After a recent post by
Zaydoun on Arab reform, I thought I'd download copies of the
2002 and
2003 Arab Human Development Reports. After a bit of searching I managed to locate free download copies, rather than pay the UN or booksellers... really this should be free, particularly to all readers in the Arab world!
In my search I also came across an Economist
article from a couple of years ago that came out at the time of the first report. I probably read it at the time, but of course it's still extremely relevant. A couple of excerpts from the article follow:
The barrier to better Arab performance is not a lack of resources, concludes the report, but the lamentable shortage of three essentials: freedom, knowledge and womanpower. Not having enough of these amounts to what the authors call the region's three “deficits”. It is these deficits, they argue, that hold the frustrated Arabs back from reaching their potential—and allow the rest of the world both to despise and to fear a deadly combination of wealth and backwardness.
•Freedom. This deficit, in the UNDP's interpretation, explains many of the fundamental things that are wrong with the Arab world: the survival of absolute autocracies; the holding of bogus elections; confusion between the executive and the judiciar (the report points out the close linguistic link between the two in Arabic); constraints on the media and on civil society; and a patriarchal, intolerant, sometimes suffocating social environment.
The area is rich in all the outward trappings of democracy. Elections are held and human-rights conventions are signed. But the great wave of democratisation that has opened up so much of the world over the past 15 years seems to have left the Arabs untouched. Democracy is occasionally offered, but as a concession, not as a right.
“The transfer of power through the ballot box is not a common
phenomenon in the Arab world,” the report says politely. Moreover, senior public servants, from ministers down, are seldom appointed solely on the basis of merit. People are given jobs not because of what they know, but because of whom they know. The result, all too often, is an unmoving, unresponsive central authority and an incompetent public administration. Freedom of expression and freedom of association are both sharply limited. The report quotes Freedom House, an American-based monitor of political and civil rights, in recording that no Arab country has genuinely free media, and only three have “partly free”. The rest are not free.
Civil society, in the Arab world, has a terribly long way to go. NGOs are hobbled by legal and administrative obstacles laid in their path by authorities deeply suspicious of what they might be up to. But they also suffer from internal weaknesses, often getting their money either from foreign sources, which adds to the suspicions, or from the government, which defeats the object of their creation.
•Knowledge. “If God were to humiliate a human being,” wrote Imam Ali bin abi Taleb in the sixth century, “He would deny him knowledge.” Although the Arabs spend a higher percentage
of GDP on education than any other developing region, it is not, it seems, well spent. The quality of education has deteriorated pitifully, and there is a severe mismatch between the labour market and the education system.
Adult illiteracy rates have declined but are still very high: 65m adults are illiterate, almost two-thirds of them women. Some 10m children still have no schooling at all.
One of the gravest results of their poor education is that the Arabs, who once led the world in science, are dropping ever further behind in scientific research and in information technology. Investment in research and development is less than one-seventh of the world average. Only 0.6% of the population uses the Internet, and 1.2% have personal computers.
Another, no less grave, result is the dearth of creativity. The report comments sadly on the severe shortage of new writing, and, for instance, the decline in the film industry. Nor are foreign books much translated: in the 1,000 years since the reign of the Caliph Mamoun, say the authors, the Arabs have translated as many books as Spain translates in one year.
•Women's status. The one thing that every outsider knows about the Arab world is that it does not treat its women as full citizens. The report sees this as an awful waste: how can a society prosper when it stifles half its productive potential?After all, even though women's literacy rates have trebled in the past 30 years, one in every two Arab women still can neither read nor write. Their participation in their countries' political and economic life is the lowest in the world.
Governments and societies (and sometimes, as in Kuwait, societies and parliamentarians are more backward than their governments) vary in the degrees of bad treatment they mete out to women. But in nearly all Arab countries, women suffer from unequal citizenship and legal entitlements. The UNDP has a “gender-empowerment measure” which shows the Arabs near the bottom (according to this measure, sub-Saharan Africa ranks even worse). But the UN was able to measure only 14
of the 22 Arab states, since the necessary data were not available in the others. This, as the report says, speaks for itself, reflecting the general lack of concern in the region for women's desire to be allowed to get on.
