“The United States and the European Union are not the sole responsibles of the world. We need to share. We are not looking for people to come from outside and ‘take care of us’, but to participate with us in giving a gift of security to the world. We have to understand ourselves as part of a larger whole, a symphony.”
These were the words of participants in The Amman Roundtable on Human Security in the Middle East, held in mid-May 2004. Its report is presently circulating among governments in advance of the G8 leaders’ summit at Sea Island in Georgia, United States, from 8-10 June. The Roundtable’s most fundamental principle? People matter; start from the bottom up.
researchgroup.org.uk.
A rage for dialogue
We came together from Israel to Iran, Iraq to the Czech Republic, Egypt to the Netherlands: citizens of the Middle East seeking ways to make sense of and put an end to the horrors that visit them daily and the barriers that wall their lives around; citizens of Europe listening and offering their experiences of working together to heal a continent.
We met as the world recoiled with horror at the images coming out of Abu Ghraib prison of hooded and naked Iraqis being humiliated and tortured; and as Americans far away asked themselves “who are we as a nation, as human beings, to do this?”
We came out of sessions to phone-calls about Palestinians in Gaza waving body parts and playing football with severed heads; to helicopters firing missiles, fighters, children, innocents dying alongside each other, bulldozers demolishing row after row of houses, the incongruous colours of a parrot and a kangaroo rescued from Rafah’s shattered zoo… Israeli soldiers dying to retrieve fragments of flesh the size of a coin. Our mood was dark. But we did what we could.
I knew it would be an interesting process when the former head of the Israeli foreign ministry said the United States should withdraw from Iraq at once (and Iraqis took issue): “It doesn’t get any easier. It gets harder the longer you stay. We know!”. I had had to promise his quivering daughter to guard him like a hawk; his security people had told him to stay away. The Palestinian reform leader we invited couldn’t even cross the border. (What kind of “security” is this?)
Yet all of us ended drinking tea in the Jordanian Palestinian refugee camp of Baka’a one evening; listening to stories of displacement, poverty, rage and hope. Human security, it became clear, is economic, political, social and physical. It’s about the capacity for human life to flourish at the most basic level. And I think it can provide real foundations for geopolitics as well as individuals.
Learning to listen
At Sea Island, the G8 is meeting to consider a “Greater Middle East Initiative” that promises – or threatens – to tackle the region’s many problems. The first US draft met a firestorm of protest. A surprise, on one level: it is little more than a modest litany of low-level technical assistance and institution-building programmes. But the problem was the mood music and the Realpolitik; in other words, Iraq. People feared the initiative as an American Trojan Horse.
Neo-conservatives in Washington have talked with mysterious fervour about the experience of Europe, and looked forward to dominoes of oppression and Islamic fundamentalism falling across the region. Some saw the initiative sowing dragon’s teeth amidst the dunes, and envisioned a guerrilla cadre of revolutionary “democrats” springing up.
So we asked: what happened in Europe’s last generation to melt cold war and frozen politics? Civil society activists who worked for peace and human rights with Václav Havel and others across the arc of central and eastern Europe explained. Détente from below rather than leaving it all to governments, cross-border loyalty and solidarity between citizens, campaigning for humanitarian intervention in disintegrating Yugoslavia, and an openness to learning from each other, were some of the answers.
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Is civil society activism the politics globalisation needs? openDemocracy writers explore its radical potential:
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The Helsinki Process of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) – which in the mid-1970s bound states to declaratory principles of human rights, democracy and security – helped provide a framework and a compass for this work. The CSCE acknowledged the sovereignty of member-states and provided a multilateral framework of legitimacy – things lacking in the first draft of the Greater Middle East Initiative. It also provided one seed of the European Union’s recent enlargement. An Iranian participant demanded an equally powerful vision for the Middle East: a Middle East Union owned by its own states and citizens!
We heard about the actions of the women’s coalition in Iraq: marching from town to town in Kurdish provinces to prevent civil strife, maintaining the personal status law against attempts to impose a regressive form of sharia. We heard about the vast gulf between the Green Zone and the Red Zone in that country: a gulf into which the outcry of the country’s great debate is vanishing, unheard and unfocused by dialogue with power.
We heard about the broader debate gathering today from Casablanca to Tehran: a debate which cannot be left to governments or to citizens alone, and whose conclusions must not be dictated by the rich countries’ leaders in Sea Island. One of our participants was summoned to interview by the Jordanian Mukhabarat, and there’s little doubt we were all bugged at some point – I hope the listeners learnt some useful lessons.
The Amman Roundtable was one of a gathering wealth of processes of civil society dialogue and invention across the region. Not least among them is the Arab Reform Forum, and its Alexandria Statement calling for “genuine democracy”, empowered parliaments, independent judiciaries and cultural reform. There are opportunities as well as threats for Middle Easterners today, and a vast reservoir of energies waiting to burst through.
While we were meeting, Fred Halliday was writing on openDemocracy, “Within the Middle East as a whole, there is a crisis of political legitimacy, after decades of hot air and rhetoric.” I would add decades of power play from abroad, only very occasionally benign for human security in the region. It is time for Middle Easterners to take responsibility together, and for the world’s states and citizens to offer solidarity and assistance; for colonialism to be succeeded by independence through responsibility for interdependence. No forces – whether those of Islamic politics or civil society – should be excluded. Everyone has rights and responsibilities in this process.
The Amman event concluded with thirty-two recommendations. But what stays equally in the mind is an exhortation I heard in Tel Aviv a couple of days later, from the Middle East civil society activist Ami Ayalon (and co-founder of the grassroots “People’s Voice” initiative Sari Nusseibeh). The gist of it was: “until we wake up every morning with a fire within us and decide what we are going to do to make peace come, until we reach out to everyone in our society and feel the pain of those who may lose, it will not come.”
It’s up to us; all of us.
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Twelve of the Amman Roundtable’s thirty-two recommendations:
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