Today’s Arab News carries a story headed Saudia aims to become customer oriented airline. It quotes Khalid Al Molhem, the airline’s director general, as saying that Saudia plans to become a customer oriented airline by “improving its services in all operation areas…”.
It has some way to go.
For many reasons, Saudi Arabian Airlines is not my favourite mode of transport. In the 1980s its main saving grace was that it offered an alternative to the gruesome flights to London offered by British Airways, and later on by British Caledonian. Usually packed full of people who had not had a drink for weeks or months, The British Airways redeye flight from Jeddah often descended into a seething mass of inebriation. For this reason, BA would staff the flights with an unusally high proportion of male stewards, and stewardesses who, shall we say, were more mature in years than the average cabin crew. Even this didn’t stop the odd opportunistic lunge and grope before the passengers slumped into drunken anaesthesia.
This was why Saudia became my carrier of choice to London. Because its flights were alcohol-free, at most times of the year they were half empty. Not good for the airline, but great if you wanted to sleep across four seats. Actually getting on the flight was a different matter. Queuing was an alien concept. Scenes at Tripoli airport, as thousands of stranded workers scrambled to get out of Libya, remind me of a typical day at Jeddah’s King Abdulaziz International Airport, especially at the high season.
Getting on a domestic flight was equally a hit or miss affair. In fact I have Saudia to thank for one of my more memorable journeys in the Kingdom. Back in 2008, I had just arrived in Riyadh. I didn’t have a car at that time, and I needed to take a trip to the Eastern Province. In those days people were a little more nervous about the threat of terrorism against foreigners. It had only been eighteen months since the last lethal attack.
I got to the airport in time for the Dammam flight, only to find that my reservation wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. It turned out that contrary to information I received from the travel agent, I was actually on the wait list. When I went to check in, I was sent a floor down to the standby desk, which I then discovered doubles as a ticket desk. There was a queue of fifty people with one person at the desk. I went to the front of the queue in time-honoured fashion and asked him how I was to get a boarding pass. He said “flight is full. Come back at 4pm for the next flight”. So I said “do I have any chance of getting on that flight?” He replied “all flights to Damman are full”. “So what’s the point of coming back at 4pm?” “All flights to Dammam are full. That is your problem”. He then went back to dealing with his fifty queuing customers. Lesson learned: only show up for a Saudia flight if you have a confirmed reservation, and make sure you check that you actually have one.
Not in the best of humour, I decided I was going to get to Dammam whether Saudia liked it or not. I went to the taxi rank and asked for quotes to take me to there. 500 riyals seemed to be the consensus. After much uproar and argument as to who should take me, a grizzled local hauled my bags off and put them in his cab. He spoke vbery little English. On the way out of the airport I double checked the price. “700 riyals” he said. After much heated argument, angry gesticulation and my demands in the manner of an affronted memsahib to “take me back to the terminal”, he seemed to agree to 500 riyals.
Fifty kilometers out of Riyadh, he stopped for gas, and a couple of minutes later told me that another person would be taking me to Dammam! “Good car – Toyota Prado!”, he said. It seemed that he had asked around to see who was going to Dammam, found a guy called Abdullah, offered him 250 riyals to take me. The deal was that they would split the 500 riyals 50:50. So my taxi driver would take 250 for driving me to the outskirts of Riyadh!
I looked at the prospective driver, looked at his car, and thought what are the chances of my being dragged out to the desert and never seen again. He seemed like a nice guy, was smaller than me, so I thought I’d give it a go. Three and a half hours later, after a journey in which I slept much of the time and for the remainder tested my Arabic to the full in trying to chat to him, he dropped me to my destination.
I reflected afterwards that sleeping was probably not a good idea, but the driver turned out to be an ordinary guy on his way home to Jubail who was glad of the petrol money. I felt a little ashamed at my suspicious nature, but still pretty cross at the taxi driver who had abandoned me.
Looking back, I probably took a bit of a risk, but given that I was due to get my wheels the following week, the circumstances were unlikely to occur again. What put things into a different perspective was that the next night one of my friends in Dammam contacted me to say that there had been an alert from the US embassy about a possible attack on western expatriates in central Riyadh that weekend. A salutary reminder that this was not Arizona.
Saudia has had other less than finest hours since then. During the Jeddah floods of November 2009, its computer system went down for some time thanks to a leaking roof, compounding the chaos in the city. As for customer service, Saad Al Dosari in his blog does a far better job than I ever could to illustrate its limitations in his 2009 piece Who Says Camels Can’t Dance?
To be fair to Saudia, it has made steps in the right direction. It has ordered a host of new aircraft, and clearly intends to clean up its act as it tried to meet the standards expected as a member of the SkyTeam Alliance. And it has much to contend with beyond its control. A high level of no-shows, creaking infrastructures at some of the Kingdom’s airports, most notoriously Jeddah, and stiff competition from foreign airlines operating on its routes. It also suffers in comparison with Emirates, Qatar and Etihad – national airlines that sit at the heart of their countries’ development strategies.
But the fact that it feels the need to announce to its own staff that it intends to become a customer oriented airline tell its own story. As a symbol of national pride, it’s currently way off the mark.
A couple of days ago I mentioned the excellence of Al Jazeera’s documentaries. One series is called Witness, and regardless of your thoughts on the station, they are well worth a watch.
I’ve been following Al Jazeera quite closely over the past few days for the same reason as most other people in the Middle East. Today there was a half-hour piece about the Children’s Parliament elections in Yemen. I don’t know too much about the Children’s Parliament programme, except that it’s international and Save the Children are involved.
The programmme was touching and at times hilarious. Kids from a school in Sana’a are canvassing for election to a Children’s Parliament. The winners will take part in a session at the real parliament house. We see kids doing their pitch to their classmates, preparing their campaign and messages with their fathers. One of the girl electors is struggling to decide on which boy candidate to vote for (they have elections for boys and girls), and goes against her better instincts by disclosing – in a fit of giggles – that she is likely to vote for the class heartthrob.
When the winners are announced (the heartthrob gets the vote from his year), the losers are pictures of grace, and announce, with absolute sincerity, that they feel like winners too. The gentleness and enthusiasm of these kids, and the affection and pride of their teachers, kept me smiling throughout.
When the winners celebrate in the playground, they are hoisted on to the shoulders of their classmates, and one kid prances around with an ignited aerosol spray sending flames into the air – just to remind us that we are in Yemen!
The show ends with the kids assembling in Parliament for their debates. I’m not sure what sorts of schools took part. Given that the heartthrob was the son of a government minister, I suspect that the school was for fairly well-heeled kids by Yemeni standards, but it didn’t seem too well equipped.
No matter. The message is that there’s plenty of spirit and idealism among the children of the Middle East. I’ve seen that in my professional life as well.
Watch the show if you can. It’s a great counterpoint to all the grown-up turbulence in the region. Here’s the link to Al Jazeera’s schedule.
Ferdinand Marcos, Jean-Claude Duvalier, Saddam Hussein, Zine Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi, Robert Mugabe.
It’s pretty obvious what these guys have in common. They would do almost anything to stay in power. They would lose no sleep at causing the deaths of their people. They subverted the instruments of state to keep themselves in power. They obscenely enriched themselves and their families. They were prepared to accept the obscenity of poverty in their countries.
Until their misdeeds became embarrassing or inconvenient, most of them were friends of the West. They may have been bastards, but they were our bastards.
In 1946, the so-called Great Powers – the US, the UK, France and the Soviet Union – delivered victor’s justice to the Nazi elite at Nuremberg. Nobody at that time was foolish enough to describe the conflict with Germany and Japan as the war to end all wars. We did that in 1918 after the First World War, and the second followed a generation later.
Our caution was sensible, because in the ensuing sixty-five years numerous nasty little regimes have raped their countries’ resources, robbed their people and enriched themselves. They have been able to do so not because of force of arms, but because in one way or another it suited the strategic interests of one major power or another to let them get away with it. Bulwarks against communism. Buffers against the West. Strategic oil producers. Allies in the “war against terror”.
Last night I watched a movie called The Lives of Others. It was the story of a secret policeman in pre-unification East Germany who undergoes a moral conversion while spying on a couple at the behest of a powerful government official. The official lusts after the wife, and wishes to bring down the husband to get him out of the way. The policeman risks everything in protecting the couple, despite discovering evidence of “activities against the state”. The movie won Best Foreign Film at the 2007 Oscars. It jumped straight into my all-time top five list, up there with Apocalypse Now, Schindler’s List and the Shawshank Redemption.
The Lives of Others portrays moral courage in a police state – the German Democratic Republic – that succeeded another police state, the Third Reich. As in Saddam’s Iraq and Gaddafi’s Libya, the state spied on its people, and spied on its spies. It took more than a few courageous people to bring about its end. The collapse of the GDR’s sponsor, the Soviet Union, finally removed the props that kept its vicious regime in power.
Just as the people of East Germany suspended their moral scruples through fear for their personal well-being, we in the West also accepted a status quo. We feared the consequences of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. We remembered how close we came to mass annihilation in 1962. We may have protested against the immorality of the communist regimes, but we felt powerless to prevent it.
We rejoiced at the collapse of communism, yet we, and our governments, looked on powerless as Vladimir Putin, in the name of order, slowly reined in the freedoms that bloomed under Yeltsin. Putin has never been our bastard, but at least he is not someone else’s. And hey, we’re capitalists, right? And there’s money to be made in Russia, right? So let’s get on with making money out of him, and to hell with human rights and the rule of law.
Then came 9/11. And the West, in order to protect itself from the threat of Islamism, moved several steps closer to the behaviours it so despised elsewhere. In the name of freedom and democracy, it imprisoned and tortured, it spied on its people through informers and telephone intercepts. Notice that I don’t say the US. All of the major powers in the West were complicit in what we thought was a necessarily evil – that in order to combat evil we had to be a little evil ourselves.
We took out Saddam when he moved from being a bulwark to what we perceived to be a threat. But other regimes that served our purposes we lambasted from time to time with pious condemnation and ineffective sanctions, but otherwise stood by as they got on with the business of robbing, murdering and otherwise silencing their people.
When I say we, I also mean me. I am one of the millions of people who watched CNN and the BBC, read the papers, and looked on with horror and yes, fascination, as the twin towers came down, as shock and awe struck Baghdad, and as bloodied survivors struggled out of tube stations on 7/7. Yes, I dearly desired the downfall of vicious regimes, but I accepted that the price of maintaining my way of life was the erosion of civil liberties and an unprecedented level of surveillance on my own people.
Since I moved back to the Middle East three years ago, I have found the consequences of bigotry and oppression increasingly soul-destroying. Not because I have personally encountered victims of torture or seen bodies on the street. But because I have seen lovable people moved to hatred – prepared to do evil in order to destroy it, and thus becoming evil themselves.
As an independent writer, I watch the world and try to form my own view on the events I see and read about. I have no editor to tell me what to write, and no commercial imperative to write what people want to hear. That’s the joy of blogging.
I used to think that the single world-changing outcome of the Second World War was that the development of nuclear weapons saved my generation from a third world war. But the nuclear deterrent has not stopped innumerable regional conflicts that have claimed countless lives and caused unimaginable suffering among the living. I also have no confidence that in years to come one city or more will not be wiped out in a regional nuclear confrontation.
Looking at the twenty-first century, if there is a game-changer that we will look back on in times to come, it is that the world can’t keep a secret any more.
Julian Assange may or may not be a grubby character with a questionable agenda. But on the grubbiness scale he doesn’t come close to some of the characters whose innermost thoughts he has revealed to the world.
The videos and testaments coming out of Libya have defied the best efforts of Colonel Gaddafi and his thuggish regime to keep the slaughter of his people his nasty little secret.
If we had chosen to do so, I have no doubt that our media would have been able to document the secret financial life of Hosni Mubarak – the way he and his family has acquired billions of dollars in assets while remaining content that 40% of his population lives on less than two dollars a day.
Although it took the raw courage of those protesters to see things through to the end, satellite TV acted as the deterrent that stopped Hosni Mubarak from violently suppressing the protests. Facebook and Twitter acted as the meduim that kept the people on the streets.
No doubt other regimes will be coming up with ingenious new strategies to keep their nasty secrets to themselves. China leads the way with the Great Firewall. But the Libyans have shown that where there’s a will there’s a way. Hillary Clinton can spit with fury at the damage that she believes Wikileaks has caused. But other Julian Assanges will pop up and embarrass future governments, and not just in the West.
A new age of fewer secrets will not stop governments in the future from turning a blind eye to the excesses of future regimes. But it will be harder for them to hide their actions and inaction from their own citizens. And the people of Egypt, Tunisia and Libya have shown that they do not need the moral and practical support of the West to deliver their own change.
If the outcome of the African revolutions and the Wikileaks saga turns out to be that Western governments are forced by their electorates to justify the morality of their positions as well as their expedience, then perhaps that will set a healthier tone for politics in this new century. It may even bring about the faster downfall of oppressive regimes, or potentially prevent regimes from becoming oppressive in the first place.
But it still takes individual and collective courage to bring about change against the odds. Those of us whose courage has never been tested in the same way as the fictional policeman in The Lives of Others, or the real protesters in Tripoli, may never know if we have such courage in us. I often ask this question of myself.
But we are the lucky ones who can speak out without fear of a knock on the door at night. And speak out we must.
Here in Bahrain, protesters and opposition groups are in talks with the government about resolving the grievances that led to the Pearl Roundabout confrontations. Among the well-heeled expatriate community, there is talk about the economic damage that the protests have already wreaked on the country. There’s also speculation about the long-term damage – credit rating agencies downgraded, rumours of one company or another planning to pull out, and others revisiting their decisions to invest.
In a recent post to the excellent mideastposts.com, James Mullen argues that Bahrain’s loss is likely to be Dubai’s gain. For all its social problems, he sees Dubai as an enduring oasis of stability within the Middle East – a place where a young expatriate can “breathe”, and create a new life away from the constricting atmosphere of his or her home country.
