Friday, June 11, 2004

Democracy and the Arab regimes.

As a reaction to the big ME project and the American plans of political reformations in the Arab world; many voices grew loud rejecting and criticizing these plans.
And in the midst of this clamor, one sentence seems to be dominating the speeches of the Arab regimes' campaign for keeping their kingdoms far from the reach of democracy:
"Democracy can not be imposed on a nation from outside. Our people will never let foreigners tell them how to lead their countries"

Establishing a democracy, in my opinion, is not a matter of addition, on the contrary; it's a process of removing restrictions off the will of a nation's people. And in our case, these restrictions are enforced by the governments and absolutely were not chosen by the people and this explains the Arab governments fear from the reformation plans because they (the plans) form a direct threat to the heads of those governments among whom no one came to power by the people's will.

They also didn't forget to use the traditional conspiracy theory weapon; describing the big ME project as the western imperialist conspiracy to cut away the Arabs from their cultural and intellectual legacy, wash their youths' brains by introducing the venoms of the "evil" western culture into their lives so that they give up the "historical dream of a great, united Arab nation".

Those dictators believe that "imposing democracy" in fact, means driving their totalitarian regimes to loosen their grips over their countries' citizens and forcing them to give the people one of their simple basic rights, the right to choose their leadership.

They say that the change must come from inside. OK, that's fine but the Arab people have been waiting for half a century to see these changes come from inside but unfortunately they didn't. Why? Because every time this file is opened, the leaders say "shut up, wait until we solve our central issue and then we'll take a look back at our internal affairs. We have no urgent problems to solve and our people are living well". Can anyone tell me why Egypt is being ruled by martial emergency laws since 1981? And why Iraq was in a similar condition since 1958, and has only witnessed freedom through "invasion"? You can say similar things about civil rights in Libya, Syria, Sudan…etc

I believe it was possible to find a solution for that this "central issue" which is the Palestinian-Israeli conflict soon after it started if we had democracies in the region. But the continued presence of these regimes was always inflaming the situation as the dictators and their clerics kept pouring oil on the fire.
Still I think these regimes can't stop what's natural. The people's lust for freedom and the support of the free world led by the USA are too strong to stop, and democracy will come *with help* from outside.






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