Like the collective gasp of horror heard round the world on 9/11, we now hear a global sigh of relief at the news of Osama Bin Laden’s demise. President Obama tells us that we can all breathe easier now. But can we? Will Osama’s death mark an end to the hemorrhaging of our treasure in the “war on terror” and allow for healing in the relationship between the West and Islam? The United States missed a golden opportunity to build on the world’s empathy after 9/11. And by the time he was finally killed, Osama Bin Laden had become an irrelevant has-been. His legacy is outstripped by the recent history of millions of Arabs demanding freedom from the brutal regimes that consumed millions in Western aid while oppressing their people. Much of that aid was justified as an effort to counter the terrorism that Bin Laden unleashed. The real issue before us now is the West’s relationship with a transforming Middle East. What has been and what will be the West’s role in that relationship?
As the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions continue to spill over their borders and enter a new and perilous phase, there is much dispute over that role. Ensnared in two prolonged wars against “terror,” captivated by the image of a “clash of civilizations,” and caught by complete surprise[1] in the cascade of recent protests, the U.S. and Europe are rightly accused of coddling the very dictatorships now toppled by their own people–or still resisting their inevitable downfall. There is little doubt that that coddling fed the resentment that Al Qaeda transformed into acts of terror.
But there is more to the story. And therein lies a tale of a second golden opportunity if we are willing to take it. Unwittingly, the West encouraged the revolutions that overthrew the brutal regimes it had so carefully attempted to stabilize. In a fit of schizophrenic behavior, Europe and the United States nourished and encouraged the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) who were key participants in the popular uprisings that drove iron-fisted dictators from power. Of course the West cannot take credit for those uprisings, and, as we note below, its legacy of support for dictatorial regimes continues to create tremendous barriers to democracy movements as they move forward. But the West can now build on its behind-the-scenes support for these courageous revolutionaries if it gives up its dangerous obsession with terror and with violence and support of repressive regimes as its chief means to counter it.
Western aid to these revolutionaries came from both Europe and The United States. In 1995, in the largest financial commitment the European Union ever made outside its borders, a partnership between the EU and all states bordering on the Mediterranean Sea was formed. The bold and unprecedented aim of that partnership was creation of a Mediterranean “region of peace and stability.” Within this Euro-Med Partnership, the EU launched a set of economic, cultural, and social initiatives intended to promote civil society and to create a “dialogue of civilizations” in the Mediterranean region. After 2001, a fervent hope emerged that this dialogue–in conjunction with trade and regional development efforts– could eradicate root causes of terrorism that went far beyond Bin Laden and al Queda. To promote this “dialogue of peoples,” millions of Euros flowed from the EU to nurture and promote networking among women’s groups, trade unions, lawyers associations, students, human rights groups, journalists, writers, artists, youth groups, and filmmakers throughout the region–to name just a few. In the United States, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the AFL-CIO, Freedom House, and a plethora of American foundations provided similar support to NGOs in order to cultivate a “civil society” in the North Africa and Middle East. Throughout the region, these groups flourished and proliferated. Ironically considered by their backers to be non-threatening to the stability of regimes in power, they were among the very groups who rose up in protest against those regimes.
In fact, the courage and political power of these groups exposed the West’s duplicity. While providing lip service to democracy and a trickle of aid to what they thought to be innocuous groups, Western leaders were caught in bed with murderous Middle Eastern tyrants. Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed that ousted Egyptian dictator Mubarek was a “force for good,” and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated in 2009: “I really consider [Egyptian] President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family.” As Tunisian protests gathered force, French Foreign Minister Michele Alliot-Marie called for France’s military to support Ben Ali’s corrupt regime. Indeed, she had borrowed a private jet from Ben Ali’s close friend for her recent Tunisian vacation.