A couple of years ago I was looking for a new base in the Middle East. I had spent a very challenging year in Riyadh. This reconnected me with a region where I had spent the best part of a decade in the 1980s. I wanted to stay in the Middle East both for business and personal reasons. When I looked at all the pros and cons, it came down to a chioce between Dubai and Bahrain. I chose Bahrain for what I considered at the time to be sound business reasons.
I continue to believe that I made the right decision, and I’m going to explain why.
By the time you get to the end of this post, you might think that I’ve been drinking the same tea as Colonel Gadaffi. But I need to explain a personal journey that led me to Bahrain, so forgive me if I stop off in unlikely places.
Unlikely as this might sound, Jeddah was where I learned to breathe. I’d left the stinking piles of garbage that had only recently been cleared away after Britain’s Winter of Discontent for another city with its fair share of garbage. In those days the city was half the size of the crowded, pot-holed mess that it is today. The infrastructure beyond the Balad – the coral buildings at the heart of the city – was relatively new, the roads hadn’t clogged up, and within a year the garbage that occupied every vacant plot in the city had been cleared away.
Although Jeddah in the 80s went through a similar experience to the rest of Saudi Arabia as the government put the brakes on social reform in the aftermath of the 1979 Mecca insurrection, it was still the most liberal city in the Kingdom outside the hermetically-sealed pods that Aramco had set up for its expatriate workforce. Women could wander around the city without needing to wear an abaya, let alone a headscarf. The growling presence of the mutawa was always in evidence. But the moderating influence of Prince Majed, then the governor of Mecca, seemed to keep them focused on the eliminating the vices of other sections of the community. By and large they left Western expatriates alone.
To give you an idea of the level of tolerance, one of my co-workers got drunk on Christmas Day, danced across the Madinah road playing an Irish air on his fiddle, and was politely escorted back to his compound by an indulgent traffic policeman.
In those days the Western expatriate community was large. There were at least 40,000 North Americans and Europeans in Jeddah at any one time. And we had a ball. There was plenty to do. Jeddah saw some of the best theatre outside the professional stage. Musicals with casts of thousands, Shakespeare, West End hits. For the sporty, there was sailing and diving off undeveloped beaches to the north of the city. There were still miles of pristine coral reef, and the occasional wreck to explore.
Jeddah was never expatriate nirvana. Driving was dangerous. Work had its frustrations. You lived on a knife-edge between achievement and the dreaded PNG day – the day on which for some reason you might find yourself on the next plane home.
But if you made the effort to reach out to the local community, you could do so without fear. Crime was low. We broke lots of rules, but tried to do so without embarrassing the hosts.
I had arrived in the city with a couple of suitcases. I left with a family and a house-full of stuff. In the end, what caused us to leave was a sense that it was all transitory. Saudi Arabia was never a country in which you could put down roots. You made plenty of friends, and indeed many of them are friends to this day. But the maasalama party was a continual feature of the social life – people moving on to pastures new.
We also yearned for diversity. The expatriate community was bound together by a limited number of common denominators. Chief amongst them was money. And we grew tired of the endless conversations about this investment, that fund, the pound-riyal exchange rate. Nobody was struggling. Everybody was on the path towards financial security. I longed to return to a world where people were also struggling – waging their personal jihads against adversity, sometimes succeeding and sometimes not. Where the vast majority of the people you met were not trundling down the track towards a gin-soaked hacienda.
So at the end of the 1980s we finally held our own maasalama party.
Within a couple of years I had started a business with a partner that kept me away from the Middle East for the best part of 20 years. But in the early 90s we missed some aspects of life in the Middle East – the winter sun, the schwarmas and the souks. So we started spending a couple of weeks every winter in Dubai. We initially stayed in a hotel called the Chicago Beach. It stood where the Jumeirah Beach Hotel now sits. Dubai in those days was far from the metropolis it is today. The tallest building in the city was the World Trade Centre, an unremarkable concrete tower that dominated an otherwise relatively empty Sheikh Zayed Road.
Our holidays in Dubai were pretty simple. We had two young kids, and they wanted the beach. I taught my youngest to swim at the Chicago Beach. It was on our second trip to Dubai that we rediscovered one of the endearing aspects of the Arab culture – love of children and personal generosity.
Our elder daughter was pony-mad. She had heard about the Godolphin stables, and wanted to visit them. So she wrote a letter to Sheikh Maktoum, the current ruler, complete with a crayon drawing of her pony, telling the Sheikh how much she loved horses, and could she please visit Lammtara, the previous year’s Derby winner, when she came to Dubai?
We didn’t really expect the letter to reach the Sheikh, let alone for him to respond. But two days before we left for the holiday, we had a call from his personal secretary. The Sheikh had read Tara’s letter, was very touched by it, and had instructed him to contact us at our hotel when we arrived.
Came the day, and Omar showed up in a gleaming Mercedes 500 to collect us. He took us to Godolphin, showed us round the stables and sat with us as Tara had a ride on one of the Royal ponies. He then took us to the Hilton Beach Club, where we spent a pleasant afternoon chatting about Dubai and the Sheikh’s plans for the country. Even in the early 90s it was clear that the Maktoum family saw Dubai as the Hong Kong of the Middle East.
At the end of the trip, we discovered that all of our incidental expenses at the hotel had been picked up by Sheikh Maktoum. Before he received Tara’s letter, he didn’t know us from Adam. That personal gesture had us rooting for Dubai ever after.
In subsequent years we kept coming back to the city. We saw the new malls, hotels, and tourist attractions sprouting up all over the place. We sat in the Jumeirah Beach Hotel watching the seven-star Burj al Arab rise from the waters over three years. But after a while, we began to feel that Dubai was losing something. The expatriate population began to grow like crazy. It became hard to see, let alone meet, an Emirati, except at the gleaming new airport. The city began to feel like an international economic colony. In the 2000s, it felt like a city of chancers – on the make and looking for a fast buck. The Arab experience had gone ersatz. It had lost its charm. We stopped going.
Fast forward to 2009. I was less familiar with Bahrain than with Dubai. I had made the occasional visit from Riyadh, but I can’t say that the experience was deep enough to make any decision on the basis of personal preference. My decision to set up in Bahrain was strictly business-driven. I expected to be doing business in Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain is less than an hour’s drive across the causeway from the Saudi oil economy – concentrated in Al-Khobar, Dammam and Dhahran. Riyadh, the Saudi capital, is four hours’ drive away. Jeddah is 90 minutes by air.
Other cities in the Gulf are within a maximum of 90 minutes flying time from Manama.
From Dubai, none of the three main economic conurbations in Saudi Arabia are easily accessible by road. So to get to Riyadh you have to fly, hire a car if you are brave enough, or take taxis from one place to another.
Then there was the ease of setting up business in Bahrain. I didn’t want a Bahraini partner initially, because I wanted to get to know a few potential partners before I took that step. Setting up a 100% foreign-owned entity was relatively straightforward. Yes, the process was more bureaucratic than I would have liked. But one becomes used to jumping through seemingly illogical hoops in the Middle East. Many of them relate to silo mentalities within individual ministries. But with its Economic Development Board, Investor’s Centre and e-government portal, it seemed to me that the country was working on removing those hoops through structures that transcend the boundaries of the ministries.
So Bahrain got my vote.
What initially impressed me about the country as a place to live and work was that it felt like a society in which the Bahrainis played a far more diverse part than Dubai. 50% of the population is Bahraini. And it is impossible live in the country without meeting and doing business with Bahrainis. This is not a country of landlords sitting back and letting its expatriate population do the work while its own nationals sit in offices behind large desks. It’s true that there are plenty of desk jockeys, but you will also find locals driving taxis and working in factories.
The divisions and problems in Bahraini society are well documented by the international media, so I don’t intend to regurgitate them here. For all its problems, the upside is the country has a wealth of educated and talented workers. Not all of them have realistic aspirations. In common with many of the other Gulf states, there is a cultural inclination to go for government work and managerial roles, and a corresponding disinclination to invent, create and take risks. But that attitude is slowly changing.
On a personal level I have found it far easier in Bahrain to meet, interact and build friendships with local people. I don’t feel as though I’m living in an expatriate bubble. Bahrain feels like a real country. And people looking from afar should be aware that none of the recent demonstrations have been threatening to non-Bahrainis. Yes, the Bahrainis are concerned about the number of expatriates in the country, and would like more locals and less expatriates in the workforce.
But I have never felt less than welcome here. In Bahrain, Arab hospitality is more than just ritual. What is equally significant is that as a society it feels less transient than some of the other Gulf states. The Bahrain experience is different from Jeddah in the 80s and Dubai in the 90s. I know people of British origin who were born here and intend to die here. Perhaps I’m being unfair to Dubai, but I have a sense that for the overwhelming majority of expatriates it is a temporary home that they will eventually abandon once it has served its purpose. Here you will find genuine affection for Bahrain and the Bahrainis. It’s hard for expatriates in Dubai to feel the same way if the majority rarely interact with its local population.
So what of the future for Bahrain? I actually believe that if the country can get through its current upheaval and resolve many of the long-standing grievances within the population, it can fly. This is not intended as a warm and fluffy message of support. It’s based on the fact that the country has already travelled further than any of its neighbours down the path of open-mindedness that will be essential if it is to progress from trading and manufacturing to creating and inventing.
There is no lack of motivation here. I have met many passionate Bahrainis who put the cynicism of the average Westerner to shame. There is plenty of passion among both the protesters and those who have demonstrated on behalf of the government.
If the reforms can channel that passion into a constructive direction, Bahrain has as much if not more going for it than any other Gulf state. Like Dubai, it does not have the natural resources of its neighbours. It must like on its wit, not its oil. But its demographics mean that it has a greater chance than Dubai for its population to create benefits for itself, rather than reap them from others.
That’s why, with all due respect to Dubai, I’m betting on Bahrain in the long term. And as a place for a Western expatriate to live and work, it beats Dubai any time. As I said before, it feels like a real country.
Al Jazeera is a superb TV station. I watch the English version, and at times feel that I am watching the BBC-By-The-Sea. Aside from its coverage of events in the Middle East, which is comprehensive, it produces excellent reporting from other parts of the world. Today’s programme about Australian Aborigines equals anything to be seen on other international stations such as CNN and BBC World.
The station has a massive degree of trust at the grass roots of the Arab world. During the recent Egyptian uprising, a Saudi friend told me that “Al Jazeera is the only channel I watch to find out what is happening in Egypt, because it’s the only one I trust”.
And yet the station has made many enemies over the years. To its supporters, it is a bastion of free speech, and has done more than any government to change the perceptions of its viewers in the Middle East.
On the other hand, at one time or another, it has made enemies of Bahrain, Kuwait, the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain and Iraq. Perceptions of the station in the West as a mouthpiece of Al Qaeda have been reinforced by its being the letterbox for just about every video and audio tape purporting to come from Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri.
Other claim that its spiritual mentor is the Muslim Brotherhood, enough to send shivers up the spines of some of its detractors in the West. And now Colonel Gaddafi has accused the station’s Qatari owners of meddling in his country’s internal affairs.
The extent to which Qatar’s ruling family, which owns Al Jazeera, does actually exert its influence on the station is a matter for speculation. But there was an intriguing statement in an article from yesterday’s Asharq Alawsat by Huda Al-Husseini – Iran, Syria and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. She referred to a leaked report from within Syria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs about plans to exploit the current situation in Egypt in order to move that country towards an anti-US alliance with Iran and Syria.
The relevant paragraph is here:
The report’s authors believe that what happened in Tunisia has no precedent in modern Arab history, although the Arab region is accustomed to military coups or foreign interventions, when regimes are overthrown. Yet they alluded to the possibility of repeated cases of collapse regarding Arab regimes, “especially in Egypt.” The report’s authors used Iranian intelligence regarding the decline of the Egyptian regime’s ability to deter [civil unrest], in the face of educated young people who suffer from poverty, unemployment, deplorable living conditions, and a political regime beset by corruption. Hence, it was impossible for the Egyptian regime to neutralize the popular uprising, because it did not have solutions to the economic problems inherent in Egypt, and was cautious about resorting to violence to confront the demonstrations, because of [the presence of] Arab satellite channels, especially “al-Jazeera”. The report indicated that a study is currently being conducted to gauge this channel’s policy towards Syria, and to try to reach an agreement with it, as Iran did during the demonstrations that erupted after the 2009 elections, when Ahmadinejad was declared victorious.
The highlighting of the text is mine. I’m not sure of the provenance of the report – the region is currently rife with propaganda of one sort or another. One also has to bear in mind that Asharq Alawsat is Saudi owned, and such an alliance would leave Saudi Arabia politically isolated.
But the article comes at a time when an Iranian frigate and support vessel entered the Suez Canal – the first Iranian warships ever to do so – on their way to what Iran claims is a “joint training exercise” with Syria.
If it were true that some countries in the region regard Al Jazeera as being open to negotiation on its editorial policy, would it really be the station’s managers with whom those countries would be negotiating, or its owners?
It’s hard to see a coherent guiding hand behind Al-Jazeera. The ruling family of Qatar would surely not benefit from all of the potential outcomes from the current turmoil. And I would expect that some of the station’s star names like Sir David Frost would not be comfortable associating themselves with being unwitting instruments of Qatari foreign policy, especially if the influence was blatant. But then again most journalists are used to working for proprietors with agendas. Rupert Murdoch, for example, could never be described as hands-off.
The Qatar ruling family are not answerable to anybody, but if the enmity felt in some quarters against Al Jazeera rubs off on them, fairly or unfairly, there could be future consequences.
I’d welcome comments from anyone with thoughts on this.
A friend who lives in England commented on my last post about the chances of western-style democracy taking root in the Gulf countries. I’m abandoning the string by reproducing his comment here:
Thanks for this, Steve. I imagine of all the people I know, you must be the best informed about these matters. We’re all focussing on the Arab states at the moment, but I see this as a great global shift and there’s evidence that places like Iran and China will also have to face the consequences of the kind of universal awareness the internet has brought about. The outcome remains disturbingly uncertain. – it’s a classically chaotic situation we’ve all been thrown into, and although we all hope good may come of it, I get the feeling that Western leaders must be feeling somewhat nervous about the practical implications of this big word “democracy”. How fast can the world catch up on the centuries of socio-economic development that were a prerequisite of democracy in the West?
