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Who's responsible for the Arab world ? - -

By Khaled Diab

Who's responsible for the Arab world?

A UN report has reignited the controversy over who is to blame for the sorry state of the Arab world: Arabs or the west?

First, the good news. Arab countries have the lowest levels of malnutrition and hunger in the developing world, have made "striking progress" in extending the lives of their citizens, abject poverty is comparatively low and, surprisingly (for me at least), levels of income inequality are moderate across most of the region. These are some of the few silver linings contained in the latest disillusioning and disturbing Arab Human Development Report (AHDR).

Despite the bad international press the conflicts in the region draw, the Arab world is, based on its level of violent crime, just about the safest place in the world. The real threat to people's safety comes not from outlaws but from those above the law, an altogether different gang of criminals: Arab leaders and foreign occupiers.

The AHDR concludes that the Arab state is often "a threat to human security, instead of its chief support". This edition of the report has shifted its perspective from collective security and development to the emerging perspective of individual "human security". It describes human security as "the rearguard of human development" which "focuses on enabling peoples to contain or avert threats to their lives, livelihoods and human dignity".

The report identifies seven categories of threats which can be divided into two broad groups: internal and external. One of the greatest of these threats, as hinted above, is the state's role as defender of a ruling elite rather than champion of all the people. This is achieved through repressive security measures and a bloated security apparatus, built-in institutional weakness, and the co-opting of nationalism to serve the survival of the regime.

In the absence of impartial law and order and as a side effect of political and economic powerlessness, women are particularly vulnerable to abuse. "Arab women, like many of their peers in other regions, sustain both direct and indirect violence," the AHDR observes.

In this, as with so many other issues, taking a regional perspective masks the massive differences between individual countries. In fact, there is a mind-boggling diversity of societies: from multi-ethnic Sudan to largely homogenous Egypt, from dirt-poor Yemen to the super-rich princedoms in the Gulf, from the largely secular Lebanon and Tunisia to the autocratic theocracy of Saudi Arabia. For example, the proportion of women who get married before they are 18 ranges from a massive 45% in Somalia to 2% in Algeria.

In my view, the Arab state's failure to serve its citizens is intimately connected – both as a cause and effect – with the region's lacklustre economic performance, as is the region's instability. Shockingly, the AHDR quotes World Bank figures that show the region's economies to have grown collectively by a mere 6.4% in real terms in the quarter of a century between 1980 and 2004.

This is partly due to the Arab world's addiction – both direct and indirect – to oil-fuelled growth, and the dismantling of the industrial infrastructure in the more industrialised states that occurred as part of the so-called "reforms" pushed by the World Bank and IMF. In fact, today, Arab countries are less industrialised than they were in 1970.

Modest economic growth or even stagnation in itself is not a problem if the fruits are distributed equitably and the population is stable. But Arab elites are increasingly hogging big slices of the economic pie, while the "youth bulge" has led to mass unemployment in most countries, especially among young people. To add pain to indignity, the "structural reforms" many countries had to undergo mean that subsidies and other benefits are becoming almost non-existent.

And the region's ecological carrying capacity is being strained by its continued population growth and global environment



    
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