US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speed-toured the Middle East last month hoping to prod other Arab governments to follow the United Arab Emirates in unilaterally normalising diplomatic relations with Israel — while Israel nevertheless continues to colonise, occupy, effectively annex, and broadly brutalize Palestinians and their lands.

His efforts have come up empty for now, as Sudan, Morocco, Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain said they remained committed to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative. At least five different factors explain why this happened and what it means for the months ahead.

They relate to the heavy-handed US diplomatic style; the particularly aggressive UAE foreign policy being implemented across the region; the continuing impact of Arab public opinion on Arab leaders; the underlying Arab willingness to live peacefully with Israel when Palestine achieves its rights; and, the reality that more Arab states will normalise soon but probably more elegantly than the UAE did.

The 2002 Arab Peace Initiative (API) that Sudan, Morocco, Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain all adhere to offers to normalise ties with Israel after it withdraws from the lands it occupied in 1967, and allows the establishment of a Palestinian state. Yet several Arab countries that say they will not follow the UAE example — Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, and Morocco — nevertheless meet regularly and quietly with assorted Israeli security, technology, or commercial interests in a low-intensity, quiet proto-normalisation.

So how should we interpret this apparent contradiction in stated positions and actual policies vis-a-vis ties with Israel?

The short answer is that those few Arab governments that normalise ties with Israel soon will avoid the US-Israel-UAE approach, which Arab public opinion widely opposes on several counts. These have to do with the wide resonance justice for Palestinians still has among Arab public opinion, and the refusal of both Arab citizens and leaders to be humiliated by the combination of heavy-handed colonial-minded leaders in Israel and the United States.

Emirati, Israeli, and American leaders share a lack of concern for public opinion in their lands or others. Their focus on achieving their own national and personal goals far outweighs any other factors, including international law, political solidarity, or how their actions ravage other societies and people. We saw this in action last month, and it was ugly.

The Emiratis under Crown Prince Mohammad bin Zayed are well into their unilateral, aggressive, and often militaristic path to assert what they see as their leading role in the region, which they feel will be bolstered by their ties with Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to expand Israel’s colonial territorial dominance and subjugation of Palestinians, while exploring new Arab terrain for more of the same — such as his having to approve sales of advanced US military items to the UAE. And American President Donald Trump unilaterally and serially upends international treaties and agreements as he applies his “America-first” policy in a way that has tended to make the Middle East more dangerous and unstable during his term.

When these three leaders combined to normalise UAE-Israel ties, many Arabs quietly feared they would be pressured next to follow suit. But those same Arabs to date have not normalised, because submitting to this American-Israeli-Emirati trio would be widely seen as a humiliating bow to the rule of the jungle, as well as obsequiously feeding urgent American and Israeli domestic electoral needs, rather than the wellbeing of their own Arab citizens.

The lack of new normalisation announcements, though, should not be misinterpreted. The Arabs who refused to normalise ties with Israel simply repeated their support for the API, which a majority of Arab citizens still supports because it offers a peaceful route to achieving Palestinian national rights and ending the wasteful wars with Israel.

Some new and insightful analysis by James Zogby of the Arab-American Institute clarifies Arab attitudes to Israel and Palestine by analysing the results of his recent regional public opinion poll.

He found in 2019 that the traditional centrality of Palestine to Arab citizens across the region had declined sharply in every country. Arabs who widely support the API also “said that Arab states should be doing more to advance this initiative,” with significant majorities in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE feeling it would be desirable for some Arab states to pursue normalisation even without peace.

Many reasons explain this dual view, which included majorities in these four countries supporting the UAE’s overtures to Israel while also opposing Israeli annexation plans.

A majority of Arab citizens supports a negotiated peace with Israel that leads to a Palestinian state — but it does not see the unilateral UAE move as promoting this goal.

Perhaps the key takeaway from Pompeo’s visit is that Arab public opinion still counts to a meaningful extent, even among autocratic Arab governments that gave Pompeo a thumbs down. These leaders probably appreciated that they could not totally ignore their citizens’ century of support of Palestinian rights. When some of them explore normalising ties with Israel they will do so by trying to extract more tangible gains for the Palestinians from Israel than the Emiratis did.

The 2002 API remains the only route to a just peace in the eyes of most Arab and foreign countries. The exception is the three in Washington, Tel Aviv, and Abu Dhabi that just showed us how not to move ahead towards a credible regional peace.

Rami G. Khouri is journalist-in-residence and Director of Global Engagement at the American University of Beirut, a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and an executive board member of the Boston Consortium for Arab Region Studies. He tweets @ramikhouri

This article originated in The New Arab.

Copyright ©2020 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 08 September 2020

Word Count: 895

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The Beirut port explosion is likely to go down in history as a turning point in Lebanon’s political configuration.

The blast, which killed more than 200 people, injured more than 6,000 and destroyed large parts of the city, has revitalised the Lebanese protest movement which had been trying to remove the entire political class since October 2019. Last year, when the economy finally collapsed under unbearable debt and mismanagement, many Lebanese people realised they had become pauperised, dispossessed and marginalised in their own country, forced to survive on their own, with few basic services from the government and little hope for the future.

The tens of thousands of citizens in the streets since August 7 have demonstrated new heights of distrust and anger at their government, whose incompetence and disregard for the people’s wellbeing had allowed the port explosion to happen. The mock hangman’s nooses set up during the protests clearly express the citizens’ sheer disgust with the political elite who have long ruled them and have driven them and the entire economy into bankruptcy and debt.

The attacks on and takeovers of ministries and public institutions demonstrate that people want to take direct control of governance and would not allow the same uncaring, thieving, and criminally negligent politicians to take back the reins of power.

The consistent protest slogan “all means all” has been re-emphasised and people have expressed their anger with all political forces. The protesters also made rare explicit criticism of Hezbollah as a member of the sectarian rulers they called “the mafia” or “a gang of thieves and criminals”. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah joined President Michel Aoun in rejecting an international investigation of the port explosion and also sounded like all the other discredited politicians in saying his party knew nothing about the ammonium nitrate that exploded in the port.

The events of the past few days have started to sweep aside the cruel recent past to reveal the few power centres in the country that will now battle it out, or, more likely, negotiate a transition to a new governance system.

We are likely to see new waves and methods of citizens confronting their state, and the state fighting back militarily, until this battle is resolved in the months ahead. This week, for example, citizens demanded that foreign donors do not channel humanitarian assistance through the government, who they fear might steal or sell the aid, or only share it with sectarian loyalists.

