab rulers and ruled alike fervently but quietly search for the mechanisms of orderly change, aware that the traditional social contract and power equation that have defined this region since the 1920s are on their last legs. The common phenomenon I have witnessed around the Arab world is that growing majorities of ordinary citizens seek peaceful but effective ways to challenge, and change, state structures and the use of power — because these state structures mostly do not offer their people sustainable security, expressions of their real identity, freedom of choice and speech, relevant education, or minimally attractive job prospects.

A very small minority of violent Arab men and women has turned to terror as an instrument that expresses their demented frustrations and desperation; more significantly, the vast mass of Arabs has learned the lessons of the mistakes of the secular and religious political movements that challenged the modern Arab security state using violent means starting in the late 1970s. Citizens throughout this region now challenge their ruling elite and foreign interference more peacefully, but also more directly and vocally. They demand more equitable treatment by their own ruling authorities, less corruption and abuse of power, and a more clear sense of equal opportunities for all citizens, rather than privileged access to power and wealth by a small, often family-, tribe-, ethnic-, or sect-based elite that often includes a criminal component.

Citizens nonviolently but explicitly challenge the legitimacy of their rulers in some cases, and the conduct of their own security services in others. The first wave of responses from the befuddled Arab security state — a thin sliver of reforms dressed up in limited media liberalisation — has been unconvincing to savvy Arab citizenries that expect a much more significant acknowledgement of their humanity, and of their human and civil rights.

The opportunity and the danger for the Arab world both seem rather clear. The opportunity is to engage and empower the vast majority of Arab citizens who actively and peacefully seek a better, more humane and accountable, political order, through orderly and incremental change. Several hundred million upright, wholesome, ordinary men and women throughout the Arab world cry out for decency in their political order, inspired by the deep righteousness of their faiths and the strong moral values of their cultural and national traditions.

The parallel danger is that Arab and foreign officials will allow themselves to be so mesmerised and distracted by the criminal antics of a few terrorists out there that they end up perpetuating the four basic mistakes that have plagued Arab, American, British and other anti-terror policies in recent years: Misdiagnosing the root causes of terror, exaggerating the religious and minimising the political dimensions of terror, and responding mainly with heavy-handed political and military policies that, astoundingly, only fuel the criminal hormones of the terrorists themselves and also further alienate the hundreds of millions of already fearful ordinary Arabs whose demand to live as dignified, respected citizens of humane and responsive modern states is, in the end, the only sure way to defeat terrorism.

This is the simple but profound lesson that I have learned in my travels and conversations across the Arab world in the past seven weeks. If you seek stability and an end to terror, mobilise the Arab masses through democratic transformations that respect their rights as citizens, rather than alienate them through American, British and other military fantasies in foreign lands that only degrade the Arab people's already thin sense of self-respect in the face of their own bitter modern legacy of homegrown autocrats and Western armies.

Rami G. Khouri
The Jordan Times

Friday-Saturday, July 22-23, 2005




Iraq Solidarity Campaign
- e-mail: MCR_Coalition@yahoo.co.uk
- Homepage: http://www.iraqsolidaritycampaign.blogspot.com/

Comments

Hide the following 7 comments

BULLSHIT

23.07.2005 12:55

"Tens of millions of educated but underemployed, unemployed, restive and frustrated young men and women have given unnatural birth to thousands of active terrorists and anarchists, targeting our own and foreign lands":

asshole,how do you know the terrorists are arabs?

fuck off regime troll..

regime spam


There is only one solution in Iraq

23.07.2005 13:39

Those who started the violation must end it! STOP THE WAR GAINST PEOPLE OF IRAQ!

Are people expected all to become masochists declined because of sadists?
A sado-masochistic character was well analysed by Erich Fromm and it would be about the ultimate time that intellectuals WO DARE TO EXPOSE THEMSELVES start screaming theory of socio-political allienation and its political consequencies as for Europe as for Middle East.
The personality of Hitler was clearly defined not by psycho-analysts, those contemporary thinkers who proclaiming themselves as humanistic anti-globalists would like to shout the exclusive blame at the face of corporative capitalism. The defeating analysis for political terror we have been confronted with since 1991 is hidden in theory that successfuly defeated spreading wings of nazism in the post 2ww era.
People have one time to live .. compared to eternity this is only a twinkle of an eye. The crime is that even this one twinkle so many people have become deprived of. To enter a well being of after-life takes efforts .. it is not gifted by a colour of eyes!?
It is a racistic war happening in Iraq! It has been happening quite a while.
Have you all got blinded by beauty of people who appear as to bear more than they are aware of? There are crimes against humanity comitted, and more words given less deeds done!
What do people in Iraq want? They want peace. Of course, not imperialistic slavery maintained by those who seem as prefering to lap oil instead of vine!

