A History of the Middle East (60 page)

Similarly seeking to divert regional attention from Iraq, Arab leaders weighed in with proposals of their own, including the eminently conciliatory initiative of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdullah which offered Israel a ‘full normalization and normal peaceful relations’ with the Arab world in return for a full withdrawal from occupied territory. Viewed from the battlefront, the offer was, in the words of Hizbollah, ‘US ink written with Arab hands’. And when it came to a vote at the Arab summit in Beirut in March 2002, over half the Arab leaders – though not their delegates – stayed away, including President Mubarak, who feared Saudi Arabia was stealing Egypt’s thunder as the regional peacemaker, and Libya’s Qadaffy, who announced his preference for the creation of a single secular state named Isratine. Nevertheless, for the first time the Arab League offered Israel a full peace with its twenty-two members. ‘No one expected,’ said an astonished Jordanian foreign minister, Marwan Muahser, ‘that all Arab states, including Libya and Iraq, would accept.’

Sharon never replied. His lack of courtesy at the time was blamed on the bombing of a Passover supper in a coastal Israeli hotel the night before the Arab League’s declaration. Instead he pulverized the remaining skeletal infrastructure of Palestinian statehood. The education ministry was stripped of its computer hard-drives, and safes ripped from the health ministry. The north-eastern quarter of Jenin refugee camp was flattened with a ferocity that participating Israeli soldiers were quoted as likening to Sharon’s earlier part in the ravaging of the Beiruti refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla. Initial claims of 500 dead were later revised down to fifty, of whom twenty-three were Israeli soldiers. But all told, the UN estimated that Israel inflicted $300 million of damage in its six-week operation. The popularity ratings of the two leaders among their own communities soared. Arafat again became a
symbol of his people’s defiant struggle for a state; Sharon embodied the bunker mentality with which Israel would fight to preserve itself. Ten years after the Madrid summit, Palestinians had no land, the Israelis no peace, and the United States few pickings to show for ten years of regional brokerage.

The Elusive Promise of Democratization

Of the elder George Bush’s four pillars for a ‘new world order’, it was perhaps his promise to build ‘a world in which freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all nations’ which most stirred the hearts of the congressmen. Here was the world’s most powerful state promising not only to project US military power, but also its values of liberal democracy and free markets among the world’s most closed political systems. The wave of democratization coursing through the communist empire in Eastern Europe only intensified the momentum for the United States to promote a new contract between ruler and ruled in the states for which it had just gone to war. These included not just Kuwait, but also such Gulf War allies as Syria’s Hafez al-Assad, whose dictatorship seemed as passé in the new world order as Nicolae Ceaus¸escu’s of Romania.

As US troops amassed in the peninsula for the 1991 war on Iraq, a group of Saudi businessmen and former ministers petitioned King Fahd of Saudi Arabia to embark on the creation of a ‘modern Islamic state’, equipped with an independent judiciary and elected government. Later that month a convoy of Saudi women led by a princess drove round Riyadh in protest at the kingdom’s ban on women drivers. The results were less than impressive. The women were arrested and sent into internal exile, and the petitions politely filed. But Saudi Arabia’s neighbours were more open to glasnost. King Hussein lifted martial law in 1991, licensed political parties the following year, and in 1993 introduced a progressive press law guaranteeing the individual’s right to publish. In Kuwait, the newly restored emir eventually consented to stage elections for a
parliament he had dissolved seven years earlier. Other Gulf principalities gingerly trod the electoral path. Even Saudi’s King Fahd appointed a
majlis al-shura
, Arabic for consultative council. Western diplomats-cum-apologists noted that within a few decades of statehood the Gulf had embarked on a path to democracy that had taken Europe centuries to realize. Critics said the changes were simply cosmetic.