The citizen rebellion has sent its ominous message and revealed cracks within the governing elite. On August 9, a number of members of parliament and government ministers resigned under pressure from the streets. A day later, the rest of the cabinet along with hapless Prime Minister Hassan Diab stepped down, simply formalising their lack of authority in the face of the citizenry.

Lebanon is experiencing the same dynamics as other Arab countries have since 2010: the irresistible force of an enraged and pauperised citizenry marching in the streets to bring down a power structure that refuses to budge. Yet, like in Sudan, Algeria, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and elsewhere, Lebanon’s exhausted and humiliated citizens have struggled against an entrenched militarised regime which is not easy to evict from power.

But Lebanon’s power structure is unlike any other Arab country’s and it is even more difficult to challenge. The main sectarian parties of Sunni, assorted Christians, Druze, and others have shown that they will retreat a bit and reconfigure power-sharing when threatened, if it keeps them in the governance and money-making game.

Last year’s events discredited the main sectarian parties in the eyes of most Lebanese, including some of those parties’ own supporters, whose standard of living has also deteriorated. These parties on their own now appear unable to prevent the demands for structural change. Parties like President Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement and Saad Hariri’s Future Movement can only rule with the backing of Hezbollah, as we have seen in recent years.

Hezbollah represents something very different. It is more powerful than the state militarily, and more cohesive than any other single sectarian organisation. It is also structurally linked with Iran, Syria, and other militant parties in a regional “resistance” front. Hezbollah mostly operates behind the scenes through shifting alliances with leading Christian, Shia, and Sunni groups in the successive governments it has supported.

We might have entered a phase in Lebanon where, effectively, the two most powerful actors have emerged as Hezbollah and the mass of uncoordinated but probably unstoppable protest movement which wants to replace the current power structure with a more democratic and rule-of-law-based governance system.

If the protesters harness their immense popular support into a focused political process, they could eventually engage and remove the existing power elite, and then hold parliamentary elections that independent groups would oversee — two of their key demands. We should expect to see intense negotiations to agree on a new, non-sectarian elections law that would permit new elections, in turn leading to a new president and a fully re-furbished governance system. This would ideally be managed by a transitional emergency government of respected technocrats focused on stabilising the economy and supporting the majority of needy people.

Many of the now discredited sectarian elite will oppose this, but Hezbollah would probably accept it if it met certain criteria. The group will not allow the Lebanese state to crumble and it does not want to rule Lebanon on its own; at the same time, however, it will not surrender its sophisticated arms and capabilities that twice forced Israel into ceasefires and have achieved deterrence on the Israeli-Lebanese border.

So the big challenge for the protesters and all Lebanese now is: can the citizenry and Hezbollah work out a compromise agreement that allows a serious, capable government to assume power for a long transitional period that can start the revival of the country, while keeping Hezbollah’s arms off the negotiating table for now? And if this happens, and the day comes when the Lebanese people demand Hezbollah give up its autonomous military capabilities, is it possible to envisage those capabilities incorporated under the defence ministry and an associated border security system?

Many Lebanese have pondered these and other possibilities for many years, but no consensus has been reached. This has allowed the old bankrupt governing system to remain in place for so long, with Hezbollah’s backing, leading to the country’s shattered condition. This legacy of corrupt and inept officials in the foreground, with Hezbollah and its external supporters in the background, has now reached its end for most Lebanese people.

The moment of reckoning has arrived. The political elite has nothing left to steal from its people, the people have no more patience and want to hang all political leaders, and Hezbollah must define a new strategy that serves it and the rebelling people of Lebanon equally well.

Finding the answer to this riddle can no longer be the object of abstract discussions. Lebanon has no other choice but to go through with reconfiguring its political system and eventually incorporating Hezbollah into the national defence network. The elite has repeatedly failed and the people have risen up more than once. They will not stop until they have regained their dignity and their citizenship, and established a functioning state.

Rami G. Khouri is journalist-in-residence and Director of Global Engagement at the American University of Beirut, a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and an executive board member of the Boston Consortium for Arab Region Studies. He tweets @ramikhouri

This article originated in Al Jazeera.

Copyright ©2020 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 August 2020

Word Count: 1,210

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BOSTON — The massive explosion in Beirut that devastated many parts of the city is a tale with three distinct but linked parts, about the past, the present, and the future. The past is about how this could happen, given that for the last six years the government knew about that the thousands of kilos of dangerous ammonium nitrate stored in the port, and did nothing about it.

The present is about how the immediate reconstruction and humanitarian aid processes will impact on the current government that has very little domestic or international credibility.

The third, and most important in the long run, is about whether in future the Lebanese people’s heightened anger with their government, for subjecting them to yet another massive source of sustained suffering, will translate into political action that removes the government and starts to reform the entire political-economic structures of the country.

These three dimensions also relate to the lives of several hundred million civilians across the Arab region, who suffer the consequences of their own cruel regimes, of which Lebanon is only the most dramatic, painful, and recent example. Lebanon is instructive because it is one of a handful of Arab countries where tens of thousands of citizens are out in the streets almost daily demonstrating peacefully against their governments for what they see as their mistreatment by those governments.

The Beirut port explosion is a consequence of the cumulative incompetence, corruption, lassitude, amateurism, and uncaring attitude by successive Lebanese governments, going back two decades, which has brought the Lebanese people to a point of majority pauperization and desperation. Ordinary citizens don’t have enough clean water. They don’t have electricity. They don’t have good new jobs. They don’t have reasonably priced food. They cannot get their own money from the banks. Education quality is declining. Trash is not properly collected or disposed of. Environmental conditions deteriorate across the land. Their currency has collapsed. The future is bleak for all, other than the very wealthy.

Every dimension of life in Lebanon has declined, steadily and uninterruptedly, for the last 20 years. But perhaps the worst aspect of this, in the citizen’s eyes, is that the government does not seem to care, or to do anything to fix the situation, as in most Arab countries. The Beirut port explosion is the most catastrophic example of how an uncaring, inattentive, and criminally negligent government operates, because the ruling oligarchic power structure circles the wagons and protects itself against angrier and angrier citizens in the street.

