A few years ago, a BBC newsreader and journalist called Martyn Lewis came in for much criticism because of his attempts to promote good news in his employer’s news bulletins. He was accused of trivialising the news. Everyone knows, after all, that the most important stories are those that cause us to furrow our brows, mutter silent curses and lose our beauty sleep through worrying about the consequences.
Even when we hear positive stories, we search for the dark side. A million less people dying from cancer every year? Great, but what about the other hundred million? Unemployment figures down? Fine, but that doesn’t alter the fundamental causes.
I’m as guilty as the next guy. As I pontificate about the Middle East and other serious topics, my favourite sentiment is “good, but”. That’s when I’m not wallowing in the dark side with no redeeming suggestion of hope.
Yesterday’s Sunday Times carries an article by Richard Woods, Don’t Worry, Be Happy, (sorry, can’t give you a link unless you’re prepared to pay the Sunday Times for access) in which he reports the deliberations of a bunch of optimists who got together recently in Oxford to discuss the “megatrends and context for large scale changes”. Woods cites six reasons why life has got better in the past fifty years: falling poverty, increased disposable income, reduced infant mortality, increased food supplies, increased life expectancy and reducing costs of technology.
Going straight into “good, but” mode, I would be tempted to say sure, try telling that to a family in the Niger Delta or the hinterland of North Korea.
Futurology is a great game. I’d love to be paid a fortune to think great thoughts about the world in fifty years’ time. In fact I do think such thoughts, and you get them from 59steps for free – worthless or otherwise is for you to decide!
But moving down the scale from megatrends , I’m going to see if I can make Martyn Lewis – if he’s still alive – proud of me by declaring my own Silver Lining Day. In that spirit here are five pieces of bad news from which – if you try really hard – you can derive some underlying positives.
Let’s start with Pastor Terry Jones. The bad news is that he or one of his mates finally did it. They burned a Quran, and in doing so sparked a riot in Afghanistan in which several UN personnel lost their lives. The good news is that now he’s played his ace, there’s a fair chance that he will slither away into an entirely deserved obscurity. Also good news that a few more people might remember that the physical manifestation of words on a page is not the same as the message Muslims believe was sent to the Prophet Mohammed and repeated by him as an oral recitation. Book burners have never destroyed fundamental ideas, and never will.
Next on the list – the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The bad news is that people have died, and across a wide region the survivors will be thinking twice about eating sushi and seaweed. The good news is that when the politicians have overcome their squeamishness about continuing to advocate nuclear power in the face of negative public opinion, there is the chance they might realise that the lessons learned at Fukushima can contribute to mitigating the risks of the technology. So thanks to Fukushima, future nuclear installations can be made safer. Assuming you’re still a believer in nuclear power, that is.
Next, Libya. The bad news is that people are still dying in their droves. The good news is that the Libyan revolt reminds us that revolution takes more than a month of demonstrations, and that every country and every situation is different. Overarching rules and doctrines cannot apply, and the purpose of change has to be to provide a platform for better lives. And that can take years, not a few frenzied weeks. Reality has returned.
Then, arising partly out of the Libyan crisis, we have the oil price spike. The bad news is that it threatens to push many of the wealthy economies into recession, and destabilise the weaker ones. The good news is that we have yet another event that forces us to think beyond oil. Yes, even you, Saudi Arabia, who could power the world with just a tiny fraction of your sun-blessed desert. If there is one advantage of political systems in which the rulers don’t have to stand for election, it is that those in power can take long-term decisions without fearing the consequences, especially if they can afford it. That’s another silver lining for frustrated advocates of democracy, by the way. So governments and gas guzzlers everywhere, you have yet another chance to do the right thing.
Next, back to Japan. I don’t have to spell out the bad news – the suffering speaks for itself. But the good news is that more than almost any other nation, the Japanese have the discipline and determination to recover rapidly from the disaster. The stimulus to the economy of the billions of reconstruction yen will see to that. Whatever you might think about the protectionist instincts of the Japanese politicians and economists, the world needs a strong Japanese economy, and on a human level, the long-suffering Japanese people now deserve some good fortune.
Try as I might, I can’t think of any silver linings for Pakistan, Afghanistan, North Korea, any number of African nations, and for the people of Palestine, Somalia and Yemen. But trust me, they’re out there if we look hard enough. And I’m looking.
I’ll end with one more piece of bad news that has nothing to do with the world and everything to do with me. A couple of weeks ago I turned sixty. The bad news for me is that unless I emulate Jeanne Calment, the lady in Arles who lived to be one hundred and twenty, I have less time left on the planet than I have already spent. The good news is that I’m approaching a time when I never have to wear a suit again, when people forgive me for repeating myself and forgetting things, and when courteous youngsters offer me a seat on public transport because of my advancing years.
Well, the last one’s a bit far-fetched, I agree. But the best thing of all is that despite the aches and pains of old sports injuries and other self-inflicted debilitation, there is one part of me that – albeit perhaps in a state of delusion – I feel is working better than ever. That’s my mind. And the joy of being sixty is that provided I look after yourself, I will hopefully have decades of sense-making and constructive thinking to look forward to before Dr Alzheimer comes calling, plus even more decades of memories and experience to fall back on.
That’s a serious silver lining!
Wherever we live, we should cherish our local historians. People who toil away on a labour of love to show us how previous generations in our home towns lived, loved and thought. Who set up local museums, and write books that will never give them a financial return.
Local history is a counterpoint to the grand generalisations that we learn at school, in popular history books and at the movies. It enables us to link directly to the past by telling us stories about the streets, squares and meadows we know well. It reminds us that for most people and for most of time, life was about getting by. Surviving great events maybe, but most of the time living quiet lives. Doing our best to improve our lot, and that of our nearest and dearest.
For the past twenty years or so our home in England has been Weybridge, a sleepy dormitory town to the South West of London. It boasts one of the most expensive housing estates in the country – St Georges Hill – and no, we don’t live there! Henry VIII built a palace nearby, traces of which survive today. It’s a genteel kind of town, somewhat yuppified in recent years as well-heeled families have moved out from London to take advantage of its easy commuting distance. It boasts a wealth of greenery, a river – the Wey – running through it, and a plethora of ponies, Range Rovers, green wellingtons and Barbour jackets.
A hundred years ago it became host to an industry that still thrives in England. Hugh Locke King, a local landowner and automobile enthusiast, brought 2000 labourers from all over the country to build the world’s first banked motor racing track – Brooklands. And for the next thirty years racers from all over Europe came to Weybridge to risk their lives hurtling round those steep banks, and sometimes coming to a fiery end.
Today, Brooklands is host to Tesco and Marks and Spencer superstores, to a few high-tech companies and to the Mercedes World showroom and test-drive area. All that remains of the old race track is a museum and bits of the concrete banking – ravaged and crumbling. The track is said to be haunted – go close to it at night and you might still hear the screaming of engines. Perhaps the ghosts of some of the many drivers who lost their lives in the days when the only protection was a leather cap and goggles.
Brooklands Museum is not just a shrine to motor racing. You will find one of the retired Concordes there. And in a shed you can visit a World War II Wellington bomber salvaged from a Scottish loch.
Why? Because Brooklands has another claim to fame. It was there that A V Roe, an early aviation pioneer, is said to have made the first powered flight in the United Kingdom, five years after the Wright brothers made their landmark flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
Roe’s success led to the area inside the track becoming one of the major centres of the British aviation industry. And that co-location was to have consequences for Weybridge and its neighbour, Walton-on-Thames, far beyond the annoyance caused by the noise and crowds on Saturday race meetings. Many of the great names of early aviation started at Brooklands – Sopwith, Roe’s company AVRO, and Hawker, the company that became one of the mainstays of Britain’s air war against Hitler’s Germany.
The aviation industry became one of the principal employers in Weybridge right up until 1986, when British Aerospace, the successor to those pioneering companies, closed down its factory.
Last time I was in the UK, I happened upon a short and unprepossessing book while browsing in my local bookstore. Called Raiders Overhead, by Stephen Flower, it is a chronicle of the experience of Weybridge and outlying areas during World War II.
By 1939, the Hawker factory was at full stretch producing the Hurricane fighter. The Hurricane, along with the Spitfire, was one of Britain’s principal weapons against the German Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain. So not surprisingly, Brooklands, which was well-known to pre-war German racers, became a prime target for the Luftwaffe as it sought to destroy Britain’s aircraft manufacturing capability. And that meant that Weybridge came in for special attention throughout the war.
Raiders Overhead contains a mass of technical information about the capabilities of the aircraft on both sides, about air defence techniques and about the bombs that rained down on the area with terrifying regularity.
What made the book special for me was the narrative – day by day – of destruction inflicted on streets I know well. Streets where I drive, shop, visit friends. Where my kids went to school. Houses, literally on my doorstep, wiped out. Families killed or not killed at the whim of fate.
And the eyewitness accounts.
The stoic description of an 82-year-old veteran of the Boer War and the First World War whose his house – no more than two hundred yards from ours – is shattered as the gun turret of a British bomber crashed through the roof and ends up on his bed. Of a Hawker manager crawling out from under a table during a raid to find an unexploded bomb sizzling in front of him. Of a mother placing her husband’s steel helmet over their baby to protect him from the shrapnel. Of a shelter full of female factory workers wiped out by a direct hit. Of shrapnel embedded in the headstones at a cemetery where a loose bomb fell. Of a shopkeeper whose hair went white overnight after he and his family were caught up in a blast in Walton. Of cows mysteriously dying, only for vets to discover that they were eating debris from the V1 flying bombs that rained down on the area in the latter part of the war.
All this in sleepy Weybridge and Walton.
There are other towns and cities that had worse stories to tell. Weybridge lost 119 civilians, and another 750-odd wounded. A far cry from the East End of London, Dresden, Stalingrad and Tokyo, whose losses were in the tens of thousands.
But this was a story of my home town. About people whose descendants most likely rub shoulders with me at the counters in Waitrose, or walk their dogs in the same parks. And that’s why Stephen Flower’s book is special to me. As I walk around Weybridge, and look at the sale signs on the windows of beleaguered clothes shops, or stop by Starbucks for a cappuccino and overhear complaints about the local library shutting down thanks to cuts in council spending, I’m reminded that this is a town that has known far darker times than any but the most elderly residents could imagine.
And that’s why we should cherish and encourage local historians everywhere. They give us a sense of perspective. Most of them have no political or ideological axes to grind. They see it as their task to document lives past – the history of people trying to get by.
Living as I do in Bahrain, of course I’m interested in the political and social background to the present troubles. But equally I want to understand what was here before the tower blocks, highways and land reclamations. About the lives of traders, pearl divers and fishermen. And about why Bahrain is dotted with cemeteries throughout the island. And what the island was like when it was blessed with underground water and covered with date palms.
These things matter too. And they should matter to everyone who lives in a town, village or settlement that has voices from the past. Because if we stop and listen to those voices from time to time, perhaps our lives will be richer for stepping out of the moment, and remembering that we are not just creatures of our age and our personal worlds, but part of a continuum that will roll on long after we’re gone.
And perhaps, if we’re going through a rough time, thinking about the past beneath our feet will make the present easier to bear.
Here’s a column I wrote recently for the Gulf Daily News. It appears in today’s edition.
“In the long-gone days of my youth, whenever a fellow adolescent was found guilty of some misdemeanour – public drunkenness, vandalism or some similar anti-social act – the cry would go up: “Bring back national service! That’ll teach them discipline!”
National service in the United Kingdom – compulsory service in the military – was abolished several years before I came of age. In some countries, most notably in Switzerland, a country that hasn’t fought a land war for centuries, it’s still a requirement. Despite growing opposition among those forced to freeze half to death up in the Alps playing war games when they could be at home playing Internet games, Swiss advocates of the tradition still claim that national service brings people together from a wide variety of backgrounds and creates bonds that last for a lifetime. Maybe they’re right, and perhaps it’s just the military bit that’s not necessarily appropriate for the modern age.
Recently, I’ve been talking to Arab friends both in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia about ways of dealing with youth unemployment and, at the same time, instilling the work ethos and discipline required in the workforce of any successful economy. One acquaintance, Riyad, suggested that Bahrain would be an ideal place to launch a different kind of national service scheme for its youth – national civil service. He envisages compulsory call-up of young people to serve the country in contributing to infrastructure and public maintenance projects. He wrote:
“I have long advocated a type of compulsory civil service stint (similar to the military draft), where for two years one is put through a rugged “on the job” training programme that would inculcate productivity skills, and other skills needed in the labour market. This could be done through requiring that the draftees pick these skills up working on public service projects, such as building roads, buildings, bridges, or fixing equipment, etc”. He goes on to say:
“It would be critical, however, that the skills they are taught relate to what is in demand in the job market, and hopefully ones they would be willing to do once they leave the service, with reasonable salaries. We have to keep in mind that foreign labour gets tickets, lodging, and food that Bahrainis may need to be in cash, and somewhat better quality.”
Riyad also suggested some form of public-private partnership could manage the programme. I believe that he makes some very good points. To develop his theme, would it not be worthwhile if Tamkeen considered the possibility of using some of its revenue to subsidise schemes in partnership with the corporate social responsibility programmes of major companies in Bahrain?
With a little creative thinking, both government and the private sector could devise activities that could benefit not only the young people involved but the companies themselves. For example, how about a phone company using young people to teach the older generation to use their smart phones more effectively, and to use the Internet to speak to their offspring in far-flung paces? How about banks training youngsters in money management and then sending them to the schools to pass on their knowledge? What about construction companies and municipalities training people in horticulture and putting them on to community beautification projects? There could also be a military aspect – training young people in search and rescue, thereby enabling the military to take a more active role in disaster relief in the region.
Of course, the devil is in the detail, but a year or two of service either before university or after graduation for every young citizen is surely a better option than the boredom and frustration of unemployment experienced by many. Bahrain, as another friend pointed out, could once again lead the way with a creative approach that could be adopted throughout the region.”
I actually wrote the piece before things went critical here in Bahrain. But in the light of all that has happened since, I think that the idea of bringing young people together from all backgrounds to work on public projects between leaving school and going to work, or upon graduation, is still a good one.
Even if there is no work to go to subsequently, the experience they will gain will serve them well. It will take them out of their comfort zones, and give them a record of solid achievement to present to prospective employers. It could also be a good way to accelerate social reconciliation in the coming years.
Even better, would it not also be a good approach to binding together the local and expatriate communities if foreign school leavers were given the chance to take part, perhaps as gap year volunteers?
If had the money, I would probably think seriously about choosing a broad-based temporary employment scheme over expanding the staff of the Ministry of the Interior with 20,000 jobs for life. But I doubt if those applying for the new ministry jobs would agree with me.
Robin Barratt from the Bahrain Writer’s Circle was good enough to ask me to share some thoughts with Circle members on blogging. This was a dangerous move on his part. Firstly because he was asking this of someone who is very fond of the sound of his own voice, and when in full flow can come over as a cross between Fidel Castro and the speaking clock. Secondly because blogging is one of my favourite occupations. Not a good mix for a 15 minute chat.
So here’s an expanded version of that talk – more in Castro mode than would have been appropriate when addressing a small gathering.
I’ll start by managing some expectations.
I have only been blogging for about a year. I’m not what you would call a professional blogger. I don’t have an audience of thousands. I have no desire to make money from my blog, although money has come my way as a result of it.
I am not an expert on the subject, and I doubt if I ever will be. The point, for me, has always been the writing. So I can only talk about blogging from a personal perspective, and share some of the things I’ve learned along the way.
Why Blog?