I certainly don’t consider myself to be the best-informed on these issues of all the people I know! But here are some further thoughts in response to Andrew’s comments.
In my opinion, the desire for democracy has not been the primary driver for the unrest in the Middle East. What has led most people onto the streets is a sense of personal grievance, rooted in poverty, inequality, corruption, oppressive policing and inability to speak freely. These grievances have crystallised into specific demands: the rule of law, freedom of speech, changes to constitutions, and in some cases the replacement of leaders. Democracy then appears to be the best way to satisfy those demands. So the cycle is grievance, demand, solution.
Egypt seems to be conforming to that model. In Libya an intermediate step seems to be in the offing. Because Gadaffi and his clan are inextricably woven into the fabric of govenment, the likely outcomes are bloody repression that successfully restores the status quo, or the whole edifice of government being blasted away.
I worry when people talk about moving to a “greater degree of democracy”, because you could argue that by a strict set of criteria you either have democracy or you don’t. Minor variants in the genome of democracy can result in the political equivalent of differences between homo sapiens and the gorilla. Some would say “give me the gorilla any time!”
Concerning China and Iran, I posted some thoughts on the prospects of serious change in those countries a couple of weeks ago. I took the view that popular protest would be unlikely to deliver change in the short term. But perhaps I underestimated the people of Iran. And even in China we have seen nascent protests. To those two countries you could also add Russia, Belarus and North Korea as candidates for change. But all these countries have been prepared in the past to use extreme violence in supressing dissent.
So will the events of 2011 turn out to be the equivalent of the “Wave of Revolutions” of 1848, which rippled through Europe and even extended to Brazil? What Andrew wrote about was not just the phenomena but the outcomes. The most recent set of political earthquakes in Eastern Europe had mixed results. The collapse of communism in the former Iron Curtain states has by and large led to more benign and enlightened systems of government in many of those countries, but integrating them into Western political and economic structures has led to strains in Europe and beyond. In Russia, the political progression since the end of the Yeltsin presidency been towards a more authoritarian structure of govenment under Putin and Medvedev.
As for the fall-out from the events in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, one of the more immediate effects seems likely to be pressures on the borders of neighbouring countries. We have already seen a flood of Tunisians arriving in Lampedusa. Expect a similar exodus of Libyans fleeing the violence. Should unrest spead widely among the Gulf states, it is also possible that we will see a repeat of 1991, when some of those states expelled a number of other Arab nationals, notably Yemenis and Palestinians, whom they considered a threat to the established order. Since many Arab countries rely heavily on remittances from expatriates in the Gulf states, such actions could exacerbate the economic problems in the home countries. These days though, it would be a hard decision to work out who is or is not a threat, so I think this is unlikely to happen.
Long term, who knows? I stick with my opinion that the best way to create stability in the region would be to establish a regional development fund dedicated towards social and economic regeneration in the neediest countries. I wrote a post about this last month.
Looking at the wider implications, yes, Western leaders will be worried, but instead of simply reacting to events, they would be sensible to have Plans A, B and C up their sleeves.
After the events of the first two months of this year, nothing that follows will surprise me. But personally, I’m excited by what is happening. If current events end up improving the lives of 300 million Arabs, I can only see positive outcomes for the rest of the world. One man’s fortune doesn’t have to be another’s pain.
As leaders topple, regimes change and nerves jangle across the Middle East and North Africa, debates rage about democracy, human rights and the rule of law. Suddenly the reputation of George W Bush – whose calls for democracy in the region were ridiculed by those who stated that the region has no history of that form of government – is being viewed (by some) in a kinder light.
If we divert our attention from current events in Libya, Iran, Bahrain and Yemen, and focus specifically on the kingdoms, emirates and sheikhdoms of the GCC nations, what are the chances of their moving to what we in the West think of as democracy? And what are the changes of mindset that they would need to go through to succeed in putting in place what Winston Churchill once referred to as the “least worst form of government”?
This post is more than a five-minute read. I apologise, but I don’t apologise. I don’t hold with the convention that blog posts should always be short and sweet. Sometimes to explore a subject you need more than a few hundred words.
First let’s look at the origins of the regimes in place today. Most of the ruling families acquired their positions through tribal leadership in times when the population of the Arabian Peninsula was far smaller than it is today. In the case of the Gulf states, the ruling families acted as local fiefdoms within the Ottoman Empire. They would acknowledge the Sultan in Istanbul as their overlord, pay tribute and taxes, but were otherwise left to rule their people as they thought fit. When the Empire collapsed, these Emirs came under the “protection” of British India, and the local rulers accepted guidance from the local British representative, known as the Resident.
Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, came into being largely by conquest. The first King, Abdulaziz, expanded his domain from central Arabia to most of the peninsula. In the process, he displaced the ruler of the Hejaz in the west, Sharif Hussein, and won the allegiance – through battle and marriage – of the tribal leaders in the north, east and south-west of what is today the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. However, when I talk about the Gulf countries, I include Saudi Arabia.
In the tradition of the Arabian tribes, allegiance to a ruler has never been unconditional. Neither is it inevitable that the eldest son of a ruler will succeed him. Even today, after the passing of King Abdullah, the new king will assume his role only after his family and other tribal leaders swear the oath of allegiance – the bayh. In other words, the king is acclaimed by a form of oligarchic consensus. Across the Gulf States too, leaders are in place through similar systems of personal loyalty.
And these systems seemed to work fine when the leaders in question ruled populations of tens to hundreds of thousands, when their fiefdoms were lacking physical resources, and when the lives of their rulers, while more comfortable than those of many of their subjects, were not so wildly different. The population of Bahrain, for example, at the time oil was discovered, was less than 20,000.
When oil was discovered in the Gulf, things started changing. After World War II, as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia dramatically stepped up production, other Gulf states discovered oil, and rulers started benefiting from wealth beyond the dreams of their ancestors. A further step change came in 1973, when Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal led the OAPEC oil embargo. The result was a tenfold increase in the price of oil.
The post-embargo price increase fuelled massive development in the Gulf countries. In most of them, a large slice of the new-found oil wealth was spent on roads, airports, schools universities and housing projects. Senior members of the royal families became very wealthy, not only through stipends directly from oil revenues, but also through commissions from foreign firms and businesses in which they had substantial stakes.
What has remained opaque in many Gulf countries is the degree to which oil revenues have accrued directly to the ruling families, as opposed to those revenues declared in annual budgets. In Bahrain, the oil revenue, as I understand it, goes straight to the government. This is not the case in some other countries.
Every GCC country publishes an annual budget, and spends money more or less according to that budget. In some cases – in particular, charitable donations, special welfare initiatives or emergency foreign aid – expenditure is characterised as gifts from the ruler or senior members of his family. Since there is no individual taxation in any of the countries, such personal gifts in reality come directly or indirectly from the wellhead. But they serve to accentuate the bond between the leader and his people.
And this leads to a crucial dynamic in society across the Middle East, not just within the GCC countries. That of ownership. Do the ruling families believe that they own the wealth that comes out of the ground, or do they see themselves as custodians on behalf of their people? When you arrive at any GCC airport, one of the first things you are likely to see will be portraits of the ruler and at least two of the most senior members of his family. You will find the same portraits in the streets, in hotels, in every government building, in company offices and in private offices of executives.
This is not the same as the “cult of the personality” favoured by the old communist regimes and the likes of Saddam Hussein. In Iraq you would find portraits and statues of Saddam in every conceivable guise – soldier, tribal sheikh, hunter, man of faith and father of the nation. Much as Roman emperors associated themselves with various deities in statues and coins, before they went to join the pantheon of gods themselves.
Portraits of Gulf rulers tend to be dignified and conservative – more akin to those of Queen Elizabeth to be found at every British Embassy. Nonetheless, the fact that they are to be found everywhere accentuates the impression that government is embodied in the persons of the ruler and his family. This is fine when things are going well – not so fine in a crisis when the finger of blame points not at the government that is failing to perform, but at the rulers themselves.
The patriarchal ethos is also reflected in business. There are few companies where the company is seen to be bigger than its leaders or owners. Saudi Aramco is one of them, partly because of its earlier history as an organisation founded on American corporate lines. Publicly listed companies have a mixed record in communicating with their shareholders. Corporate governance and investor relations tend to be fairly low down the agenda of executives and boards of directors.
So one of the key elements in a transformation of the Gulf states into Western-style democracies is for loyalty to the nation and to the ruling families not to be seen as one and the same. This was a journey that the United Kingdom took over the best part of five hundred years. Today, the British still sing “God Save the Queen” as their national anthem. The state prosecutes individuals and companies in the name of the Queen. Royal Assent is required for new legislation, but never withheld. The Queen opens Parliament, and delivers a speech outlining the legislative programme for the forthcoming session using the phrase “my Government….”. However, the speech is written for her by the government.
Equally, if England wins the football World Cup, the Queen is not congratulated, and if the nation suffers an economic calamity, it is the government that is ejected, not the Queen. And so it has been, with a wrinkle or two on the way, since 1705, when the Act of Union brought the Kingdoms of England and Scotland together.
This form of constitutional monarchy is far from the system in place in the Gulf countries today, where the notion of allegiance is still intensely personal, and where the ruler will often take and be accorded personal credit for the achievement of his government. Queen Elizabeth, though a person, is a symbol. Gulf rulers have an active influence over all aspects of their subjects’ lives. Moving to a Western style of constitutional monarchy would take a major change of mindset on the part of the rulers and the ruled.
Even if the current unrest in the region results in regime change in one of the Gulf states – perhaps the replacement of a ruling family with an elected president – such a change will not necessarily result in a constitutional democracy as seen in the US, France and Turkey. Current and former Arab leaders such as Hosni Mubarak, Bashir Al-Assad, Zine Ben Ali and Muammar Gaddafi know their cultures, and have mined the same seam of personal loyalty as do the ruling families of the Gulf. “L’état c’est moi” has typically trumped the notion of the leader being at the service and disposal of the people, no matter how much their rhetoric claims otherwise.
What of the ruled? The cornerstones of Gulf societies have always been respect for family and elders, and belief in God. The implicit contract between the rulers and ruled is that the rulers will look after their people as a father would look after his family. The association of public development initiatives with ruling families has never been clearer than in Saudi Arabia, where universities, airports, research institutes and streets are all named after the current king, his family members and predecessors.
That social contract has held strong for as long as the ruling families have kept their side of the bargain – provided for their people in terms of education, jobs, decent housing and the ability to raise families and have comfortable retirements. People may grumble at the wealth of their leaders, but provided they themselves are guaranteed the essentials of life, they have traditionally been happy to accept the bargain.
But over the past 30 years, as populations have mushroomed across the region, oil prices have risen and fallen, and conflict has raged in neighbouring countries such as Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and Yemen, that bargain has become increasingly difficult for the Gulf states to keep.
The oil wealth has not only been used to create roads, airports, schools and universities. It has also funded the import of huge numbers of foreigners to do the dirty work of building the roads, sweeping the streets, cleaning the offices, watering the palm trees and looking after the children.
Especially in the cities, foreigners do the manual work that the grandparents of today’s citizens would happily have done themselves. The whole of the Gulf region has become addicted to foreign labour. And that addiction is perpetuated by the fact that immigrant labour, at the manual end of the spectrum, will do the work at a far lower wage than would be acceptable to a citizen of the region.
Opinions, widely held by expatriates in some countries, that nationals “do not want to do real work” and that “there are plenty of jobs available if they were prepared to get their hands dirty” is both simplistic and unfair.
It is true that there is an overwhelming preference among Gulf nationals to work in offices, preferably as managers, and above all, preferably in government. Government jobs are seen as secure. The working hours are often short compared to those in the private sector. Salaries, while not astronomic, are at least enough to allow employees a reasonable standard of living.
As to arguments about dirty hands, many nationals will claim that they would be unable to find decent housing and raise a family on wages paid to a labourer in Baluchistan who lives as a single man in a dormitory.
At the same time, youth unemployment in the region is high. Although family support systems tend to cushion the young unemployed from the worst effects of having no job, they cannot easily mitigate the sense of frustration felt by those who feel that they are serving no useful purpose in society.
The imbalance between high youth unemployment and high dependency on foreign labour is just one of the elements threatening the status quo, and causing citizens to look again at the social contract between rulers and ruled.
Another key factor is that education programmes across the Gulf have seen hundreds of thousands of young people gain degrees at home and abroad. These are people who are more likely to question the old ways, and less likely to pay deference to the established order. They, along with young professionals and teenagers, are the prime users of the social media. They return to their families with expectations that the government will provide them with jobs and salaries suitable to their perception of their status. When that doesn’t happen – or doesn’t happen quickly enough, they in turn become frustrated and resentful.
The media, social as well as conventional, is perhaps the most important factor of all. Well before recent events, Facebook and other sites have provided a forum without borders for Arab youth. Add to that the modern alternatives to national TV stations which are not necessarily toeing the government line, and you have a generation of people who questioning conventional norms more than ever.
But even if, as seems likely, the demands of the younger generation lead to significant reform, will that reform take their countries closer to a western model of democracy?
The biggest step change towards the western model of constitutional democracy would be to reform the social contract. There is little chance of that happening with the stroke of a pen or an announcement from the ruler. To move from entitlement to responsibility will not happen overnight.
One approach that would kill several birds with one stone would be the introduction of personal taxation. Not a popular concept anywhere, I suspect. But even a moderate level of taxation would have profound implications.
Taxation would have three primary effects.
First, it would be a way to wean countries off the hand-out culture – the feeling that all you have to do to keep your people happy is to pump the oil and gas out of the ground, spend it on infrastructure and public services, and provide a financial safety net for those in greatest need. The Gulf countries do recognise that they need to reduce their dependence on oil and diversify into other wealth-generating models. Many talk about transforming their countries into knowledge economies, where the true assets of the nation are not natural resources, but the inventiveness and knowledge of its people.
But these initiatives are funded primarily through use of the oil patrimony. If the wealthier members of society were asked to contribute to that transformation through a moderate level of taxation, the result would be more oil left in the ground for future generations.
