From the WSJ Opinion Archives
THE REAL WORLD
Free Arabia
The West can no longer afford to ignore repression in the Mideast.
Saudi Arabia's royals are doing another round of damage control. They've sent Adel Al-Jubeir, the top foreign-policy adviser to Crown Prince Abdullah, on a whirlwind U.S. tour to explain that the Saudis are not, as a recent Rand Corp. briefing at the Pentagon had it, "the kernel of evil." As Mr. Al-Jubeir tells it, things are fine and benign in the desert kingdom, and--by the way--attacking Iraq would get everybody upset and the Saudis want no part of that.
Thus did Mr. Al-Jubeir turn up last Friday on MSNBC's "Hardball," telling guest host Pat Buchanan that "we have no problem with legitimacy in Saudi Arabia, and whatever our people want, our people are going to get. We are evolving. We have built institutions. We have . . ."
At that point Mr. Buchanan cut him off, for which I was grateful, and perhaps he was too. Mr. Al-Jubeir is an urbane man, and I suspect he knows the line between fact and fiction. The Saudis have built institutions all right--straight out of the construction manual for your basic totalitarian state. There is no freedom of speech, there are no elections at any level, there is no freedom of assembly, political parties are illegal, travel is restricted, and even our own fawning State Department notes in a recent report that "members of the security forces committed serious human rights abuses." There's no such thing as a tourist visa. This is a country that in the latest Freedom House annual survey ranks right down there with Iraq, Cuba and North Korea--and well below Ethiopia and Albania--as one of the least free on the planet.
It might be worth debating whether the Saudi system, with its high-yield terrorist crop, should qualify the Saudi government as the kernel of evil, or just one fat seed lined up right next to Iraq in the fecund field of Arab tyrannies. But what ought to be beyond argument by now is that the Arab world is run by tyrants, and however elaborate the arguments they might provide for not toppling Saddam, there is a simple reason these thugs are worried sick about the prospect. Saddam's downfall might open the way for one of the most threatening things anyone could plant in their midst: a free society of Arabs, the world's first. When Bush administration officials met last week with Iraqi resistance leaders and underlined the president's stand by announcing, "Our vision is for a democratic Iraq," it must have curled the hair of despots from Riyadh to Ramallah.
Freedom, once it gets rolling in a region, has a way of becoming contagious. Not always, as Burma and China demonstrated some time back by gunning down democrats in the streets. Some of the former Soviet states, such as Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, instead of reforming, still rank right down there with Saudi Arabia among the world's most repressive regimes. But the broad lesson of East Asia in the late 1980s, and the former Soviet empire in the late 1980s and early '90s, is that once liberty comes to the neighborhood, it's hard for even the most industrious dictators to keep it from spreading.
The rulers of the Arab world, seem to understand this pretty well. They have long done everything they can to ensure that freedom gets no foothold in their house, no matter what the cost to the 280 million souls under their sway. This systematic smothering of human promise involves in some ways its own nasty cartel, not of oil but of evil. "Out of seven world regions, the Arab countries had the lowest freedom score in the 1990s"--even below sub-Saharan Africa, states a recent report by the United Nations Development Program.
This alone goes far to explain why regimes such as Iraq's and Saudi Arabia's like to lament so loudly the plight of the Palestinians while at the same time stomping all over their own people, and backing Yasser Arafat's policies of repression and terror, which make any genuine peace impossible. One can wonder if Israel's greatest affront to Arab governments is not that it provides a home for Jews, but that it offers a constant example, resident in the region, of functioning democracy. Any real "peace process" would involve Palestinian leaders permitting their own people similar blessings. What Arab tyrant could tolerate the risk of letting his people observe that development, and perhaps ask why they can't have some too?
Not that there's much love lost among the assorted Arab rulers, whose tribes, resources, favored styles of oppression, and array of religious beliefs vary greatly. Some are America's clear foes, some are presumed to be America's pals. Some are autocratic; some, like the Saudis, totalitarian. They all have one common enemy: the possibility that their people might rise up and, in the time-honored way of human beings, demand freedom. Immerse yourself in human rights reports on the Middle East--Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House--or just read the wires, and it gets hard to see why anyone talks about the ordinary people of the Middle East as the Arab street. The better phrase might be the Arab gulag.
Just to sample some of the recent doings--without even lighting on Iraq--there's the case in Egypt of Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a naturalized American citizen who returned to his native Egypt and dared to advocate fair elections--the kind in which the votes of ordinary people really count. Arrested two years ago, the 63-year-old Mr. Ibrahim has just been sentenced to seven years of hard labor. He was convicted on charges of embezzling money from the European Union (which protested that he was innocent) and tarnishing the reputation of Egypt. Mr. Ibrahim's sentence sends a warning to anyone, democratic moderates not least, who might challenge Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak, who has been running the place under a state of emergency for more than 20 years. Egypt receives some $2 billion a year in U.S. aid. If this is supposed to be buying peace and progress in the region, it's an investment that makes Enron look good.
Or turn to Syria, where after 30 years of dictatorship, Hafez al-Assad died two years ago, and his son Bashar al-Assad took over. For a brief spell, there was some hint that a more open society might follow. Democracy "salons" sprang up--only to be shut down. By the end of 2001, reports Freedom House, "whatever progress had been made was effectively snuffed out as the government curtailed informal gatherings and jailed opposition leaders, critical journalists and intellectuals." With some fanfare, Syria recently released from jail its longest-serving political prisoner, communist Haitham Naal. Offsetting this, however, is a fresh intake into prison of moderate dissidents more germane to any real call for reform. This includes such people as Walid al-Bunni, a physician and civic rights activist; and Aref Dalila, a 64-year-old economist who warned that Syria's economy was stagnating and in need of reform. Both were convicted of "trying to change the constitution by illegal means" and sundry other affronts to Syria's dynastic rule of martial law.
Or take a further look at our pals, the "evolving" Saudis. The House of Saud's treatment of democratic dissent is such that Human Rights Watch in its annual survey released last December reported: "There were no independent human rights organizations operating from inside the country either overtly or clandestinely." Not just a small number. None. That's not because all Saudis are happy as clams. This report went on to note that "surveillance of telephone, the Internet, and postal communications made it difficult for persons inside the kingdom to provide information." And "Saudis abroad were reluctant to speak of sensitive matters for fear of repercussion on family members or future employment prospects." Freedom House, in its latest assessment of Saudi Arabia, notes that "Arbitrary arrest and detention are widespread. . . . Police routinely torture detainees and signed or videotaped confessions extracted under torture are used, uncorroborated, as evidence."
I guess I haven't mentioned Islam. I'm sure it's important. But behind the bewildering weave of Arab politics and religion are an awful lot of workaday dynamics of plain old dictatorship. Sept. 11 wrote a message across the skies that it is no longer possible for the West to ignore Arab despotism, any more than it could afford to ignore the Nazis. The cure is not aid or appeasement or some archaic assumption that if you slap a royal title on a despot, he is therefore entitled to absolute rule and nothing bad will come of it. The only real answer is freedom. The extreme degree to which Arab rulers fear and fight it suggests just how eagerly their own people, given any real opening--imagine a democratic Iraq--might seize the day.
Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Wednesdays here and in The Wall Street Journal Europe.