I originally started to blog for one specific reason. I run a business here in Bahrain. When I started, very few people knew about my company, and fewer still about me. I saw blogging as a good way to project myself – what I believe in, what I know, the way I think. Why? Because in the Middle East, personal relationships are even more critical than in any other part of the world – anything you can do to make yourself appear less anodyne has to be an advantage.
So I thought that a good way to reach out to people beyond the bullshit they may or may not read in brochures and websites was to write about subjects that might interest them. I would then email them a link to the piece and follow up on the phone.
This worked to an extent, but not as much as I hoped, because you still to get people to follow the link and read the piece. Also people don’t like being bombarded with emails, so the lesson here is that this is a technique that works, but you need to use it sparingly, and make sure that you pack a punch in your writing. And it’s very important to give them a very good reason in the email as to why they should read your stuff.
As time went on, I started expanding the scope of my writing. I moved from blogging on a company website to starting my own blog. The agenda moved from a specific business focus to a wider, more personal look at the world around me. And that’s when the fun really started
Let’s now look at some of the practicalities. Remember, I’m not a guru. I can only talk about what works for me. There are many people that know far more about blogging than me. You can find them on the web, and you can buy their books on Amazon.com
Choosing a Host
The two most common ways of getting your blog site up and running are to use a hosting site, or doing it yourself – in other words building your own website.
I chose the former. Why? Because it costs nothing and you can have a site in minutes. I use WordPress. It’s easy to set up, and you can select from a wide range of pre-built templates. I went for a template that was clean and sober – rather like me, I like to think!
But there are some weird and wonderful alternatives. The only problem is that your template will be shared by many others. If you have a few dollars and some basic technical skills, you can pay for the right to customise the template. But I don’t bother. The only thing I care about is the words.
There are several other popular hosts – Blogspot is WordPress’s major competitor. Also, if you really want to impress with the visuals and functionality, you can build your own site. There are many companies selling web sites out of the box. If your intention is for your blog to be part of a larger site that, say, sells books or training, this might be a better option for you than a one-size-fits-all host like WordPress.
Developing a Focus
Depending on what you want to achieve with your blog, I think it’s important to have a focus.
I defined my audience as educated, open-minded people both from the Middle East and beyond. Particularly people who, like me, have an interest in politics, history and social issues. I have tried to write about the Middle East from an international perspective. I have also tried to be balanced and objective, but not to be afraid to express my own feelings and emotions on issues I feel strongly about.
The tension between personal feelings and clarity of opinion has been one of the most stimulating aspects of writing the 59steps blog – especially in a region where untrammelled opinion is not always encouraged.
So I have a focus that works for me. If you’re thinking of starting a blog, you too might find it useful to think about what, why and for whom. But don’t be surprised if your focus changes over time.
There are many reasons why that might happen. Changes in your life and personal priorities. Interaction with your audience. Striking a balance between what interests you and what seems to strike a chord with your audience. But in the end, it’s your journey and your choice.
If you want to make money, you need to find a formula that drives as much traffic to your site as possible. You can earn royalties on referrals to e-businesses such as Amazon.com. You can also make money with paid advertisements through sites like Google Adsense. A good source of advice for commercialising your blog is Dailyblogtips.com. Check out this article: http://www.dailyblogtips.com/ways-to-make-money-online-with-website/.
For me, blogging is more about providing perspectives on current events and trends – what the newspapers call “op-ed”, or opinion editorials. I do care about gaining traffic, but largely because I have a big ego, and it can be soul-destroying to pour your thoughts into words and be read by one man and his dog.
So let’s now look at how you can attract traffic to your shiny new site.
Getting Traffic
Once I got to the point where I didn’t really care about winning friends and influencing people, I set about finding an audience.
Here are the ten techniques I have used:
- I use the social media. Every time I post a piece, a taster automatically comes up on my Facebook page. Also, the piece gets posted to my Twitter site. Both Facebook and Twitter have substantially increased my traffic.
- I use an email list – not one bought commercially, but a list of friends and associates. Occasionally, if I write a piece that I think is particularly powerful, I send a specific email to my list alerting them. The creates a big spike in traffic whenever I do it, but again, it’s a technique to be used sparingly unless you’re prepared to piss people off, or unless your list consists of a lot of people you don’t know.
- I try to form relationships with other bloggers. I have links to other blogs on my site, and they reciprocate. So traffic comes to my site from theirs.
- I use a technique called guest blogging. I have a good relationship with www.mideastposts.com. They are a blog of blogs for the region. They have a number of contributors, and I am lucky enough to be one of them. The arrangement I have with them is that they can use any post from my site. They don’t pay me, but they do provide a link to my site and rather a flattering profile of me with each article they publish. Their model is the Huffington Post, the mega-site that AOL recently acquired. I get a lot of traffic from this source. I like being associated with them because they have a variety of lively content both from Arab and expatriate writers that you would otherwise need hours of browsing to find.
- I encourage people to subscribe to my site. This way, subscribers get an automatic email that alerts them to a new post. I have a number of subscribers, and as a result each post usually has a minimum number of readers.
- I post regularly. The more you post, the more you get picked up by search engines like Google. If you search for 59steps in Google, you will probably find my site as Number One.
- I include a lot of links on the site. The search engines raise you up their rankings if you do this. Including links is one of the techniques used in Search Engine Optimisation, a dark art designed to make your site more likely to be picked up by searches.
- I am fairly careful to include a number of categories and tags with each post. These are the words and phrases that the search engines pick up on when they deliver search results. So if I was writing about Egypt, for example, I would include tags like “Tahrir Square”, “Hosni Mubarak”, “Egypt uprising”, and categories like “Politics”, and “Middle East”. Google and the other search engines then use a combination of these terms to match search criteria.
- I find it useful to reserve my heavyweight posts for days when people surf the internet most. So I tend to post long pieces on a Wednesday or Thursday. There’s often a tipping point when people pick up on a post by re-tweeting it or “liking” it on Facebook. This can happen a day or so after the original posting. So by the time the post does the rounds, you’re into the weekend both for the Middle East and the rest of the world.
- Finally, I set myself an schedule for posting. Regular posting is not just a matter of attracting the search engines. You will not build an audience if you post one piece a month, even if it’s a stunning revelation about the sex life of your least favourite politician.
Other “Rules”
There are other “rules” you should be aware of for driving traffic to your site. I mostly ignore them.
The first is that you should use images to back up your posts. I do this occasionally, but only if they are my photos, or they are specifically selected to make a point. Frankly, I’m not sure if an article about Tahrir Square really benefits from yet another photo of protesters with banners. But if I’m reviewing a rustic restaurant in Bahrain, then yes, it definitely helps to have a photo of the unfortunate fish you’re about to consume.
The second rule is that you should pander to the supposed limited attention span of the average web reader by keeping your post relatively short and sweet. I write frequently write columns and articles for newspapers and magazines. Naturally, the editor sets a desired word count – usually between 600 and 1000 words. I’m happy to write within those constraints, and it’s good discipline to be able to do so.
But for my blog, the inner Fidel Castro often emerges – like the alien exploding from John Hurt’s chest. The joy of blogging for me is that I have no constraints. If I wish to drone on for pages, I do so. If you, the reader, give up on me after a thousand words, that’s fine by me. If I end up boring people to death, that will be reflected in the traffic to the site and a dwindling number of subscribers.
One “rule” I do abide by is to encourage comments, and then always to acknowledge them. If someone has the interest to comment on something you have written, then the least you can do is to have the courtesy to respond. If I ever get to the point when hundreds of people are commenting on each post, perhaps I’ll have to review that policy. But at the moment I might get five or six comments per post, and often those comments add a lot of value to the subject, so why not start a dialogue?
What’s in it for me?
Since I started writing the 59steps blog, I have posted over 150 articles on subjects ranging from politics, religion, culture, education, business, books, media and even the odd restaurant review.
So, you might ask, what’s in it for me?
Well, I’ve spent the past 50 years absorbing stuff. Reading newspapers and books, watching movies and TV, travelling, meeting people – good, bad and ugly. For the past thirty years I’ve been in one business or another, mostly as a manager or owner. Although writing has been central to my career, it’s always been for a specific purpose – marketing communications, proposals, business plans, email.
About three years ago I decided it was time to make some sense of some of the stuff I’ve absorbed in my life before it turns into a formless mush. So I started writing about what I see, hear and read about. And I found that writing about the subjects closest to my heart is a good opportunity to weave my knowledge and personal experience into articles that are potentially of interest to others.
For example, you will find in many of my pieces – particularly those about politics – historical parallels to current events. You will also find me quoting conversations with friends – most of them much wiser than me – to illustrate a point I am making. And you will find references to episodes in my life – stories in other words – that serve a similar purpose.
There’s nothing special about this. It’s what millions of writers do. And there’s nothing special about my life.
But for me, the joy of blogging is that it gives me a disciplined framework for writing. I force myself to write at least four pieces a week, and in order to do that I have had to acquire a writer’s mentality.
Instead of watching the world go by, sighing, and returning to a business and social agenda, I find myself taking a much more critical view of events as they unfold, of what people tell me and of what I experience personally. And that’s because I know I have at least four articles to write every week, and they had better be interesting – at least to someone!
Another major reason for blogging is that you can do it for as long as your brain works – in fact, writing is one of those things that keeps your brain working well into old age
So you could say that I’ve now entered my next career. Not a hobby – because I do earn money from my writing – but an activity in which the input and output is entirely under my control, and in which money is not the prime motivation.
And that’s a good place to be.
I returned to Bahrain a couple of nights ago after a two-week holiday in Thailand and Malaysia. The morning I left, tanks from Saudi Arabia were arriving. Within days, Pearl Roundabout had been cleared, the monument demolished, and checkpoints established at key locations around the island. The country was, and continues to be, in a State of Emergency.
Pearl Roundabout is now no longer a roundabout – more an intersection. The government has made strenuous efforts to explain the reasons for the crackdown. In particular it has blamed Iran – and its Lebanese client Hezbollah – for inspiring the uprising. It has cited acts of violence against the police and members of the expatriate community – especially those from South Asia – as evidence of the malevolent intent of an extreme element among the protesters.
Stories and letters in the local media describe the politicisation of school teachers, and of staff at the Salmaniya Hospital – the main public hospital in Manama. They talk of verbal and physical abuse of patients, including a Pakistani policeman who alleges that he was set upon and beaten up by a gang of young people when he was returning home after a shift outside a foreign embassy. He claims that he was then dumped at the hospital by the youths, who boasted that they had killed him.
It is not difficult to find the protesters’ side of the story on the social media – Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Claims of police brutality abound. Videos purporting to show the police beating people up, helicopters with mounted machineguns in the sky over Manama, pictures of the dead – characterised as martyrs – and images of grieving relatives.
The local media has been full of criticism of the international press – particularly the BBC – for unbalanced coverage of the events of the past eight weeks. Nick Christof of the New York Times has come in for strong criticism for his reporting of the initial violence. Predictably, he and his Facebook page have become a magnet for admiring opponents of the government.
I have no idea about the veracity of the competing claims. I only know that much damage – personal and economic – has arisen out of the conflict.
I arrived at an airport that was relatively empty. There were few people entering Bahrain off my relatively full flight from Kuala Lumpur. Most were transit passengers. The arrivals hall seemed much less busy than usual. I took a taxi home and discussed the situation with the driver. He was at pains to assure me that things were much better now – getting back to normal. But the cost to himself was severe. There had been many days when he had been waiting for up to five hours for custom.
On the journey to my apartment, we passed through four checkpoints. It didn’t take long, because there was little traffic on the road. The checkpoint nearest the airport was manned by uniformed traffic police, and one member of the internal security force clad in a black jumpsuit and matching balaclava – a sinister touch.
The taxi driver told me that the curfews had been gradually relaxed – it is now 11pm to 4am in certain areas. I asked whether the Saudis – who normally flock across the causeway in their thousands for the weekend – were returning. He said not.
When I got back to the apartment I scanned the newspapers for the past two weeks. They were full of stories designed to restore confidence in the economy. Announcements about new infrastructure projects, plans for thousands of new houses, possible help for businesses that have been badly affected by the turmoil. There has been no attempt to downplay the economic damage, but as you would expect, the government is doing its best to spread good news.
Leaving aside issue of public order – the situation seems to continue to be tense in some areas, especially in the villages where many of the protesters live – you can see that the private sector will be suffering for some time yet. This is especially the case for the hospitality industry and for the small traders who rely on tourism for much of their income.
But on the upside, there are likely to be major opportunities for contracting companies as the government starts spending some of the $10 billion aid package it received from the GCC.
In the long term, Bahrain must transition from the State of Emergency into a new normality. Whether the government will address the political issues that were at the root of the initial protests remains to be seen. My guess is that, like Saudi Arabia, it will focus first on the grievances based on economics – housing, education and jobs. There may be some political changes, but they are unlikely to go as far as many of the protesters have demanded – and certainly not to the point that the ruling family cedes control over the fundamental levers of power.
The views expressed at the Pearl Roundabout are not likely to subside any time soon. If claims of Iranian support for the uprising are valid, it is possible that we will see action in the future that bears the Iranian trademark. But Bahrain is a small island with a relatively small population. It is neither Beirut nor Baghdad. It will be difficult for an organised resistance movement to keep their activities secret.
The overwhelming feeling on the island, particularly among those who have no axe to grind, is sadness. Yes, of course there is plenty of anger as well. Bahrain was no paradise – the issues that have come to the boil have done so before, and the government surely knows that it will happen again unless they can address them in a constructive way. But the sadness, that I share, is to see how people have jumped to the sectarian barricades, and also to see ordinary people living reduced lives because of the economic impact of the recent events.
Looking forward, new laws and state handouts will not heal the wounds. There must also be a process of dialogue and reconciliation. The trick is to bring people to the table even while the country remains under a State of Emergency. That will not be an easy task. Harder still will be to return to the development agenda – to build a nation of entrepreneurs, critical thinkers and wealth creators.
The New Bahrain is a sadder and not a gentler place. But the way to build a better Bahrain is to develop the talents of its people, change mindsets about the meaning of work and move beyond a culture of entitlement. Achieve those objectives, and political change will evolve of its own accord. The alternative is slow decline. And nobody wants that.
You do not need to be a paid-up Saudiologist to pick up Abdullah Al Jamili’s message in his article When Habits Become Faith, originally published in Saudi Arabia’s Arabic daily Al Madinah, subsequently republished by the Arab News.
In his article he describes the famous experiment in which scientists conditioned monkeys to behave in a counter-intuitive way based on the experience of their peers without going through the experience themselves. He goes on to say:
This experiment is representative of life for some human communities in the Third World countries, especially those that are always led by tradition and fear of the unknown.
Many of our habits and practices are down to an inherited fanaticism, individuality of opinion and many other things instilled in us by our ancestors.
They have become our faith and our religion with which we kill ambitions and slaughter initiatives. Whoever tries to jump over these traditions, whether at an individual or social level, will be castigated and accused of being a heretic.
Many officials in our government departments worship these obsolete rules and regulations and would not dare to violate them. In fact, they will defend them without asking for the reason behind their application.
The traditions and norms of the people are usually governed by the circumstances of their time and place. Do we have to impose these obsolete rules on the new generations who are living in different circumstances? Is this part of an innate social conduct or are these rules imposed on them by some sectors of society in order to control them and keep them suppressed?
In order to build a better future, we have to unchain all the fetters of the past and also the illusion of what we call “the specialty of our society.”
Al Jalili takes pot shots – couched in cautious language – at several big targets.
The first is the resistance of the social and religious conservatives to change – those who use a mixture of cultural tradition and interpretation of the Hadith – the reported acts and sayings of the Prophet Mohammed – to impose practices and social norms that the writer clearly thinks are inappropriate for the time we live in.
