Associated Press
BEIRUT: The daily carnage in Iraq is claiming another casualty; Arab reformers who have increasingly become the target of governments that no longer feel pressured by the United States to change.
Ten intellectuals were recently thrown in jail in Syria. In Egypt, more than 600 people protesting in support of two reformist judges who called for the independence of the judiciary have been detained. And in Yemen, journalists are facing a rash of mysterious beatings, arrests and other forms of intimidation as the government cracks down on the media ahead of the presidential elections.
There s been a setback in reform in most of the Arab world, said Salama Ahmed Salama, a prominent Egyptian columnist. Liberals are going through a very difficult period.
Analysts blame the slowdown on several developments that followed the 2003 U.S.-led war which toppled Iraq s dictator Saddam Hussein.
After the war, the United States promised Iraq would become a model for Arab democracy, and it pushed regimes in the region to yield to some local demands for change.
Reform, Washington says, will make Muslim and Arab societies less fertile ground for extremists.
For a while, it looked like the Arab regimes, most of them autocratic, were responding to the U.S. demand.
The Palestinians held a vote that brought moderate President Mahmoud Abbas to power to replace the late Yasser Arafat. Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy, held its first elections ever, a vote for municipal councils. Egypt allowed candidates for the first time ever to run against President Hosni Mubarak last year. They lost. And Syria promised a host of reforms.
But the momentum seems to have been lost, and the governments appear to have closed the door to dramatic reforms.
Experts said one reason is that Arab regimes believe President George W. Bush is too preoccupied by the violence in Iraq to pressure them to change.
The Arabs put on a show, and when they saw Bush becoming weaker, they revealed their true face and their lack of intention to reform, said Hazem Saghieh, a senior Lebanese columnist with the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat.
At the same time, the experts say, the U.S. zeal for reform has waned after it became clear that democracy is bringing to power the same groups it had hoped the reform process would sideline, such as the militant Palestinian Hamas which won the Palestinian parliamentary elections in January.
In Egypt, parliamentary elections in November and December saw a flood of support for the Muslim Brotherhood, who increased their presence in the legislature six-fold.Some liberals believe part of the problem stems from the intellectuals themselves.
Sulaiman Al-Hattlan, a Saudi writer, said reformers have lost credibility in his country because in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks they used the small margin of freedom the government gave them to lash out at extremists but refrained from writing critically about corruption and government performance.
The government used the liberals in the war against the Islamists, Al-Hattlan said. But when that crisis was over, the liberals didn t turn their attention to the problems facing the country.
The question now is What kind of principles do liberals stand for? he added.
Many Arabs say the democracy call was premature in a region where democratic values are not entrenched.
The people themselves do not believe in the democratic process, and that has a reflection on the governments since governments emanate from the people, said Abdul-Reda Assiri, a professor of political science at Kuwait University.
Saghieh said it is an oversimplification to assume that the masses are great and only the governments are bad.
He said the Arab culture is not receptive to modernity and has scores to settle with the West, some as old as the Crusader Wars against Muslims and others relatively new such as the 58-year Arab-Israeli crisis in which the West is perceived as biased in Israel s favor.
That makes it difficult to apply the Eastern European model of democracy here, he said, referring to the spread of democracies that occurred after the fall of the Soviet Union. The Eastern Europeans didn t have this cultural issue.
There are also several prerequisites that should be in place before democracy could thrive in the region, such as a large middle class, stability, lack of militancy, religious reform and the empowerment of women, Saghieh said.
The question is not whether we do democracy or not. The question is whether we can develop secular sources for legitimacy in the Arab world, he said.
Some liberals, like Saghieh, say the reform process has gone back to square one.
But others, like Salama, say some progress has been made and despite the setbacks, it will be impossible to go back to the kind of oppression that was rampant in the Arab world before the Iraq war.
The liberals face a great challenge to prove their ability to resist the current regressive conditions, he said. Will they succeed? Only time will tell. But we ve gone beyond square one, by a small margin, he added.