Because nobody in power did anything about the ammonium nitrate in Beirut port, as has been the case with water, garbage, electricity, and the economy, the political aftershocks are likely to be the most significant dimension of this incident. These will happen only after some time, as the country absorbs the psychological and physical shocks of the explosion, and deals with the massive humanitarian suffering.

The Lebanese people — like the Algerians, Sudanese, Iraqis, and others — are actively focused on understanding how they can demonstrate and mobilize politically in order to achieve a common goal: to recreate a legitimate, credible, effective, and humanistic government system that treats its own citizens as human beings and not as animals without rights, without feelings, without voice.

This populist force across the entire region has been out in the streets demonstrating now for a decade. Since the 2010-11 uprisings, Arab men and women have signaled the intensity of the political deficiencies and the populist quest for dignity in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Sudan, Algeria, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Mauritania, and Lebanon.

A core problem that must be resolved is how to overcome the mistrust of power that defines all Arab countries experiencing uprisings. The Lebanese people certainly don’t trust their government anymore, because they’ve suffered the physical and emotional consequences of its cruelty and deficiencies over the last 20 years. That’s why most Lebanese demand an independent international investigation to find out how the port explosion happened and who should be held accountable.

Similarly, many also ask that international humanitarian aid should not go to the Lebanese government, but rather to non-governmental organizations or international groups who can be trusted not to steal the money. When the minister of justice went to inspect one badly damaged area today, she was hounded out of the neighborhood with shouts of “resign!” and “revolution”!

These are signs from the Lebanese citizens of why, when they march in protests, they call for the departure of all the governing elite, not just one or two bad apples. This is similarly the case in the protests in Iraq and Algeria, where disgruntled, and dehumanized citizens, demand the removal of the entire governing elite, and its replacement with a more participatory, accountable, and rule-of-law-based system.

This is the critical issue now in Lebanon — the transition from the humanitarian catastrophe of the explosion to a political reconfiguration of the political system. Yet, Arab citizens marching in the streets largely have not been able to remove their governments by popular will in the last 30 years. So the region continues to be ruled by autocratic, authoritarian, and increasingly militarized regimes, whose policies have led to around 75% of all Arabs being poor or vulnerable.

The explosion destroyed much of Beirut. It might soon destroy the old, heartless, political system that allowed it to happen.

Rami G. Khouri is journalist-in-residence and Director of Global Engagement at the American University of Beirut, a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and an executive board member of the Boston Consortium for Arab Region Studies. He tweets @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2020 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 07 August 2020

Word Count: 888

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BOSTON — The devastating explosion Tuesday that ravaged much of Beirut’s human and physical infrastructure will rightly generate massive amounts of humanitarian aid from around the world. This happens in the context of a devastated Lebanese economy and citizenry, and a widely discredited political order and government whose negligence, ineptitude, and/or corruption are widely blamed for allowing the thousands of pounds of ammonium nitrate to be stored in the port, when the dangers of this were well known and pointed out to the state several times.

Most Lebanese people will not trust their government to investigate this preventable tragedy, hold accountable all former and current officials who played a role in it, or honestly and efficiently disburse the hundreds of millions of dollars in humanitarian and reconstruction funds that will flow into the country. I propose to Lebanese officials, organizations, and citizens alike to consider using this critical moment of immense human need combined with enormous distrust of the state that they see this as an opportunity to start on the road of real reform that they all say they wish to pursue.

Real structural, political, fiscal, and administrative reforms are a pressing priority for Lebanon and most Arab governments, whose citizens suffer under similarly low-quality governance systems. Lebanon’s immediate humanitarian emergency could converge with its political and economic crises to make this a moment of innovation, opportunity, and hope for real reforms across a better Arab region.

My suggestion is that the humanitarian and reconstruction funds that flow into Lebanon should be disbursed and overseen by a newly created consortium comprising a few credible and efficient government officials, proven non-governmental organizations and humanitarian foundations, a few credible international aid agencies, and some individuals with respected professional expertise.

This is needed because the governments of the past three decades have proven to be unable or unwilling to serve the Lebanese people equitably and efficiently. A better way must be found to spend public money — and this must happen immediately in Lebanon’ precarious condition.

Lebanese NGOs, universities, professionals, and other private institutions are world-class outfits in most of what they do, and they are already drawing up plans for how to manage the state and society equitably in a future politically reformed system. The leverage of international aid can be used quickly now to speed up this process, force the state to share decision-making with the citizenry, and respond to the country’s dire humanitarian needs in a speedy and fair manner.

Such a shared decision-making system of spending and monitoring aid funds will help donors commit quickly as they become confident that their donations will not be stolen or misused. It will vastly speed up the implementation of urgently needed projects that people need to survive (unlike the state’s years of wasted time and stolen money in not addressing the garbage collection and electricity issues, for example).

It will create a model of fruitful public-private partnerships that genuinely include the views and talents of the private sector. And it will offer a signal of hope to Lebanon and many other Arab countries whose citizens urgently need real political reforms to prevent further slides into mass poverty, marginalization, and helplessness.

This proposal would also shake up a mostly dysfunctional system of international aid and international NGO involvement that offers some assistance to some people in need, but mostly allows the decrepit states to continue their failed policies and widespread corruption, while officials and their cronies amass immense private wealth without earning it.

Donors should require this kind of oversight of how their funds are spent, and if Arab governments refuse they should send aid directly to non-governmental organizations and others in society who will use it properly.

The key benefit of this idea is that it combines Arab citizens’ desires to reform their state with the international community’s often expressed but rarely implemented desire to do the same thing. If the two join hands, the state will have no option other than to go along with this, to the benefit of all concerned. Also, this mechanism would allow the voices of ordinary Arab citizens to impact their countries’ policy-making mechanisms for the first time ever — in ways that Arab parliaments have never done with any credibility.

Here is a way to check Arab state corruption, improve state efficiency, generate state-society collaborative action, expand the citizenry’s participation in decision-making, encourage more international aid and investment, and give the bludgeoned and battered Arab citizens a rare sense of hope that they can fix their dilapidated country and hold their heads high, as they know they can.

I hope that French President Macron and other leaders who are expressing their desire to assist Lebanon consider such new ideas to do what they have failed to do for the past century — promote genuine national development, prosperity, and security in Arab countries based on the consent of the governed and the will and skill of the citizenry.