The second is the resistance of government officials to new ways of thinking – officials who cling to ways of doing things “because that’s the way we’ve always done it”.
Finally, he has a dig at his fellow citizens who believe that their country, as the custodian of the Holy Mosques and a nation blessed with abundant natural resources, is for these reasons special, and by implication superior to other nations.
Al Jamili’s frustration with conservatism is not unique to Saudis.
I was speaking to a Malaysian Muslim friend the other day. He told me that many young Muslims feel that state and society are continually telling them what they should not do, rather than what they should do. Muslims in Malaysia find themselves banned by law from doing things that are permitted to fellow citizens of other faiths. The state does not give its Muslim citizens the right to exercise their personal choice and act according to their own moral code in matters mandated by their religion, yet gives Christians, Buddhists and Hindus that opportunity. As a result, many Muslims, according to my friend, feel like third class citizens.
Which really goes to the heart of the matter – to what extent should the state and its institutions act as an intermediary between an individual and his or her conscience – and ultimately his or her Maker?
Most countries make laws whose purpose is to prevent citizens from harming themselves and others – physically and economically – and over centuries their legal systems have evolved into a minimalist and secular approach. Others enact laws for the same purpose, but use a moral code that goes much further in dictating acceptable behaviour. When that moral code is based on the word of God but subject to the interpretation of man, it is rarely the word of God that is questioned, but the way in which human interpretations of that word serve the higher purpose.
Which I think is what Al Jamili is talking about. Given King Abdullah’s recent allocation of increased funding to the religious establishment, there seems little chance that the fundamental relationship between Islam and the Saudi state will change any time soon.
Perhaps he will have more luck changing the mindset of those change-resistant government officials, and even in convincing his fellow-citizens that they are not so special.
“We don’t know who these people are”, were the words of a US congressman when expressing reservations about arming the rebels in Libya. Yesterday I had a long conversation with a Libyan friend. As a long-standing opponent of Muammar Gaddafi, I expected him to be cheering on the rebels. Not so. To summarise what he told me:
- Gaddafi was telling the truth as he saw it when he said that the rebellion was being fomented by Al-Qaeda. My friend, whom we shall call Ibrahim, believes that there is a strong element of extremist support underpinning the rebel resistance. He also said that many of the people in the videos from Benghazi did not appear to him to be Libyan.
- Benghazi is seen in Libya as a poor relation to Tripoli. Many educated and talented people who grow up there end up in Tripoli. This is not to insult the people of Benghazi, but Ibrahim’s view is that Tripoli is the intellectual centre of Libya. It is highly Westernised. Many of the other cities are less so.
- Gaddafi has strong support in Western Libya – not just a few thousand die-hard fanatics, as is often portrayed by Western media, but hundreds of thousands who have benefited from his regime and would class themselves as loyalists.
- If Gaddafi and his family fall, there is a danger that an Iraq-style civil war could follow, especially if Gaddafi loyalists find themselves disenfranchised, as was the case with Baath Party members in Iraq.
- The Libyan exiles, some of whom expect to return to a post-Gaddafi Libya, are not an impressive bunch. They are out of touch with modern Libya, and would be unlikely to play a leading role in a new government.
- There a various ethnic groups in Libya – Bedouin, Berber, people of Mediterranean stock – from Turkey, Cyprus and Malta. There is a serious danger of conflict between these groups, with the possibility – in a state of anarchy – of ethnic cleansing.
- Even as things stand, a negotiated solution would be the best outcome. Gaddafi is a very tough customer, and if backed into a corner would create as much havoc as possible as he went down in flames.
I am reflecting Ibrahim’s views – right or wrong – because we need to be aware of the possibility that even as the rebels advance on Tripoli, there may not be a happy ending – at least not for some time. Ibrahim did make the point that the average Libyan is not an extremist, and that there are many smart people in the country who want to be part of the Mediterranean and wider Arab community. He last visited Libya only a few weeks before the uprising, so whatever you might think about what he says, we should be aware that his experience is not that of an exlie who hasn’t set foot in Libya for decades.
It seems to me that it would be very unwise for the countries enforcing the no-fly zone simply to leave Libya to its own devices if Gaddafi falls – and even more unwise to put Western boots on the ground. If there are to be boots on the ground, they should be Arab boots, preferably in the form of a peacekeeping force.
While the rebels are making ground, the coalition – in exchange for continued support – should be extracting promises from the revolutionary council in Benghazi about human rights, restraints on those who would wish to take revenge, and respect for all citizens, regardless of their loyalty.
The last thing Libya needs is for one despotic and repressive regime to be replaced by another.
The regime of President Saleh of the Yemen appears to be in its death throes. By coincidence, I’ve just read The War that Never Was, a book about the Yemen civil war by Duff Hart Davis.
In 1963, the thousand-year-old Yemeni Imanate was deposed in a coup engineered by the Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdul Nasser. Nasser’s agenda was to unite the Arabian Peninsula into a pan-Arab federation led, of course, by Egypt.
The coup did not drive the Imam and his forces out of the Yemen. In a four-year civil war, the new republic held the plains, with massive Egyptian military assistance, while the Imam fought a guerilla war against the Egyptian forces from the mountainous regions of the country. He and his commanders spent most of that period living in caves, bribing tribes and sallying forth against Egyptian incursions.
The War That Never Was describes the campaign by a group of British and French mercenaries to assist the Imam’s forces. The British group never numbered more than forty. They were recruited by a former SAS soldier, Jim Johnson, with the tacit support of the British Government, but under conditions of complete deniability.
Johnson recruited the team from various sources. People he knew from his club, recommendations from former comrades and people he met on trains who seemed the “right sorts”. Most of them were former SAS members. Funding came from Prince Faisal of Saudi Arabia, subsequently to become King Faisal. Various British luminaries were in the know, including the founder of the SAS, David Sterling, Duncan Sandys, the Foreign Secretary and Alec Douglas Home, the Prime Minister. The UK’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, provided deniable support. Johnson led the operation from a pokey little office in London, and the operational base was in Aden, then the capital of the British Protectorate of South Arabia.
If we think that the political landscape of the Middle East today is bewilderingly complex, this book reminds us that things were no less byzantine in 1963. Prince Faisal backed the mercenaries because for good reason he feared Nasser’s designs on his country. America recognised the newly-proclaimed republic because it wanted to cozy up to Nasser in order to reduce his reliance on the Soviet Union, who themselves had designs, using Egypt as its proxy, on the mineral resources of the Middle East. Britain supported the intervention because it, with good reason, was afraid that Nasser had designs on Aden. But it could not admit to its tacit support of the mercenaries because it did not wish to fall out with the Americans. The Shah of Iran supported them because he was also afraid of Nasser’s burgeoning empire. The Israelis provided covert airdrops of weapons and ammunition, unknown to the Saudis, who would have withdrawn support for the operation if they had discovered Israel’s involvement.
Many of the mercenaries did not see themselves as such. They justified their actions on the grounds that they were acting in the national interests of Britain. That didn’t stop them from accepting handsome monthly paycheques for their efforts.
Their brief was to provide training, logistic support and tactical guidance to the Royal armies. The “armies” – under the command of relatives of the Imam and a rag-tag band of tribal sheikhs – were tribesmen bound together by a desire for weapons and gold. Over the four years of the insurgency, Johnson’s men inserted themselves into caves and villages, and set about organising the Royalist attacks on the Egyptian army. Hart-Davis estimates that 20,000 Egyptians were killed during the campaign. At one stage there were up to 60,000 Egyptian Military personnel in the Yemen, supported by MiG fighters and Ilyushin bombers piloted by Russians. Nasser later described the campaign as “my Vietnam”.
The fighting was brutal. The Egyptians used poison gas bombs on Yemeni villages, killing indiscriminately – something of a revelation to me at least, since I was under the impression that gassing civilians in the Middle East was Saddam Hussain’s exclusive domain. The mercenaries organised ambushes with extensive use of landmines, and sent regular dispatches to base reporting thirty killed here, fifty there. They lived in caves with their Yemeni comrades for months on end, and were constantly bombed and strafed. Amazingly, there were only three British deaths and one French casualty in the whole campaign.
Hostilities finally ended after the Six-Day War in 1967, in which Israel destroyed the Egyptian army and air force – as well as the Jordanian and Syrian air forces – and annexed the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights.
The insurgency – or counter-revolution, depending on how one looks at it – had two effects that are not often remembered today. By tying down such a huge part of the Egyptian armed forces for four years, the Royalists and their foreign assistants made it impossible for Nasser to push on into the rest of the Arabian Peninsula. Also the effect on the morale of the Egyptian army seems to have played a large part in their poor performance in the Six-Day War.
The extent to which the subsequent failings of the Egyptian army can be blamed on the Yemen experience is debatable – as Hart-Davies points out, they were poorly led. The fact that the “poor bloody infantry” were buried in the Yemen – while the bodies of officers were flown back to Egypt – tells its own story.
The War That Never Was is a chronicle of cynicism, intrigue, brutality, greed and courage. It’s well worth reading if, like me, you’re a student of Middle East politics or military history. It’s also a reminder that the Yemen is in for a tough time whether President Saleh stays or goes. Although the country has a more advanced infrastructure today, it has a host of problems that in a sense are even worse than those facing the country forty years ago – acute shortages of water, the same old tribal divisions, a separatist movement in the South and Al Qaeda training camps in the mountains.
Most of the protagonists are now dead. But I happened upon a personal connection in the most unlikely place. I recognised one of them as an elderly member of my golf club – a quiet and unassuming gentleman who never breathed a word about his military past.
One should never make assumptions about the elderly.
I feel sorry for Khaled Al Molhem, the Director-Genral of Saudi Arabian Airlines, because I sense a scapegoat being made ready for sacrifice. A month ago I wrote rather an unkind piece about Saudia’s customer service – centering mainly on Saudia’s declaration at a sales conference that it has decided to re-invent itself as an organisation dedicated to customer service – as if an airline exists for any other purpose apart from making money for its shareholders.
At the Jeddah Economic Forum, Mr Al-Molhem had the unenviable task of defending his airline against delegates who lined up to take pot shots. As the Arab News reports in Saudia faces flak at JEF:
“The Saudia chief blamed the Kingdom’s substandard airport facilities for the airline’s poor services, saying they are inter-related. However, he pointed out that the renovation of airports in Jeddah and Riyadh would change the situation in the near future. He said Saudi Airlines has been incurring heavy losses as a result of low-ticket fares for its flights to domestic destinations. “There has been no change in domestic ticket fares for the last 16 years. Prices of everything have gone up and the salaries of our employees have increased. So we are suffering losses,” he said.
Many Saudia passengers Arab News spoke to are highly critical of the airline’s services. One regular flier said he has stopped flying Saudia because of its poor customer and in-flight services. He said Saudia staff should change their attitude to passengers. “We are hesitant to travel by Saudia due to the arrogant and uncivilized behavior of its staff which starts from the check-in counter queue itself. We tried to approach the duty supervisor in the terminal to lodge a complaint, and we found him super arrogant,” he said.
A Jeddah-based Saudi executive complained about poor in-flight services. “Whenever I fly Saudia, I find seats in the aircraft not reclining properly, music system failing and the food not up to the mark.” She also complained about flight delays and the inability of some staff to communicate in English.”
Saudia passengers will not be surprised by the comments in the article. But what surprised me was the rather inelegant picture of Mr Al Molhem swigging at a water bottle. Now we British are familiar with newspapers at home using unflattering images of politicians their editors don’t like – pictures taken in settings designed to make them look ridiculous, jowly images of ministers who have had a few lunches too many, and use of lighting and contrast to make them look like “something from the night”.
But the Arab media seldom uses these techniques, especially on dignitaries who are part of the establishment, as Mr Al Molhem is. So unless the picture of him is the selection of an inexperienced sub-editor, I fear that things might not look too good for him in the long term.
I have no view on the gentleman himself. It is his job to deal with decades of decline in his organisation, and that’s not an easy task. It’s natural for the customer to blame the boss, but when the media starts to turn on him, the pressure really mounts.
Following on from my previous post about the welfare state in Saudi Arabia, I had a quiet laugh when I read an article in today’s Arab News. In “Who deserves the payout”, the reporter has gathered opinions from the street about groups of individuals who feel that they should benefit from the King’s generosity.
There were two deserving cases that caught my attention.
The first relates to fines for traffic violations caught by Saher, the camera system installed in Saudi Arabia last year:
“Following the royal decree on Friday ordering the payment of two additional monthly salaries to all employees working in the public sector, I received messages from a number of readers who called for those employed in the private sector to also be included in the move. They also highlighted a few other points.
Many of them said the money they receive from the kind royal gesture would be spent paying Saher traffic fines.
They said Saher hunts people in streets and alleys. They said Saher uses all its means to take money out of their pockets and that this money ends up in the hands of a private company whose sole aim is to make money.
They said the traffic police support this system and they asked whether it is the objective of the traffic police to deplete their pockets?
Maybe citizens will be saved via a royal decree, particularly since it is still a controversial issue among scholars and does not have the approval of the Shoura Council.”
In a country known for the cavalier antics of its drivers, the Saher system was always going to be unwelcome among those who delight in jumping red lights, weaving through traffic at high speeds and treating the highways as racetracks. As in other countries, the penalties increase if the offender doesn’t pay the fine within a specific period.
Many drivers ignore the penalty notices and accumulate a number of fines. The trouble is, when they apply for certain government services, they find that they are unable to obtain them until they settle their Saher dues. The religious controversy over the system relates to the opinion of the Grand Mufti, Sheikh Abdulaziz Alasheikh, that the practice of increasing the fines following non-payment within the original period amounts to usury, which is forbidden under the Sharia.
No matter, it seems, that the system is reported to have substantially reduced traffic fatalities in some regions. My experience is that the roads are calmer since the cameras appeared, although you still encounter cars coming from behind you as if from nowhere, headlights flashing and racing past you with inches to spare on the outside hard shoulder. It’s just that they do it from a lower starting speed!
I have a feeling that His Majesty is unlikely to be sympathetic to the pleas of serial Saher offenders, but nice try guys!
The second suggestion I enjoyed was the one about students getting low grades being disqualified from receiving their monthly stipends:
“Then there are those students who do not receive their monthly stipends because they have received academic warnings or their grades have dropped. Many of these students and their families have no income except the monthly stipends. Why should they be deprived of it? Their low grades may be because of emergencies. They are, however, Saudi citizens and we have to stand by them.”
Well yes, there are obviously extenuating circumstances that lead to students getting low grades, but if there were no consequences arising out of underachievement, perhaps more students, especially those studying abroad, might be tempted to settle for an inferior degree. Considering that the government is investing up to $500,000 in every undergraduate who studies abroad, it seems to me that there is a bargain to be kept.
Having said that, it would be far better to support the failing students with advice and guidance before thinking of penalising them. I have heard that this aspect of the King Abdullah Scholarship Program is less than optimal.
In any event, if a student fails to make the grades and doesn’t finish the course, he or she now has the cushion of the unemployment stipend.
Just two examples of people not really grasping that with privilege should come a modicum of responsibility – something many of us learned when we were growing up.
This morning my wife and I were eating breakfast at our holiday resort in the lush island of Phuket. As we looked around the restaurant at our fellow guests – most of them European – I noticed one striking feature about them. None were smiling, let alone giving any other sign that they were enjoying themselves. In fact they were going about the business of eating with a look of gloomy determination. True, it’s difficult to smile when you’re eating. But even in breaks between foraging, couples and families were sitting at tables mainly in stone-faced silence.
