Slave revolts and Arab summits

Somebody should remind the few Arab heads of state who attended the Arab League summit in Khartoum Tuesday that we have just had our first modern slave revolt in the Arab region. Well, "slave revolt" may be too harsh a description of the actions of hundreds of mostly South Asian construction workers in Dubai last week. The workers stopped work and went on a little rampage for two days, to protest their harsh working and living conditions, low pay, delayed pay, and general lack of rights.

by Rami G. Khouri

This should have caught the attention of the few Arab heads of state who bothered to attend the Khartoum summit, because it reflects the sad situation that defines much of this region. The collective Arab leaders have conspicuously failed to resolve any significant regional issue in the last half century or so, while allowing their countries to degenerate into increasingly inequitable and abusive systems of exploitation and corruption, often enforced by militia power.

The revolt by the Asian workers in Dubai ironically occurred in a country, the United Arab Emirates, that otherwise has earned accolades for its sensible development and efficient modernisation. It should prompt us all to look again at how we treat foreign workers in the Arab region, and to use that prism to examine how ordinary citizens are treated by their own governments and societies.

Mercifully, perhaps as a sign of God's enduring affection and mercy for the Arab people, the Arab League summit meeting in Khartoum was pared down to a one-day event Tuesday. Nine Arab heads of state did not even bother to go. Many of those who did attend, like the Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian presidents, are under immense domestic and global pressure to resign, or to radically change their policies.

The defining collective characteristic of the Arab heads of state who attended or stayed home is an embarrassing combination of irrelevance, police state autocracy, or razor-thin legitimacy. The Khartoum gathering highlights the profound pressures and problems that plague most Arab countries. These can be summarised as a general lack of the rule of law in systems where political, military and economic power is closely guarded in the hands of small numbers of mostly unelected, unaccountable people – often just the men of a single family. Narrow, gun- and clan-based power structures that are more suited to urban gangland cultures have evolved in the Arab region in the past half century into prevailing systems of official governance.

Not surprisingly, a majority of young people in the Arab world these days responds to the dilemma of living in such a world with a range of startling options: a majority of Arab youth wants to emigrate to foreign countries, finds refuge in religion rather than more fully engaged citizenship, adheres to extremist political groups or terrorist cells, goes along with institutionalised corruption and nepotism, experiments with drugs and diversionary alien lifestyles or joins a militia.

I would guess that the percentage of young Arabs aged 14-25 that does not fall into one or more of the above categories is no more than 25 per cent of the total. This is one legacy of contemporary Arab leaders who meet in increasingly delusional summits. We have transformed our children into aberrations of good citizenship and decent humanity because we have raised them in largely lawless systems that enrich those who have and use guns — whether renegade militias or official security services and military sectors.

For the past quarter century, since the 1970s oil boom, this region has relied heavily on millions of manual labourers and semi-skilled professionals from Asia and other parts of the Arab world. For the most part, in return for meagre wages that are only more attractive than the no wages they would suffer in their home countries, these immigrant workers have been treated badly in almost every aspect of their personal and professional lives, i.e., wages, working hours, benefits, medical care, housing, recreational and leisure facilities, family unification, civil rights, education and legal protection. Some women domestic workers have been sexually and physically abused. Some others have been held in conditions that can only be called captivity.

This is not a minor issue. These immigrant workers number in the millions throughout the Arab world. The Asian workers in Dubai, the Gulf, the Levant and North Africa are not "slaves" in the strict sense of the word. But their life and work situations bring them so dangerously close to conditions of captive servitude that one could be excused for metaphorically saying that the Arab world experienced its first “slave revolt” last week.

The Arab leaders who met in Khartoum, and those who stayed at home, should stop wasting their time on issues that they have only mangled over the years – Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan, democracy, common economic policies. Instead, they should address these issues of fundamental human rights and conditions in their own societies that are more directly under their control, and that ultimately reflect the quality of their own moral values — noble or shrivelled as these may be in real life.

This article was published in the Friday-Saturday, March 31-April 1, 2006 edition of the Jordan Times. It is used here with permission.