In the euphoria of the communist collapse, Western strategists argued political liberalization would broaden the popular base of the United States’ Middle Eastern allies, bolster their legitimacy and improve stability. They also assumed that the process might answer the growing doubts over what sort of transition might follow the demise of the Middle East’s ageing coterie of rulers. But the received wisdom that democracy was good for Western interests was sorely tested by election results from Jordan, Yemen, Israel and Iran, the four Middle Eastern states most advanced on the road to multi-party democracy. All four elevated to parliament a bloc of religious politicians, suspicious of and hostile to US foreign policy. The same pattern was repeated even more starkly in Algeria. After adopting a constitution legalizing independent political parties, Algeria staged the first round of its first multi-party general elections in December 1991. The Islamic Salvation Front, FIS, won with a landslide, reaping 188 of the 231 seats contested. The National Liberation Front, the FLN, the dirigiste secular party which had governed since independence was pushed into third place. Responding to appeals from 150,000 panic-stricken secular demonstrators, the Algerian army staged a coup, cancelling the elections and appointing one of their own head of state. With the acquiescence of Western capitals, tanks moved on to the streets, martial law was declared, and the Islamist party, FIS, banned.

The lesson from the plight of Algeria was three-fold. It shocked Arab regimes into recognition of the harsh reality of the ice-thin levels of their popular support and the mass enthusiasm for political Islam. It dissuaded Islamist politicians from pursuing a democratic path to power, and goaded them to arms. And it turned
both Western strategists and local westernized elites off the idea of democracy. In the final count, concluded Washington’s mandarins, pro-Western military tyrants were better guarantors of the new Middle East order than unpredictable, unstable democracies.

Algeria paid a terrible price for denying Islamists power. As clashes erupted across Algeria, thousands of FIS activists were incarcerated in to internment camps. Hundreds more fled to the mountainous hinterland from where they began an armed assault on key economic installations, as well as members of the security forces, politicians, intellectuals and foreigners. At least 100,000 Algerians were killed in the bloodshed, and millions displaced. But in some ways their recourse to violence enabled an intensification of military rule. It allowed the army elites, first in Algeria, and later in Egypt and Israel, to treat Islamist dissent as a security not a political problem, and thereby spare the establishment from sharing power. Algeria’s generals – known as the
eradicateurs –
negotiated with the armed groups, but eliminated anyone found negotiating with the Islamist political wing, not least their own president, Mohammed Boudiaf, who was assassinated in June 1992. FIS politicians aspiring to make a comeback shared a similar fate. In 1999, Abdelkader Hachani, the most senior FIS leader to elude arrest, was shot during a dentist’s check-up, spoiling the Algerian joke that the dentist was the one place an Arab could open his mouth.

While edgy Middle East regimes feared the spillover of Islamist revolt, the real impact of the violence was the militarization of the political domain. In Turkey, the armed forces brought down the country’s first Islamist prime minister, Necmettin Erbakan, a year after he was elected to power in 1996. His party, Refah (‘Welfare’), was banned, on the grounds it violated the country’s secular constitution, and Erbakan sentenced to jail. The generals argued that they had intervened to preserve democracy rather than destroy it, and continued to take annual delivery of $800 million dollars of US military hardware.

Across the Arab world, rulers and generals used the fig-leaf of cosmetic elections and referenda to prolong their mandates and
secure legality if not legitimacy with scores of more than 99 per cent of the vote. The result was that although twelve of the region’s twenty states were embroiled in major revolts or violent upheavals in the 1990s, the political map of the Middle East barely changed. For the most part, voters boycotted North Africa’s series of elections in 2002, unwilling to participate in what one observer called ‘the parlour game indulged in by the Maghreb’s ruling circles’. In Algeria, the FLN was restored to victory. In Tunisia, President Ben Ali amended his own constitution, awarding himself judicial immunity for life and allowing him to stand for a third term, and promptly won a 99.52 per cent yes vote from a 99.56 per cent turnout.

Their European and American backers shied from linking aid programmes to an improvement in the region’s human rights record or the development of civil society, and the US State Department reined back its democracy programmes in the Arab world. The bulk of US aid to the region remained military rather than economic. Spared Western sanction, President Ben Ali banned Tunisia’s Islamist party, al-Nahda, abolished human rights groups, shackled the press, and rigged elections. Tunisians, who boasted the Arab world’s highest literacy rate and its largest middle class, were subdued by a system they called Khubzism (after the Arabic for bread,
khubz
), which roughly translated as ‘eat and shut up’. For all that, Tunisia was implausibly defined by its US aid programme as a ‘stable democratic country’.