Then I looked at the Thai staff, whose job it was to keep the coffee flowing, clear away the plates, set the tables and replenish the mountains of food from the central buffet. They were smiling. Not just the professional smile of the obliging waitress, but amongst themselves. Laughter, good humour, enjoyment of each other’s company.
Their wealth would be a fraction of the average holidaymaker’s. Yet they looked like the ones on holiday.
A few weeks ago I was visiting a Saudi friend in his house. He doesn’t live in a palace, but it’s a spacious, well-furnished and comfortable home nonetheless. As we sat drinking coffee and discussing recent events in the Middle East, the conversation turned to reported wealth of Hosni Mubarak and Zine Ben Ali. Why did these men feel the need to amass their millions and billions? For the sake of their families? As insurance against their overthrow? Or was it because they could? Because extreme wealth was a mark of their success?
If they wanted to provide for a comfortable retirement in exile, surely tens of millions would be enough, not tens of billions?
“You know, sometimes I think that wealth is the punishment of Allah”, said my friend. We swapped quotations on the subject of wealth from the Quran and the Sermon on the Mount. Each has a different take on camels passing through the eye of a needle, but the meaning is more or less the same.
His remark often comes to mind, especially when I think of his country. For most of the Saudi Royal Family, wealth is not a novelty. Only the very oldest of them, King Abdullah for example, can remember a time before their country was blessed – or cursed – with great wealth. Most members of his family were born into wealth and privilege. So for them, wealth is not a matter of having a roof over their heads and food on the table. It is a matter of competition between peers – who has the largest palace, the best private jet, the most successful business, the most prestige.
As a family, they will also be aware of those who are jealous of their wealth, and have been very adept at seeing off threats to their pre-eminent position in the society that they conquered by the sword and forged by largesse from the ground. They are as politically astute as any ruling class. They saw off Gamal Abdul Nasser’s attempt to absorb them into a secular pan-Arab empire. They have seen off – so far – the threat of Al Qaeda and its predecessors. And now, as the youth of the Arab world rises in revolt against autocracy and what they see as a lack of personal and political freedom, the King and his ministers have responded to unrest in their country by disbursing billions in welfare programmes. Hundreds of thousands of new homes, salary increases and a minimum wage for government employees, increases in education budgets, and a stipend for the unemployed.
The calculation is that the King can say to his subjects: “you’ve never had it so good. Why would you want political freedoms when the state provides so much for your comfort and well-being?”
And they have a point. For most of remembered history a people would look at times like these as golden days. They would not expect a say in how they are governed. They would rejoice in prosperity and peace. They would thank God that they could feed their children and live in a country not threatened by invaders or civil war.
That has been the achievement of the Saudi Royal Family over the past eighty years of the Kingdom’s existence. Many other countries similarly blessed with mineral resources have felt the curse of their wealth – Iraq, Iran and Libya for example.
The Saudis have maintained their social equilibrium not – as is commonly believed – through autocracy, but by creating a consensus within the competing stakeholders of their country – their own family, the tribal leaders, the religious leaders and the business leaders. By striking a balance between these interests, and ruthlessly acting against individual and group dissent, they have maintained their own power and by and large allowed their people to live in peace.
But the people of Saudi Arabia no longer live in social and cultural isolation. Millions watch Al Jazeera’s coverage of events in Egypt. Hundreds of thousands study in countries where people can say what they think, believe what they like, dress as they wish and change their leaders with a vote in a ballot box. Many will learn from the finest Western minds while thanking God that the society they will be returning to is free of the moral depravity of the West. Others will yearn for the freedoms that their fellow-students from America, Britain and Australia enjoy – the right to vote, to protest, to aspire to be president or prime minister, to blog, write books and make movies without fear of censorship.
So will the King’s new initiatives be enough to satisfy his people? Will they take the view of a friend of the eminent Saudi blogger, Ahmed Al Omran, who cannot understand why there is a section of society that seeks political reform when the government has done so much to assure the welfare of its people? Or will the reformers resort to more extreme measures to ensure that their voices are heard? Ahmed’s post is here.
The King’s measures have been widely welcomed. He is loved and respected by the vast majority of his people.
But niggling questions remain.
Will increased benefits for government employees further disincentivise Saudis from seeking careers in the private sector, which many see as insecure? There are only so many government jobs that Saudi Arabia can create. So will the private sector become even more populated by foreigners, further undermining the government’s efforts to put its people to work?
Will Saudis prefer to remain unemployed now that they receive monthly welfare payments? Many of the unemployed of Saudi Arabia are not like those in Western countries – the strong family structure in the Kingdom means that there are not so many youngsters living on their own in social housing. Unemployed sons and daughters tend to remain within the protective bosom of the extended family. Will the Kingdom’s social problems – drug abuse for example – be exacerbated through increasing numbers of bored and aimless youngsters?
Watching my fellow holidaymakers tuck into their breakfasts in gloomy silence reminds me that wealth is not the secret of happiness. Most of us – once we have achieved a modicum of comfort – need more out of life. We need risk, excitement, success, and yes, failure. We need to walk without our parents being on hand to stop us falling. We need to make our own choices according to our individual consciences. We need to find joy in our journeys as well as in reaching our destinations.
I’m sure that this is what King Abdullah wants for his people, too – but not at the cost civil disorder. Whether his recent measures turn out to be enough to satisfy those in his country who want more than a comfortable life from cradle to grave remains to be seen.
It’s funny how in times of trouble you stumble upon stories that put current events in context. Stories reminding you that trouble is not just about individual events, disasters and unrest that erupt and subside – it can stretch over generations and seem like the curse of whatever god you believe in.
A few days before I left Bahrain on holiday, I stopped by a bookstore in one of the malls. I do this often – sometimes to pick up an English newspaper, and sometimes to browse the new titles. This is a habit that sometimes causes annoyance to my wife, because I end up buying books at a much higher cost than I would have to pay if I ordered the title through Amazon. But the beauty of a bookshop is the ability to happen upon something that it would not occur to me to buy if I browse online. And I actually have no problem with paying more to bookshop because I believe that the world would be the poorer if there were no bookshops – places where one can pick up a title, look at the cover, read a few paragraphs.
The book I happened upon that day in Jashanmal bookshop was Atlantic, by Simon Winchester. I had read two of his other books. The first was about the eruption of Karaktoa – a vivid chronology of the greatest volcanic eruption in living memory, and its terrible consequences. The second was The Surgeon of Crowthorne, about an American surgeon and millionaire locked up in Broadmoor hospital for the criminally insane after committing a murder in London. W C Minor devoted decades of his life to the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. Only towards the end of his life did the editors of the OED discover who he was and why he was unable to come to Oxford to receive an award for his contribution.
But this article is not about Winchester’s latest book. I mention his previous books in passing because they are worth reading. When I went to the counter to buyAtlantic, the cashier told me that I could also choose one of a selection of books at no cost. The offer of “buy one, get one free” is standard at bookstores like W H Smith. But this deal was not advertised. The cashier just asked me to take one.
The book I chose was In the Valley of Mist, by Justine Hardy. It’s a personal chronicle of the Kashmir conflict by a British journalist who has spent much of her life in India, and who still calls Kashmir home. She writes about the conflict through the lens of her longstanding relationship with a Kashmiri Muslim family.
Hardy talks of the beauty of the lakes, meadows and mountains of the region. Of the Srinagar houseboats to which the administrators of the Raj would retreat for the summer season, later followed by wealthy tourists and latterly by the dope-smoking backpackers in the sixties and seventies. Of how Hindus and Muslims lived happily together, albeit in the shadow of the 1948 partition that divided the province between India and Pakistan. About the separatist movement that became hijacked by jihadis looking for fresh battlegrounds in the wake of the departure of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan.Of how the Indian Army brutally suppressed the separatists and stamped on incursions by the jihadis.
She writes about the recruiting techniques of the jihadis as they selected and seduced young people to join the training camps on the Pakistani side. About how Kashmir slowly transformed into a Muslim-dominated region as the Pandit Hindus fled to conflict – many into transit camps where they still live today. How a vibrant college for women that turned out doctors and lawyers was slowly stifled, as families judged that it was no longer safe to educate their women to be anything other than mothers and housewives.
But In the Valley of Mist is no polemic against radical Islam, or indeed about the brutality of the Indian security forces. It’s about a family, the Dars, to whom she became close before the conflict started in 1989, and how they adapted and evolved amid the chaos that gripped their society.
The narrative comes to a climax with the devastating earthquake of 2005. She describes how the family patriarch, after decades as a merchant and houseboat operator, redefines the meaning of his life by leading relief efforts throughout the region. How corruption and attention-seeking international NGOs hampered the desperate attempts to reach those survivors most in need of aid.
The book is full of heartbreaking and poignant anecdotes. Of Mohammed Dar’s efforts to obtain hot water bottles for those freezing on the mountain slopes. Of the tailor struck down by agonies of itching, the physical manifestation of the stress of living through the conflict. Of attempts by an Indian general to rebuild trust between the Army and civilian population in the wake of the earthquake.
I was reading Justine Hardy’s book as soldiers took to the streets in Bahrain, as Colonel Gaddafi turned his tanks on his people, and as thousands were swept away by a tsunami in Japan.
I knew little about Kashmir except as a holiday resort we were thinking of visiting in the 1980’s. I also knew it as a flashpoint in the relations between India and Pakistan. But it’s only when you hear stories about human beings and their suffering over decades – about lives that were and never will be again, and about life’s tendency to visit disaster upon disaster upon a single people – that you remind yourself that suffering for many is not a single event. It can be a life-long curse – whether or not you believe that a divine hand is involved. After Hardy’s book was published, the region suffered yet another curse – millions displaced and made homeless by the floods of 2010.
The experience of suffering is no less for an individual even if that suffering is confined to family, friends and local community. I would never ask anyone to compare their suffering with that of others and tell them that they are still luckier than some. I would only say that suffering on a massive scale has massive consequences, and that when we consider those consequences we should try to understand the causes before we take actions, make policies and form opinions. Hardy’s book served that purpose for me, not that anything I say or do will make a difference in Kashmir. All this from a book I didn’t pay for.
If you live in Bahrain, you can probably still get a copy of In the Valley of Mist from Jashanmal. If not, it’s available on Amazon here. Alternatively, you can support your local bookstore!
Either way, it’s a compelling read.
I wrote yesterday in praise of Wikipedia, and its role in facilitating freedom of thought. But it is not only words that lead us to take a view on current and past events. Images are equally powerful.
Static or moving images tell us stories that enchant, inspire, horrify and sometimes radicalise us. Here in the Middle East, state-sponsored media have been more or less brushed aside in the battle to influence and persuade.
Conventional media can select the pictures and video clips that they wish us to see. The internet gives us raw, unmediated material and lets us form our own opinions about what is in front of us. If we have a pre-formed opinion, we can look only at websites and material that support our view, and we can ignore the rest. Likewise we will go to a particular TV channel because we believe that the owners, editors and reporters “think like us”.
The internet has brought about a massive power shift from state-regulated media to bloggers, website operators and pressure groups that can be, and often are, accountable to nobody.
All this is obvious if we stop and think about it. It is the means by which grass roots movements promote their causes, activists organise their revolutions, and missionaries of all hues recruit for their movements.
Control of the media is the means by which governments can rewrite history. Stalin’s favourite habit was to airbrush those who had fallen out of favour from official photos. Mubarak’s photo editors move him from the back to the front of a procession of politicians walking with Barack Obama. The US marines hoisting Old Glory on the captured mountaintop at Iwo Jima did so in a reconstruction of the event. The marines that got there were shot at on the way down, and it took another 30 days before they finally wiped out the Japanese resistance.
That power is with us all today. We can demolish state-sponsored myths, and create our own.
I can alter an image, build a false story around it, and, if my story is powerful enough, it will go viral and arrive at millions of desktops within a matter of days. It might spark riots in Islamabad or conspiracy theories in New York. I can select pictures from the past and present them as fresh images showing a current event. Or grab pictures from one location and claim they are from another. Thus it was with the pictures of a vandalised mall in Egypt purporting to be from Seef Mall in Bahrain. So I, too, can rewrite history in the minds of my readers if they are unwise enough to rely only on my words.
I do not presently see any equivalent to Wikipedia as a source of images. I can go to Flickr or to YouTube and search a subject. I am then at the mercy of highly individualistic metatags – the information that those posting the videos and images use to describe their material. It’s up to me to select my search terms and hope for the best. I might then have to trawl through thousands of items before I find what I am looking for. It’s the same if I use the Google Image feature.
Unless there are techies out there who can tell me otherwise, there is no structured way to categorise and review images and videos. I am aware of new technology that can search videos based on an analysis of their actual content – words spoken and images used. A crude version of this technology picks up a large area of pink or brown flesh and interprets it as a pornographic image. But there is nothing in the commercial arena that allows me to pick up the napalm clip in Apocalypse Now, or go straight to Hamlet in a Shakespeare film intoning “to be or not to be”. I rely on some bright spark inserting a tag that enables me to get there.
So for now, we must rely on the information provided by others to find what we need.
Aside from the difficulty of gaining perspective on what we see in the conventional and new media, there is another reason why a structured vehicle to search for images and videos would be of benefit to us all.
Images enable us to compare and contrast – between present and past, between one culture and another, between one worldview and another. I have a particular agenda in saying this. I am passionate about history. Not just the grand sweep of events, but the minutiae of life. I yearn for a resource where I can search in one place, say, for Dorset (where I went to school), set a date range of 1860-1880, a topic of agriculture, and find a hundred pictures – each with a consistent narrative – relating to that search. Or if I was researching the American Civil War, I could find all the available pictures of Gettysburg in one place. At present I can find such images, but I might have to trawl through the website that uses them to find out their context.
About five years ago, I digitised around ten thousand family photos. The earliest dated from the 1860s. The latest were taken at the dawn of the digital camera. I did so because I was concerned that family pictures should not be a resource exclusive to those who happened to inherit them. I wanted my siblings, their children and my children to be able to see all the pictures that existed of their parents, grandparents and great grandparents. I wanted future generations to see that they are part of a social and family continuum.
I also digitised as many documents as I could find relating to the people whose images I had captured. So those future generations have, if they happen to be interested, a record of the past as it relates to them. I even recorded a five-hour video interview of my father months before he died. I asked him about his time, his attitude to world events, and the kind of life he lived as a child and a young adult.
What if a million people around the world did the same, and agreed to contribute their archives to a central resource? What if photo-libraries, governments and academic institutions agreed to contribute their material to the same resource? And what if we went further back than the age of photography, and placed in the same repository images of paintings, sculptures, drawings and other works of art back to prehistoric cave paintings?
I collect ancient coins. One of the reasons I do so is that I am fascinated by the stories they tell. The messages that the Colonel Gadhafi’s of their age sought to send to their subjects on one side of the coin. The changes in portraiture on the other side reflecting fashion, society, culture and belief.
Every culture, in my view, is enriched by a knowledge and understanding of its past and its origins. And today’s cultures are increasingly disinclined to spend days reading books to gain that understanding. We live in an era of videos, pictures and soundbites. Many of us read books only because we have to – to pass exams, to learn how to do something, to make life or business decisions. Many of us who read books for other reasons do so to relax – we chose fiction of one sort or another, because we want to experience another person’s perspective rather than learn and experience for ourselves. For the same reason we watch movies and TV. And if we want to find out about the world, our first preference is to watch a three-minute video on YouTube, a half-hour documentary on the History Channel – or go to Wikipedia. When I say we, I don’t mean everyone – but I do mean an increasing number of people whose world revolves around TV and the internet.