Rami G. Khouri is journalist-in-residence and Director of Global Engagement at the American University of Beirut, a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and an executive board member of the Boston Consortium for Arab Region Studies. He tweets @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2020 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 05 August 2020

Word Count: 819

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The grievances that exploded all over the Arab region between 2010 and 2020 are historic in so many ways that it is hard to know where to start understanding them. Scholars should avoid a single-focus analysis and instead grasp why the protests across nearly a dozen countries have addressed almost every dimension of material, political, and psychological life. Four key factors that converge, though, should take priority in any assessment of what this decade means for the Arab region: (1) the expanding range of rights, denials, and grievances that citizens raise; (2) the fact that Arabs have unsuccessfully tried to redress these grievances since the 1970s without receiving any serious responses from their states; (3) the demands today to go well beyond reforms in individual policies and instead totally overhaul the governance systems and throw out the ruling elites; and, (4) the simultaneous uprisings across much of the Arab region, revealing the common suffering of citizens and the incompetence of governments in about a dozen states at least. In short, the deterioration of the quality of citizenship and the dilapidated state of public services and governance have reached such a severe condition that they have caused mass eruptions by citizens in multiple lands to redress these stressful and often dehumanizing realities.

The strength and depth of this decade’s protests reflect the fact that their core issues have been raised by Arab activism, demonstrations, and other means for at least four decades, without eliciting any serious policy responses from the political elites or the foreign powers that support them. This is far from just a seasonal “Arab Spring,” as it is often referred to in the West. It is the second half of a century of Arab statehood in which ordinary citizens have struggled unsuccessfully for their rights.

The very wide range of criticisms and demands the protests raise across the region indicate how ordinary citizens have suffered in virtually every dimension of their lives. The issues raised include corruption, household income, poverty, inequality, opportunity, jobs, education, health care, water, electricity, accountability, police brutality, abuse of power, the rule of law, environmental justice, gender equality, and the lack of citizen voice, to mention only the most significant.

This range of issues that keeps growing with time and their painful impact on ordinary citizens due to decades of governmental mismanagement ultimately generates more serious new threats. The latest examples include Lebanon and Iraq. In Lebanon, a banking crisis prevents citizens from drawing their deposits beyond a few hundred dollars a week and cripples many small and medium businesses that need dollars to import essential goods. In Iraq, the worsening electricity shortages and the new threat of a possible cut in power imports from Iran due to US sanctions both highlight the inability of Iraqi governments to manage their people’s welfare or even the integrity of their state (given the Kurdish autonomous region, the short-lived Islamic State, and some calls among southern residents around Basra to run their own affairs).
The accumulation of so many problems since the 1980s contrasts with the pre-2000 period, in which protests were occasional and tended to focus on singular issues, such as gas, bread, or milk prices, cost-of-living increases due to new taxes and fees, elite abuse of power, lack of equal rights among citizens, normalization of the relationship with Israel, and others. This decade’s complaints and demands, however, cover simultaneously almost every sector of life, and protests go on for months or years at a time.

These growing multi-sectoral stresses over decades help explain another critical factor in the current uprisings: the fearlessness of citizens who challenge powerful state and sectarian leaders by name and demand their departure. Protestors stopped being scared off by rough treatment from security agencies or sectarian thugs. This lack of fear results from nearly half a century of neglect during which citizens have felt that their governments pay no serious attention to their needs and rights, and governments appear to lack the technical capabilities to respond effectively. Citizen anger becomes amplified from older people’s memories of past decades when their governments in their state-building developmental eras had provided their citizens with basic services equitably and efficiently, like collecting garbage, operating decent schools, and providing clean water and electricity, while younger Arabs under the age of 40 have only known deteriorating social services and security conditions and widespread political exclusion. The combination of uncaring, corrupt, and incompetent governance proved to be too much for citizens of all ages to take without fighting back.

To make matters worse, citizens who rise up to protest in anger and frustration are usually met with police and security responses that are increasingly militarized and brutal. This only exacerbates people’s feelings of being ignored and abused by their own power elite that treats them with disdain. Citizens eventually move beyond anger, and if like so many today they are unable to feed or educate their children or secure a decent job for themselves, they often feel dehumanized by the actions of their own state. They rise up to no longer accept being treated with contempt by the officials who should serve them.
These developments are evident across the Arab region, where the persistent protests have generated a historic new demand by large segments of Arab citizenries for a total change of their governing system, which would both remove the individuals who have been in power for decades and institute new governance mechanisms based on participation, pluralism, and accountability, under the rule of law. This contrasts sharply with the many previous, smaller, protests from the 1970s through the 1990s, when demonstrators usually just sought one or two policy changes or to replace a few officials with others. The problems that have accumulated reflect the fact that policy changes were minimal and that the “new” officials who assumed power came from the same pool of the failed ruling power elite. The protesters now call their actions “revolutions” because they aim to both eradicate the old power structures and to rehumanize and revitalize the role and rights of citizens.

These key elements of the ongoing Arab revolutions reflect many driving forces that have converged in the past decade, including rampant corruption by crony capitalists within security-dominated ruling elites who also proved incompetent in addressing the challenges, in economic development, political rights, and environmental protections at least, that became evident since the 1970s. This poor quality of governance resulted in insufficient real economic growth through productive activities, reliance on rentier political economy systems, erratic economic growth that was unable to keep up with population growth, and complicity in or impotence in the face of the non-stop damage of local and regional wars, including the Arab–Israeli conflict that has now entered its second century.

Another recent development and consequence of these drivers may well explain the widespread and apparent desperation of many protesters who say they have nothing to lose because they have nothing to live for. A large and growing number of Arabs live in poverty and vulnerability, which leads to economic and political marginalization and ultimately alienates them from their state, from their economy, and even from some of their traditional social configurations, like tribal, religious, and community organizations that had long defined people’s identities and supported them in times of need. The United Nations and credible data indicate that some two-thirds of all Arabs are poor or vulnerable. The vulnerable are low-income families that live right on the edge of poverty and plunge into that category with a sudden increase in prices or taxes or a shock to the family’s income. New analyses in light of regional turmoil that slows economic growth also indicate that families in poverty are destined to stay there for several generations. That percentage of poor and vulnerable in Arab countries is also increasing due to the impact of the armed conflicts and internal economic collapse in several states, including Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Libya, and Yemen.

As some states seem to abandon their citizens and stop serving them, those citizens turn away from their states and assert other identities and allegiances (tribal, religious, ethnic, ideological). In extreme cases, they create their own sovereign or virtual states (South Sudan, Kurdistan, Islamic State, Somaliland, Gaza), most of which encounter difficult days for various reasons.

