An attempt to grasp on-going events in the Middle East Given the circumstances, it seems prudent to revise the popular notion of an Arab Spring and talk instead of “Arab transitions,” while certainly hoping for the arrival of a more verdant season for the countries of North Africa and the Middle East.
Things will become clearer once elections in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Jordan, all scheduled to happen within a year, have taken place, and once the fog shrouding the Syrian protests and post-Qaddafi Libya has lifted. We’ll also have to see what comes of the turmoil in Saudi Arabia and Algeria, and, to a lesser extent, in Morocco, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. And, of course, one hopes that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict doesn’t get out of hand, and that things in Lebanon hold steady.
It’s hard to get a firm grasp on what happened and continues to happen in the Middle East. As the accurate fact-checking of history replaces the initial Internet headlines, things that at first seemed positive turn out to be much more problematic (see the situation of the Egyptian Coptic Christians, with church burning, killing and serious harassment). In fact, even the revolution of the youth activists in Egypt seems not to be reaching the hoped-for results. The regimes of the region, all theocratic and Islamic, all having Islam as their state religion or being led by an Islamic leader with constitutional mandate, rely on a fragile stability that seems more precarious every day. They are threatened by fundamentalism, anti-Semitism, migrations, local skirmishes and intra-Islamic conflicts.
Finally, it is impossible to ignore the gap between the technologically advanced Western nations and Middle Eastern countries whose development is being held back by totalitarian regimes.
The twenty-two Arab countries contain 340 million people. With the exception of some states on the Arab peninsula, their living standards are three or four times inferior to that of neighboring Europe. In fact, sanitation, nutrition, water and power distribution, and education are actually getting worse.
This is in stark contrast to these countries’ natural resources, which are staggering. The Gulf countries sit on 45 percent of the world’s oil and 40 percent of the world’s natural gas. The North-African countries have 70 billion barrels of oil reserves — Libya alone has 44 billion barrels of oil and 50 trillion cubic meters of natural gas. The Arab countries in the Middle East have reserves of 180 billion barrels of oil and 55 trillion cubic meters of gas (Iraq alone has 150 billion barrels of oil and 50 trillion cubic meters of gas) — without counting other valuable minerals and metals.
This scenario of extreme poverty on the one hand and extreme wealth on the other is, at least partly, the product of Western neocolonialism. Recently the Catholic Maronite Patriarch of Lebanon, Béchara Pierre Raï, said: “It is urgent that the international communities allow the so-called ‘New Middle East’ project to fail. It was launched in 2006 by several international powers and meant to re-draw the map of the Middle East. The project intends to create a reign of chaos in order to fragment the Arab world in weak ethnic and religious mini-states in order to facilitate foreign hegemony on the economies of Arab lands. This would cause an arms race and empty the financial resources of the oil countries.”
Such a scenario is made more plausible by the fact that the recent revolutions have not emerged from well-thought-out ideological platforms supported by a well-prepared leading class, as is typically the case. Instead, they have been organized by young people who, while certainly brave, enthusiastic and determined in their goal, lack political expertise.
Do we ask ourselves whether Christian minorities gain or suffer from these changes? They are certainly happy to be able to move with greater freedom, but also fear for their survival. It is possible that these revolutions will create new dictators, although more sophisticated and subtler ones than those of the past. If Islamic fundamentalists — particularly those who follow the Wahhabi form of Islam — gain strong government positions in upcoming elections, it is also possible that religious states imposing universal implementation of Islamic law, or Sharia, may be born.
This is not to say that Christians in the Middle East don’t like their proximity to Muslims. They feel that they are an integral part of these lands and these civilizations, and want to continue living this way. At the same time, they don’t just seek freedom of expression and religious practice, which they partly enjoy in some of these countries (with the exception of Saudi Arabia).
They want to be full-fledged citizens, with all the rights they’re entitled to, including the right to govern.
A true transition to democracy, or at least to justice and peace, will take time. The Arab world rejects Western democratic models because it wants to find its own way. This is a time for the world to seek ways to support and aid the Arab world in this quest, and to do so with attentiveness to its values and true cooperation, while abandoning the tools of exploitation and fostering peace-building efforts.
— With reporting from correspondents in Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Joran, Lebanon, Turkey and Israel
Michele Zanzucchi
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