Fawwaz Traboulsi:
Since Tarek Mitri has solved the question of denomination, which has been weighed upon me by the Issam Fares Institute to talk about, now I can talk about something else. If you’d allow me, I would like to talk about two things:
First, what caused those phenomena which we are calling rightly so, Arab democratic revolutions? Since we’re talking about narratives, I’d like to take two slogans from those revolutions. The first is, of course, الشعب يريد إسقاط النظام”” (The people want to overthrow the regime) and the other, which was present from the beginning in Tunisia and which went a little bit less noticed, is “عمل, حرية, خبز” (Work, Liberty/Freedom, and Bread). I think this latter one is a good introduction into causes, and I would like to make the point that three converging factors made up what is very common about processes which cover now at least seven or eight Arab countries.
First is the question of work. We have the world record in the Arab world in two senses. First, the highest percentage of youth among the population, and second is the highest percentage of unemployment. So, we cannot understand what’s happening whether concerning youth, work, or the future without laying that much influence on this question of unemployed youth, and I think they were in the general sense that Rabab talked about; youth meaning all kinds of youth, and not especially middle-class youth, who are also looking for jobs by the way.
Second, I think that one way of looking into the link between this and our economies is to look at how the neoliberal model was implemented in our part of the world. It only takes us to read the pronunciation of directors of both the IMF and the World Bank just after Tunisia and Egypt. They both had the same remark: we did measure economic performance by percentages of the growth of GDP. We forgot about finding and creating jobs. It is not a minor issue that the highest institutions that govern our everyday life discover suddenly after Tunisia and Egypt that they missed that simple point which is job creation not to speak ofcourse about what they always miss, which is two things: First, their disregard and hatred for productive sectors of the economy, for example, that 500 Arab intellectuals went to Alexandria five or six years ago to produce a document, which considered the financial sector as the driving force of the Arab economies, and forgot to mention, in 26 groups of demands, the fact that there is oil in this region. I would give a lot of importance to this.
Now, حرية (Freedom). I think we are at the closing section of the stagnation of the majority of Arab regimes, in two senses. The oil-rich oligarchies, repressive oligarchies, minoritarian oligarchies of the Gulf are now faced by the rising expectations of their people and by their corruption, not to speak about their autocracy and dictatorship. On the other hand, you have the regimes that descend from national liberation, who have been transformed into dictatorships especially bent on hereditary transfer of power. Not only has their popular base shrunk, they have been left with one leaver of control; mainly repression, that starts with Iraq and does not end with Syria.
Now, خبز (Bread). At least I think I would like to say that I am astonished at some attempts by oppositions to negate the role of social rights, or equal distribution, or redistribution of social wealth in the name of either حرية أو كرامة (Freedom or dignity); this is not about bread, this is about freedom or this is not about bread, this is about dignity. I have never imagined that being poor does not entail some form of humiliation, but let’s move from that.
I think those three elements compound to give us a very deep popular movement which is definitely revolutionary is two senses.
First, it is a very long revolution, which is now one year old. I do not know many democratic social revolutions which take that long and which persist and achieve goals. I mean we just talked about 1848 in Europe which was for few months and was defeated and crushed. This is a revolutionary process and not a national liberation process, that’s been going on and continuing for one year. So, at least this should give an idea not only about the courageous heroism of our people but about the very deep popular basis of this revolution. You have generations of generations of the leaders of the Syrian تنسيقيات who are taking over the job of those who have been killed, assassinated or put into prison.
From that point of view that it constitutes to my mind a critique in deeds and critique by practice of what will have been hammered upon our heads for the past quarter of the century.
First, I find the term extremely silly, people regime, nobody talks about people and regimes in this part of the world; we talk about مجتمع مدني أو مجتمع أهلي (civil society) and state. We have been acclimatized to the neoliberal political jargon, which tells us that if the state becomes weaker, then the freedoms of the individuals and the private sector become greater. This is what civil society-state nexus means, and this is why the American invasion in Iraq had to kill the state–demolish the state–but of course it did not empower the individual as you might consent. So, that’s one thing to be revised.
Now, we’re not talking about eight or nine sectors of society, which are called women, youth, leadership, environment, etc… Those same people in the streets and in the squares now have discovered that it is not enough to preach democracy; it is not enough to talk about the rights of journalists, for example. Let’s take one example. When nobody knew about Tawakol Kamaran in San’aa, she was interviewed and asked “what are you doing here?” She said, “I’ve been fighting for the past seven years for the rights of journalists. I discovered that nothing will come out of it if I did not change the regime” That’s one example of how the democracy advocacy we have been subject to was a form of preaching. It had two things; you preach about democracy, but you do not give what is now called, in diplomatic language, “a road map” on how to reach democracy. At least the people in the streets found the road map and that is the overthrow of the existing regimes. And the people in the streets found the road map in a different sense; they are faced by a big problem, which academia, intellectual production, did not provide. We were working on what we lack, or what the Arab world lacks, and we were looking at explaining the absence of something and that absence is of course democracy; deficiency, gaps.
I do not know for the past 25 years of any academic endeavor to study what we have; those regimes–the Saudi regime, the Syrian regime. What do we know about how they function? Where should we go and read about why they are so resilient? How do we know more about that mixture of repression and consent everybody loves from Gramsci.
Two: Corruption. We have been studying corruption as the petty official, who takes a little bit of money. We never talked about the corruptors who can corrupt the corrupted. Now, we know not only that this is the least important part of corruption. Now, we know that we are living under kleptocracies in which, for example, six Saudi Emirs levy the revenue of one million barrels of oil per day, for a production of eight million barrels of oil. This is happening with the knowledge of Mr. Sarcozi, Mr. Obama, and the Prime Minister of Britain. We know that Mr. Saif Al-Islam Al-Gadhafi used to levy 5% directly from Total revenues in Libya, and if I know well, I think that Total is a government oil company. So, the fight against corruption was based on the assumption that we have huge government agencies that they should be reduced, and that bureaucracies are the source of corruption. Now, we are discovering that definitely this exists, but we are also discovering that the biggest corruption is that we are ruled by Ali Baba and the forty thieves, and they don’t even reach forty, I mean in Syria you cannot find forty thieves.
Let me just end by saying that this is a very severe critique and practice, not only of thoughts but of practice. The termنظام (regime) now according to those young people and less young people in the streets who are giving their lives for democracy and for social change, for them a نظام (regime) is the compact set of institutions, legislations, ideology which they want to down. They are not looking. They do not care at all, not anymore at least, about linking women empowerment and environment and making a common workshop on this. Neither are they really convinced of that question of leadership where you spend your time teaching the Arab young people that they should be optimistic. There was a lot of work in Egypt that the Egyptian people is pessimistic; well they do not seem to be pessimistic to me, and that the problem of the Jordanian male is that he’s frowning all the time. Well, he might be frowning but he’s doing something to change.
So, a النظام (regime) is now put into question in all those countries, whereas weakening the state ends up by the collapse of society. We learned that from Iraq. I do not think that we will repeat it anymore.
Thank you