No-body


British terrorists

23.07.2005 15:21

First of all, the bombers of the London underground (1st time) were actually British, born and brought up here, so don't blame the arabs.
Secondly, the stop the iraq war and terrorism will dissapear is BULLSHIT, France opposed the Iraq war and they are a target, Spain withdraw from Iraq after their own bombing of the trains but they are still a target, India had nothing to do with the Iraq war and is also a target, Egypt and Saudi Arabia muslims country that are also a target.
The Iraq war has nothing to do with the bombings, the war started in 09/11, by then there was no Afghanistan or Iraq war and the terrorists still existed, the terrorists want to destroy the West no matters what they do, we can't give in to our own destruction.

Unai


Less confusing

23.07.2005 19:55

Perhaps it would be less confusing if the word Muslim was used instead of Arab.
It is worth noting there are numerous Christian Arabs (including Christian Palestinians) who have NEVER blown themselves up yet are surrounded by thousands of Muslims doing so.

As for the question of Iraq, how does one explain yesterday's (Muslim) terrorist attacks in Egypt.

Was that to do with Iraq? I don't think so.

Israel perhaps? I don't think so.

Radical Islam? Uh huh...

Time to name the problem.

Rohan


time to name the problem

24.07.2005 06:01

in the u.s. since 21 july
fox "news" and cnn have both featured numerous terrorism experts (burgmansteinfields)
calling for just this "thing"
time to "name the enemy"
radical islam,islamists,etc

bullshit

the enemy is "the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place"
the enemy is so called "isreal"

true jews,christians and muslims know this

rohan is full of shit
mail e-mail: zionism is the problem
- Homepage: http://ifamericansknew.org


arabs are not to blame

24.07.2005 14:20

i can see the point of publishing this article as it is one very interesting perspective from a writer in Jordan.

Indeed Arabs are not to blame for either the situation in Iraq or the bombers in london but the Middle East is being used to justify each action.

The bombers of london were from pakistan but all we are hearing are the words Iraq and Muslim and all arabs are being tarred with the same brush.

This was an article from one perspective and ofcourse not every one is going to agree but the only question i would give and that is who is afraid of asking questions to Arabs, seeing as though, the now spokespeople for Iraq and the Arabs as a whole are now British born Muslims.

pissed of arab in the Middle East


A matter of perfecy vs. the Commons

25.07.2005 09:39

Yes. I absolutely agree with you, brother Arab.

The main questions are the cases of interference. Underlining those is the question of diverse identyfications that world's (read: opposite to regional) muslim tend to ignore when pretentiously expose and agitate their concerns about what happens in the Middle east. These seem as to have made themselves preoccupied simply by re-defining a sense to "be", when researching a ground (read: the soil of Islam) imagined as to have risen from while taking a cast in the biggest act ever played by the west easily, because of being and feeling deprived inside a "post-colonial" socio-economical hegemony and, thus, adding a brick into a wall of an imperialistic divison of global roles.
The Islam was badly hurt by populistic attempts to tackle exitential problems of westernized (read: migrated from those countries, where the colonial political and cultural influence was extremely emphasized and subtile integrated by a language substituting native's) muslim who have tried to integrate and get "emancipated" as diaspora. These attempts have successfuly pulled after the "free spirits" of post-modern society (defined by encountering changes that were introduced by commercialization of mass media, thus created world's = global audience), which conditioned as Paulov's dogs reacts promptly to each task of the western's pragramme, so conditioning events when senses of the mass must be favoured and evoken, and finaly to become completed in agreeing of the commons expressed by a generalized sense.
I wouldn't mention any names of all modest and pious muslim of the west, because those names we are not allowed to forget. One I shall expose and appeal at: Salmon Rushdie, the hero of Bombay, the cultural initiation to religious aspects of post-modernistic era introduced by the vampiring verses of yours was successful - ladies proceed!!! Congratulations, yapy.

It is true, brother Arab, we have not been asked.
We were yet demanded to have asked questions smiling and politely!

Why the interferences? It is obvious by now, isn't it? The wesetern muslim prefer the most to use the word "Love" and later to quote and pledge... if ever. We may see them behaving since the Brittish ground and sky have been warmed up. They entered Downing str.10 piously as were trained to do. Up the hierachical ladder they go. Well, the crown is still some higher. Firstly, the castle fools must be conquered. I wonder if they payed any tribute to had sung Marseillaisa before dined.

Grabar al. No-body