Across the Arab region, with only a few exceptions, pauperized citizenries are challenging their militarized states in an epic battle that has been brewing for a century and that has now exploded into the open air. Taking to the streets to topple the entire systems that brought people to this condition is the last-resort option that nevertheless seems to motivate many—probably a majority of—citizens to take charge of their own lives and future wellbeing. It remains unclear, however, whether the current revolutions will be able to depose any power structures and replace them with more democratic systems.

The transitional sovereign council in Sudan is an important precedent that we must watch closely to see if it fully tempers the once absolute powers of the security agencies and creates a new governance system that is pluralistic, participatory, and accountable under the rule of law. Lebanon and Iraq suggest that sustained protests and road closures that suspend business as usual for a short period of time can elicit some tangible concessions, like the resignation of a prime minister or even drafting new electoral laws. The Algerian protests similarly achieved some limited gains, like the decision of the moribund president not to seek a fifth term.

Yet, the Egyptian experience of 2011–2013 remains fresh in many people’s minds, as well as among the ruling elites and their military allies. These elites, sometimes with external support, have pushed back against the protesters, often violently and brutally, resulting in hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries, especially in Sudan and Iraq. The counter-revolution of conservative autocrats in Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, and others has been as evident in most Arab countries as the street demonstrators trying to evict them forever. Electronic surveillance systems, shooting to kill or injure protesters, erecting massive concrete walls to protect state institutions, widespread arrests, internet shutdowns, and other responses have only seen the protests persist and expand, as best evidenced in Lebanon and Iraq.

The protesters today endure, however, partly because they have obviously learned and applied lessons from the 2010–2011 uprisings. These include the importance of cross-community solidarities, persistent challenges to the elite, innovative protest tactics that emphasize the incompetence or criminal corruption of the ruling elite, coordination among different protest groups, and sticking with a set of a few basic demands until they are met. The most important ones across the region have been the governments‘ resignation, new election laws, appointing efficient ministers, creating credible anti-corruption mechanisms, and most importantly, installing a civilian government in place of military or oligarchic-sectarian rule.

As the protests and countermoves go on, we can also see some basic social values and power control systems evolving underneath the surface. The most dramatic include the significant role of women in the protests and other dimensions of public life, the widespread open participation of all citizens in public forums to shape the new governance systems they seek, cross-sectarian solidarity among protesters from groups that more commonly used to confront each other, the pervasive demands for social justice, and accountability under the rule of law.

All signs indicate that this epic battle for the identity of the Arab region will go on for some years to come.

Rami Khouri is an internationally syndicated political columnist and book author, a professor of journalism and journalist-in-residence at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. This article originally appeared in the Kennedy School’s Journal of Middle Eastern Politics and Policy

Copyright ©2020 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 25 March 2020

Word Count: 1,918

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BEIRUT — The death today of former elected President Mohammad Morsi of Egypt should be seen as perhaps the single most iconic moment of modern Arab political history. For he represented everything that is good and bad about political authority and governance in the past century of Arab statehood. Yet his legacy will only be fully clarified in the decades ahead when the fate of the ongoing Arab uprisings is also clear.

Not surprisingly, it is in Egypt that his life and death capture the main lines of the modern Arab political struggles for stable statehood and citizenship. Three, in particular, stand out from 1952 until today, and they continue to shape the trajectories of power, the sources of political legitimacy, and the fate of entire societies. These are the rule of the armed forces, the opposition of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists, and the counter-revolutionary onslaught of conservative Arab monarchies against democratically elected governments after the 2011 overthrow of the former Egyptian regime of Hosni Mubarak.

The first and most important of these has been the penchant for Arab military offices and allied security services since the 1950s to take over governments and economies, and mostly run them into decrepitude. The non-stop governance of Egypt under military rule since then, with only the 2012-13 interlude of the elected Morsi government, is not only a structural weakness of the Arab region that reveals itself widely in the form of shattered economies and many destroyed cities. It is also a growing threat because the heavy-handed nature of the rule of Field Marshall-turned-President Abdel Fattah Sisi since 2013 has added new layers of hard authoritarianism and abuses of ordinary citizens and civil society. The rule of the officers continues to harden, amazingly.

The second important symbolic dimension of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood Society is that they have consistently spearheaded two critical but failed aspects of modern Arab political life since the 1930s: the quest for good governance that promotes citizen rights and values and stable, prosperous societies, and open opposition to autocratic Arab governments, foreign colonial powers, and Israeli Zionism. Many other movements and forces have reared their heads and sought to govern well or to challenge dictatorships and family rule in Arab lands, but only the Muslim Brotherhood and its many offshoots, including a few militant ones, have consistently shown the courage, self-confidence, and persistence in their mission that explains why they have lasted so long and succeeded in a few instances, while all other opposition groups faded away.

Morsi was a symbol of the ultimate success that they had always sought: to govern the biggest Arab country, and to do so with the legitimate approval of the citizenry, which no other Arab government could boast — with the exception of Tunisia (where another Islamist party, Al-Nahda, was the big winner in the elections after the overthrow of the former regime).

Yet, tragically, Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood broadly also have been political failures and amateurs. They repeatedly proved unable to use power effectively when they won it through elections or assumed it through appointments by the military, in countries like Egypt, Yemen, Kuwait, Sudan, Jordan and others. Morsi and his colleagues were neither prepared nor qualified for political incumbency in Egypt in 2012, and it showed in their mismanagement of almost every sector of life and society. They had no idea how to mobilize the immense public support they enjoyed, nor how to respond to the military when it started working to overthrow them in 2013.

The third dimension of the political symbolism of Morsi’s life, overthrow, imprisonment, and death is what these reveal about the aggressive wave of neo-authoritarianism that now ravages more and more Arab societies. For it was the advent of the elected Morsi government in 2012 that so frightened the Egyptian generals, the deep state behind them, and their fellow travelers in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and caused them to join forces to overthrow Morsi and then make sure that nothing like that Islamist success ever happens again. These forces now smash the Muslim Brotherhood wherever they can, wipe out almost all active elements of independent civil society and media, and jail tens of thousands of citizens for their political views and for daring to speak their minds independently.