Second, when introducing taxation, the countries would have to apply the principle of “no taxation without representation”. Taxpayers would need to have a say in how their money is spent. They would start feeling that money spent by government is “my money”, not the government’s, and certainly not the ruling family’s. The form of representation would very likely need to be electoral.
Third, taxation would need to be applied equally to nationals and expatriates. For the majority of senior expatriates, the lure of employment in the Gulf countries is the absence of taxation. If taxation was introduced, many would leave. Maybe not immediately – the job markets in their home countries are not exactly booming at the moment – but over time. This would create opportunities for nationals to step up into their roles.
The process would have to be managed carefully, and it would need to be carefully regulated. In the 1980’s, Saudi Arabia announced taxation for expatriate workers. When it became clear that to avoid a mass exodus of much-needed skills, the private sector would need to pay the tax for its key expatriates, the scheme was rapidly shelved after strong pressure from business leaders. If the process was a GCC-wide inititative, this would prevent one GCC member from gaining a short-term advantage over another by providing tax privileges now unavailable in the countries introducing taxation.
So governments would need to consult the private sector, and implement a carefully-phased programme that did not have any dramatic impact early on. Certainly, there could be no question of directly taxing those on low incomes, although increased indirect taxation might be feasible.
The introduction of taxation as part of a package of measures that included more financial transparency in government and greater electoral representation would be one way to change the dynamic between the ruler and the ruled forever in the Gulf region. It would be the fastest way to move the Gulf countries towards a western model of constitutional democracy.
The idea of moving towards Western models might be the last thing on the minds of many young people in the region. They could point out that democracy in the West has many flaws that they would not wish to see in their countries. And the region’s leaders would be keen to ensure that any changes were not dramatically counter-cultural. But perhaps the net-savvy youth of the region can, if given the chance, come up with representative models that leapfrog the tried and tested systems in the West. Perhaps the social media offer opportunities for more effective means of consultation and democracy than the once-in-a-while systems in place in the West.
So it’s possible to imagine that the legacy of the conservative nations of the Gulf could end up not being all the things the West currently associates with the region – oil wealth, concrete and conspicuous consumption – but new systems of government from which the rest of the world can learn.
Arabs who look back with nostalgia at the invention and creativity of their world a millennium ago are perhaps ignoring a black swan gliding up the river towards them. Could a political renaissance that inspires and informs the world be the lasting monument to Tahrir Square, Pearl Roundabout and, maybe, Tripoli’s Green Square?
If you have read my last three posts on Bahrain, you will be relieved to know that I’ve run out of mundane descriptions of views outside my balcony window. This morning, though, I woke up at 7am, an hour later than yesterday, and three hours later than the day before.
That must be a good thing. Perhaps it was because there were no helicopters clattering around for the first time in a while.
Yesterday, the Crown Prince went on national TV appealing for calm and offering dialogue. The stated response of some opposition leaders was “no dialogue”. Yet later on we heard that he was holding discussions with opposition figures. And then we learned that police and army units had disengaged from Pearl Roundabout.
Perhaps it’s too soon to say that reason has finally prevailed, and that there is a potential way forward. Much depends on the assessment of the parties of the relative strengths of their positions.
The rapid bleeding of the Egyptian economy in the days leading up to the departure of Mubarak was a significant factor in swinging support of vested interests behind the change in that country. Egyptians who earn $2 a day will have been unlikely to be concerned at the estimated $300 million haemorrhaging from the economy every day. But powerful business interests will have been extremely concerned.
Here in Bahrain, a similar concern will be in play. Leaving aside for a moment the real dismay and shock felt in all quarters at the violent events of the week, the economic consequences of further disruption, and even stalemate, will be felt long after the protesters have left the street. The cancellation of the Bahrain Grand Prix in March would be an obvious symbol – both in terms of economic loss and wounded national pride – of those consequences. Less dramatic but more telling in the long run would be damaged international perceptions of the stability of the country. Such concerns could lead to foreign investment postponed or switched to other Gulf countries.
I can’t believe that anybody in Bahrain, except possibly those who would like to see the country purged by fire, wants that to happen. It will cost money to make the social changes demanded by those who see themselves as underprivileged. Not just funds reallocated from other budgets, but, in the long run, new money generated by the economy. And that means investment, ingenuity and a convincing national proposition.
So international perceptions are important. Not just the pious sentiments expressed by Hillary Clinton, but the views of the international business community that Bahrain has worked so hard to woo in the past ten years. That is why it was also important that the government tried to put its best face forward to the world yesterday, and will continue to do so tomorrow. Onlookers have become used to some unimpressive attempts at damage control from Arab leaders over the years – from the ludicrous claims of Mohammed Saeed Al Sahaf, the Iraqi Minister of Information, in the run-up to the fall of Saddam, to the dour expressions and words of Hosni Mubarak and Omar Suleiman in the final days of Mubarak’s reign.
That was why it was vital for the Crown Prince to radiate calm, and, most importantly, humanity, in his interview yesterday with CNN. And I thought he did the job well. The art of switching from the rhetorical style traditionally used when addressing an audience in Arabic to the more understated and conversational style that plays well with the Western media is one mastered by few Arab leaders. Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the Saudi oil minister in the 70’s and 80s, comes to mind as one of only a few expert practitioners. Yamani did a lot to humanise the Saudi government in the eyes of the world.
The Crown Prince is not a politician in the sense that elected leaders in the West are. He does not have the practiced delivery of a Tony Blair or a Barack Obama. Although fluent and articulate, at times in the CNN interview he seemed a little hesitant. But actually that was a refreshing change from the hectoring style of many Arab leaders. What made it especially important that he should come over as a sincere and concerned human being, was that he was doing so in the context of the demonisation of the royal family, and particularly of the King, by some influential foreign reporters.
For example, Nicholas Kristof in yesterday’s New York Times referred to what he described as the “brutality of a medieval monarch”. While I don’t condone the brutality of the police action, it was both insulting and inaccurate to imply that it was the click of a single person’s fingers that sent in the security forces. King Hamad sits at the apex of a government structure in which there are many decision makers – not one person in autocratic isolation – however tragically misguided some recent decisions might have been.
What’s more, whatever the inadequacies of the current system of government – which will no doubt be a subject of intense discussions in the coming weeks – Bahrain is as far from being an absolute monarchy as the British system of government is from the court of Henry VIII. In fact, as Kristof would discover if he took the time to find out, most of the monarchies of the Gulf states are also by no means absolute. They may not have systems of government that we in the West would consider optimal. But there are checks and balances in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other neighbouring countries that may not have a constitutional basis, but are nonetheless very powerful.
What happens from here? An educated guess is that there will be some social changes first – perhaps increased spending in some areas. These can be relatively straightforward. Constitutional changes will take longer, because the government will say that to amend a constitution – and create something that is fitter for purpose than that in place today – is no small matter, and will require widespread consultation and maybe even a referendum. And they would be right. Personnel changes? I wouldn’t hazard a guess, but perhaps there might be some form of reshuffle earlier rather than later.
But what is critically important, both for international and local stakeholders, is that the unequivocal message of change from the Crown Prince is translated into a demonstrable sense of purpose and urgency. It’s not enough to take action. That action needs to be seen to be taken – and clearly communicated to the waiting people of Bahrain.
Today at 6am, the view outside my balcony is eerily normal. The gargage truck has rattled past, noisily emptying nearby bins as on any normal morning. A small water tanker sets off for work. The sound of a tile cutter sets the nerves on edge. The ubiquitous cockerels have become less excited because the sun has been up for a while. In the distance, traffic rolls up and down Kuwait Avenue as if it were any other day. The motor functions of the city are rumbling on, seemingly regardless of what is happening in the heart and mind.
But it’s not a normal day for the people in hospital nursing wounds. For families in shock at what has happened to their loved ones. For bystanders who have spent the past 48 hours watching CNN and Al Jazeera in horror at the scenes of high emotion. For people texting and emailing each other: Are you alright? What’s going on? Look at this video. Check out this link.
And it’s not a normal day for the politicians as they ask themselves: What to we do now? Talk? Not talk? Talk about what?
Nor for the mourners who turned out in their thousands yesterday: Do we go again today? Will we be shot at? Are we prepared to risk our lives?
As I look out on this “normal” morning, I think back to 1969 in Northern Ireland, and see eerie parallels.
1969 was when the army came out on the streets. There had been other periods of strife ever since the political settlement in 1921 that resulted in the partition of Ireland. A situation that many Catholics in the northern province of Ulster – which remained part of the United Kingdom – never accepted. But the violence of 1969 was not primarily about religion. It was about civil rights. About a Catholic minority feeling that they were discriminated against by a Protestant majority. The divide was not only religious. It was also tribal. The Catholics were descendents of an earlier population in Ireland – let’s not say original, because we all know where that would lead – and the Protestants were descended from Scots who migrated to Ireland in the 17th Century.
The grievances were about equal opportunities: discrimination in employment, poor housing and a perception that they didn’t have a voice in the democratic process. As the violence erupted, the army stepped in to keep the peace between rival factions. Extremists went underground and started killing each other. The army slowly started to be perceived as the instrument of oppression rather than the guarantor of law and order. Outrage piled on outrage, and each side soon had the mythology to fuel decades of conflict. The violence spread to the mainland of the UK, and the Republican movement increasingly benefited from moral and logistical support from Irish emigrant organisations on the East Coast of the USA – just across the water.
That’s a quick and dirty thumbnail of thirty years of hatred, mayhem – and consequent economic retardation – in the tiny province of Ulster. It would be wrong to say that it’s even over now. There are still elements waiting for their moment to reignite the conflict.
The population of Ulster in 1969 was not much larger than that of present day Bahrain. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not suggesting that Bahrain is in for thirty years of insurrection, bombing and sectarian strife. And the situation here in 2011 is not a perfect analogue for Northern Ireland. But what I am saying is that when tribal, ethnic and religious differences find a focus in protest, there is a danger that the original issues of the protesters become subsumed in the subsequent grievances thrown up by reactions to the protest.
The government and its many supporters indignantly point out that Bahrain had made substantial progress as a constitutional monarchy over the past decade. That Bahrain is an example of tolerance, political liberalism and economic sophistication unmatched among its fellow members in the Gulf Cooperation Council of oil-producing states – Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE and Oman. That there is a political process in place now to resolve grievances.
The protesters and political opposition groups say that progress has been made, but not fast enough, and that there is still an unacceptable level of inequality and discrimination.
Those are the starting positions.
This morning’s news is that the King has authorised the Crown Prince to open talks with opposition groups in an effort to end the crisis. The suffering of Northern Ireland is an example of the abyss that beckons if today’s leaders fail to rise above the raw emotions of the moment, cut back on the rhetoric and act now to address the issues once and for all. In any compromise, there are bound to be people who feel that they have lost something or failed to gain everything. But compromise acceptable to the majority is far more desirable than the alternative.
Wish those leaders well. It’s not too late to save the day.
Very calm for most of the day. As my wife and I walked home from a nearly location, we came across a large procession of Shia chanting “peaceful” and “no religion” in Arabic. They were headed for a nearby cemetry. Within half an hour of arriving at the apartment, we heard shots coming from the direction of the Pearl Roundabout. There were two bursts. They were not sustained. We subsequently discovered that there were substantial casualties from the fusillades.
Salmaniya Hospital, which is about 2km away from us, is apparently overwhelmed. My wife, who is a registered nurse with trauma experience, was prepared to go over and help, but was advised in no uncertain terms that it would be extremely dangerous to go. There are thousands around the hospital, and reports on the TV that armed forces, for whatever reason, have been denying ambulances carrying casualties access to the hospital. Also reports that live rounds have been fired.
The Crown Prince has been on Bahrain TV offering immediate talks with the opposition factions behind the protests. You can be sure that there will be intense discussions in the King’s palace tonight. The big unanswered question is to what extent were the shooters acting within their orders, and under whose orders?
It’s four in the morning. Outside my window there’s a full moon – the harbinger of madness. Cocks are crowing and the thak-thak-thak of nearby helicopters has woken me.
I am not a news reporter. I was not at the Pearl Roundabout when security forces cleared the area. Nor was I at Salmaniya Hospital counting the bodies and interviewing the wounded. In the past 72 hours I have had phone calls and texts from friends – foreigners and Bahrainis – on both sides of what has now become a divide. They have been telling me their stories and perceptions of events. In my judgement, these people are not liars. They are people of goodwill who pass on what they hear – some in anger and some in fear. Or both.
I have learned something in the past three days.
It is easy to form judgements based on reports of events thousands of miles away. You see stories from newspapers you trust, TV channels you believe would report the big picture as well as the minutiae, and reporters you respect. And then you form a view.
This is the first time since the troubles in Northern Ireland that I have lived in a country in such turmoil. But in the days of the IRA campaign I was firmly on one side. It was my country in jeopardy. I walked through the streets of a city gripped by fear the morning after a bomb had killed 20-odd young people in a pub I knew well. I had no Irish republican friends. I could understand the grievances that led to the riots and ultimately the bombing and killing that blighted the next two decades. But understanding them is not the same as hearing them from somebody you like and respect. And it’s certainly not the same as accepting that murder, maiming and intimidation are legitimate activities in pursuit of a political end.
What I have learned from Manama is a lesson in emotion. That it is not anger that drives people to uncharacteristic decisions, but fear. One side fears the loss of its privileges, its wealth and political primacy. The other fears for the future of its children. It fears that the next generation will not be able to fulfil its dreams. It fears that the sacrifices of the older generation for the sake of the next one will be in vain. And fear begets decisions that are often rational, but are based on assumptions derived from emotion. On an intellectual level I have known this for as long as I have thought about it. But this is the first time that I have witnessed at close quarters the effect of fear on both sides of the divide. Among friends and acquaintances who I always thought were on the same side.
When you watch tanks crush bodies in China, or see emaciated prisoners in Srebrenica – all from the comfort of your own home – it’s easy to respond emotionally. To feel outrage and indignation. To condemn. But when you watch the stones flying in Tahrir Square through grainy YouTube videos, you only have the scenes continually replaying in front of your eyes, and the guidance of reporters at the scene, to help you form a view. What’s going on? Who started this? Why is this happening? Half the time, the reporters have no more information than you do. Again, you rely on media you trust, and take a view. And even if you can’t take a view, you watch with despair – another emotion – at the acts of inhumanity unfolding.