This is the world we live in. Billions of voices, websites, newspapers, TV channels, pictures and videos competing for our attention. Each with its own perspective, agenda or worldview. What reaches us most effectively is down to the survival of the fittest – or richest.
If it is possible to build a Wikipedia in ten years, is it not also possible to build a disciplined, structured resource that delivers images – both moving and static – in a similar manner?
In post a few months ago, I provided a link to two photo galleries showing the Hajj. The first dates from the late 19th century. The second is a collection of photos showing the 2010 season. Would it not be superb if a student of Islamic history could access all images of the Hajj throughout the centuries in one place?
Equally, would the people of Northern Japan not wish to show their grandchildren how life was in their towns and villages before a tsunami erased that life forever?
Maybe because I’m of an age in which one looks back as much as forward, I am becoming more conscious of the importance of remembering the past. I believe that today and in the years to come we have a unique opportunity to view our past and connect with it in a way that was never possible before. We have the chance to collect our history before some future historian has the chance to reinvent it. Perhaps that’s an impossible dream, because people will always try and put their slant on current and past events. But at least we have the chance to give future generations the ability to rebut those “authorised versions”, because they have a wide range of easily accessible material at their disposal.
Surely this is worth the efforts of a host of volunteers and a few million bucks of Bill Gates’s and George Soros’s money?
There has been much debate recently about the teaching of history in British schools. Traditionalists like Michael Gove, the new Minister of Education, lament the fact that compulsory history education ends when pupils reach thirteen. Others complain that history teachers are poor at explaining the narrative of history – what happened and why, what led to what, and what effect individuals had on the societies in which they lived or ruled. Others still say that there is too much emphasis on social history without explanation of the context.
Traditional history teaching – before the advent of the National Curriculum – always focused on narrative first. My generation learned a set of key dates by heart from an early age – starting with the Battle of Hastings in 1066, when William of Normandy defeated the Saxon King Harold and proceeded to conquer England. The narrative skeleton continued through to the present day, citing key moments of English history – the signing of the Magna Carta, the Black Death, the Wars of the Roses, the English Civil War, the unification of England and Scotland, and onwards to the conclusion of the Second World War.
I might argue today about the selection of those landmark events and dates I was made to memorise – but not about the teaching approach. Most of them are with me still today. I don’t need to go to Wikipedia to find out the meaning of a rotten borough.
Equally, it is important to understand how our forebears lived, because history is about humans, not just wars, political movements, revolutions, kings and queens. But if I want to understand why my ancestors emigrated to America to escape starvation in the blighted potato fields of Ireland, I need to understand why Ireland faced starvation in the first place. And it’s not enough to know that 40% of Europe’s population died in the Black Death – it’s equally important to understand that the depopulation of England ended for ever the feudal life of the average English peasant.
I mentioned that I didn’t need to go to Wikipedia to remind myself of the essentials of English history. But I do see Wikipedia as one of the greatest boons of the internet age. I use it frequently to discover things I don’t know – and not just history. Jimmy Wales’s objective to create a resource available to speakers of every major language in the world is perhaps the most civilising project of modern times – comparable to the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, and to the liberating effect of the translation of the Christian bible in the early days of the Reformation.
The scholars of Baghdad took works of philosophy and science from all over the known world and translated them into Arabic, only for those works – and many new discoveries and schools of thought flowing from them – to be subsequently translated into Latin and used as the feedstock of the European Renaissance.
The translators of the Bible ensured that never again would the layperson need to rely upon the interpretation of an established priesthood in order to understand the meaning of the scriptures. The scriptures could henceforth speak directly to the individual.
This is not to say that Wikipedia – like any body of knowledge assembled from many sources – is not flawed. But it is priceless as a jumping-off point to many other sources of knowledge. It is then up to you to come to your own conclusions on what you see and read – as my history teachers encouraged me to do.
We live in a world in which many of us are told what to think, and sometimes ordered what to believe – by teachers, by priests, by governments and by parents.
Historians of the future might cite the social media as the most influential promoter of free speech in this century. But free speech does not necessarily mean free thinking. I believe that those historians will point to Wikipedia as the means by which millions will have learned to think for themselves, and to escape the shackles of conventional wisdom.
And it will be through free thinking that our civilisation will move to a better place.
“They created a wasteland, and called it peace”. These were the words that the Roman historian Tacitus placed in the mouth of a British chieftain after the conquest of his country by the armies of the Emperor Claudius.
It would be unfair and inaccurate to call Bahrain – in the wake of the recent crackdown – a wasteland. But the chain reaction of events following the initial crackdown on February 13th has possibly destroyed for ever the society that Bahrain’s rulers spent decades trying to build.
Hillary Clinton condemns the recent violence. Key stakeholders – a minister, members of the appointed Shoura Council and members of the elected Lower House of Parliament – resign and disassociate themselves from the government. Expatriates, on the advice of their embassies, are lying low in their houses or heading to the airport to leave the country on special chartered flights.
Claims by the media in Bahrain about the correct behaviour of the security forces are immediately rebutted by a flood of pictures and YouTube videos appearing to show arrests, rough handling – including shooting – of civilians, damage being caused to vehicles, and helicopters with machine guns.
Under the State of Emergency, the government has the power to ban trade unions, NGOs, demonstrations and political societies. It can arrest citizens, close newspapers and monitor “phone calls and correspondence”.
Some businessmen are quoted as being relieved that the clampdown has happened – as well they might if they feel that their businesses are dying on their feet.
But Bahrain should now consider the possible cost. A nation polarised as never before. The possible exit of many foreign investors, leading to even greater unemployment among Bahrainis. The departure of foreign experts on whom many companies rely. The destruction of those businesses that advocates of the clampdown are so keen to preserve. The prospect of Bahrain becoming dependent for years to come on handouts from its wealthier neighbours – its independence eroded with every new bail-out.
Even if the process of dialogue continues, and some sort of settlement emerges, there will still be many people so radicalised by the handling of the crisis that they will perhaps never accept any settlement that retains even a vestige of the status quo.
There have been tragic misjudgements on both sides. The crackdown in February that set the escalation in train. The attempts by protesters more recently to assert control over key highways.
So now the die is cast. Only with difficulty can Bahrain still claim to be “Business Friendly Bahrain”. A few weeks ago I wrote about the relative merits of Bahrain versus Dubai as a place to live and do business in. I voted for Bahrain. But with the best will in the world, I couldn’t vote the same way as things stand today.
The problem for the government right now is that although they can impose law and order, it will be very hard for them to silence the opinions of those who have been offended and radicalised by the violent crackdowns. They can disrupt or shut down the internet, but without it, it is almost impossible to maintain the advanced physical and societal infrastructure that Bahrain has built. Yes, it can administer a police state, with constant monitoring of communications and mass arrests of dissidents. But it cannot keep secrets.
Recently, in Death, Lies and Videotapes, I argued that the game changer of the 21st century was the decreasing ability of any government to keep the lid on information it doesn’t want the world to know. Wikileaks and the new media have seen to that. So the price of crackdown and lockdown is precisely the police state that the multitudes in other parts of the Middle East are striving to dismantle. The flip side of governments not being able to keep secrets is that individuals can’t either.
If we accept that the international edifice that the government has been trying to build has been severely disabled in the short and possibly medium term, what is the way forward?
If the government acts quickly there are still creative options. Although it is difficult to conceive of any form of reconciliation between the polarised factions for as long as the State of Emergency is in place, the government can start planning for a different Bahrain. It can unilaterally implement the proposals for constitutional change that were on the table before the crackdown, and attempt to bring opposition groups back to the table.
It can develop a new vision of the country in which development always considers the interests of its citizens rather than those of a small group of powerful business leaders. A vision that relies far less on expatriate labour and far more on the expertise of native Bahrainis. A vision that promotes a different system of education designed to equip Bahrainis to be wealth generators rather than recipients of entitlement. A system that equips them to export their expertise throughout the Middle East.
Having announced that new vision, it can also say “yes, we know there has been injustice. We know that we have made mistakes, but we are where we are. It is time to move on”. It can then announce a Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the lines of the commission in South Africa, in which all parties took the opportunity to describe their experiences under apartheid – to apologise, to forgive and to move forward.
Would such moves work? Not without much wisdom, common sense and forbearance on all sides. And perhaps not, period.
But it seems to me that the alternative facing Bahrain is as a nation that increasingly looks like the poor relation of its wealthier neighbours, and without the political freedoms that its citizens have come to expect. It is even possible to conceive that it could end up as an independent state in name only – in reality a client of its big neighbour across the causeway.
I hope that this is not the outcome. Bahrainis are a proud, independent-minded and talented people. In the long term, a police state is not an option. The government does have progressive thinkers. Sooner or later their voices will dictate the agenda. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
Nobody who loves Bahrain wants it to become a wasteland.
Minutes after I posted the previous piece, I went to the BBC website and learned about the crackdown. It changes nothing that I wrote. Whatever the justification for the clearance of Pearl Roundabout, it is bound to polarise opinion even further, and intensify emotions.
The situation just got even more critical. I can only wish everyone in Bahrain a safe passage through this crisis.
I write this from a holiday resort in South East Asia, far from the Bahrain I left hours before the tanks and armoured personnel carriers rolled across the Saudi-Bahrain causeway on the invitation of the Bahrain government. The holiday was planned many months ago – little did I realise at what critical point I would be leaving the country.
Since I left I have received a number of messages providing updates on the security situation. I have also heard from people on both sides of what is now an increasingly tall fence.
To give you a flavour, here is one of many messages within the expatriate network – this from a Canadian:
“I will keep this short and sweet – STAY INDOORS AND AWAY FROM YOUR WINDOWS!!!!
I have had a Canadian email to say that his friend was pulled from his car by the Pearl Roundabout last night so please limit your travel and be smart and avoid the Pearl Roundabout completely. I have had other Canadians write to say that they have young men wearing masks and waving machetes roaming outside of their homes.
There is a lot of military activity at the moment all over the island including areas around Jawads, Al Osra and Al Jazeera supermarkets in addition to location around Bahrain Financial Harbour, Manama and pearl roundabout so it is best to STAY INDOORS TODAY! There are also reports that roads leading to the airport are closed – for the latest updates please refer to the UK Embassy Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/ukinbahrain
The UK Embassy has noted this past hour that there are problems with the mobile phone network so you might want to connect with people to give them your landline phone number so that you can stay connected.”
This from a British friend on Facebook:
“Steve and Others: Check out the FaceBook Page – We Are Bahrain – to get a good picture from the Pro Government Supporters. The BBC keeps on quoting that 70% of the population are Shia and thus implying that they are all Anti Government. When will someone get it into their thick heads that the majority of the population love the present system. Only a few want to change. DEMOCRACY”
And from the opposition side, there is a PowerPoint presentation doing the rounds that accuses the government of using foreign nationals within the police force of acting as agents provocateurs by attacking schools and universities, in the hope that Sunnis will blame the Shia. The presentation also claims that the same elements are carrying out acts of violence in the Shia villages. It denies claims by Bahrain TV that Shia are attacking Sunni mosques. It asserts that the 2002 constitution was “twisted without the approval of the nation”, and that opposition groups, which it claims include both Sunni and Shia, refuse to engage in dialogue with the government until they receive convincing guarantees of good faith. It ends by citing the misdeeds and failings of a number of ministers – some of whom have already been dismissed.
These are opinions, perceptions and reported personal experience. I report them here – dispassionately I hope – to illustrate how the fences have become progressively higher over the past month.
Since the GCC forces arrived in Bahrain, the Iranian bogeyman has also surfaced with renewed vigour. The Iranians have described the CGG intervention as “interference”. An editorial in Saudi Arabia’s Arab News described Iran’s attitude as hypocritical. Bahrain has recalled its ambassador from Tehran for “consultations”.
Here are a few thoughts on the current situation from my limited perspective:
In my opinion, Iranian influence in recent events is unlikely to have played a major part in the unrest. People I met in Pearl Roundabout last week gave me the impression that they have no allegiance to the Iranian regime. In fact, I got the feeling that if they had been Iranian they would have been with the green protesters after the 2009 Iranian elections.
However, the Iranians have never been afraid of taking advantage of an unstable situation. Logic suggests that offers of help and support from their end to those in the island who seek regime change might welcomed by a limited section of the opposition as a means to an end. One only has to look at the “support” they have provided elsewhere to understand the implications.
Once the GCC announced its $10 billion aid package to Bahrain – and a similar amount to Oman – it would be inconceivable that there were not conditions attached. Those conditions may well have related to limits in the scope of the reforms which the government is contemplating. To put it bluntly, the Saudis and their allies in the GCC would never write a blank cheque to a new regime of unknown composition.
So by accepting the aid, it is conceivable that the Bahrain government has also reduced its room to manoeuvre. And by doing so it may have made the GCC intervention inevitable given certain trigger events.
As to those trigger events, the government will have seen blockages of main highways as the point at which protest transforms into insurrection. Until that point, there had been a number of demonstrations targeted at specific areas. After the initial violence in February, the government had accepted the permanent occupation of Pearl Roundabout, and had made no attempt by force to clear away the demonstrations in other locations. But once the protesters started to dictate – most notably at the highway running past Pearl Roundabout – what traffic could go where, alarm bells will have rang.
There will also have been increasing pressure from powerful businessmen who will have been seeing the Bahraini economy sliding towards meltdown. I have no idea about the truth or otherwise of the protesters’ claims of provocation. But whatever led to the increasing breakdown of the rule of law, the negative impact on business will have accelerated. Business owners, large and small, will be afraid that they are facing ruin.
So where do things go from here?
I wrote a few weeks ago about parallels between Bahrain in 2011 and Northern Ireland in 1969. Hopefully things have not got to the point where some elements within the protesters feel that they have to hunker down for a long campaign of violence and insurrection.
Bahrain is a much smaller country than Northern Ireland – it would be much harder for opponents of the regime to wage such a campaign. Over the hills and farmland of Northern Ireland, and in the streets of Londonderry and Belfast, it was possible for the IRA and the protestant militia to wage war for thirty years. Not so easy in Bahrain.
If the process of dialogue continues despite the restrictions of the State of Emergency, and results in real change that satisfies most interests, then all is not lost.
However, it is hard to conceive that any compromise will emerge that does not maintain the ruling family in a position of power acceptable to Bahrain’s neighbours. However, it is possible to imagine a new constitution that provides greater political power to parliament, addresses long-standing grievances and yet gives the King the ultimate power of veto. Such constitutional devices exist elsewhere. For example, the US president can veto any legislation presented to him by Congress. True, he is elected by the people of America every four years, and King Hamad is a hereditary monarch.
Nonetheless, a constitution in which there are checks and balances that secure the rule of law and prevent abuses of political and economic power while preserving the position of the hereditary monarchy must be an attainable goal.
But no settlement is likely to erase from the public memory the deaths and injuries caused in the recent confrontations. Forgiveness may be forthcoming, but people have long memories, especially in a region where events in Makkah and Madinah – and in Karbala – one and a half millennia ago remain fresh in the common conscious.
So agreement must come quickly, before further events can be added to the future folk memory.
I have many friends in Bahrain. I do not wish to see them killed, wounded or bearing fresh scars of hatred.
Things appear to be escalating in Bahrain.
Yesterday, there were confrontations between the police and protesters in the vicinity of Pearl Roundabout and the nearby financial district. I was turned back on my way to a meeting in the area, having been met by a large force of police heading on the wrong side of the highway away from the district. There has been coverage of the events locally, but international coverage has been limited to mention of the riots, and the playing of a YouTube video. I had seen the video earlier – it seems to have been issued by Al Wefaq, one of the main opposition political parties. Among other things, it appears to show a protester being shot at point blank range. It remains to be seen whether the guy was actually hit, or was hitting the deck to avoid being hit. This is one of the difficuties with YouTube videos – reality TV, but what is the reality?