That resurgent Arab force of regressive conservatism and authoritarianism, with its popcorn machines in cinemas to keep the youth happy, now threatens many other ‘moderate’ Arab societies that do not buy into either the Egyptian model of military rule or the Wahhabi-Saudi-Emirati model of states that manage the minds of their citizens alongside their malls and highways. The elected President Morsi mattered because he was the frightening reality — legitimate, populist, Islamist, and incumbent — in the biggest Arab country that scared these ultra-conservative officers and Gulf leaderships who then unleashed the beasts of political regression.

So Mohammad Morsi was much more significant than being a legitimately elected president who was overthrown. His life and death tell a much bigger tale: the continuing agony of Arab political cultures that insist on seeking a life of dignity, freedom, and prosperity, yet remain unable to do so in the face of the much stronger and moneyed forces of fear and authoritarianism.

The ongoing mass struggles for democratic pluralism and civilian authority in Algeria and Sudan, and regular demonstrations against government incompetence in half a dozen other Arab countries, remind us that Mohammad Morsi’s successes and failures — like Egypt and its people themselves — represent something much bigger that continues to play itself out today in most Arab countries.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow, adjunct professor of journalism, and Journalist-in- Residence at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He can be followed @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2019 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 17 June 2019
Word Count: 929
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BEIRUT — The last thing the Middle East needs is another $8 billion of American armaments in the hands of Arab autocrats, and thousands of additional American troops here, which Donald Trump has decided to send us as he ratchets up the U.S.’s exaggerated and mostly hysterical confrontation with Iran. Such decisions by the Trump administration in recent weeks, combined with supporting roles by autocratic Middle Eastern governments, are central reasons for why our region continues to spin incoherently in its maelstrom of turbulence, destruction, violence, state collapse and massive human suffering.

Foreign military engagements and posturing in the Middle East during the past five decades or so have usually led to catastrophic consequences. These include destroyed cities, ruined states, long-running dictatorial regimes, rampant corruption that comes with billions of dollars of arms spending, money siphoned away from basic human needs and developmental priorities, and — as the UAE-Saudi-UK-US war in Yemen shows — the proclivity to use the weapons systems you accumulate, often in criminal ways.

Also, in Arab states that only stay alive thanks to U.S. and other foreign arms providers and funders, governments tend to pay more attention to the wishes of the foreign powers than to the rights and aspirations of their own people. The 2010-11 Arab uprisings were a major signal that most citizens would no longer accept that, as are the current uprisings in Algeria and Sudan.

Militarism is at the heart of aggressive policies that foreign powers use across the Middle East. These include arms sales, prolonged wars, isolated attacks, sanctions, troop build-ups, creating fantasy coalitions of like-minded states to confront an imagined enemy, and inventing fake local militias that you dream up, initiate, equip, train, feed, sustain, and then designate as your “allies” in a noble mission to repel evil and fight the battles that keep America safe — or, in the case of this White House with some of its wacko quarters, battles that immensely please the Lord.

The United States has been the main culprit in this legacy of knee-jerk militarism in recent decades, though this sickness now includes most major foreign and regional powers. Russia, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, France, Israel, the U.K., and the United Arab Emirates all directly participate in military action inside Arab countries. Other less militarily powerful Arab states in recent years, like Egypt, Qatar, Jordan, and Sudan, have offered military support for groups fighting in Arab lands (like rebels or governments in Syria and Libya), while major non-state powers like Hezbollah also engage in warfare in neighboring lands.

Hundreds of smaller groups now spring up in many Arab countries to get the support from abroad that allows them to buy some snazzy uniforms, join the battle, make some money, hire some unemployed young men, get the world’s attention, and perhaps get invited to a peace negotiation in London, Paris, Sochi, Doha, Muscat, or Amman. Militarism and militias are the growth industry of this decade across the Middle East.

Here are the four main consequences of foreign powers pouring money and guns into the hands of Arab autocrats whose citizens have no meaningful political rights and cannot hold power accountable: 1) steady physical destruction of numerous and ever larger swaths of Arab societies due to war, 2) mass pauperization and marginalization of a large majority of Arab nationals (65-75% of whom are now poor and vulnerable), 3) the expansion of political extremism alongside the birth and growth of terrorist and other violent groups that are often a natural offshoot of military groups, and 4) mass frustration, humiliation, and helplessness among a majority of ordinary citizens who do not know where to turn to survive, let alone live a normal life, and whose desperation inevitably fosters more political extremism and violence, and ultimately the fragmentation or even collapse of some countries.

About half the 22 Arab countries today are in dire straits. Half a dozen of them have collapsed into all-out civil wars and open warfare that attracts regional and foreign fighters at will (Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, and parts of Sudan, Palestine, Sinai, and the frontiers between the Maghreb and the Sahel regions). Another half dozen or so states have so badly mismanaged their national development and state-building opportunities that they are deeply in debt and insolvent, and must rely on the financial handouts — and accompanying political orders — of any autocratic regime that offers to help keep them afloat, whether that lifeline comes from within the region or from abroad.

What does the United States expect to achieve by sending us more troops and guns, after 25 years of direct warfare in the Global War on Terror, whose failures and unintended consequences are so obvious now? The U.S. military and its political masters in Washington are still floundering in pockets of Syria, and trying to figure out how to exit the mess they created in Iraq. And Al Qaeda and “Islamic State” today regroup, expand, and reconfigure their criminal actions, while tens of thousands of their trained fighters scatter to more lands around the Asian-African continents than ever before.

More ironic, the alleged threats from Iran’s expanding regional contacts that Washington says it wants to counter mostly represent Iranian opportunistic strategic ties with assorted parties in the region — ties that usually occur in the wake of disruptive and failed foreign militarism by the U.S., Israel and other foreign powers that opens the door to Iran’s engagement with assorted Arabs.

So Donald Trump is sending us a few thousand more American troops and $8 billion more arms this week to do what, exactly?

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and adjunct professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He can be followed @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2019 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 27 May 2019
Word Count: 924
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BEIRUT — Washington’s formal announcement of its plan to hold an economic workshop in Bahrain in June to kick-start a promised Palestinian-Israeli peace process — “the deal of the century” — brings us all face-to-face with a momentous decision. Do we dance or stay home?

We will find out soon if Bahrain is the first stop on a serious journey towards peace with justice for Israelis and Palestinians, or merely Jared Kushner’s social secretary confusing this event with his children’s slumber party in the desert. The vexing problem for Palestinians and a few others is that they cannot possible accept an invite to attend such an insulting fantasy event that tries to buy off Palestinian rights with promises of material life improvements. Yet they also should not simply reject the invite and not go. What to do?