But when you are living among the protagonists, and you have friends in villages and palaces, your critical instincts go on red alert. You are torn between the evidence presented to you, and an unwillingness to believe that this is the whole story. Because to accept the story wholesale from one side feels like betrayal of friends on the other side. You say to yourself: “how can this be true?”
These conflicts are perhaps not so troubling for Nick Kristof of the New York Times, who dismissed as “preposterous” claims from the government that knives and swords had been found at the Pearl Roundabout, on the basis that he saw women and children sleeping peacefully in the hours before the clearout. Why preposterous? Is it not possible that some of the protesters, fearing aggressive action from the police, brought weapons into the square for self-protection, though not necessarily for acts of aggression on their part? Equally, would it be logical for knife-carrying protesters to carry out attacks on policement armed with batons, teargas and shotguns?
I mention the sword story because Kristof starts his article with the statement that:
“As a reporter, you sometimes become numbed to sadness. But it is heartbreaking to be in modern, moderate Bahrain right now and watch as a critical American ally uses tanks, troops, guns and clubs to crush a peaceful democracy movement and then lie about it.”
The emphasis on the last five words is mine. Harrowing as his report is, the only evidence he presents for one of his central assertions, that the government lied about the events, is the story about the knives and swords. Is that evidence sufficiently clear to justify such a blanket statement?
Kristof’s story eloquently reflects the indignation of the people he interviewed in the aftermath of the clear-out. He quotes eye-witness reports of brutality, and states that he has seen the bodies. He goes on to say:
“So here’s what happened.
The pro-democracy movement has bubbled for decades in Bahrain, but it found new strength after the overthrow of the dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt. Then the Bahrain government attacked the protesters early this week with stunning brutality, firing tear gas, rubber bullets and shotgun pellets at small groups of peaceful, unarmed demonstrators. Two demonstrators were killed (one while walking in a funeral procession), and widespread public outrage gave a huge boost to the democracy movement.”
All of which may be true. But as far as I’m aware, he didn’t witness the “acts of stunning brutality” earlier in the week. He didn’t mention claims by the government that those fired on had lobbed Molotov cocktails at the police. That last year during Ramadan there had been alleged attacks on police in the villages, and that an innocent bystander from India had been severely burned when his car caught fire, and that he subsequently died in hospital. That across many of the roads of Manama there are the scars left by tyres laid across the highway and set alight. He didn’t consider that the violence inflicted upon the protesters might have been motivated to an extent by fear on the part of police. They are humans too.
I am not picking apart Kristof’s article to justify the actions of the government or those of the protesters. I am doing so to make the point that he represents the New York Times, one of the most influential newspapers in America. And that if I was an American citizen reading his piece, and I knew little about Bahrain, I might have some sympathy for his suggestion that it was time for regime change, made with the very simple conclusion that “when a king opens fire on his people, he no longer deserves to be its ruler.”
Perhaps I would have come to that conclusion if I was free of the welter of conflicting opinion and emotion to which I am exposed as a close bystander who actually lives in the country. But I probably wouldn’t have considered that by the same logic it would have been right for Great Britain to have forced the abdication of Queen Elizabeth II after the shooting by paratroopers of 13 citizens in the 1972 Bloody Sunday riot in Londonderry, or for America to have impeached Richard Nixon after the Kent State shootings in 1970. Yet in neither case did the vast majority of citizens consider such action to be either feasible or desirable.
Emotions I understand. Kristof is human, and he feels emotion about what he reports. But what I have learned from this event – through experience rather than theory – is that it is easy to come up with clear-eyed conclusions when you witness one end of the emotional spectrum and don’t consider all the other emotions in play.
By writing this I realise that I run the risk of upsetting one body of opinion or the other. So be it. But I want any Bahraini reading this to understand that any form of violence, anywhere in the world, makes me sick to the stomach. I am for Bahrain. I love this small island and I love its people. I believe in human rights, in equal opportunity and the rule of law. These are my emotions.
But if there is to be a way forward that does not involve repeated cycles of violence, it will be because the parties in conflict recognise the emotions of the other, rise above instincts for revenge and retribution and reach a settlement in which there are no losers. Too soon for that, perhaps. But with wise people to the fore, Bahrain can get there.
I’ve been contacted by a number of people from outside the country concerned about what is happening in Bahrain at the moment.
Now that coverage of events by the foreign media has started building up, I’m not sure that I can add much to the wide spectrum of opinion that has already been expressed.
What I can say is that in my neighbourhood, things are pretty quiet apart from a noticeable increase in helicopter traffic.
In government circles there seems to be some concern that external media coverage of the protests have been somewhat one-sided. One TV programme specifically referred to is the BBC World “Our World” edition that went out on Friday, which focused strongly on Shia grievances without presenting the alternative view that there are many Bahrainis whose standard of living has risen substantially over the past ten years.
There’s no doubt that the death of two protesters – the first from a deflected rubber bullet and the second, allegedly, from bird-shot wounds – has ratcheted up the tension. The main protest now seems to be focused on the Pearl Roundabout, one of Manama’s main intersections. According to one Bahraini I spoke to, there are “many thousands” gathered there. He believes that the protesters are planning to set up a Tahrir Square-style presence there. There are reports of one or two tents springing up, and of the security forces blocking road entrances to the roundabout.
On the Government side, King Hamad went on TV earlier today to apologise for the deaths of the protesters, and promise a full investigation into the circumstances. The Minister of Interior has announced that the paramilitary security force has been given instructions not to intervene at the Pearl Roundabout unless they are themselves subjected to violence.
People I have spoken to discount the theory that the hand of Iran is influential in stirring up the protests. They say that this is Bahraini problem. Indeed, there have been placards saying “No Sunni, no Shia”. But it’s clear that there are long-standing sectarian issues behind the protests – rooted in perceptions of discrimination in employment, housing and education against the Shia majority.
There seems little doubt that the protests will accelerate political reforms. To what extent and how quickly remains to be seen. As in Jordan, the agenda of the vast majority of the protesters does not appear to be regime change. But the protesters of Bahrain are sailing with the winds of Tahrir behind them. The next few days will show where those winds take them.
Let’s hope that wisdom – on both sides – prevails.
This morning I awoke to a glorious Bahrain dawn. Whatever people say about the poor air quality here, when the wind drops, it looks pretty clear across my balcony. The nearby buildings still in the shade contrast with the pastel hues of buildings further afield as the sun lights them up. True, it’s not exactly an urban idyll outside my front window. In the foreground there are twisted TV aerials sprouting from the rooftops of nearby villas. Cables running wild across the walls, and rusting satellite dishes. Further back, the light browns, greens and pinks of the buildings compete with an ugly red and white microwave tower, and the jagged grey stumps of half-completed buildings.
If you look out to the right of my apartment block, you will see an older building that seems to be dying on its feet. Fading paint, crumbling masonry, balconies full of junk, washing out to dry, broken pushchairs and white goods ejected from the living spaces indoors. A friend who served as a UN peacekeeper during the Lebanese civil war gets flashbacks when he sees it. He instinctively looks for snipers.
This afternoon I was supposed to be facilitating a workshop. It was cancelled last night because the meeting of country heads for an international firm had overrun, so they didn’t have the time. They had only called for it three days ago, so I wasn’t entirely surprised.
As I review things to follow up, I note that one company had promised action within a week. That was three weeks ago. Still nothing. A government department had promised a decision on a tender by the end of the week. That was two weeks ago. Still nothing. This was the third broken promise on their part. Now the bid bond has expired and I want the money back.
Nothing out of the unusual, really. Looking out from my balcony, you could be in any city in the Arabian Peninsula – Riyadh, Doha or Abu Dhabi. Maybe not Sana’a. More brick and babble there. But in any of those cities, your email inbox would be equally notable for what’s not waiting for you as for what is.
As a Westerner living in the Middle East, you get used to compromise. You encounter the tension between old and new every day. You admire the shiny new buildings, yet you’re not surprised that they’ve been designed without the safety features you’d expect elsewhere. You encounter old people wielding smart phones, and young people whose lifestyles and attitudes you think you can predict because they’re wearing Armani – but can’t. You see closed minds among the young, yet wisdom and openness from the old. Youngsters desperate to learn, older generations stuck in their bureaucratic silos. Cruelty, bigotry, kindness and humanity. All part of the human experience.
As the guest worker, I sometimes ask myself for whom these cities are built. For the minority of inhabitants who were actually born in them? Or for the millions who come here to help build, sustain and grow the edifices in an increasing spiral of development? The answer is obviously both. But I wonder if the ancestors of the indigenous populations – if they looked out over the tower blocks, tenements and clogged up streets – wouldn’t say that their sons and daughters had signed a pact with the devil.
The days of short lives, disease, scarce resources and subsistence living have given way to a legacy of plenty – greed, envy, fear, incredible wealth and desperate poverty. Old ways struggling with new. Heritage villages and museums recalling yet not capturing lives long gone.
What does it mean to be a citizen of one of these countries? To be joyful because they are part of a global village of shared technology, instant communications and slowly coalescing cultures? Or angry because in every street they hear voices they can’t understand, or see behaviour that they have no desire to tolerate?
And what will it mean to be a citizen in the future? Will the legions of immigrant workers slowly acquire the rights of earlier immigrants and share the citizenship enjoyed by the descendants of south Asians, Africans, Persians and Turks who settled in the region as merchants, pilgrims and conquerors? Or will these countries cling to their cultural and religious identities, and shut the door to those whose services they need but whose presence they resent?
It seems ironic that the Prime Minister of Great Britain, David Cameron, tells his compatriots that the age of multiculturalism is dead – that it is no longer acceptable for British citizens to live in cultural enclaves. Yet his government and many others expect the Arab world to respect and tolerate the cultural bubbles in their own countries – oases of little Americas, British clubs and Indian schools.
So are we moving towards a Middle East where there will be churches in Saudi Arabia, where the majority of the population of Dubai is Hindu, where English eclipses Arabic as the dominant language, and where falafel and tabouleh yield to the mighty burger as the dish of preference?
And is the real meaning of the Days of Rage, Anger and Departure that Arabs want freedoms available elsewhere, and to enjoy being part of the pluralistic global village? Or is it that they want to be proud to be Arab, for their culture to be seen as equal to all others, and live free of the condescension and economic colonialism that they feel have beset their homelands since the discovery of oil?
Perhaps both, depending on who you speak to. The desire for an end to poverty and for freedom of speech would seem to be common denominators. But how things pan out from here may be beyond the control of the most profound thinkers and determined actors in the region. There’s much at stake, and the tension between the old and the new will continue to eat at the Arab soul in the months and years to come.
Meanwhile, I shall return to my day of mild annoyance.
It seems like a lifetime. But but in fact it was only ten days ago when I suggested in a post that the world should look further afield than the Middle East for potential dominoes – countries where populations, inspired by the example of Egypt and Tunisia, might soon rise up and challenge their governments.
Specifically I mentioned Pakistan, Thailand and, perhaps unfairly, Indonesia. To that list I would add China and Iran – maybe not as imminent candidates for change, but as countries where the conditions exist for upheaval in the future. What are those conditions?
I’m not a political scientist, so you are not going to get complex theories in this post or any other. I’m just a person who has lived for a while, travelled a bit, and watched a lot of revolutions – big and small – come and go.
But it seems to me that most revolutions start with the tension between haves and have-nots. Human rights are the least concern of people struggling to get from one day to the next. Their priority is staying alive – keeping their families together, having enough to eat, having decent shelter. If you have a society where there is a significant minority, or perhaps a majority, living under these conditions while witnessing others living what they see as better lives, then you have a fertile ground for change.
However, that is not usually enough. Where the haves concentrate political power into a small group, and use that power to deny a voice to the have-nots, the fear they generate through the apparatus of the state is usually enough to maintain the status quo. Things change when an educated and articulate middle class, that might have prospered under the autocratic regime, see that their aspirations are limited by a government that concentrates economic and political power among a privileged elite. And the catalyst is usually some dramatic event – economic, social, environmental or political – that threatens their position in society or outrages them to the extent that they lose their fear of the state apparatus.
At that point they find common cause with the underprivileged, take to the streets, and a tipping point arrives. And during the run-up to the tipping point, lack of human rights moves from long-running private resentment to slogans on placards.
In the case of Iran, that tipping point arrived in the summer of 2009. The problem for the protesters was that they were unable to carry the have-nots with them in sufficient numbers. The state apparatus isolated and suppressed them. Iran is a country rich in natural resources. Its ability to exploit those resources has been limited by its international isolation through political and economic sanctions. If those sanctions continue to bite, and the subsidies and welfare programmes put in place by President Ahmadinejad in order to placate the have-nots become economically unsustainable, expect the tipping point to arrive again.
But the catalyst will not be the threat of military conflict. Exploiting fear of external threats – or fear of real or fabricated internal enemies – is often the means by which autocratic regimes maintain power. No nation likes to see itself in the gun sights of a foreign power, and military intervention over the nuclear issue is likely to bind Iranians together rather than spark the next uprising. The trigger is more likely to be an internal event such as the disputed election of 2009. But the longer Iran finds itself in its bind of stunted development, the greater the chance that the demand for political change will eventually yield results.
The threat to China’s ruling class would seem to be more remote. The country is growing at an unprecedented rate. Its middle class is becoming wealthier as the economic benefits of the country’s development trickle down. But it still has a massive population of the under-privileged. People who feel that the economic revolution has passed them by. Who work in factories at survival wages. Whose homes have been bulldozed or submerged as China undertakes its massive urban development and irrigation projects. Whose family structures have been skewed by the gender imbalance resulting from the one-child policy.
Again, common grievances among the downtrodden are unlikely to change the status quo. But if China’s economy – seen by some economists as having the classic symptoms of a potential bubble – should suffer a crash, then a rapid downturn affecting the hard-earned wealth of the new middle class could act as the trigger that turns the heat on the regime.