Today comes a full page spread in the Gulf Daily News in which the Crown Prince lays out a programme of reform which he says has approved in principle. But he also warns that there will be no compromise on security.
This morning I received a British Embassy advisory warning British to stay indoors until further notice. The advisory also quoted “reports of protestors establishing roadblocks, and reports that the Saudi National Guard will enter Bahrain”. It’s hard to imagine the British Embassy passing on such reports unless they felt that there was a real possibility of Saudi intervention. If this happened, there would be serious and wide ranging repercussions.
I’m afraid I don’t have time for further comment on the current situation here in Bahrain, because I’m about to head to the airport for a scheduled holiday in South-East Asia. Given what is happening in Japan, it’s hard not to consider the possibility of being met by a cloud of radiation. Hopefully not, for everyone’s sake.
Anyone reading this from outside Bahrain should be aware that Bahrain is not Libya. There are many sensible people here, as well as some hotheads. Hopefully pragmatism and common sense will prevail.
And none of the man-made traumas in this region come close to what is happening in Japan in the wake of natural disaster. We should think of the victims, and pray for them.
Today’s explosion at the Fukushima 1 nuclear power plant in earthquake-shattered Japan will have the effect of amplifying concerns about the safety of the Bushehr nuclear power station, which lies only a few hundred kilometers downwind of Iraq, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Only four days ago Bloomberg ran a story about the shutdown of the plant and worries about its 30-year old cooling technology:
A shattered cooling pump at Iran’s only civilian nuclear-power reactor, forcing a shutdown during its initial start-up phase, has renewed safety concerns about the hybrid Russian-German power plant on the Persian Gulf coast.
The 1000-megawatt power plant at Bushehr combines a German- designed plant begun under the rule of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in the 1970’s and Russian technology installed over the last decade. Safety questions have raised concern among some nuclear-power experts and in neighboring countries such as Kuwait, which is vulnerable in the event of a radiation leak since it is downwind about 170 miles (275 kilometers).
“The rest of the world is depending on the Russian Federation for policing the nuclear safety of this reactor,” said Mark Hibbs, an expert on Iranian nuclear issues at the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace. The pump failure “raises questions about the decisions the Russians made to move forward with emergency coolant system that’s 30 years old,” he said.
The whole article is here. It points out that Bushehr “sits at the junctionof three tectonic plates”, and last suffered an earthquake in 2002. In the light of the current Japanese crisis, the statement by an American physicist that the risk from a modern nuclear reactor is “extremely low” should perhaps be questioned.
It seems that the plant is in no danger in its present shut-down state. But at some stage it will be fully operational. In the light of the Japanese disaster, a memo to the GCC Council and Iraq: would it not be sensible to revisit the issue with the Iranian authorities?
I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for national TV stations in Africa and the Middle East. Not because I’m transfixed by the content – in fact I can only manage about ten minutes of viewing at a time before I get the urge to flip on to the next channel. It’s largely because there’s always the chance of a hilarious surprise waiting round the corner.
A good example was the time when the credits came up at the end of a programme on Zimbabwean TV. A succession of large hairy hands appeared from the right of the screen holding pieces of cardboard with the names of the presenters and producer. Rather like one of those animated sequences from Monty Python, but with a real hand.
Speaking of Monty Python, John Cleese and company clearly had some admirers in Saudi Arabia. Back in the 80s the staple fare on Saudi TV was the news story in which the King or one of the senior Princes receives guests at some formal event. Each in turn kisses the royal shoulder and moves on. All the while a jaunty tune – seemingly at odds with the dignity of the occasion – is playing in the background.
The favourite ditty at that time was an old Yankee march called The Liberty Bell. It was composed in the late nineteenth century, and has been used for public occasions ever since – most recently the inaugurations of Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama.
But in the 70s and 80s The Liberty Bell was known around the English-speaking world as the opening and closing theme tune for the Monty Python TV series. At the beginning of every show, a few bars of the tune would be snuffed out by a stomping foot and a loud splat.
So it was hard to watch these agonisingly long sequences without waiting for the splat and thinking of dead parrots and the Ministry of Silly Walks. The only thing that kept me watching was a little game of “spot the prince” in which I tested my ability to recognise the dignitaries – usually with the family tree section from Robert Lacey’s The Kingdom open in front of me. Sad really.
Fast forward to 2011, and you can still see these ceremonies on national stations across the Gulf. Commentary such as “His Royal Highness Prince such-and-such today received the congratulations of the senior representatives of such-and-such on the occasion of such-and-such’s birthday.” Then followed by “In another development, His Royal Highness sent a telegram to the Emir of such-and-such on the occasion of the country’s National Day.” And so on.
I love the use of the phrase “in another development”. You would expect it to be used in connection with some momentous event. For example “this morning, Col Gaddafi’s forces continued to pound Zahwiya with tanks, artillery and air strikes. In another development, The UN Security Council scheduled a meeting in two days’ time to discuss the possibility of imposing a no-fly zone on Libyan airspace….”. But sending a telegram??
Yesterday, when thinking about this post, I sampled a few of the national stations. It’s pretty obvious that most of them still function primarily as the instruments of the state ministries of information. And pretty unsubtle instruments they are, too. I watched a story on the English-language Saudi TV2 about an injured soldier being evacuated from the Eastern Province to Riyadh. As he was being loaded on to the ambulance, a senior prince was seen next to him offering effusive messages of sympathy and encouragement. Such a fuss being made of a single wounded soldier struck me as rather odd. The fact that the presenter made no attempt to explain how the soldier was injured – and why – was even odder, though probably par for the course. The Ministry was clearly eager to show how well the Kingdom cares for its armed forces, but reluctant to draw attention to the cause. But I wonder whether if it was a coincidence that the evacuation took place the day after what was reported as a minor disturbance in Qatif. I’m sure that the average Saudi viewer is better at reading the subtext than I am. The same story appeared in yesterday’s Arab News.
Following that story there was a program called “Good Morning KSA”. Two chirpy young female presenters opened the show by telling us how we must start the day with a good attitude to life, and make sure that we didn’t utter any harsh words to our families or colleagues that we might afterwards regret. They also wanted us to avoid sleeping away the day, especially as we might miss prayer times. Dawn and dusk, they said were beautiful times of the day.
In the background was a garden, with the occasional jump-suited maintenance man wandering aimlessly past the window
They then introduced us to a more mature who was going to give us a cooking demonstration – something sweet for breakfast, they said. The motherly chef – bringiong to mind Mrs Doubtfire in a hijab – started rattling on about cinnamon muffins, and I moved swiftly on.
Back to Saudi TV in the evening, and another of those unforgettable moments. A comedy involving some awkward family situation. The usual rather gauche acting, or should I say overacting in the grand Cairo tradition. Rolling eyes, downcast expressions and hand gestures so vigorous that they dragged the whole body into an explosion of movement. But what made this unmissable – at least for five minutes – was that it was dubbed into English. Well, a form of English anyway. The characters spoke with very odd and almost indecipherable American accents in the style of a 50s Disney cartoon.
Onwards to Bahrain TV. As you would expect from a state-operated station, much of the content is about the current crisis. Patriotic tunes, animated national flags, chat programmes discussing the current situation, and the inevitable majlis scene. In this case, the King was receiving a report from Sheikh Nasser Bin Hamad Al Khalifa about his meeting with representatives of the youth of Bahrain. As the King addresses the Majlis, there is an English commentary, which ended by saying that Sheikh Nasser had written a poem for the occasion. A full thirty seconds of silence, before the Sheikh delivers his poem – in Arabic to his father, the King.
We then left the Majlis and heard a presenter delivering in English one of those statements that could only have come directly from the Ministry of Information. If you go to the Bahrain News Agency website, you’ll see an example of Ministry-speak. Streams of stilted, polysyllabic verbiage that you have to read at least twice to understand. Our presenter delivered it at breakneck speed. It was as if he couldn’t wait to get through it.
I checked Bahrain a couple of other times during the day. In the morning, an animated cartoon about as far in sophistication from the stuff your kids might see on Cartoon Network as a wooden cart is from a Cadillac. A chat show, in Arabic, again on the subject of the crisis. Even if you don’t speak Arabic, there is usually one sure way of telling the subject matter – wait for the word shabab, which means youth. If you hear it ten times a minute, you know what they’re talking about.
Later on there was a video of Sheikh Nasser’s meeting with the shabab. Not, as you might expect in the West, a round-table discussion or some form of focus group – though for all I know that might have happened elsewhere – but one of those typical conference formats. A large conference hall with a stage and podium. Rows of people with ID lanyards. In the front row, Sheikh Nasser with other dignitaries. A succession of young people would go up to the podium to say their piece. All in the full glare of TV lights and multiple camera crews.
It wasn’t exactly a forum conducive to debate. Later on there was some footage of demonstrations, and the inevitable flag-swirling mood music again.
Now I must point out that the intended audience for these little vignettes clearly was not the likes of me. And I would understand if the producers of these programmes were to take exception to the way I have described them. My purpose is not to get a cheap laugh or two about some content that we in the West might think was somewhat unsophisticated. I mean no disrespect to Sheikh Nasser, King Hamad and the rulers of Saudi Arabia. But I do believe that they are being let down by their national broadcasters.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Al Jazeera’s popularity, and the fine line its managers have to tread to maintain a reputation for objectivity. The good news for viewers is that the state TV stations make no pretence of objectivity in their content. They are with the state. So everyone watching knows roughly what they are going to hear and whose opinions will prevail. The content may be unsophisticated, but at least it’s unequivocal.
The bad news for the national stations and the bureaucrats feeding them with information is that many people look elsewhere to find out what is really going on in their countries. They look at the Arabic satellite channels, at the BBC, CNN and other international stations. And almost inevitably the content – in terms of production techniques and delivery – is far, far more sophisticated than what is available on the national stations. And if viewers don’t like what they see and hear on TV, they can always go to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
So whereas thirty years ago, the local TV audience had to rely exclusively on the national channels for their content, today they have a choice. I asked a Bahraini friend what was the general opinion of Bahraini TV among the population. He said that most people, if given the choice, watch other channels. And he added that even in the poorest areas of the island, there is ready access to satellite TV. From conversations I have had with Saudis, I get the impression that the same applies across the causeway.
So why do the national channels seem to compare so unfavourably with the satellite channels? Is it that these stations are starved of funding? That they have given up trying to compete for viewers with the likes of Al Jazeera, CNN and Cartoon Network? Are they resolved to stick to their knitting and seek to be nothing more than an outlet for government propaganda?
I come from the UK, where the BBC – the original state broadcaster – has, over the 90 years of existence, done a pretty good job of fulfilling the terms of its charter by providing content free of domestic political bias. Much – though by no means all – of its programming has been the envy of the world.
In the USA, there is no state broadcaster. The only organisation remotely resembling one is the Public Broadcasting Service, which is a network of not-for-profit stations funded by grants from a number of sources including charities, state agencies and universities. But the commercial networks produce a large quantity of vibrant content – as well as some unspeakable dross.
In countries such as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, to a lesser or greater extent controlled by ruling families, it would be unthinkable to adopt a model comparable to those in the UK or the USA. There must always be an outlet for official communications.
But it seems to me that there is such a gap in sophistication between the national stations and the satellite channels that the governments are effectively working with one hand behind their backs in trying to tell their side of the story.
Yes, in both countries, there is airtime for debate on controversial issues – far more than thirty years ago. But the dull, formulaic and often cack-handed way in which these stations put forward the official line tends, I believe, to work against the interests of their sponsors.
Even in countries like Bahrain, which have severe budgetary constraints, it should still be possible for a state TV channel to engage its viewers, provide them with a platform for their opinions and provide a high quality of content without sacrificing one of its primary functions as a mouthpiece for its government.
A lighter and more subtle hand on the government communications, combined with more creative and imaginative programming, would surely bring many viewers back to the national stations, and serve the long-term interests of the countries concerned far better than operating stations that many people simply don’t want to watch.
It has been three weeks since the protests in Bahrain reached their violent peak. Security forces cleared the Pearl Roundabout of protesters before dawn. The following evening, shots rang out, scattering a nearby procession and inundating Salmaniya Hospital with casualties, some fatal.
Perhaps sensing that any chance of a peaceful resolution of the crisis hung in the balance, the government backed off. It removed its tanks, armoured personnel carriers and black-clad security forces. The protesters came flooding back to the Pearl Roundabout.
Since then, there have been meetings between the government and opposition groups. An announcement of twenty thousand new jobs to be created by the Ministry of the Interior. The release of a number of prisoners. Demonstrations and counter-demonstrations across the island on a daily basis – all peaceful. One or two incidents of violence with sectarian undertones, but not involving the security forces.
As efforts by the government to promote national dialogue continue, opponents of the status quo across a wide range of opinion and interest have been attempting to form a common front.
The economic consequences of the initial violence and subsequent stalemate have been severe. The Formula 1 Grand Prix cancelled. Cruise ships excluding Bahrain from their ports of call. Conferences, a large source of income for the hotels, cancelled. A marked decrease in visitors from Saudi Arabia who cross the causeway for weekends of fun. Restaurants, traders and hotels reporting a downturn in business.
It would be unfair to say that Bahrain is in paralysis. But clearly there is a sense of “wait and see” that will continue until some form of national consensus emerges.
Since February 18th I have gone about my normal business without any sense of personal threat. There has been the odd traffic snarl-up caused by demonstrations. But by and large the city has continued to function. I had no desire to gawp at tanks and razor wire, and although I pass by the Pearl Roundabout occasionally, I have not stopped.
Last night, however, a friend offered to take me on a guided tour of the now-famous heart of the protests, and I found it impossible to say no. I spent about four hours at the roundabout, and here’s what I saw.
For Westerners who read this, I can best describe the scene as cross between a massive street party and Glastonbury with attitude. We parked up about a quarter of a mile from the roundabout, because the whole area is effectively a pedestrian zone. A few cars come in and out with supplies, directed by young volunteers with yellow fluorescent jackets. As we came closer to the centre, we passed by many tents. Each village has its own tent, and some are handing out free food and cups of tea from counters bedecked with slogans.
Pearl Roundabout is close to a major highway that links the island of Muharraq to Manama, and goes south as far as the Grand Prix circuit. All around the area, every available wall and underpass pillar is covered with paintings. Many refer to the current issues. Most have a strongly patriotic theme – one Bahrain, no Sunni, no Shia. The few remaining spaces on the walls have little inscriptions saying “reserved for ……”.
Ther area was thronged with people. Men and women wandering around carrying flags, or crowding around the booths set up by people wanting to make their personal points. There are symbolic coffins of those who died in the protests. A basket containing spent tear gas containers and cartridges. A monument to one of the protesters – flowers, candles and photos – in the exact spot where he died by the side of the road. I was shown a lamppost with what appeared to be bullet holes on one side and lumps on the other – presumably where the bullets came to a stop.
Everywhere are pictures of the dead. Lying on hospital gurneys, peppered with buckshot. One horrific image of a protester who appeared to have been shot at close range.
The organisers have created a concourse on the road circling the roundabout. All around the Pearl Monument is evidence that this is not an impromptu gathering. There’s a media tent, and a medical tent with ambulances standing by. Doctors and nurses on 24-hour rotas treating minor ailments. Teams of youngsters doing the rounds with collection boxes seeking donations.
I saw no evidence that the area was a health hazard. There were garbage trucks and bins in abundance. Every so often, there were requests through loudspeakers for people to pick up litter.