Critics of the Bahrain weekend workshop must figure out how to transform this offensive and nonsensical opening act of “the deal of the century” into a more credible and constructive negotiating process that serves the interests of all. One option is for Palestinians and their supporters to muster world support for a counter-offer two-day seminar — a step up from a mere ‘workshop’ — in which the Bahrain gathering would be one segment, perhaps even the first one, if it is organically linked and leads into a political and legal rights process that respects the conflict’s core elements of land, sovereignty, dispossession, refugeehood, security, recognition, normal relations, and national political rights — all of which only make sense if they apply equally to Palestinians and Israelis.

We must now wake up from the Arab region’s collective old men’s slumber and reaffirm to the world three simultaneous points: 1) we are willing to participate in any credible opportunity to negotiate a fair peace that addresses all the core issues seriously, such as we offered in the 2002 Arab Peace Plan; 2) we are prepared to be pragmatic and flexible on procedural logistical and sequencing issues, as long as the core substantive issues are on the table; and, 3) any negotiations must be anchored in existing international legal/political principles and consensuses.

The fundamental point we must make in both rejecting and conditionally accepting the Bahrain invitation — which is now essentially a weekend cookout and slumber party — is that we will not enter into a process that only reflects the power imbalance on the ground that the Israeli and American governments are using to force the Palestinians to surrender (just as the U.S. also tries to force the entire world to abide by its laws and wishes).

The current U.S. government’s actual deeds and words to date on Israel/Palestine show Washington to be working according to Israel’s rightwing government’s interests and the wishes of its colonial-settler community — to which Jared Kushner and the two top officials working with him are directly linked. This follows the string of recent Trump decisions that gave Israel what it desired and ignored Palestinian and Arab rights, on Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, aid to Palestinians through the UN and directly, and Palestinian diplomatic representation in the United States, among others.

Washington’s Bahrain weekend invite also affirms the more sinister and dangerous legacy of U.S. policy-making on Israel/Palestine: For the entire last century from Balfour to Kushner, the United States largely perpetuates a steady colonial mindset that has seen white men in London and Washington toy with the Palestinians and stay close to the Israelis, largely for their own domestic political interests but also for other perceived short-term reasons (like fighting Communism or terrorism, making money, seeking technological-strategic gains, and others).

That colonial/imperial mindset in London and Washington, from Balfour to Kushner, has allowed Israel’s dominance to prevail in the region. It also reflects a dominant perception in Washington that the Palestinians, like African-Americans in the U.S. in the 1940s, exist neither as a national people with collective sovereign rights nor as individuals who should enjoy the same political or civil rights as Western white men or Israelis.

The double pain is not only that we must endure the increasing American pressure to crush Palestinian society until it surrenders or dies; it is also that we have not found a way to stop the United States under Trump from dictating its terms of conduct to the entire world, including its European allies and powers like China, Russia, Iran, and Turkey.

Can our response to the Bahrain invite start to change this unbearable situation that will soon start pummeling other Arab countries beyond Palestine?

Can we transform the Bahrain gathering into the initial step in a UN-managed meeting at the Security Council that would launch substantive negotiations based on the extensive existing international consensus for a two-state peaceful solution?

The Bahrain weekend invite is a silly idea offered by politically immature men with a century-long history of colonial meanness and cruelty — which will be heightened if we simply refuse to attend Bahrain. We must suggest a better way to enter into a credible and equitable negotiating mechanism that could be phased to include a weekend cookout, a slumber party a few days after that, and end with a full-fledged square dance hootenanny a week later.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and adjunct professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He can be followed @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2019 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 21 May 2019
Word Count: 856
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BEIRUT — The ongoing street demonstrations in Algeria and Sudan and the high-level changes in leadership they have sparked include political developments that are very different from the Arab Uprisings of 2010-11 (the so-called “Arab Spring”). We should watch two dynamics, in particular, to find out if this is genuinely a historic moment of change, or another re-run of previous uprisings and some toppled leaders of Arab authoritarian states that did not fundamentally change how power is exercised or how citizens are treated.

The two dynamics to watch are: 1) the demonstrators’ insistence that the entire political leadership and its security appendages be removed or reformed, rather than just deposing the president; and that they be replaced by a civilian authority to assume power across the government, without any disproportionate role for the military and security agencies in governance; and, 2) the early discussions about holding accountable those across the power structure, and not just in government, that should be charged with crimes against the citizenry, abuse of power, war crimes, or crimes against humanity.

These dynamics represent an important new dimension to Arab popular rebellions against authoritarian rule; they are being implemented to some degree already, and should not be brushed aside as romantic wishes of naive young men and women. In the last two weeks, in both countries, demonstrators and citizens at home who support them have learned to focus the immense immediate energy of their collective power on the one issue that has been the single most important impediment to decent governance and sustainable and equitable human development in the Arab region over the past half century: the absolute power of military and security officers who seized executive authority in Arab countries starting as early as the 1936 coup by General Bakr Sidqi in Iraq and the 1952 coup in Egypt led by Gamal Abdel Nasser and fellow officers.

Ever since then, military and security officers steadily assumed power across all Arab “republics” like Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Sudan, Algeria and others, and expanded their powers to dominate the legislative and judicial branches of government. Military rulers spurred rapid state-led growth and state-building in the early decades of their rule in the 1950s-70s; but by the 1980s these systems started to stagnate and decline, as they became corrupted due to lack of accountability and the distorting lure of oil-generated wealth flowing across the region.

The citizens of the Arab region rebelled against these autocratic and authoritarian systems for decades, to no avail. In the past decade of massive popular uprisings, however, they showed that they understand their central national weakness to be the military’s unchecked dominance of governance and control of political-economic power. The insistence of the citizenries in Algeria and Sudan on a genuinely civilian authority to oversee the transition to a fully democratic governance system has been importantly manifested in the past ten days by two telling developments: the demonstrators’ repeated rejections of interim leaders from the old power structure, and negotiations with the military to shape a transitional authority that is dominated by civilians.

In other words, following the lead of the Tunisian people in 2010-14, we may now be witnessing the transition of two of the largest and most important Arab countries to systems that respect the principle of “the consent of the governed,” and that genuinely vest political authority in the people. If this happens in Algeria and Sudan, we are likely to see it expand steadily to other Arab lands.