As to the immediate future, Amer Taheri, a far more erudite commentator than me, has some interesting views in his recent column in Asharq Al Awsat – Egypt – change within the regime, not regime change. In the first part of his article he talks in scathing terms about the Iranian regime’s attempt to characterise the events in Egypt and Tunisia as triumphs of the Khomeini revolution. Later on, he talks about the nature of the changes in those countries:
So, if Tunisia and Egypt today are not like Iran of 32 years ago, are they following some other model?
In last week’s column I suggested that labelling the Tunisian and Egyptian events as revolutions was premature.
What we may end up with in both cases is change within the regime rather than regime change as was the case in Iran.
Each in its own way, Tunisia and Egypt may be following the model developed in a number of Asian and Latin American countries in which autocratic regimes based on the armed forces gradually evolved into democracies.
This was the case in South Korea and Taiwan and, more recently, Indonesia. It has also been the case in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Guatemala among others.
The process goes something like this: an autocracy evolves into a plutocracy that allows a widening space for dissent that, in turn, succeeds in broadening its base. In the meantime, economic success produces a larger middle class, the key ingredient for pluralist politics.
Thanks to economic development and inclusion in the global trading system, all the countries mentioned ended up looking like their democratic partners.
In every case, however, a popular movement for reform maintained the necessary pressure to achieve change of direction. Without political reform there could be economic growth but not genuine economic development. This is why the “Jasmine Revolution” in Tunisia and the freedom fest in Tahrir Square were needed to provide the necessary pressure to get the country out of an historical impasse.
One factor he didn’t mention is the economic power concentrated in the military establishments – the fact that the Egyptian army has many investments that it would wish to protect, as do the Revolutionary Guard in Iran, and the People’s Liberation Army in China. Mitigating or unpicking those vested interests will be, in the case of Egypt, and would be, in the case of Iran and China, no easy task.
But I particularly like Taheri’s distinction between economic growth and economic development.
Growth can be to the benefit of the few. Development should benefit the many. There are many regimes in the Middle East and beyond that will perhaps be asking themselves which of these conditions apply in their countries.
Minutes ago, Hosni Mubarak stepped down. The future is uncertain.
Here’s a timely email I received earlier from a French acquaintance who writes under the nom de plume of “Fils de Danton”, or “Son of Danton” in English. Students of the French Revolution will recall that the original Danton was a firebrand orator who eventually met his end at the hands of Robespierre. I previously published Fils de Danton’s tirade against President Sarkozy of France. This time he aims his sights at people in the West who view the Arab world through a colonial prism. I leave the link in for the benefit of readers who speak French.
“Hi Steve,
I wish you could read in English the article contained in this link:
Basically, it describes how deep the misunderstanding in the West is about what’s going on in the Arab world right now. How so many people see all this through the prism of the Islamic and Arab-Israeli conflict, both in the press and in people’s minds. And how arrogant it is to want to “protect the dignity” of Arab women over here by prohibiting the niqab, while they are demonstrating, without niqab, side by side with men. The article talks at length about how these people are using technology for freedom, while we are using it for fun, and how they stand up to tyrants while we moan about the “crisis” and worry about losing jobs. Bourgeois concerns, in the face of guts and courage in the face of true oppression and deprivation….
Western people have become fat, petty, and fearful. Wake up!, the article concludes, and stop being so condescending when witnessing guts you no longer have.
I fully agree with the article. Many Arabs speak French. I’d love at least one of them to know that not everybody in the West takes them for what they are not, and respects what they are trying to do, under great pressure and intimidation, while ensuring that one tyrant is not replaced by another – which many European revolutions failed to do in the past. Let also at least one person in the West right now reflect for one second on what it actually means to face a tank and hear bullets whizzing past.
You said in one of your blog pieces, let’s hope the hatred doesn’t last for too long. I’m not sure I agree. It is not hatred, it is anger and strength, and it is necessary sometimes. You know my stance – and I am as guilty as others for doing nothing. Violence and anger, if for a good cause, are sometimes necessary. They have the leadership, and we don’t, because we let corrupt politicians and greedy global groups take away riches. That should be a lesson, but people in the West, who are trying to protect their jobs and hard-earned property, may not listen to it. And yet they should…at least, tone down this stinking, bourgeois, colonial-style thinking… I have respect for these people, and I hate this Western arrogance, ignorance, and weakness, including mine.
For years, intellectuals in the West, and especially in America and France, were telling us two things:
- Economic growth automatically and eventually brings about democracy anywhere in the world. Not so, if wealth is being hijacked by a family gang. What brings about democracy is human will and resistance to injustice.
- Democracy will never work in the Middle East because of culture, and of course, the only alternative is “Islamism” – as if the Iranian model was all-pervading. Behind this idea are two very arrogant and false ideas: that these people are somehow inferior, and are bound to be the slaves of their cultural heritage (but of course this is not the case in the West!) and that they are so limited in imagination that they can only turn to extremist islamism. As if they were incapable – feckless and divided as they are supposed to be – of simply protesting against and fighting for poverty and injustice.
Could it be possible that these people will achieve what the French, those hypocritical lecturers on democratic rights, could not achieve in 1793, or the Hungarians in the Fifties and the Czechs in the Sixties? If they do, the Arab world will have given the West – and Israel – a lesson in history.
That would be my most sincere hope and a step forward as regards human freedom and dignity.”
While I don’t agree that everyone in the West lacks courage, I do believe that we take our liberties for granted. And we’re content to stand by and let our governments pick and choose whose freedoms they defend – and chose not to defend – depending on what they see as the national interest. So successive Western governments have been happy to count Hosni Mubarak as their friend for strategic reasons, yet are prepared to rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein, another serial abuser of human rights, for other strategic reasons.
To repeat the popular cliché, modern versions of the Great Game do not play well in the “Arab street”. But to focus only on the attempts of the US and the former colonial powers to influence events in Egypt and Tunisia is to ignore the complete picture, which is that neighbouring countries are trying to do the same. Also that broadcasters such as Al Jazeera, whose ownership is clear but whose agenda is not, are important influencers. What the demonstrator in Tahrir Square would say – and many have said it – is that “this is our revolution, our agenda, and we don’t need foreign interference. If you believe that we are influenced by outside forces, media or otherwise, you are very much mistaken.”
Fils de Danton’s point, as I interpret it, is that we should respect the courage of people who are standing up for what they believe is right, and set aside our fear that that the outcomes will be against our interests. And that we – meaning the rest of the world – should let the newly-empowered people of Egypt and Tunisia determine their futures in their own way, and deal with the new political realities when they become apparent.
It’s hard to disagree, but also hard for risk-averse politicians to accept.
The past few weeks in the Middle East, traumatic as they have been for many, have not been without examples of two qualities that abound in the Arab world – determination and generosity of spirit.
The recent Jeddah floods have caused much havoc – far more than the previous event in 2009, about which I commented at the time in a piece called Saudi Arabia’s Katrina. In the big scheme of things, the disaster in Jeddah was dwarfed by similar events in Australia, Brazil and last year, Pakistan, but was no less harrowing for those caught up in it.
It’s heartbreaking to see the human suffering caused by all of these events. But for me, watching streets where you have walked, shopped and driven for a decade turned into rivers of muddy excrement brings a special horror to the spectacle. Far more if you happen to be one of the victims. There will be few as articulate as Roger Harrison, the journalist who wrote a moving article, Rain destroyed my 11 years, in yesterday’s Arab News.
In the article, he laments the loss of irreplacable personal mementos, celebrates the humanity of strangers who overcame religious inhibitions to rescue his wife, and the kindness of friends and acquaintances who pulled together to help him clear up the mess. And finally, he lists with cold anger the acts and omissions that led to the disaster. A powerful story.
Then there’s a story about the floods from the BBC. In Brief encounters for young Saudis in Jeddah relief effort, Priya Kaur-Jones describes how young Saudi men and women are working side by side to deliver relief to thousands made homeless in the floods. The main point of the article was to show how the youngsters are defying conservative social norms in fulfilment of what they see as a higher moral imperative. There will no doubt be repercussions from the story. But it’s just another illustration that in extremis, there are those who will always be willing to put the greater good before religious practice or traditional culture.
Another example of idealistic spirit in the region is the Mount Kilimanjaro climb that a friend is helping to organise – so far the climbers have raised $360,000 for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. Should you wish to sponsor them, go to http://www.firstgiving.com/pcrfkiliclimb.
And finally, of course, there’s Tahrir Square, where the volunteer spirit has transcended religious, social and economic divides in a way that will change forever the lives of many of those involved
So while many in the West frame their views of the Middle East in the context of stock negatives – fanaticism, greed, violence, brutal dictatorships and social customs that meet their disapproval – they should also open their eyes to the generosity and selflessness that we Westerners who live in the region see around us every day. That’s the big picture, and it’s a hopeful one.
Today’s Asharq Alawsat has published an article, What About the Gulf, Your Excellencies? from Saad Bin Tefla Al-Ajmi, the former Kuwaiti Minister of Information. He articulates the view of his own generation that change within the Gulf is inevitable, but not at the expense of the stability that the ruling families of the region currently provide. He also accepts that his generation is in no position to second-guess the thoughts and attitudes of the succeeding internet generation. An interesting admission, coming from a former minister of information who is currently a member of the National Assembly.
I have had a few conversations in recent days about whether the events in Tunisia and Egypt will impact on the stability of Saudi Arabia. The country has a large number of unemployed youngsters and a significant portion of the middle class impatient for change. Could the Kingdom be in for some rough times?
My answer would be almost certainly not – at least not in the current conditions.
Here are the reasons.
The roots of the Saudi royal family go deep into society. There are thousands of descendants of the founder of the modern state, King Abdulaziz, and of his immediate family. They have built up a huge network of patronage through serving in national and regional government. Many are involved in business, and have links with some of the country’s largest private and public companies.
King Abdullah is perhaps the most popular monarch since King Faisal, who died over thirty years ago. He is moving ahead with gradual reforms, and is widely respected, indeed loved, across the whole spectrum of Saudi society. It’s fair to say that those reforms are not fast enough for some, but he is is treading a careful path between conservative interests and the reform-minded in his country.
Saudi Arabia has an exceptionally competent internal security and intelligence service. 9/11, the internal terrorist attacks of 2003 and continuing threats from Al-Qaeda have kept them at high alert throughout the past decade. They have been extremely effective at dealing with the current threat from exiled Saudis operating within the Al-Qaeda group in Yemen. If there were signs of a dangerous level of unrest, you can be sure thay they are watching for them.
The state has always shown its willingness to come down rapidly on public protest, as shown by the recent round-up of a crowd protesting at the perceived lack of response from the authorities to the recent floods in Jeddah. It has also intervened quickly to stifle sectarian unrest – both in the Holy Cities of Makkah and Madinah, and in the Eastern Province, where there is a sizeable Shia minority.
Purely in practical terms, the only opportunity for large crowds to gather under state sponsorship – excluding within the mosques, of course – is the Haj. However the annual pilgrimage season is over nine months away. One would expect that by that time Egypt’s future will be more predictable than it is today. And over the past thirty years, the government has a tightly-controlled permit system for individuals and parties wishing to perform the Haj.
Outside the Holy Cities, the main conurbations of the Kingdom – Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam – are not conducive to set-piece demonstrations of the kind seen in Tahrir Square. There are no grandiose squares, perhaps because it has never been the habit of the government to allow large public gatherings outside the religious context.
On the surface, the media would seem to be a point of vulnerability. But although the print media operates under a system of self-censorship, there is an unwritten red line across which editors stray at their peril. Satellite TV is widespread, but many of the stations are partly or wholly owned by Prince Al-Walid bin Talal, Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest businessman and a prominent member of the royal family. The blogosphere and social media are lively. Facebook and instant messaging are very popular, Twitter less so. Recently, the Ministry of Information released a set of rules governing websites, blogs and internet advertising designed to regulate the internet space more tightly. In a crisis, there is little doubt that the government would block Facebook and instant messaging.
What might affect stability in the Kingdom in the future?
The first and most obvious factor is the succession. King Abdullah seems remarkably robust for his age, and appears to have come though his recent back operation successfully. But he will not be around forever. He has set up a Succession Council that enshrines a process for choosing his successor. But it is untested. If that process results in a falling out between factions within the royal family, then the result could be that different interest groups – tribal, business, military and religious – could take sides. But that would be very different situation from a bottom-up insurrection Egypt-style.
Also, the royal family has a history of sticking together in times of crisis. Differences of opinion are dealt with within the family. The only serious family conflicts that ended up playing out in public were the dispute between King Saud and Crown Prince Faisal in the early Sixties, and the episode of the “Free Princes”, who went into exile in Egypt after criticising the slow pace of reform in the Kingdom. The former crisis ended with the abdication of King Saud in Faisal’s favour. The latter resulted in the princes concerned renouncing their criticism and returning to the country. Since their return in 1964, there have been no further public disputes within the family.
The second factor is the economy. At present, the Saudi economy is booming, and the government is investing massively in education and job creation programmes. Vulnerabilities include creaking infrastructure in some large conurbations, most notably in the second city, Jeddah, and a high level of youth unemployment. Although poverty on the scale of Egypt is rare, there is disquiet among many young Saudis who perceive that they cannot easily get married, raise families and own properties because their standard of living has been eroded in recent years by inflation. If political developments in neighbouring countries adversely affect the Kingdom’s earning power or other economic conditions, then visible unrest might surface.
But such is Saudi Arabia’s wealth that it is easily able to ride through temporary economic turbulence by drawing on its vast sovereign reserves. For example, if the current sharp increase in food prices – triggered by disruption to supplies from Egypt – were to continue, the government could without difficulty raise food subsidies to ease the pain. Also, in recent years, the government has been quite prepared to run budget deficits in order to support what it sees as strategic priorities.
What you can expect is that some of those strategic priorities will flex in response to current unrest elsewhere. Yesterday’s announcement by the King about increased house building projects – and the write-off of housing loans to a number of people who died without paying them off – could be seen as timely. (Coincidentally, there was also an announcement by the Bahrain government about new housing initiatives in this morning’s newspapers.)