Beside the monument itself, there is a large stage. I saw speeches, prayer sessions and impromptu theatre – for example, fishermen explaining how their traditional fishing grounds had been destroyed by landfill projects. Away from the main stage are other stands where videos were showing or people were speaking though makeshift public address systems. The whole effect was a constant cacophony of competing voices and sounds.
Wherever we walked, we would come across evidence of an explosion of creativity that the protests seems to have sparked. In addition to the wall paintings there are cartoon exhibitions, a tent where artists where creating new paintings. A photo gallery showing dilapidated buildings. Aerial photos illustrating alleged land grabs.
And then the people. Young and old, men and women. Manning stands, sitting outside the tents smoking shisha. Making tea, baking bread. Crowded around released prisoners and other notables. Shaking hands and embracing. Draped with flags. Wandering around in small groups, chanting “no Sunni, no Shia, we are all brothers.” I was introduced to relatives of the deceased, to doctors manning the medical tent. People would come up and shake hands, and point me towards one stand or another. Everyone I met was friendly and welcoming in the best Bahraini tradition. I drank many cups of tea.
Earlier on I drew a comparison with Glastonbury. But not the well-patrolled, fenced-off commercial rock festival that Glastonbury is today. But the original festival I first camped out at forty years ago. Makeshift, informal, cooperative, with a strong sense of community and volunteer spirit. The people of Pearl Roundabout are not new age dreamers with a vague sense creating a better world. They have made common cause to address what they see as fundamental grievances. Whether that sense of unity will survive the difficult decisions facing all parties in Bahrain remains to be seen.
Pearl Roundabout is not a tourist attraction. It clearly exists to persuade and to rally. Most of the star reporters from the international media have left Bahrain. Some are now dodging bullets in Libya, or watching the slow-motion demise of President Saleh of Yemen. I didn’t get a sense that the slogans, exhibitions and speeches were for any audience other than the Bahrainis themselves. During the four hours I spent there, I only saw one other person who looked like a Westerner.
As is the nature of these events, there is no semi-permanent settlement around which the government supporters are encamped, so there is no comparable experience for them beyond the frequent demonstrations of support.
I didn’t go to the Pearl Roundabout to form an opinion on the rights and wrongs in Bahraini society. These issues are well known and exhaustively debated both in the conventional and the new media – my opinion is largely irrelevant. I wanted to witness a human phenomenon.
As I walked back to my car after an extraordinary evening, I was left with the feeling that the men women and children gathered there were going through an experience that would never be repeated, that would remain with them for the rest of their lives. An event that they would recount to their children and grandchildren in decades to come.
And I sincerely hope that all Bahrainis will look back on 2011 as the year in which old enmities were put to rest and the country once again regained its reputation for prosperity, tolerance and inclusivity.
The Arabic language has been a constant, though often distant, companion throughout my years in the Middle East. Mournful intonations from the mosques. Quranic incantations on the radio. Sharp conversations on the street corner. Hectoring broadcasts from leaders and imams.
You could argue that I am utterly unqualified to write about this language of 300 million people, given my rudimentary familiarity with it. Yet in a way, I feel that I can appreciate Arabic as a means of communication in a way many fluent speakers perhaps cannot.
Just as a person who cannot see compensates for his blindness by hearing what the sighted cannot hear, and by an enhanced sense of taste, touch and smell, it is possible to look beyond the words of a language one cannot understand. The distinctive nuances of facial expression, tone of voice, gesticulation and body language convey a meaning that sometimes transcends those words.
And just as one does not need to understand French to appreciate the beauty of a passage from Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, so one can appreciate the beauty of the Quran when spoken or sung. It has often been said that Arabs are more openly emotional than the buttoned-up people of Northern Europe and North America. Listen to Arabs interacting, both in anger and in jest, and you will see the evidence.
A couple of nights ago I had the pleasure of listening to Hamid Al-Qaed, a prominent Bahraini poet who writes both in English and Arabic. He was speaking at a meeting of the Bahrain Writer’s Circle at La Fontaine Cultural Centre – a large villa in the centre of Manama that has been converted by its owner into a arts centre and restaurant drawing from traditional and contemporary architectural styles. Stone pillars, cloisters, fountains and open performance areas.
Hamid has had four books published, and he read a selection of poems in English and Arabic – about love, life, nature and much else. His poems were short and emotional, and I enjoyed listening to him speaking in Arabic as much as his English work. You can visit Hamid’s website here.
Most Westerners do not understand the importance of poetry in the Arab world. How many 16-year-old, internet-savvy kids in England would admit to their pride in the poems they write, as did a bunch of young people I encountered recently in Saudi Arabia? In the royal courts of the region, especially among the gatherings attended by Bedouin tribespeople, it is still common for guests to stand up and recite odes in praise of the host – and receive a small gift as a reward.
In a previous post I had lamented the apparent decline of Arabic literature. Perhaps I was a little unkind in suggesting that Arab countries could do more to support and encourage their authors.
This week sees two major literary events in the region. The first is the Emirates LitFest in Dubai. Besides hosting stellar participants from the English-language literary world – Michael Morpurgo, Margaret Atwood, Lionel Shriver and Michael Palin to name a few – there is a host of Arab literary figures in attendance, including poets, novelists and non-fiction writers from Syria, Egypt, the UAE, Lebanon and Tunisia.
And earlier this week I made a flying visit to the Riyadh Book Fair. Leaving aside the kerfuffle over the disruption caused by conservative “activists” objecting to certain aspects of the proceedings, to which I referred in my previous post, the Fair was an eye-opener.
A hall full of stands manned by publishers from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, India, Pakistan, Sudan and North Africa. I was there to check out a few publishers about the feasibility of launching an Arabic version of a book that I have co-authored. Although there were thousands of titles on display, in a way, I was disappointed. Many of them were textbooks and religious works.
I expected that given the setting and local sensitivities, the range of subjects would be somewhat circumscribed. But as I looked at the books, I was surprised how unimaginatively they were laid out. Endless streams of text, few illustrations except where the subject demanded them, and very few photos or artwork. Yes, there were some lavish coffee-table books, but by and large, the books on display were far less varied than those you would see at Barnes and Noble or Waterstones. One of the publishers explained that the reason for the absence of pictures was cost. Most of the books sold at the fair are bulk purchases of textbooks for schools and universities, although I did see a number of individuals buying for their own use.
Still, an interesting experience, despite the slightly threatening aura of the young men corralling everybody off to prayer at the appropriate times. But this was Riyadh, after all.
If there is to be one positive outcome from increased freedom of speech across the Arab world, I hope it will be a renewed flowering of Arabic literature. Free speech liberates creativity, and literature is one of the lasting legacies of a culture.
Dr Khalid Alnowaiser is a prominent Saudi lawyer. I have commented in the past on his columns in the Arab News. He has now weighed into the current social and political debate in Saudi Arabia – this time with an open letter to King Abdullah.
In the letter, he touches on all the contentious issues in Saudi society. He writes about the need for an elected council, a written constitution, decentralisation of government, more equitable wealth distribution, effective action against corruption, judicial reform, equal rights for women and the abolition of the Commission for the Propagation of Virtue and the Elimination of Vice.
He ends the letter by making the point that in the internet age it is no longer possible for governments to hide what is happening in their countries. And he urges the King to take proactive rather than defensive steps to save the Kingdom from the kind of turmoil that is currently wracking the region.
It’s an eloquent summary of reform-minded opinion in the Kingdom. His letter was published a couple of days ago in the Arab News. The virulent comments that the article attracted, together with a similar number of messages of support, show that opinion is sharply divided, especially on the highly contentious issue of the Commission (also known as the Haia or the Mutawa). More significant would be feedback from the Arabic media, since many of those writing in to the English-language Arab News are clearly not Saudi nationals.
Although the role of the Commission is only one of many issues Dr Alnowaiser has raised, it is nonetheless highly topical.
I have just returned from a visit to the Riyadh Book Fair, the scene of a well-publicised intervention by several individuals who appeared to be sympathetic to the ethos of the Commission – even though the Commission denied that they were members. These individuals disrupted a ceremony on the second day of the Fair. According to the Arab News:
“Several activists, alleged to be members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, stormed the Riyadh book fair on Wednesday evening, roughed up participants and relayed orders through a mike for women to dress up properly and move graciously or face the consequences.
The Haia members also opposed the invitation of some intellectuals who have allegedly criticized Islamic teachings to the seminars being held on the sidelines of the exhibition.
The ugly situation shocked Minister of Culture and Information Abdul Aziz Khoja, who was also present at the fair at that time. “The situation was brought under control within no time,” said Mohammed Al-Abis, a spokesman for the ministry.”
Subsequently, as the Arab News reports, Dr Khoja’s remarks about the incident attracted a particularly nasty SMS from an individual who informed him that he would go to hell for his opinions.
It seems that the “activists” were also objecting to some of the books on display. I’m not sure which books they were finding fault with, but given that there were many thousands of titles on view, they would have had a hard job reviewing all of them! On the Book Fair, more in another post.
Returning to Dr Alnowaiser’s open letter to King Abdullah, I believe that there is a fundamental hurdle to be crossed before the Kingdom can become the nation that he ardently desires it to be. And that is the hurdle of ownership.
Saudi Arabia originally came into being by forcible unification. And among the ruling family there still seems to be a sense that they are the owners of the country and its resources. Whatever is granted to citizens – rights, land, public amenities, education, welfare and social programmes – is at the discretion of the rulers. The ruling family sees no issue with the use of resources to support the numerous members of the family and tribal leaders, because it sees that policy as an important contributor to the cohesion of society as a whole.
The transition from owner to custodian is one that the ruling family has yet to make. And a key element of that transition would be a written constitution that enshrines the rights and responsibilities of all citizens.
To use an historical parallel, in 1066, William of Normandy invaded England and became King William I. The England he conquered became a feudal society in which he and his supporters divided the country into fiefdoms and ruled by decree and custom. It took a century and a half for the King’s barons to impose a basic constitutional framework for the country – the Magna Carta. The Magna Carta was signed by the King and by twenty-five of his leading barons. Significantly, it was also witnessed by thirteen bishops and twenty abbots – testament to the power of the church in the affairs of the state.
It was only after a further five hundred years that the powers and prerogatives of the King were curtailed to the point that the main elements of the United Kingsdom’s constitutional monarchy finally emerged.
Saudi Arabia, which has modernised at a breathtaking pace since its foundation, clearly doesn’t face a journey of a similar length. And the parallel is inexact, because Britain still does not have a formal written constitution – the UK legal system is a construct of statute and common law slowly built up over hundreds of years. Saudi Arabia also has many laws, and claims that the Islamic Sharia negates the need for a written constitution.
But my point is that it is no easy process for a nation to move from a state where all things flow from a King and his family, to one in which a country’s wealth and resources belong, and are perceived to belong, to its citizens. And ultimately, to a state where all citizens, rulers and ruled, are accountable to a democratic body politic for the disposition of wealth and the administration of society.
It seems to me that these are the implications of the changes Dr Alnowaiser proposes. I’m not a lawyer (although I grew up in a legal family), and I’m open to being shot down on points of detail or principle by Dr Alnowaiser and other eminent lawyers.
I’m not suggesting that he is proposing a constitutional monarchy along UK lines. But certainly his proposals would move his country down that path.
He speaks to King Abdullah with great respect and loyalty. I’m sure he doesn’t underestimate the fundamental change in mind-set that the ruling family, and many of the Kingdom’s other powerful stakeholders, would have to undergo before the evolution he seeks becomes a reality.
But on one thing most of Saudi Arabia’s citizens, as well as the Kingdom’s foreign stakeholders, would agree – evolution is vastly preferable to revolution.
Here’s an intriguing story coming out of Bahrain.
Sheikh Rashid bin Abdullah Al Khalifa announced yesterday that following King Hamad’s directives to boost employment in his ministry, the Ministry of the Interior will be hiring an additional 20,000 staff. The official Bahrain News Agency announcement is here.
According to the Labour Market Regulatory Authority there are currently 140,000 Bahrainis currently in employment. So it seems that an additional 14.5% of the workforce will be police or employees of other Ministry of the Interior departments.
Even allowing for the possibility that a number of policemen of other nationalities will be replaced by Bahrainis under the new measure – which would be very sensible given the resentment caused by the presence of non-Bahrainis in the security forces – that would be a pretty significant hike, especially if you consider that the Ministry already employs a number of Bahrainis.
Much as I commend the sentiments expressed by the Minister about the need to protect citizens against sectarian violence, 20,000 new staff is a pretty jaw-dropping figure. If the United Kingdom’s Home Office employed an additional 14.4% of the country’s 30 million workforce, that would mean an additional 4.35 million policemen and supporting civil servants.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding the Minister’s announcement. But if only from a communications perspective, I question whether this is the kind of message that will ease current tensions, especially as it will take some time to recruit and train the additional staff, by which time one would hope that there is a settlement in place that satisfies all parties.
This morning the Bahrain Gulf Daily news published my piece on immigrant labour in the wealthy nations of the Arab world. One of my points was about the tardy efforts of some countries to come to the aid of their citizens trapped in Libya.
But the wider point was that the low-paid migrant workers keep their host countries running by doing the jobs that the locals refuse to do. Their presence is resented by many, especially in countries with high youth unemployment. Many work in tough conditions. Some are abused and financially exploited by their sponsors and employers.
As an example, here’s a disturbing story about an incident involving a contretemps between a Bangladeshi taxi driver and a group of young Saudis. It comes from the personal experience of Ali Shah, who writes a blog from Riyadh.
Another aspect of the use of migrant labour – particularly in Saudi Arabia – is the sheer inefficiency of the system. At a time when the Saudi Minister of Labour is proclaiming yet again about the need to replace foreign labour with nationals – a consistent but largely unfulfilled refrain over the past thirty years – the sponsorship system incentivises wealthy individuals to import foreign labour whether it is needed or not.
Thousands of workers many from South Asia find themselves in jobs in which they do little actual work, but are there for the convenience of their masters and mistresses. Drivers, cleaners and tea boys for example. Their presence enhances the status of the businesses and families that employ them. In fact, whether needed or not, a large group of retainers is as much de rigeur for the wealthy as a fleet of Mercedes 500’s.
Here’s a little vignette I wrote after a year spent in Riyadh:
In the week before I arrived, the Owner informed us that “you need a tea boy. This is very important”. So a couple of days later, Ali (not his real name) was delivered to the office by the Owner’s secretary. Unfortunately, he couldn’t make tea, coffee or anything else we were aware of. Worse than that, he couldn’t speak English or Arabic – only a language (which we subsquently discovered was Malayalam) with which none of us were familiar. We were not even sure that he could read and write.
Nonetheless, my colleagues went out and bought some packets of ground Starbucks coffee, and taught Ali to make coffee with a cafetiere. So for the first week, he was able to respond to a request for a “Starbucks”, which for him became the English word for coffee.
We established that Ali was from Kerala. By getting him to write down the name of his home town, we also worked out that he was literate. So the first task was to teach him the basics of English and Arabic, so that our conversations would not be confined to “tea”, “coffee,” “water,” “hello” and “goodbye”, and their Arabic equivalents.
But the main problem was what to do with him. There are only so many cups of Starbucks and bottles of water that one can take in a given day. We were a small team, so Ali spent much of his time doing nothing. He used to stand in the doorway of the kitchen, effectively in wait mode. Not reading a book, not writing home, not sitting down. Just standing.
As a Westerner used to trying to get bang for the buck from every member of staff, I found this quite disturbing. I didn’t know where he came from, how long he had been in the Kingdom, or where he lived. I suspected that he was a recent arrival, grateful to have a job, but without a clue about what was expected from him.
