home > by publication type > interviews > Arab Expert Dunne: Atmosphere for Change in Arab World Improving, but Rulers Taking Few Specific Steps
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| Interviewee: | Michele Dunne |
|---|---|
| Interviewer: | Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor |
February 7, 2005
Michele Dunne, the editor of the Arab Reform Bulletin published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says there has been a marked improvement in the atmosphere for political change in the Arab world, but this has not yet translated into significant reform.
Dunne says President Bush’s calls for democracy and reform are resonating despite his unpopularity in the region. She says, “It very often happens that Arab intellectuals say, ’I’m against American policy in the region and I reject America’s moral authority to promote democracy, but I have long thought we needed democracy and reform in this society. And although I reject America’s ideas, here are my ideas.’”
Dunne, a former State Department expert on the Middle East and a visiting assistant professor of Arabic at Georgetown University, was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on February 7, 2005.
There has been a good deal of talk these days about political reform in the Arab world. Could you provide an overview of what’s happening? Are we on the verge of something big happening?
The atmosphere in the region is markedly different now from what it was a few years ago. For example, I was living and working in Egypt [for the State Department] from 1999 to 2002. At the time that I left, in mid-2002, the kind of issues that are under discussion now were more or less taboo; they were not publicly discussed at all.
So, here we are in early 2005 and the atmosphere has changed a great deal. What we are all grappling with now is what this really means. There is definitely a different atmosphere, a lot more space in which to discuss the issues of reform. At the same time, the actual reform steps that have been taken by governments in the region are still modest.
Some governments have done more than others and have been active in different areas of reform, which is appropriate, because, of course, each Arab country is a little bit different, and what they need to do differs. But it’s not clear at this point whether we’re seeing a wave of liberalization that will come to an end short of full democratization, or whether we really will see a transition to democracy in a few Arab states. There have been previous waves of liberalization in the Arab world, and it isn’t clear yet whether this one will go much further.
Let’s start with Egypt. Egypt, of course, does have elections, even though there’s been no competition for the presidency since I can remember.
There has never been any competition or popular selection of the head of state in Egypt.
But there is an election set for this autumn.
Yes. There are actually two events in Egypt coming up in the fall. The first is the election of President Hosni Mubarak, who is due to begin another six-year term; this will be the fifth one. The process, which is laid out in the Egyptian constitution, is that the Egyptian parliament nominates a single candidate for the office of the presidency and that candidate is subjected to a popular referendum. But it’s simply a yes or no referendum; there is no competition.
And Hosni Mubarak has indicated he is willing to become president again.
That’s right. Recently Mubarak indicated that he wanted to begin another term, and the party announced that it will nominate him in May. And then the referendum will take place in September. Following that, Egypt will have elections to their lower house of parliament, the people’s assembly, in October. In 2000, during the last parliamentary elections, they did this in stages; three different election days spread over about a month in different parts of Egypt, and I think they will do that again.
Are these competitive elections?
The parliamentary elections are competitive, but the party system in Egypt is quite weak. The last elections, in 2000, were generally seen as better than the elections that took place in the 1990s because they were held under judicial supervision. They actually had a judge or a public prosecutor present in each polling place to supervise the voting and counting. So, the voting and counting in the 2000 elections were considered to be more or less fair.
There were lots of other problems with the electoral process, however: security problems, candidates being eliminated from competition ahead of the polling, and so forth. Looking at the issue of competition, you have the National Democratic Party [NDP], which is the ruling party in Egypt. It is the descendant of the party set up by Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s, and it dominates the Egyptian party system.
Egypt has a relatively large number of parties; I think there are 17 now. But most of the other parties, aside from the NDP, are weak for lots of different reasons and they command little support. The major opposition force in Egypt, which is the Muslim Brotherhood, is not allowed to become a party because, according to Egyptian law, you cannot have a party based on religion.
There is no party representing the Muslim Brotherhood, although the Brotherhood fields candidates as independents or members of other parties. The big phenomenon in the 2000 elections was the candidacy of many, many independents. People from the NDP who were not nominated to the list went ahead and ran as independents and in many cases won against the actual NDP candidates. In the 2000 elections, the ruling party actually only got 40 percent of the seats outright. However, most of those independents who were elected later rejoined the National Democratic Party, thereby giving the NDP a large majority in parliament.
Does President Bush’s advocacy of democracy resonate in the Arab world, or is the United States so disliked that people automatically oppose anything Bush advocates?
Well, I think it does have resonance, but in an indirect way. I mentioned that the atmosphere now is very different from what it was a few years ago. There are lots of factors that contribute to that, but certainly, I think, the interest the United States has taken in this issue and the things the president has said about it have played a large role in opening up the political space so people who have long advocated reform can step forward and say so freely.