If you were to include Saudi Arabia in Saad bin Tefla’s remarks about the Gulf States, then his comments very much apply to the Kingdom:
“There is a near consensus amongst Gulf intellectuals monitoring what is happening in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Jordan, which is that change is an inevitable duty. This is in order to protect the stability of our Gulf States and to ensure the rule of the Gulf ruling families. I write “to ensure the rule of the Gulf ruling families” because even the most radical legitimate opposition figures are not calling for the removal of Gulf regimes; this is not necessarily out of love for these regimes but due to an instinctual pragmatic awareness that their removal would mean chaos and instability and that their survival represents a safety valve for the security and stability of the Arab Gulf States which did not experience true stability until these ruling families came to power. In the past, this region was mired in the chaos of tribal in-fighting and lacked any features of state or government. The Gulf States are not brutal dictatorships in the same manner as that of the brutal Arab Republics, but they are also not fluid democracies like Finland, for example. The Gulf States are countries whose people live in a state of luxury in comparison with those around them, and this is thanks to the surplus oil reserves that some [states] have squandered and which others distribute to the people. This formula worked, and continues to work, ensuring relative stability and prosperity in comparison with the regional countries.”
Saudi Arabia has maintained a state of relative stability for the past eighty years, despite periodic turmoil and conflict across most of its borders in that period. I would bet on both conditions continuing – stability within and instability without. But then again, I am of Saad bin Tefla’s generation.
There is always the possibility that Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan – some random and unpredictable event that nobody sees coming – will appear out of the blue and change everything.
Might that black swan arise from the murky waters of cyberspace? Who knows? But if it did, its effects would probably touch us all, not just the GCC’s most powerful nation.
The BBC recently ran a story about an “uncontacted” tribe in the Amazon, close to the border with Peru. A helicopter made a low-level pass over their village and took pictures of them.
According to the report:
Members of the tribe are seen covered in red paint (known as urucum), which is made from seeds from the annatto shrub. Indigenous people use it to colour hammocks and baskets, as well as their skin.
The group is also seen using steel machetes – which must ultimately have been obtained from outside the forest. Fiona Watson, field and research director for Survival International, said the people are likely to have acquired these through trading links with other forest tribes.
“These networks have been in existence for centuries and I don’t think they will have had any contact with non-tribal people, because if they had, the chances of being killed or contracting a disease to which they have no immunity are very high,” said Ms Watson.
Ms Watson added that some authorities denied the existence of such tribal groups in the forest, in order to further their aims.
Isn’t there a bit of a moral dilemma here? On the one hand you have loggers tearing down the forest without a care about who gets in the way. Then you have environmentalists and anthropologists urging Brazil and the other Amazon nations to leave the tribes alone in their pristine Edens.
Brazil raises taxes, provides civic services to its citizens including healthcare, police and civil defence. The tribes living deep in the Amazon receive none of the benefits of the modern state, yet are subject to all of its adverse by-products. Their way of life is threatened by the encroachment of industrial combines, diseases to which they have no immunity, not to mention the threat to their habitats of climate change.
What if their average life expectancy was 20 years shorter than the Brazilian average? Is it right that the state denies them the opportunity to live longer? If you were a mother or father with a sick child, and someone came to your village and told you that your child could be cured with medicines you knew nothing about, would you accept a visit from a doctor from outside the tribe?
The argument from the Christian missionaries who acted as the advance guard of the colonial powers in the 19th century would be that it is our duty to rescue the natives from their godlessness and squalor.
But what about now? Is it the ultimate human right to be able to live in isolation and peace in an otherwise connected world? Should we be making decisions on behalf of the isolated ones without their knowledge and consent? Should these tribes have the right to be able to imagine the alternatives and reject them? By ring-fencing them, are we treating them as somehow of greater worth, yet at the same time, less worth, than the rest of humanity?
Not that I would wish on them the joys of Facebook, MacDonalds or a Los Angeles traffic snarl-up. Yet it seems to me that we are treating them as gorillas in the mist – an endangered species to be protected, largely undisturbed but occasionally snooped on. But they are human beings, not gorillas. They, like the rest of us, left Eden a long time ago.
Do we have the right to deny them the choices that the rest of us have? To poison ourselves with Big Macs, to kill each other in the name of whichever god we believe in? To listen to Beethoven or Bob Marley, read Shakespeare or the Quran, visit Yellowstone or Victoria Falls, to visit the moon?
I sometimes wonder whether by keeping them apart we are merely delaying the inevitable, and whether their descendants will thank us for allowing their parents to dance with wolves, while denying them the hard choices facing the rest of humanity.
I frequently refer to stories in the Bahraini and Saudi media. But Asharq Al-Awsat provides an interesting counterpoint to local voices. It has been published in London for over thirty years. Although Saudi-owned, it’s by no means a mouthpiece for the Saudi state. It does tend to steer clear of subjects that might cause embarrassment to its proprietors, but since it has a pan-Arab focus, it has plenty of scope to publish interesting and provocative stories from across the Arab World.
The English-language website – Asharq Al-Awsat publishes the newspaper in Arabic – is full of thought-provoking articles. Some of them are a little convoluted, perhaps because they are translations from the original Arabic, but nonetheless worth reading.
Here are three examples.
Al-Sadr fled to Iran due to assassination fears is a story by Ma’ad Fayad about Moqtada Sadr, one of the major players in the Iraqi political landscape. Apparently Moqtada, having returned to Iraq two weeks ago with great fanfare, has gone back to his former base in Qom, Iran. The reason for his abrupt return was the threat of assassination by the Asib Ahl Al-Haq group that used to be a part of his Mahdi Army. Moqtada Sadr receives political support from Iran. Asib Ahl Al-Haq receives economic and logistic support from Iran. Yet the one is threatening the death of the other! Stranger still, Fayad reports that Moqtada is thinking of seeking refuge in Lebanon – presumably in the warm embrace of Hezbollah, yet another client of Iran.
The story gives a fascinating insight into the tangled web of factions within Iraq and Iran. When looking at both countries, the big picture might be clear, but the devil is definitely in the detail.
The second piece is a guided tour of the woes of the Arab nation by Osman Mirghhani. The whole article, Why is the Arab World Drowning? is here. Speaking about morale in the Arab world, he says:
Frustrated by the state of affairs, the Arab citizen is filled with suppressed rage at the deplorable situation, and also at failing to make his voice heard. He feels defeated by the state of weakness and submission that has caused the Arabs to feel powerless and humiliated, in view of the prevailing state of fragmentation, rivalry and tension. There is a lack of Arab consensus, a lack of confidence, as well as a notable, rising sectarian tone.
And here is Amer Taheri, one of the doyens of Middle Eastern journalism, talking about Tunisia:
…..I never believed that Tunisia’s failure to emulate the Mediterranean model of political development, as in Spain, Portugal Greece and Malta, was due to any single dictator.
What is needed is a campaign against the little dictator that resides within almost every Tunisian.
Bourguiba and Ben Ali could not have sustained half a century of dictatorship on their own.
Who commanded and manned their armies, police forces and security services? Who served as their ministers and ambassadors? Who filled all those newspaper columns with their praises? Who helped them amass and manage their fortunes? Who painted all those ghastly portraits of the dictator, and who stuck them on the walls of every shop in Tunis? Who were the tens of thousands of people who turned up each time they were asked to demonstrate in favour of the dictator? And what about the millions who, for 54 years, voted in one fake election after another?
Taheri’s full article, Tunisia, and Caesar’s Boots in Winter is here.
The voices of Asharq Al-Awsat speak volumes about the current trials and tribulations of the Arab World. Even if you’re a casual observer of events in the region, the newspaper’s website is well worth a visit.
Not far from where I live in Bahrain, down a quiet residential side street populated with apartment blocks and villas, sits an uncompleted building. It’s been there for as long as I have. No walls, just rectangular concrete pillars with steel reinforcement rods sticking out of the top like radio antennae. It’s been raining recently, so pools of water lie stagnating among the foundations. Broken planks of wood and other debris are strewn around the site.
It’s not clear what the building was intended to be. And now we’ll probably never know, because it’s unlikely ever to be completed. Unprotected concrete starts deteriorating. Steel rods rust. So even if the owners found the money to finish the project, they would be hard pressed to find a civil engineer who would advise them to do so.
This would have been a small building. Across the Gulf there are huge projects – tower blocks waiting to become swishy apartments or modern offices – in a similar state. Testaments to ambition and greed on the part of property developers and investors who didn’t see what was coming in 2008. With many of these rotting buildings, the only way forward will be to tear them down and start again. Or leave them standing, like decaying teeth.
As the developers go bankrupt and liquidators inherit the mess, the chances are that nobody will know what state the buildings are in. Plans get lost, and records detailing exactly what work has been completed are hard to find. So even if the projects could be resurrected, the new developers would have the devil of the job establishing a clearly documented starting point.
Doug Langmead, an Australian architect who has been in the Middle East for 30 years, reckons that the wasted investment in stalled projects in Dubai alone exceeds $4 billion. His Bahrain-based company, Langmead Associates, has an innovative technique for preserving these buildings for future developers. He takes measures to protect them from the elements Then he carries out a detailed audit on the state of the building to ensure that the developer knows precisely what needs to be done to finish it, how long it will take and how much it will cost. Doug wrote a recent article for Construction Weekly explaining the concept.
Yet uptake is slow. As Doug observes:
“As a rule of thumb, every year that a building stands incomplete shortens its life by eighteen months. Therefore if a building project stalls for 5 years, and you have designed the building to last for 50 years, you end up with useful life of 37.5 years. This seriously impacts your return on investment.
The problem is that when developers run out of money and therefore can’t complete the buildings, they throw up their hands and walk away. Preserving the project is the last thing on their minds. Often new developers who take over the sites prefer to start again.
The original investors end up losing all the money they put into the construction, and possibly the land as well, because the land is sold to pay back the banks and the other preferred creditors.”
One would hope that governments and private investors in the UAE and other GCC countries will have learned some lessons from the events of 2008-9. Protecting investors, especially individuals who have paid deposits for apartments they will never live in, should be high on the agenda.
One measure that could make a difference would be to require all developers to place a percentage of the anticipated development cost in an escrow account to be released when the building is completed. If the project comes to a halt for more than a year, money from that account is used to mothball the building so that in years to come it remains feasible to re-start the project. That way, investors have a reasonable chance of recovering a portion of what they put into the project in the first place.
Waste – of resources, of public money and private investments – is never pretty. As I write this, armies of metal cutters are busily chopping up six billion dollars’ worth of new aircraft thanks to the cancellation of the Nimrod aerial surveillance programme in the UK. As Britain seeks to balance its books, the government thinks it’s cheaper to scrap the aircraft than to continue the programme.
Another consequence of the economic downturn. Taxpayers’ money that could have been spent on new hospitals, refurbished schools, medical research or improved public transport – down the drain.
At the same time, deliberations have been going on about the future of London’s Olympic Stadium – a building that cost over $600 million. It will be used for 17 days in 2012 before being wholly or partly torn down. Contrast this with one step in the right direction in the Middle East – Qatar’s plan to build stadia for the 2022 World Cup that can be dismantled and re-erected in poorer countries unable to afford new stadia of their own.
Rotting tower blocks, chunks of mangled high technology and buildings with the lifespan of a butterfly are but three examples of a phenomenon that receives less attention than other pressing problems of the day – waste. Of money, time, effort, mineral resources, energy and food.
When the world’s movers and shakers gather in Davos for next year’s World Economic Forum, I suggest that eliminating waste should move closer to the top of the agenda.
The only surprising aspect of the suicide bombing at Moscow’s Domodedevo Airport is that it hasn’t happened before in some part of the world.
Security systems at most airports are designed to stop people blowing up planes. If X-ray machines and body scanners are necessary to prevent another 9/11, then by implication, whatever other measures airports use to prevent self-detonation at a check-in line are bound to be weaker. And the same goes for measures to avert a car bomb in the drop-off area, as the incident in Glasgow a few years back showed.
So what will our security experts come up with next? Inspections of all vehicles coming within 500 meters of the terminal? Scanners and pat-downs at the front entrance of the terminal? Maybe, but not without vastly increasing the time and cost of travel.
When I worked in civil aviation, the mantra of airport and air traffic control authorities was “safe and expeditious travel”. Today, you could argue that air travel can either be safe or expeditious – but not both. And even if you invested billions in security improvements at the world’s airports, would that stop the suicide bombers? Of course not. They have a huge choice of high-profile targets.
Wealthy countries have alert systems that trigger responses to perceived levels of threat. In the UK, during the IRA bombing campaign of the 1970s, there were times when your bag would be searched every time you entered a large public auditorium. Once a few months had passed after the latest bombing, the measure would be quietly dropped. The trouble was, as soon as the authorities deemed that the worst was over, bang – another bombing.
Things are not much different today, except that alert levels are permanently high. We occasionally see minor relaxations of the most stringent measures, such as those relating to bringing liquids into aircraft, yet we read in the media about Steven Greenoe, a businessman who is alleged to have smuggled more than 80 handguns into the UK via checked baggage on transatlantic flights.
The lesson of Domodedevo is that there is no section of humanity – privileged or not – that is immune to mortal danger. All we can do is to mitigate risk. In the case of terrorism, we can work to remove the motivation for terrorist acts, we can boost national security measures and systems, and we can increase international cooperation to avert imminent threats.
Although the wealthy and the powerful can take measures unavailable to the rest of us, even they cannot guarantee their safety, as John F Kennedy, Rafik Hariri and Benazir Bhutto discovered to their cost.
Those of us who can’t afford to live in fortresses, fly in private jets and surround ourselves with armed bodyguards need to remind ourselves of the common human condition – life is dangerous, and always was. In previous centuries, the dangers were early death through plague, starvation, warfare and civil disorder. Those dangers are still with us, though in many parts of the world, the threat of infectious disease has taken second place to natural disaster, environmental catastrophes and terrorism.
In earlier times when the average life expectancy was far shorter than it is today, there was a stoic acceptance that living to a ripe old age was a matter of luck rather than design – or the will of God rather than the acts of man.
