“We want to elect the American president”

Syrian journalist Yassin Al-Haj Saleh says out loud what many Middle Easterners think: they would a say at who is going to be the next president of the US, since he is going to have such a hold over their lives.

We ought to take seriously the findings of a recent global opinion poll in 23 countries and consider joining the citizens of the world in electing the next American president. Making this proposition a reality should be very simple since it rests on a fundamental and democratic tenet: decisions taken by the resident of the White House affect the destiny of countries, peoples and individuals all over the world. In other words, the latter is the president of the world and it is only right for those who are at the receiving end of any authority’s decisions to express their opinion and participate in its election.

[…]

The decisions of Mr. Bush or Kerry will affect the future of my country as well as my own destiny as a member of the Syrian and Arab democratic opposition, and this will manifest itself most evidently in the next few months. I therefore see American policies as coming from the corner of power and hegemony rather than those of solidarity with the weak and in defense of the persecuted. I do not need to witness the daily killings of Palestinians to dismiss any illusions I might have concerning the American project in our region, for those who want to see justice in Iraq and Syria cannot at the same time lend support to a professional killer’s work in Palestine. That is why I see American policy in the “Middle East” (this terminology itself does not give due recognition to the peoples of this region) as being the other face of the Syrian ruling elite that does not recognize the right of the Syrian people to make up their own mind and decide on their own future. American policies in the area therefore are a mixture of dictatorship and cultural condescension, as was manifested in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal a few months ago.

It seems to me that to democratize the Middle East we need to liberate ourselves from not one but three authorities: autocratic power structures throughout the region; the authorities above the law, i.e. Israel; and the most overreaching authority of all, the United States of America. None of these authorities, as far as the “Middle East” is concerned, is genuinely democratic.

U.S. policies in the region always had a far greater impact on our destiny than the Americans ever dared to admit, and this impact is only second to that of the local ruling dictatorships that could always count on the support of the U.S. as long as they carried out their designs and fulfilled their every request. Today the latter wants to control us under the pretext of liberating us, and the former want to preserve their power under the pretext of standing steadfast in the face of external threats.

Intellectuals vs. fundamentalist sheikhs

A group of over 3000 Arab and Muslim intellectuals wants to take to court sheikhs who they say encourage violence and terrorism:

Shaker al-Nabulsi, a U.S.-based Jordanian university professor, said about 3,000 Arab and Muslim intellectuals have signed the petition thus far calling for international trials. Iraqis, Jordanians, Libyans, Syrians, Tunisians and Persian Gulf intellectuals were among those who signed, al-Nabulsi said.

“The Arab regimes cannot put an end to these fatwas of terrorism; the international community can,” al-Nabulsi told The Associated Press in Cairo in a telephone interview from his Denver home.

Among those the intellectuals want to see tried are Qatar-based Egyptian Sheik Youssef al-Qaradawi, who has condoned attacks on American civilians in Iraq and sanctioned kidnapping in wartime. Two prominent Saudi clerics, Sheik Ali Bin Khudeir al-Khudeir and Sheik Safar al-Hawali, also are mentioned.

Good for them. It would be great if a movement of liberal intellectuals took to court prominent Islamists in their own country (although I’m not sure on what legal grounds they could do so), much as Islamists in Egypt have taken liberals to court for publishing books that are “insulting to Islam.” Youssef Al Qaradawi (even if he is not guilty of all the things often attributed to him) would be a good start.

Egypt tries to make itself useful in the Western Sahara

Al Jazeera reports that Egypt is now getting involved in the Western Sahara dispute, claiming it can bring the two parties back to the negotiating table.

“Egypt, which has a neutral position on the issue of Western Sahara, will engage in contacts with the two parties,” Mubarak’s spokesman Majid Abd al-Fattah told reporters on Sunday after the president met with visiting Moroccan Foreign Minister Muhammad Binaisa.

A laudable aim, no doubt, but I find it strange how over the past year at least Egypt has tried to position itself as a negotiator and mediator in virtually every conflict in the region. There’s always been Palestine, but now Egypt is taking the risk of becoming directly involved by essentially helping run a post-Israeli pullout Gaza Strip. Then there was Iraq, where Egypt is training police officers and hosting a regional conference later this month. And there’s Sudan, on which Egypt will be hosting a conference in a few days.

The Egyptian government would probably say that this is normal due to Egypt’s stature in the region and its long-standing role as mediator, which it particularly developed during the Oslo peace process. I don’t think this is the whole story, though. In fact, Egypt has been unable to assert itself as a mediator during most of the Bush administration, which preferred to bypass altogether regional leaders like Egypt. That has been the case with Israel/Palestine, where Egypt had to take a risky position in the Gaza Strip to re-enter the picture. In Sudan, a country Egypt considers its “near-abroad,” it was completely bypassed in the Machakos process and does not seem to have much relevance to the UN sanctions process right now. In Iraq, Egypt was ignored and then offered police training support, it seems to me, mostly to ingratiate itself to the Bush administration which has desperately been looking for Arab partners in the occupation of Iraq. Police training is so far all they could get, but it is better than nothing.

The bottom line is that Egypt’s influence is waning, and that its current activity probably shows two things: it is eager to maintain the appearance of influence for domestic and regional purposes, and it is eager to convince the US it is a useful ally and not, as many US policy-makers (and not only neo-cons) believe, an obstacle to the spread of democracy in the Arab world. I wrote an article (here [pdf] if you have a subscription) about this in the Middle East International a few months ago.

But going back to the Western Sahara conflict, while I don’t think that Egypt can make much progress where the UN, EU and US have failed (especially considering Moroccan and Algerian intransigence), it would be a good thing for more attention to be given to it. James Baker, who worked as the US’ special envoy, has given up, but hopefully the next president, whoever he is, will send someone new and try to get it going again. The conflict has lasted for too long for no particularly good reason except stubbornness and inertia. This Economist story has a good update, and concludes:

The simple fact is that Sahrawi dreams of independence have not faded. Both in Laayoune and in the far-off refugee camps, there is talk of taking up arms again for what everyone calls The Cause. In September, Morocco received a jolt when South Africa added its moral weight by recognising Sahrawi statehood. And at the UN, even America has declared impatience with supporting a mission whose initial mandate was to arrange a referendum, and which has so far cost $600m.

I must say I think the story is a bit too biased against Morocco. But then again, I’m told my Moroccan roots tend to show when discussing the Western Sahara. My feeling is that while Morocco should at least grant some form of limited sovereignty to the Saharaouis, it is important that the Sahraoui movement does not simply hand over what it reaps to Algeria, which has been pulling the strings all these years. I think that is a key concern for Morocco that has to be solved, and also believe that a semi-federal system that would integrate a large degree of autonomy for the Western Sahara would not only be good for that region, but for Morocco at large. It would help the slow and halting spread of democracy in the country by putting decision-making into the hands of locals rather than in Rabat. It’s a tendency I observed traveling around Morocco a few weeks ago, and I hope it continues.