I tried communicating with him via the Google translator, by translating “I hope you’re having a nice day” into Hindi and showing him the screen. But he stared at the words blankly, and at me as if I was slightly mad.
How he coped with standing by the kitchen at for three hours at stretch doing precisely nothing was beyond me. We set him at cleaning the office as well as making “Starbucks”, and as his language skills improved, on the odd occasion he would sally forth to bring back takeaway lunches. He could have progressed to binding documents and sending faxes, but we had an executive assistant from Egypt who jealously guarded that activity.
There are thousands of Alis in Saudi Arabia, waiting on the command of their masters, with nothing to do until that command arrives. I suspect that many of them are more resourceful than our guy, and find ways to occupy themselves during fallow periods. Hopefully in time Ali will transform himself into the typical trilingual, multifunctional man around the office who keeps Saudi business afloat.
After I left Riyadh, Ali also moved on. He had mentioned that he had a brother who ran a restaurant. Perhaps he’s working there now. You might ask why I didn’t simply let him go when it became obvious that there was little for him to do. That would have been the Western way. But the minimal impact of his salary on the bottom line, and the cultural imperative of having someone around to serve tea and coffee to our infrequent guests, kept him in the job.
There’s nothing unique about Ali’s story. But it seems to me that addiction to foreign labour is so ingrained in the societies of the wealthy oil producers that it will take a generation or more, and some very hard decisions on the part of governments, before these societies recognise that the status quo of addiction to migrant labour is unsustainable.
That, and a radical mindset change among people who believe that everything can be bought, and nothing has to be worked for.
I am the least fashionable person I know. I wear a $30 Swatch. I have never owned a designer suit. In fact I hate suits. I have no idea why women pay thousands of dollars for a designer dress when they can get something very similar for a tenth of the price from Marks and Spencer.
I have no interest in shoes, either. Jimmy Choo might just as well be a kung fu star or celebrity chef as far as I’m concerned. And anyway, a woman’s feet are not the part of her anatomy that first draws my attention.
Designers themselves live in a world no less precious than that of the gross-out rock stars of the Seventies. Designers have groupies, are followed around by wannabes, hangers on, addled journalists who greedily drink their every vacuous word.
I draw a parallel with the music business of the Seventies because I was part of that world for a while, so I have some actual experience to draw upon. I came across more than one of the rock casualties, and I can tell a few tales about the self-referencing lunacy of those years.
Like the music business, fashion has its share of troubled souls. The difference between the Seventies and 2011 is that the burnt-out rock stars didn’t have MTV and a host of other celebrity shows in attendance to document their slow decline for the watching millions. There were a few music papers that would report in gleeful fashion the antics of Ozzy Osborne, Keith Moon, Jimi Hendrix and all the lesser loonies of the era.
When rock stars died young, it was usually a pathetic end. Too many pills, choked on vomit, heroin overdose, cirrhosis of the liver. Long suicide notes.
Today’s generation of self-destructing celebrities tend to melt down in public on their way to oblivion. Everyone has a smartphone handy to capture the irresistible indiscretion. Paparazzi lurk, waiting to capture the descent to oblivion of alcoholic movie stars and anorexic models.
Which leads me to John Galliano. A British designer rated as talented by the harridans of the fashion press spits out an anti-Semitic tirade in Paris. Next thing, he’s all over YouTube. He reveals himself as a fan of Adolf Hitler, and is fired by Dior, his employer.
What interests me about this sordid little story is that Mr Galliano announces that he’s “getting help”. For what? Being a Nazi sympathiser? Is there a clinic for recovering fascists? Or is he planting his stake in the ground for a pre-emptive defence in his forthcoming trial for race hatred? No doubt he will have his mitigating circumstances lined up for the trial. Whether it was drugs, alcohol, abuse as a child or some form of mental disorder, I know not. But you can be sure that his problems will be paraded in colours as bright as his clothes before judge and jury. And no doubt he will have started his treatment well before he arrives in court.
For this is what celebrities do. There’s treatment for everything – help at hand for every affliction, provided you can afford the $1000 per day for some clinic in Palo Alto. And don’t we love it when the celeb emerges from rehab and sins again? Lindsey Lohan, Britney Spears, Mel Gibson, Charlie Sheen, Pete Doherty – the list goes on. Sin, repentance and sin again….
I have nothing against the fashion industry. We need colour, flair and variety in the way we dress, just as bees need flowers to attract them to pollen. It would be sad if the world dressed uniformly in black, white or brown.
But I will be listening to Bob Dylan and watching Coppola movies long after Galliano’s creations hit the recycle bins. Fashion’s for a season. Music and cinema are for life.
As for Mr Galliano himself, if his treatment fails there is an obvious home for him. I’m sure he would receive a warm welcome from Hugo Boss, whose founder’s creations adorned Hitler’s SS and a number of Nazi luminaries.
But that’s a cheap shot, and it’s cruel to kick a man when he’s down, so I wish him well in his recovery from whatever ails him. Let’s just hope he doesn’t make an ideological about-turn, and clads all his models in Mao suits next year.
I’m not sure who’s been reading this blog lately, but I’m encouraged to learn that my suggestion a few weeks ago that some form of regional development fund be set up to help lagging economies in the region is being contemplated within the Gulf Cooperation Council. I take no credit for the idea. It’s blindingly obvious.
Today’s Gulf Daily News runs a story about a plan to aid the two GCC countries – Bahrain and Oman – that have been most affected by the recent unrest. This would be a sensible measure of self-preservation on the part of Gulf leaders who are undoubtedly concerned about the unrest spreading to their own countries. Bahrain and Oman do not have the financial clout of the other GCC members – Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE and Kuwait. So they cannot afford grand gestures such as Saudi Arabia’s recent injection of $35 billion into social programmes and pay rises for civil servants.
Aid for Bahrain and Oman is a good step, although describing such a programme as a Marshall Plan is a trifle overblown. These countries have not been devastated by six years of war as had the European beneficiaries of the original Marshall Plan in 1948. But it’s a short-term measure that might pay off.
Looking to the longer term, there are two further measures that the GCC could consider.
The first came up in a conversation I had with some delegates at yesterday’s Capital Markets and Investor Relations Conference in Bahrain. One of them suggested that the GCC should “adopt” Yemen.
Yemen is the gangrenous thumb of the Arabian Peninsula. It is the only state in the peninsula that is not in the GCC. Like Bahrain and Oman, it has some oil and gas, but its reserves are declining. It has an increasingly critical shortage of water. It is wracked by tribal conflict and the Houthi rebellion in the north. It hosts a resilient Al Qaeda faction deep in its mountainous region that threatens the stability of its neighbours, particularly Saudi Arabia. The fault line between north and south has re-emerged as President Saleh’s regime looks increasingly likely to fall.
A perennially unstable Yemen threatens the stability of the whole Arabian Peninsula. Foreign intervention against Al Qaeda causes resentment, especially when attacks go wrong and innocents are killed. The Houthi conflict spread across Saudi Arabia’s southern border a couple of years ago, and sparked armed intervention on the Kingdom’s part.
Yemen’s borders with the rest of the GCC are so long and porous that keeping the country in quarantine is not an option. Some form of associate membership of the GCC combined with a substantial reconstruction programme – funded by Arab brother nations rather than powers from outside the region – could be Yemen’s best option for the future. And it could be the GCC’s best option for creating long-term stability in its back yard.
But the GCC leaders will be acutely aware that they cannot ignore the turmoil immediately beyond the peninsula. Leaving aside the thorny problem of Israel, the bigger Marshall-style regeneration opportunity is in Egypt, the Levant, the Maghreb, Somalia and the two Sudans. I wrote about this in a previous post. Although I envisaged a massive programme under the auspices of the UN, the GCC could do much to change the perception of it beyond its borders as an alliance of self-interested oil-rich sheikhs by extending its largesse to the less fortunate nations in the wider region.
It would take a heavy financial commitment to make a serious difference in those areas, I agree. But even if funding outside the region were also needed, the GCC, by leading an Arab solution for Arabic-speaking nations, would win itself lasting respect and influence. It would find itself riding with the wave of change in the Arab world rather than against it. And in a region deeply conflicted about the influence of non-Arab nations in its affairs, there might even be the prospect that Pax Arabica could replace Pax Americana as the facilitator of stability in the region.
A little optimistic perhaps. And the thorny problems of Israel and Iran would remain if not addressed in a parallel process.
But the GCC has the economic power. It has much to gain by leading, rather than battening down the hatches.
I am an expert in investor relations.
At least I was an expert several decades ago, when my bank used regularly to invest in me as an impoverished student. I would go cap in hand to the bank manager (remember them?) and beg for a temporary overdraft of £20. I would listen reverently while Mr Thompson ticked me off about my profligacy and gave me a long lesson on his favourite subject – the technology of funicular railways.
What I always thought was my charm – but Mr Thompson probably saw as abject grovelling – would prevail, and I would walk out with the means to go partying that weekend. On the Monday, I would contact my other investor, the Bank of Mum and Dad – well Dad actually, since he was a softer touch – and negotiate a bail-out.
I thought of those happy days this morning while attending the Arindon Annual Capital Markets and Investor Relations Conference in Bahrain. It was an interesting event, and full marks to Arindon for ploughing ahead with it despite concerns over attendance given the current unrest in the country.
As things turned out, although one or two people pulled out, they ended up being oversubscribed, and described it as their best event ever.
The format was a refreshing change. Panel discussions, rather than long presentations from masters of the universe.
A major part of the conference centred on the complexities of managing risk and the approach to investment in the MENA region. Panellists included representatives from the Bahrain Central Bank, the sovereign wealth fund, the Bahrain Bourse, Fitch, the credit rating agency, investment banks and corporates, including the joint sponsor, Batelco.
The initial session dealt with the outlook for the region in the light of the current political turmoil. Unsurprisingly, the sentiment was downbeat. Optimism in the final quarter of last year has given way to relative gloom about the near term future.
I ended up thinking about my old bank manager because impressive as many of the panellists were – and few were more impressive than Hasnain Malik, the MENA head of equity research at Citi – I felt that I had listened to a team of very able technocrats. It was only when we got to the session on investor relations that the human element came into play.
I have some experience of pitching for investment and selling companies, and it has always struck me that the finance industry, when making investment or M&A decisions, has a tendency not to be able to see the human wood for the technical trees. When making decisions, most financiers will look at historical and comparative data, and will apply all manner of sophisticated forecasting models to determine the wisdom of their potential investments.
But companies are not machines. They are staffed and led by people. Too often, financiers ignore the blindingly obvious questions. Who is this person or team in whom I am going to invest? To hell with their track record, what are they capable of today and tomorrow? Can they buck the trend? Can they make the difference in the future? Can they handle crises? Do they work well as a team? What are their strengths and weaknesses? What are their current motivations? All questions that you would ask if you were recruiting a new CEO or top team.
Yet so often investors allow themselves to be schmoozed by the likes of Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay of Enron, blinded by the rock solid integrity of Bernard Madoff and swamped by technical data that they do not understand – witness the sub-prime instruments that in 2008 brought down eminent investment banks and caused so much embarrassment to the credit ratings agencies. Of what use are your technocrats if they can’t see a fraudster staring them in the face?
It seems to me that, more than ever, we need to focus on the humans that run our businesses. Can an investor predict with any certainty that a five-year forecast has any chance of coming to pass if they have no idea who will be running Libya within the next seven days? Or whether the China bubble will burst and the ruined middle classes will drag the workers on to the streets of Beijing?
It was only in the last session that we started looking at the human element of investor relations. The need for a confident CEO with media training and strong presentation skills. The opportunities to communicate with investors outside the conventional communications vehicles – strong websites, CEO’s blogs, Facebook and Twitter.
If there was a point that could have come out a little more strongly, it was that for large companies, especially multinationals, the world is their investor. So it’s not enough for the CEO to have the occasional cosy chat with a handful of institutional investors. Companies should view investor relations as an integral part of their overall communications strategy, not as an office down the corridor. What’s good for the brand and the stakeholders is usually good for the investors.
They should also consider the role of the staff. From the janitor upwards, staff need to understand that the investor is investing in them, not just the shareholders. That their careers and job security depend on their exemplifying in their behaviour and attitudes what is good about their companies.
And boards should impress on their executive teams that they will never get the best out of their staff if they cannot personally demonstrate the standards of behaviour that they expect from their people.
For all the sophisticated techniques that investors have at their disposal, they should never forget that the future of their investments is in the hands of human beings. We can send machines to the moon, but when things go wrong, it’s human qualities that save the day, as NASA demonstrated when Apollo 13 came home.
And a dose of common sense from the likes of my old bank manager Mr Thompson wouldn’t go amiss either. After all, we do live in the real world.
At last, someone mentioned them.
Reports in the media about Libya have understandably focused on the courage of the Libyans as they struggle to overthrow Gaddafi. They have also reported efforts by the wealthier nations to evacuate their citizens by air and by sea.
Only now have the international TV stations run a story about the thousands of nationals from countries that do not have the means or the inclination to send ships, aircraft to take them away. Countries that have no special forces and C130 transport planes to whisk their compatriots away from the violence. Bangladeshis, Indians, Thais, Pakistanis and Filipinos. People who are doing the dirty work, the heavy lifting that keeps the projects rolling and the oil flowing.
Across the Middle East there are millions of migrant workers working for low wages that are nonetheless better than what they would earn at home. Their families depend on their remittances.
But the price of keeping the home fires burning can be years away from their loved ones. Many of them have to pay money to agents to get their jobs in the first place, and often don’t start seeing a return from their work for months. In some countries a significant slice of their income goes to their sponsors as the price of renewing their work permits. Many live in dormitories with the minimum of privacy. They get to go home perhaps once every two years. Construction workers on some sites face safety hazards that would cause a scandal in Western countries.
They often work in a climate of institutional racism, not only from locals but from other migrants further up the food chain. Treated with disdain. Summoned and dismissed by a click of the fingers. Across the region, and notoriously within the GCC countries, domestic workers – especially housemaids – run the risk of violence and abuse from their employers. Workers are frequently left for months without payment when their employers go bust, or themselves are kept waiting for payment from their government clients.
Migrant workers feel unable to walk away from their jobs because they are aware of how much their extended families rely upon the money they send back home.
In many countries, they do the jobs that nationals refuse to do. They sweep the streets and build the roads in temperatures of 45 degrees. They bring up the children of the urban middle classes so that the mothers can shop the malls and visit each other for tea.
At the height of the unrest in Bahrain, I recently commented that Manama was a city in which the motor functions continued while the brain was otherwise engaged. That was because the city is kept running by an army of low-paid migrant workers.
The demands of the protesters across the region are about the rights of citizens. I have not heard any protester rooting for the Bangladeshis, Keralans and Indonesians. No calls for labour laws to be adhered to, health and safety standards to be enforced, and for physical abuse to be punished with the full force of the law. Most of the time, these workers do not protest because they fear for their jobs. Their embassies might complain and provide what practical help they can, but they have little diplomatic and practical leverage, apart from barring their people from working in the region. But the effect of such measures is to damage the home economies.
This is the dark side of the region where I live. It’s easy for me to tell the world of the pleasures of living in the Middle East, and of my high regard for its culture. But I’m not the one who has to risk his life fifty stories up a construction site for twelve hours a day, and come “home” to a camp outside the city which I have to share with a thousand others.
I do not tar every host nation with the same brush. Some treat their migrant workers better than others. And there are many individuals and companies that treat them with great humanity and respect. But many others, if they looked into their hearts, would admit that they take those workers for granted, and could do more to give them decent lives during their years of residency.
Spare a thought for the thousands at the borders of Libya, traumatised and awaiting an uncertain future.
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