Rather than live our lives consumed by fear, perhaps we should regain the stoicism of previous generations, mourn the victims of life’s capriciousness, and count each day as a blessing. No amount of knowledge, science or technology will ever change the basic human condition.
We should not stop striving for a better world. But we should remember three things. Life is short. It’s dangerous. And whether we rise above the danger to find happiness is down to us.
Saudi Arabia spends a fortune on Western know-how to try to transform the way it does business, both in the public and in the private sector. The country has long been a prime market for consultancies. And this is especially the case today, with all the current soul-searching about the pressing issues of the day: Saudization, unemployment, energy, social issues like drug abuse, security, and above all the challenge of moving towards a knowledge-based economy. Most of the major international consultancies have a presence in the Kingdom – McKinsey, KPMG, Booz and Co, Ernst and Young and PWC to name a few.
Many of these companies are highly reputable and do good work. But some Saudis I talk to comment that the big consultants bring in their senior people to pitch for the business, and then deploy the junior, less experienced people to do the work. Whether or not this is fair comment, I do sometimes wonder whether the Kingdom gets long-term value for money from the consultancy delivered both the public and private sector.
My experience in Saudi Arabia tells me that consultancies often deploy out-of-the-box methodologies developed in New York and London, and try to make them fit in an environment for which they may not be suited.
Let’s take the notional example of a company that wants to set up a corporate learning and development centre. They bring in a team of Western consultants, and within a year they have launched a shiny new learning centre. It has the enthusiastic backing of the company’s senior management, and for a while receives rave reviews for what it is achieving.
A few years on, the centre is becoming a back-water. The consultants have long gone. The management team is cautious and reactive. So much so that the company is about to launch a parallel organisation which will progressively strip the original centre of its role and responsibilities. It will be left to wither on the vine. In the West, such an organisation would be shut down, and its staff would be made redundant or reassigned.
But that is not the Saudi way. Across the landscape you can see examples of failing organisations being allowed to wend their way to oblivion, while new organisations are set up in the same space. This is one of the reasons why so many sectors are riddled with organisations that have overlapping functions. Little empires, some on the rise, some on the wane.
Why, you might ask, are these organisations not integrated, rationalised, restructured, as they would be in the West? For many reasons. Saudization, which discourages any initiative that reduces the number of Saudis in employment. Patronage – the head of a department has a friend in high places, and middle managers are afraid of offending him. The ruthlessness that a Western company would bring to bear is tempered by the complex strands of the Saudi culture.
Here’s another example. A large company implements a Western-designed performance management system. Under the system, every member of staff, from senior management downwards, is supposed to have an annual performance evaluation that assesses the capabilities of the individual against a set of standard competencies adopted by the company. The outcomes from the evaluations determine pay increases, the person’s training needs and objectives for the following year.
The company sets up an assessment centre manned by a number of HR specialists. Hundreds of managers and supervisors receive training that takes them out of the line. Classic Western thinking. The cost of the assessment centre, the mapping of the comptencies, the training and the inevitable change management consultancy comes to millions of dollars without even considering the cost in reduced productivity as the process rolls out.
A few years later, it becomes evident that the new system has not produced the desired results. Yes, the company Board of Directors is able to report to shareholders that it has implemented a modern performance management system. But look under the bonnet, and you will find that the system is not working, for a simple reason.
Performance evaluations often involve frank and sometimes adverse assessments of performance. It is not in the nature of most Saudis to be openly critical of colleagues, and especially when they have to put those crtiticisms in writing. They are also afraid that their criticisms will be taken as insults, and wary of upsetting employees who may have connections elsewhere in the company that can be used to damage the manager’s standing and career prospects. So evaluations tend to be anodyne and lacking in substance. Resulting decisions on pay are not necessarily an accurate reflection of performance.
So why did these initiatives fail? Was it because the vision of the Western-educated leaders could never be translated into reality because the cultural undergrowth grew up and stifled it? Because less senior staff who saw the new model as a threat to the status quo – and by implication to their jobs and social standing – mounted a campaign of passive resistance? Was there a particular culture in company that worked against it, or was that culture typical of Saudi Arabian business as a whole? Indeed, was the centre or the performance management system actually broken, or were they merely – using a Western frame of reference – sub-optimal? And was that sub-optimal state not the best they were likely to achieve in the long-term?
Complex questions, and no easy answers. But perhaps we should return to the idea that what the consultant designs for New York doesn’t necessarily work in Riyadh. Here are some suggestions as to why some of these expensive solutions fail:
- Saudi Arabia spends billions in creating organizations and implementing programs inspired by Western models. This process has accelerated since the Kingdom’s entry into the World Trade Organization, because the government has been obliged to change long-standing practices relating, among other things, to competition and transparency.
- For decades, Saudi Arabia has imported Western know-how and technology in order to develop both its infrastructure and its society. The technology import has been successful, as evidenced by a modern infrastructure that works as well as could be expected.
- The intellectual imports have not worked as well. Both in the public and private sectors, Saudi Arabia has invested massive sums in importing organizational models that work for the West, but are not nearly as effective in the Kingdom because they are counter-cultural.
- Much of that intellectual investment has been wasted because it is designed to produce revolutionary rather than incremental change. This is a deeply conservative country that does not take readily to revolutions.
- Most of the changes brought about by that investment have been to form rather than substance. The substance of Saudi social and business life continues to be built around patronage, tribal, family and regional loyalties, and the practical application of patronage – also known as wasta.
- The real changes in the country over the past twenty years, infrastructure excepted, have been to attitude, outlook and expectation. And those changes been accelerated by telecommunications, a more open media, the internet, international travel and foreign education. Youngsters do not use Facebook because their parents taught them to do so. They do so because their parents have bought them laptops and paid for an internet connection. Nor are they encouraged to visit Jihadi websites. They do that by themselves.
Some of these points may seem obvious, and certainly they are not new to the Saudis themselves. But if you accept their essence, then you can say that the history of intellectual imports to the Kingdom is that the exporter makes lots of dollars, and the importer gets questionable value. Win-lose. And looking forward, the $64,000 question is: how do you create win-win?
One way forward – as I’ve said before in this blog – would be for the Saudis to start trusting their own people to come up with the answers. There is a tendency among governments and businesses everywhere to bring in consultants because they don’t believe that their own people will be sufficiently objective or have the necessary skills. There is the additional advantage that if things go wrong, the consultant is an easy scapegoat.
This is not an exclusively Saudi tendency. I’ve focused on that country because it’s the largest economy in the region. But to a lesser or greater extent I believe the same comments hold true in other GCC countries.
Foreign consultants certainly have a role to play in countries like Saudi Arabia, but as facilitators and guides, rather than as solution providers. If they are to be lasting, appropriate and sustainable, the solutions themselves must come from within – from bright, motivated nationals who are prepared to take responsibility for their own decisions, and are not afraid of failure. Solutions must run with the culture rather than against it.
And those who implement them must realise that changing mindsets and behaviour is far more difficult than building roads, airports and car factories.
I am sitting in a busy airport terminal in Doha. All around me, people are having urgent conversations on their mobile phones. An airport is the modern equivalent of the Tower of Babel. Many languages are being spoken, but the default is English, not Arabic. A Lebanese businessman is talking to a colleague, another Arabic speaker. I can understand most of what he is saying, because in one sentence he uses phrases from three languages – Arabic, French and English. Nearby, a Gulf Arab is also on the phone. Like the Lebanese guy, she switches language mid-sentence, but confines herself to Arabic and English.
After five decades of oil-fuelled development, English is firmly established as the second language of the GCC countries. For many Arabs this is a good thing – English is their gateway to other worlds, just as French was for the people of the Levant a century ago. Yet there is also widespread concern that English is colonising the language that gives Arabs their common identity. Words and phrases of alien origin are creeping into Arabic, and creating a common parlance far from the pristine language of the Quran.
Even in Saudi Arabia, that most conservative of nations, it’s fashionable for many youngsters to speak in English, as this article in the Arab News reports. And for all the wealth and power of the Arabic-speaking nations, very few words in the modern era have crossed the other way into common English usage. Those that have made the jump bring with them connotations seen by native English speakers as negative – fatwa, jihad and intifada. A far cry from the language of invention and discovery that entered the European languages in earlier times – algebra, algorithm and safari, to name but a few.
Since humans first grunted to each other in caves, languages have developed, mutated and split off into separate dialects. Even families have special words not understood outside their own small confines. Slang comes and goes – some gets absorbed into the mainstream. And every year a few minority tongues die out.
What troubles Arab intellectuals more than the bastardisation of their language is that its use is declining, especially among the young. There is an Arabic interface for Facebook, yet 75% of Arabic-speaking Facebook users prefer the English interface. Go back to Doha airport and visit a bookshop. Only a small minority of titles are in the native language of Qatar.
For many expatriates living and working in the Middle East, Arabic is an impenetrable barrier that inhibits our understanding of the nuances of the local culture. We expect Arabs to understand our culture, and often think of them as “Westernised” if they have fluent English. Yet we fail to make the effort in their direction. Because we don’t have to. I include myself in that category. I probably understand more Arabic than many, yet recently a close friend from Saudi Arabia said to me “Steve, you have been coming to the Middle East for thirty years. It’s an absolute disgrace that you have not learned more than basic Arabic.”
He’s right. It is a disgrace. When I first arrived in Jeddah a long time ago, I took Arabic lessons. I didn’t keep them up. More recently, I bought a CD-based Arabic course. It’s largely unvisited. There are always more important things to do. I find reading the script particularly difficult, yet I haven’t forgotten how to read ancient Greek. But I will persevere.
Making the effort to speak Arabic is one way of crossing the cultural divide, and it’s a shame that more people don’t do it. In fact, I would argue that the GCC countries would do themselves a favour if they introduced a requirement that expatriates in some job categories are required to pass a written and spoken Arabic test as a condition of being allowed to work in the country for more than two years. Such a measure would boost the teaching of Arabic, create jobs for nationals and increase mutual respect among local and expatriate populations.
But the bigger issue is that the health of a society and culture is reflected in the health of the language. If I was a GCC national, I would be encouraging my government to make greater efforts to promote Arabic literature – not just scholarly tomes, but works that touch and inspire ordinary people. I would be subsidising the film industry, incentivising bookshops to sell more Arabic titles, setting up more literature prizes.
Yes, I know that many of these activities are already taking place, and that there are already some great writers, artists, cartoonists and dramatists in the Middle East. But not enough. It’s time that an Arabic film won best foreign film in the Oscars. It’s time that another Arabic writer stepped into the shoes of Naguib Mahfouz and won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Because these prizes bring global respect for Arab artists. Recognition for a great work of art will bring far more respect for the Arab world than the world’s tallest building or the 2022 World Cup.
And a little more self-respect and esteem by others will go a long way in this region.
Here’s my column in today’s Gulf Daily news. The column covers one aspect of a talk I attended last week at the Bahrain office of the UK-based think tank, the International Institute of Strategic Studies. The aspect I latched on to was cybercrime, and particularly the speaker’s comments on the 419 scam. The talk, which was delivered by a former member of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, is well worth a listen. It covered a much wider range of subjects, such as cyber warfare and the nature of the stuxnet worm attack on Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities. It’s published here on the IISS website.
My column is about cybercrime and the vulnerability of people to manipulation, both via the internet and conventional print and broadcast media:
Cybercrime is a big issue these days. In economic terms, according to Nigel Inkster, director of transnational threats and political risk at the International Institute of Strategic Studies, the estimated annual cost to private sector companies of criminal groups who use the Internet for fraud and other purposes is $1 trillion. To put that figure into context, that’s approximately 20 times the projected revenue of Bahrain for 2011. Or, to look at it another way, it’s what you would have to pay for 12,000 footballers of the calibre of Cristiano Ronaldo, the world’s most expensive player.
One of the classic Internet frauds is the “419 scam”. Out of the blue, you get a letter or an e-mail offering you a slice of a huge sum of money which for one reason or another is locked away. The scamster promises you this reward in return for your co-operation in helping him to access the funds. But first you have to send him money up front. Surprise, surprise, you never see your money again. The scam originated in Nigeria many years ago. Variants are still in use across the world, although since the coming of the Internet, e-mail is the preferred medium of propagation.
What amazed me was Mr Inkster’s statement that around 20 per cent of recipients of these communications end up falling for the scam and sending money. That makes for a very profitable little business with minimal operating costs. Millions of these e-mails and letters go out every year. How could so many people be so gullible?
Back in prehistory, I learned how to do radio and TV interviews, write Press releases and also how to place news into the media. Part of my training involved analysing stories in the media, working out where they were likely to have come from, and what was the agenda behind them. This was before the days of the Internet, so the focus was entirely on the print media, radio and TV.
These days, millions of people get their news and opinions exclusively from the Internet. They read blogs, visit bulletin boards and go to sites like the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera and a number of other mainstream content providers. In the Middle East, as elsewhere, sites such as YouTube, with their instantly digestible video clips, get as much viewing as mainstream TV.
Newspapers usually have a fairly obvious set of agendas, even if some are more subtle than others. In the UK, if I meet a hypochondriac believer in aliens who has a fairly right-of-centre political bent, I can predict with some confidence that he or she will be a Daily Mail reader. But the Internet is a sea of unlicensed manipulation. There are thousands of sites claiming to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The problem is that the source of the information they push, and the motivation of those responsible for the sites, is often masked, or at least not obvious to the reader.
The majority of Internet users are reasonably street-wise. But if the example of the 419 scam holds true, there is a significant minority who succumb to Internet predators – not just financial, but also political and religious.
Not a week goes by in the Middle East when we don’t hear about this or that initiative to promote critical thinking in the young. I would argue that an essential dimension of critical thinking is to be able to look objectively and sceptically at information derived from the media – regardless of whether it comes from the Internet or the traditional sources – before swallowing the stories, arguments and messages wholesale. And that, in my opinion, is an ability that should be taught by parents at home and by teachers from primary school onwards. Information is the stuff of life, but when dressed up by the unscrupulous, it can be very dangerous indeed.
You could argue that as a blogger, I’m one of the army of unlicenced manipulators to whom I refer. That may be true, but at least in everything I write, I represent nobody but myself. However, that’s for you to judge…..
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