The second important and related issue beyond the demonstrators’ demand that the military stay out of government is that all individuals who abused the citizenry or engaged in criminal or abusive acts be held accountable, including, significantly, private sector individuals who formed part of the ruling power structure. A few have already been detained or prevented from leaving the country in Algeria and Sudan, but it will take time for the transitional authorities to structure credible judicial mechanisms to bring to justice the alleged war criminals and abusers of powers. Changing the president is a meaningful achievement in the uprising’s initial stage, but it is meaningless ultimately if it does not eject from authority the rings of crony capitalists, security appendages, and ruling family-linked associates who monopolized power and ran the country and its economy into the ground.

The past ten days are especially important and impressive for revealing how firmly the populist demonstrators in Algeria and Sudan maintained their focus on these two central demands, kept insisting on them both, and to date have been able to push the military to make concessions. This is a tangible change from the 2011-14 transition in Egypt that remains the emblematic example of how not to allow the military to remain in power in the face of popular demands for democratic pluralism and civilian rule.

Genuine civilian-led governance in large Arab countries is the right of their citizens. It is likely to happen soon, and it will be a sight to behold, to celebrate, and to protect.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and adjunct professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He can be followed @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2019 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 April 2019
Word Count: 833
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BEIRUT — The nationwide street demonstrations that have now toppled two long-serving and ageing dictators in Algeria and Sudan are particularly poignant, because they occur in two pedigree countries in the modern Arab struggles for freedom and dignity.

Much instant commentary around the world will speak of the arrival of Arab Spring 2.0, following the 2010-11 popular rebellions that achieved mixed results in half a dozen Arab countries; it will also note the armed forces’ continued hold on power, or at least on transitional political mechanisms, hinting that Arab societies are doomed to be ruled by military officers.

Such short-sighted and incomplete views of what is actually going on across most of the Arab region should be juxtaposed against the Algerian and Sudanese people’s reaffirmation of Arab citizens’ longstanding desire for a life of political dignity and socio-economic equity — and their willingness to risk their lives to achieve those rights.

Algeria has long been appreciated across the Arab region for its epic struggle for independence from French colonialism over nearly two centuries, and its support for Arab nationalist and progressive movements since the 1960s. Its decades of military rule reflected similar trends in most Arab lands, while the brief democratic breakthrough of the 1992 elections that were won by local Islamists was quickly and viciously quashed by the armed forces who were supported by Western governments.

Sudan is especially noteworthy because this will be the fourth time since its independence in 1955 that its citizens install a democratic system of government — the first three having been overthrown by military coups. Two other popular uprisings overturned military rulers and briefly restored democratic rule in1964 and 1985.

So far from being sudden, isolated, and delayed revivals of the 2010-11 Arab Uprisings (or “Arab Spring”), Algeria and Sudan’s populist ejections of military rulers more accurately affirm a century-long quest for democracy and human dignity that has defined Arab societies since their late 19^th Century stirrings for freedom from European or Ottoman rule.

Algeria and Sudan today should remind us of how deep, wide, and continuous has been the struggle for human rights and political decency across the Arab world, not how erratic or episodic it is. The historical reality is that every conceivable configuration of Arab citizens has struggled day and night, week after week, year after year, from century to century, to achieve the rights they expect as human beings, first, and as citizens of their states, second. They face prison, torture, and death. They are ridiculed and humiliated, marginalized and exiled, beaten, bought, and disappeared — but they persist because they know their own humanity is both invincible and universal.

So they march, write, speak out, challenge, organize, mobilize, vote, go to court, and try every available means to break through the authoritarian chains that bind them to empty political systems, drowning in gutted economies, on the surface of ravaged natural environments, supported by cruel and uncaring Arab and foreign governments.

Everybody beyond a handful of wealthy families and their guards in the power elites struggles in one way or another — sometimes silently, only in their hearts — in this legacy of Arab demands to achieve one’s humanity and rights: individuals, political and professional groups, women’s and student groups, lawyers, street artists, media figures, singers and dancers, local religious and cultural leaders, businessmen and women, high school and university students, local fruit and vegetable sellers, global high-tech magnates, mass movements anchored in religion, ethnicity, or ideology, garbage collectors and school teachers. These and hundreds of other categories of citizens have always challenged their own disdainful  authorities, foreign occupiers and invaders, and a global capitalist elite that works closely with ruling governments.

These activist Arab men and women never stopped, even when the foreign television crews went home. They only occasionally laid low when death and imprisonment were no longer useful options to achieve their goals. But they always revived after brief interludes of rest, planning, re-grouping, and re-strategizing, when they sought the most effective and non-destructive way to remove their hollow regimes of old men with guns who routinely go to London, Paris, Washington, Moscow and other faraway capitals to secure praise and more guns.

I feel this viscerally because for the past 50 years, I have personally experienced, reported on, analyzed, and marveled at this legacy of modern Arab struggle for decency, democracy, and dignity, and not just once every seven years when it rears its head and waves to the television crews who drop in from New York, London, and Paris for a few days to marvel at the suddenly restive natives dressed in flowing robes who peacefully but relentlessly demand to live free, or not at all.

The meaning of Algeria and Sudan in this long, uninterrupted legacy of human struggle that has toppled dictatorial rulers recently is in three main causes: citizens who no longer fear their military regimes but challenge them peacefully in the streets; economies that have been turned into wastelands by the regimes that can no longer feed, employ, or house the population, two-thirds of whom have become poor, vulnerable, and desperate; and, the massive security systems the regimes created to protect themselves in the end refused to shoot and kill their own brothers and sisters.

Most honest people in the Arab region understood in their bones that the 2010-11 uprisings were a milestone on a very long and hard road to the three goals that teased — but ultimately eluded — Arab people a century ago, when the modern Arab state system was formed: statehood, sovereignty, and citizenship. Those three prizes, we learned finally, would not come from the generosity of colonial rulers or brutal indigenous autocrats, no matter how many troops they have or how much money they spend.

Statehood, sovereignty, and citizenship emerge only from the persistent toil of honest citizens who respect each other, love their country, and dare to battle homegrown or foreign tyrants to live in freedom and dignity. Arabs have done this for many, many decades, and Algeria and Sudan are the latest examples of this ongoing legacy.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2019 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 April 2019
Word Count: 1,006
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