Generous Western aid propped up these regimes despite their brutality. In Egypt, for example, the Obama administration spent just $20 million a year on “democracy promotion” while lavishing $1.3 billion, in military aid on Mubarek’s regime. With the excuse that they were just “soft dictators,” the West looked the other way when Arab rulers ignored “good governance” conditionality clauses in trade agreements, when they jailed, tortured, and killed journalists who cried out against repression, when they ruthlessly attacked opposition political parties, and when their security forces—bolstered, of course, with Western funding– committed unspeakable acts of routine and pervasive brutality. Why were the Obama Administration, the European Union, and European leaders so intent on propping up repressive regimes?
When confronted with their duplicity, Western diplomats invoked Osama Bin Laden. They whined about Ben Ali, Mubarek, Saleh and others who had seduced them with threats that, unless dollars and Euros continued to fill their coffers, their secular-Islamist regimes would be overrun by radical Muslims. Without aid, they cried, Al Queda would run amok and their lands would turn into terrorist breeding grounds. Europeans trembled at the prospect of immigrant hordes storming northern Mediterranean shores unless the EU coughed up more military and economic aid for security forces and “economic development” that promised to keep these hordes in check. Although funding flowed to build what they called “civil society,” the bulk of both U.S. and EU aid to the region went to buttress corrupt dictators in the belief that they were necessary to maintain social and political stability. Stable regimes in North Africa and the Middle East would, they reasoned, provide a bulwark against dreaded Al Qaeda terrorism. They were, in the words of one analyst, “too big to fail.”
Financial support to civil society groups was minuscule when compared with the billions in Western military and economic aid that dictators consumed. And while refusing to support opposition parties and Islamic groups, the U.S. and the EU were content to aid only seemingly innocuous groups in the belief that they would pose no threat to the dictators they coddled and the social stability they promised. Funding women and “youth,” they believed, was an especially non-threatening activity. This belief could not have been further from the truth.
In fact, a little funding went a long way to spark political awareness and strengthen a nascent pluralist civil society. A small but steady stream of aid funded the diffusion of information technology vital to the growth of the social networking culture that gave protesters unfettered communication capabilities and created new public spaces uncontrolled by the ruling elite. Within the Euro-Med Partnership’s “Dialogue of Civilizations,” NGOs sponsored by the EU reached out to other groups, bridging social, ethnic and religious divisions. The Euro-Mediterranean Information Society Initiative (EUMEDIS) provided information technology and infrastructure to seemingly innocuous non-political NGOs throughout the region. Funded by grants from the U.S. and the Austrian Government, Women Without Borders, an organization geared toward women’s empowerment, financed a host of political empowerment projects including “Bridging the Gap: Empowerment Strategies For the New Female Arab Leadership,” focused on the dissemination of information technology as a tool for political opposition. Women without Borders also sponsors SAVE (Sisters Against Violent Extremism), a support group with chapters in throughout the world providing women with the tools for critical debate to challenge extremist thinking. Each year the EU funded hundreds of training sessions, conferences and workshops throughout North Africa and the Middle East aimed at bringing together NGOs like these to develop coordinating mechanisms, and promote discussion and debate among them at both the national and regional levels. In Bahrain, The Bahrain Youth Society For Human Rights (BYSHR) has a liason office in Norway and is, in part, supported by the Norwegian-based Arab-European Center for Human Rights and International Law.