Bereft of democratic transition, Western strategists began to hunt for an alternative means for the transfer of power following the autocrats’ demise. A solution was a matter of urgency. By 1997, the majority of Arab leaders were in their seventies, and some, like President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, had refused to name a successor. King Hussein ranked as the world’s longest reigning absolute monarch, but even the average Arab leader reigned for two decades, twice the length of the region with the next most entrenched rulers, Africa. Across the Gulf, government was run much like a family business, with sons and brothers vying for the key positions of prime minister, ministers of defence, foreign affairs and interior, except
in Oman where Sultan Qaboos held all four. In their dotage, Gulf monarchs were spending as much time in European sanatoria as in government, and their top-heavy decision-making process was rotten with
rukud
, Arabic for inertia. And yet their longevity in what was widely held to be one of the world’s most troubled spots was remarkable. Following independence, the standard form of transition had been military coup. The first eight of Yemen’s nine leaders were removed by the bullet and for the first decade after Syrian independence the average leader lasted three months. One generation on, Arab states had produced rulers who not only survived for decades, but could also expect to die in their beds. Would not dynastic succession, asked the policy-makers, be the most stable way of transferring power?

The first states to face the transition were the less problematic monarchies and Gulf tributaries, where the succession of crown princes was already an established tradition. In 1995, Shaikh Hamad ibn Khalifa al-Thani ousted his father, the emir of the tiny Gulf state of Qatar, in a bloodless coup assisted by French mercenaries. Four years later, three Arab heads of state (King Hussein of Jordan, King Hassan of Morocco and Emir Isa al-Khalifa of Bahrain, otherwise known to his people as Jack) followed each other to the grave in quick succession, and their thirty-something sons were smoothly enthroned in their place. Western foreign ministries rushed to pay homage to a ‘new generation’ of Arab monarchs their spokespersons hailed as reform-minded and dynamic.

The creation of hereditary republics proved harder to sell. For decades Syria had trumpeted its laurels as a Baathist revolutionary bridgehead, whose principles included a rejection of ‘exploitative inheritance’. Hafez al-Assad had been born in a stone hovel in a mountain village that had no shop, café or mosque. But his sons had been raised in palaces and groomed to inherit the state. When the father died in June 2000 Syrians mocked that in place of
assad
, Arabic for lion-king, they got a shy Simba, but Western leaders, led by Washington, rushed with almost rude haste to herald Bashar al-Assad as Syria’s new president. It was a sign of how reactionary the Arab
world had become that there was no overt resistance. Assad became a trend-setter, and the rulers of Iraq, Yemen and Libya – the one-time ringleaders of the anti-royalist front – all promoted their progeny to positions as sons-in-waiting. Egyptian pundits universally derided the succession of Assad junior, hoping to avoid the imposition of a Mubarak junior. After a half-century of rivalry between the republican and royalist blocs, there was now very little difference between the two: as a rule they were all dynastic autocracies.

Keen to shore up their legitimacy, the new leaders promptly promised to usher in a new age of democracy and modernization. The result from Morocco to Bahrain via Syria was a Prague spring of glasnost. King Mohammed of Morocco sacked his father’s brutal but faithful grand vizier, Driss Basri, and to cries of ‘king of the poor’ toured the rebellious Berber hinterland that his father had deliberately impoverished. Syria’s President Bashar released hundreds of his father’s political prisoners, nodded in the direction of a courageous democracy movement, and chose a wife from the Sunni Muslim majority, signalling his intent to broaden the base of his father’s minority Alawite rule. Sheikh Hamad of Qatar abolished the ministry of information, and held the emirate’s elections with universal suffrage, simply ignoring traditionalists (and neighbouring Saudi Arabia) who wanted women kept disenfranchised. The new leader of the nearby emirate, Bahrain, moved to resolve the violent uprising of the island’s Shiite majority under his father by inviting back the exiled opposition, re-establishing an elected parliament after a 25-year suspension, and releasing political prisoners.