A Place that Never Changes

Robert Fulford
National Post A13, 1 August 2009

A miracle always lifts the spirits, and a miracle as rare as a mostly honest and readable UN report can lift mine. The UN normally publishes material written in a flannel-mouthed style invented for the purpose of evading ugly truths. But in a surprising deviation from the norm, the Arab Human Development Report, a series that began in 2002 under the United Nations Development Programme, has acquired an unexpected habit of honesty. The fifth installment, the work of 90 Arab scholars, appeared last week under the title Challenges to Human Security in the Arab Countries (available at www.arab-hdr.org).

Seven years ago, the first report identified three "deficits" in Arab life — education, political freedom and women’s rights. In these fields, particularly politics, the situation has grown worse. Despite occasional reports of emerging democracy, most of the 350 million people in the region remain afflicted by dictatorships that show no sign of changing.

Economically, news is no better. While the planet has been in a temporary recession, the Arabs live in a permanent depression; Arab unemployment is more than double that of the rest of the world. As the assembled scholars judge it, Arabs are even less industrialized than they were four decades ago. Illiteracy remains high in many countries, health services sketchy. As for public safety, people fear the state security forces as much as they fear foreign invasion.

Rami G. Khouri, a Palestinian-Jordanian journalist, says as an Arab that "we have marginalized ourselves as serious players on the global political stage and now assume the role of nagging annoyances and miscreants." That’s from a paper, The Year that Was, in the report’s closing chapter. Core weaknesses grew during 2008, and democratization remains "buried beneath the stultifying weight of corruption-riddled Arab security states."

Yet most people in the West anticipate improvements in Arab life. The West believes in progress above everything else, and insists on re-asserting its belief against all contrary evidence.

Consider this week’s edition of The Economist, in which the UN report serves as the keystone of a 14-page section on Arab prospects. The editors recount the failures of the Arab countries, but announce in their magazin e’s cover line that the Arab world is "waking from its sleep." The leading editorial ends with glimpses of progress in women’s education, increasingly enlightened businessmen and the growth of satellite television (meaning al-Jazeera and its ilk) as a source of non-government information. Moreover, the unemployed young, more numerous than ever, are ripe for social upheaval.

Grandly, The Economist pronounces that the corrupt authoritarian style of Arab government deserves to die. "At some point it will almost certainly collapse. The great unknown is when." Oh, those wild and crazy Economist optimists.

They should note that the official Arab media have mainly ignored the UN report. This suggests that its authors, many of whom live outside the Arab world, are not taken seriously in their own countries. A piece in the Kuwait Times this week by Meshary Alruwaih, a staff columnist, reflects the approach that Arab governments prefer.

Alruwaih’s article about the Arab Human Development Report, Arab Cultural Security, turns away from practical matters, like the fact that about one Arab in five lives on the equivalent of two American dollars a day. Alruwaih prefers to opine on a philosophical plane. He suggests it’s all very well for the UN scholars to focus on national security, social security, water,=2 0education and so forth. But they miss a vital issue, cultural security, "the soul of the society."

He treats it as a pan-Arab issue: society’s ability "to maintain a theme of its history" while constructing purpose and meaning for the future. According to Alruwaih, what’s needed from social scientists is "proliferation of a discourse on cultural security."His gauzy, sentimental approach perfectly demonstrates the kind of complacent Arab thinking that serves mainly to protect the status and the power of the elites controlling the region’s governments. Confronted with the unpleasant truths in the Arab Human Development Report, Alruwaih does what contemporary Arab leaders have done for all of their lives, and believe they can do forever: He simply changes the subject to something much more pleasant. And then, defying the cover line on The Economist, he goes back to sleep.

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