Similarly, the NED provided funding for “The Egyptian Union of Liberal Youth,” permitting it to expand the use of new media among youth activists in order to promote “democratic ideas and values.” And together with Freedom House and a German political foundation, the NED funded The Egyptian Democratic Academy, a Youth non-profit Organization established to promote the values of freedom of opinion and expression, openness, and political and religious tolerance in Egypt. In particular, the group focuses on “using New Media tools to promote Democracy and Human Rights with a special interest in the participation of the groups who are most subject to marginalization, such as women, children, and disabled in the political and public life.” Also in Egypt the NED funded the Arab Society for Human Rights (ASHR) which, each year, held a series of workshops to promote “legal awareness among journalists about freedom of expression under Egyptian laws and encourage greater and better informed media coverage of human rights issues.” The U.S. AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center actively supported the Labor Union movement in Tunisia. The Euromediterranean Human Rights Network worked with the Tunisian Lawyers and Magistrates Associations on civil liberties and human rights issues. In effect, European and American aid, support, and transnational networks allowed civil society groups to educate citizens (especially women and youth) about their human rights, support workers’ rights, encourage youth activism, strengthen leadership skills, conduct civic and political training programs, monitor human rights violations, maintain web sites to share information, encourage anti-corruption campaigns, share grievances, learn about groups like them around the world, and much more.
We saw many of these NGOs boldly leading and participating in the protests of the “Arab Spring.” And today we see many of these same groups participating together in the democratic process in Egypt and Tunisia. We continue to see them courageously demonstrating and reporting abuse in the continuing protests against repression in Barain and Yemen. Supported by the Euromediterranean Human Rights Network, the Tunisian unions and the Lawyers and Magistrates Associations played a key role in the December-January protests, and they continue to be an important force in shaping the post- Ben Ali government. Their leaders had long been tortured and harassed by the Ben Ali regime. In Egypt, The Egyptian Democratic Academy was at the forefront of the historic January protest in Tahir Square. Jailed by Mubarek’s regime in 2008 for organizing protests in support of labor unions, the group’s media director, Esraa Abdel Fattah, is now meeting with the interim Egyptian cabinet and the military on a regular basis. In Yemen, Nadia al-Sakkaf, the Editor-in-Chief of the Yemen Times, considered one of the strongest forces in the country for exposing government corruption, is an active advocate for the Women Without Borders SAVE project.
In Bahrain, BYSHR has been an active participant in the anti government protests, courageously reporting torture and abuse and urging international human rights groups to protest the trials against demonstrators and protest the government crackdowns on social media. Like labor and human rights leaders in Tunisia and Egypt, their courage is not without consequence: Since 2007 BYSHR leaders have been harassed and arrested; the organization’s president, Mohammed Al-Maskati was beaten by security forces during the protests, and both he and board member Naji Fateel have received death threats since the protests began.
The West’s monomaniacal focus on Islamic extremism and schizophrenic practice of shoring up dictatorships while simultaneously helping to create the vibrant pluralist societies that toppled them is not without consequence. The irony that tiny amounts of aid were funneled to groups deemed harmless to Western-supported dictators will not be lost on the new political forces that are shaping the Middle East. Some commentators rightly claim that Western promotion of civil society was intended to undermine Islamic identity in the region. Aid targeted only to secular organizations left out a large body of Islamist opposition, including moderate groups. Certainly, no Western aid went to support the creation of mechanisms for effective electoral competition. And the preference for funding those organizations with ties to international NGOs and Western foundations may carry the stigma of neo-colonialism that many in the Middle East and North Africa have long resisted.
Osama Bin Laden faded long before he died. The real history of the Middle East in the 21st century is being written in the revolutions of the Arab Spring. The final chapter of these revolutions is yet to be written. The West’s relationship with the people of North Africa and the Middle East can support a stable and healthy democratic future. Protesting, like political campaigning, is not governing. Emboldened protesters must have a seat at the table in the process of creating democratic governing structures. The West can now choose to see Bin Laden’s death as a watershed, transforming the meaning and instruments of the “war on terror.” The region is ripe for a convergence of civilizations and an identity that transcends national, religious, and ethnic divisions. Now is the time for the West to recognize and work with all groups in Arab civil society towards a genuinely stable future.
[1] The New Yorker Magazine reported in March 2011 that the hundred and twenty-five million dollars’ worth of algorithmic computer modeling that American military and intelligence agencies had ordered over the previous three years to forecast global political unrest completely failed to predict the waves of North Africa and Middle East protests of 2011.