Why it all went wrong
A country can have one or two of these deficits, says Clovis Maksoud, a respected Lebanese involved in the report's preparation, and still surge ahead. Singapore, for instance, manages to prosper without offering much political freedom. It is when a country or a region suffers from all three deficits that it is in such a bad way.
and...
Do not search or question
The most delicate issue of all, again carefully skirted by the authors of the report, is the part that Islam plays in delaying and impeding the Arab world's advance towards the ever-receding renaissance that its intellectuals crave. One of the report's signed articles explains Islam's support for justice, peace, tolerance, equilibrium and all good things besides. But most secularists believe that the pervasive Islamisation of society, which in several Arab countries has largely replaced the frightening militancy of the 1980s and early 1990s, has played a significant part in stifling constructive Arab thought.
From their schooldays onwards, Arabs are instructed that they
should not defy tradition, that they should respect authority, that truth should be sought in the text and not in experience. Fear of fawda (chaos) and fitna (schism) are deeply engrained in much Arab-Islamic teaching. “The role of thought”, wrote a Syrian intellectual “is to explain and transmit...and not to search and question.”
Interesting aside about Kuwait societies and parliamentarians being more backward than their governments! Some good fodder for the reformists in Kuwait. Of course, this is the Economist's view (i.e. Anglo-saxon liberal economist establishment view) and like everything written needs to taken with a 'pinch of salt', but it's usually one of my favourite reads.
Further on this theme of reform in the region, Dubai last week held a 3-day Arab Strategy Forumn, which I only found out about after the event. A friend attended though and offered the following insights (which I hope he doesn't mind me reproducing here):
- The involvement of women in society, economics and politics was a given by all speakers. It wasn't even an issue. About a third of the attendees were women including some leaders and speakers.
- Everyone sees clearly that society gives the mandate to leadership they just don't know the best way to do it in their society (i.e. they are sure that Western Democracy is a wrong road).
- The Westerners speaking were often blind to the sins of the West even if Arabs have the same sins. E.g. the American World Bank rep (who is supposedly a specialist on the Arab world) praised Palestine for having low levels of corruption because it has almost no bribery. He doesn't realise that whilst bribery is a gross sin in Palestine, power is still used to distort due process (it is just that no money changes hands). A common sin in the Arab world is "wasta" - the use of influence to change something into your favour. Arabs recognise it as a sin & would translate it into English as "Access to Government" or "Lobbying" But of course the World Banker sits amid lobbying and can't see it as designed to distort the use of power, and therefore he missed the fact that the Palestinians themselves know that their authority needs radical cleaning!
- The definition of an Arab was unclear. It was assumed that all Arabs are Muslims, but sometimes the Arab world was restricted to the rich Gulf states, sometimes to the Middle East. I wonder how the Algerians / Moroccans / Tunisians / Sudanese felt. The Libyan foreign minister was even asked on the platform whether Libya was Arab or African (the answer was something like "We are both, but African has been more loyal to us"). Of course, the Lebanese don't think they are Arab anyway, as one person said to me, "Don't ask me what an Arab is. It certainly is not defined by language because my mother tongue is Arabic and I am not an Arab. I am Lebanese." Thus at this forum to discuss where the Arab world is going, there was not even a clear view of who "we" are, let alone where we are going? I guess it was like all the English speaking nations meeting to discuss "our strategy" when we are too much aware of our differences. The difference is that Arabs expect unity. As one Arab said, "If Europe can achieve unity, despite its differences why is it that the Arab world with one common language, one common religion, one common value system, can't achieve even a 10% of the unity. If any region should be able to achieve unity it is us and yet we are still where we were 100 years ago." Unity involves trust. Trust involves loyalty (rather than conspiracy) & no one is ever more loyal than the top guy. In the Arab world, "The Top Guy" is fundamentally a law unto Himself. In order to trust you have to promise & "The Top Guy" makes no promises.
- Why are the Arabs so self-critical of themselves as a group but not self-critical of themselves as individuals. "We are a mess" seems much easier to say than "I am a mess." Do we have this same tendency too?
On this last point, this seems to be the same theme I'm trying to teach my children. You've got to take responsibility for your own mess / life / decisions / circumstances, etc. You have to acknowledge and take accountability for your own life. Bottom line is you're not a victim, you're creating your own experiences - the situations you are in and the way you feel about those situations. So don't blame others for your situation. I guess in simpler language the message is, "grow up, and get a life".