That is one of the factors that have really changed. In terms of how people respond to what the president and other American officials say about this, Arab intellectuals often say, “I’m against American policy in the region and I reject America’s moral authority to promote democracy, but I have long thought we needed democracy and reform in this society. And although I reject America’s ideas, here are my ideas.”
So, it’s been a kind of indirect success. Although there are not that many people standing around applauding what the United States is saying, nonetheless, what the president has been saying has really caused a flowering of debate. It has caused people in all these various countries to step forward with their own alternative proposals for reform within their own societies, which, overall, has been a very positive development.
What has been the reaction to the Iraqi election, which is now a week old?
It’s still early and, of course, the results are just beginning to trickle in from the elections. The fact that the Iraq elections went better than expected; that there was a larger turnout than anticipated, at least among the Shiites and the Kurds; that the voting, while still marred by violence, was more peaceful than expected; that’s one set of developments. Together with the Iraqi elections are the positive developments now on the Israeli-Palestinian front.
These two issues have been, obviously, of great concern to people in the Middle East- Palestine and Iraq. It seems that these hopeful developments are causing a moderation of the rhetoric that we see in the Arab world about this issue. And a few people are stepping forward and now saying, “Look, maybe something good is happening in our region, perhaps we can be a bit optimistic,” and so forth. There are still plenty of people saying this isn’t going to last and it’s not going to lead to anything good. They’re very suspicious of American intentions and Israeli intentions and so forth. But, at the moment, we see a little bit of guarded optimism as a result of developments in Iraq and Palestine.
President Bush, in his State of the Union address, specifically called on Egypt and Saudi Arabia, two of the United States’ major allies in the region, to do more to promote democracy in their countries. How did that go over?
The president has been saying these things for some time. In fact, what the president said in the address on Egypt was almost a word-for-word repeat of what he said about Egypt more than a year ago. So, this is not news to these countries. But what is the response?
I think we see the Egyptian and the Saudi governments feeling they need to try to get control of this issue and show that they are taking some positive steps, however limited. In Saudi Arabia, one of the things they are doing right now is holding local elections for the first time. They will have partially-elected municipal councils, and those elections will be held in stages starting this week.
In Egypt, we see a lot of emphasis on economic reform. President Mubarak appointed a new cabinet last summer with a pro-reform prime minister [Ahmed Nazif], and several pro-reform ministers, and they are stepping forward pretty aggressively on economic reform. They are taking some very modest steps in terms of political reform. The ruling party is calling for the establishment of an electoral commission, and they are trying to get that through parliament. However, the minister of justice heads the commission, so it’s not independent.
Saudi Arabia and Egypt are taking some little steps, but there’s also plenty of backsliding. There were a number of dissidents arrested in Saudi Arabia in January for holding a demonstration, and they were flogged, which is unusual for political offenses, since flogging is normally reserved for moral offenses. And then in Egypt last week, there was a very negative development with the arrest of a prominent, active young opposition parliamentarian, Ayman Nour, detained on questionable charges. At this point, I cannot say that there is strong forward momentum in either Egypt or Saudi Arabia.
There were demonstrations in Egypt last week?
Again, this is symptomatic of the changed atmosphere. There have been several demonstrations over the last few months. There’s a new small movement in Egypt called “Kifaya,” which means “Enough,” specifically demonstrating against President Mubarak’s having another presidential term. This would have been unthinkable a few years ago. These demonstrations are small, a few hundred people at a time, but they are a new phenomenon.
So right now there is a lot of talk and movement, and I guess it’s just a matter of waiting and seeing what happens over a period of some time.
That’s true. Some countries are taking interesting steps. For example, in Morocco they’re holding hearings with people testifying about political disappearances that took place over the years. This is a new thing in the Arab world, televised hearings in which citizens talk about human rights abuses suffered at the hands of the regime. So, there are individual steps that countries are taking, but you really need to sit down and look at each country and consider the significance of the steps they’re taking and whether there are also setbacks or limits. On good days, it seems to me the process is two steps forward, one step back; on days when bad things happen, it seems like one step forward, two steps back.
If you had to guess, where would you expect the most change to occur in the next two to three years?
What we see unfolding before our eyes are changes in Iraq and in Palestine. This is not surprising because in both cases the political situation has been broken wide open by crisis. You no longer have ossified regimes that are difficult to remove, but instead have fluid situations and new leaderships. For now, those are the places where the stakes are very high but there’s real potential- by no means guaranteed- for the establishment of democratic governments within a few years.
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