Following the most recent suicide bombing attack in Israel, the White House let it be known through its spokesman, Ari Fleischer, that it holds Palestinian President Yasser Arafat responsible and would like to see him replaced. “In the president’s eyes,” Fleischer said, “Yasser Arafat has never played a role of someone who can be trusted or who was effective.”
As usual, Israeli Premier Ariel Sharon went a bit further, lobbing a few shells into Arafat’s offices. That is a bit drastic, given that the accusation against Arafat was not that he masterminded the attacks, only that he “failed” to stop them. Since Arafat is virtually a prisoner, the accusations and the “reprisals” appear even more outrageous. No one has (yet) advocated the bombing of FBI headquarters for failing to stop the Sept. 11 attacks, or removing, let alone shooting, the Israeli Army’s chief of staff and the Shin Bet chief for failing to stop the June 5 suicide bombing (and many others before).
What is intriguing, however, is the way international prescriptions for the Palestinians appear to shift toward advocating more dictatorial regimes and more drastic measures against human rights.
Arafat is bombed for having too few Palestinian prisoners, and Pakistan’s president, General Pervez Musharraf, is chided for not shooting enough Indians and Pakistanis, and threatened with war for “not doing enough.” Saudi Arabia is blamed for neglecting to undertake sufficient repression against its citizens, with the result that many traveled to America to commit acts of violence.
Yemen, the Philippines, Afghanistan and a number of Central Asian republics are all receiving “aid” in the shape of guns and armed personnel to help them shoot and apprehend their citizens. However, this is an area in which Muslim countries need the least help ­ so much so that Arab leaders have been berating America for not “learning from the Arab experience” in combating terrorism. What these leaders mean by terrorism is usually peaceful opposition. Even where violence is perpetrated by a few, thousands who have nothing to do with it are severely punished. Most Arab regimes take what they regard as pre-emptive action: nabbing any dissent in the bud and relying heavily on their overdeveloped intelligence services.
In the contemporary Arab world, the mukhabarat (intelligence bodies) state has become the norm. Ruling parties, families or even “democratic” governments are no more than appendages to the shady organizations that control the real trappings of power. The horror of such regimes is evident enough, but sometimes the full horror is revealed only when the nightmare comes to an end.
In Morocco ­ which over the last few years took the courageous step of breaking with its dark past ­ revelations have been coming thick and fast about kidnappings, murders, torture and prolonged imprisonment without trial, even of children. And yet Morocco has always been one of the least repressive among the Arab states. Compared to many other Arab countries, it is practically Switzerland. One can then only imagine what is going on in less “liberal” Arab countries, and shudder.
In its most recent annual report, Freedom House counted only one Muslim majority nation as free: Mali. In the list of “enemies of the press” published annually by the Paris-based media monitoring organization Journalistes sans Frontieres, over half the membership of the list of 25 come from Muslim countries. The reports of Amnesty International, Index on Censorship, Human Rights Watch, the US State Department and other human rights monitoring bodies, paint a similarly dismal picture.
In short, if there is one thing that is not in short supply, it is repression and the police state. Unfortunately, however, someone up there thinks that we do not have enough. Thus the central “reform” proposed for Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority is to have more effective security services. The CIA chief himself traveled to the region to promote the idea.
It takes a lot of “intelligence” to figure out that what is needed by the long-suffering Palestinians crowded in refugee camps and with nothing to lose, is more policing and more repression. However, this appears to be the prevalent international wisdom of these days. And we must not blame Sept. 11 for this, since the experiences of Algeria, Tunisia, Pakistan, Egypt and many other Middle Eastern countries had consistently shown that the West prefers ruthless Muslim dictators to unruly democrats, just like in the good old days of colonialism.
What Sept. 11 has done is remove the equivocation and reservations that characterized Western attitudes in the past. Now, even the worst and most vicious dictators, such as Turkmenistan’s Islam Karimov, are not bad enough.
Nowadays, apparently, the only good state for Arabs and Muslims is a police state. Even for the millions who voted with their feet against this unbearable order and sought exile havens in Europe, the US and Australia ­ which are now choked full with refugees ­ the nightmare does seem to end there. More and more, the countries of refuge look like the ones they fled.
Being called a “police state” is probably the worst condemnation for any regime. It is a state whose instrument of rule is terror. In such a state, an Orwellian Big Brother spies on citizens, terrorizes real and suspected opponents and generally engages in all sorts of criminal activity in order to maintain a regime unwanted by the people. The mukhabarat reign supreme and act above and outside the law. However, the police state in the Arab world is now undergoing rehabilitation. It is in hot demand and even being “exported” to the West.
Either intelligence chiefs or military commanders now undertake diplomacy. The CIA chief making the rounds in Arab capitals is met by heads of state and, of course, mukhabarat chiefs who are currently the most popular officials in Western capitals. The US defense secretary is also making the rounds in the Indian subcontinent (and who better to talk the language of Pakistan’s petty dictator, General Musharraf?)
It would seem then that the mukhabarat state, which the Arabs had hoped to see the back of soon, has a long future ahead. It is not a rosy one, though.
To use the fact that a large proportion of the accused in the Sept. 11 attacks were Saudi as a blackmail tactic against Saudis and Arabs is likely to backfire. To start with, the accused, if they are really guilty, have committed their crimes in the US, not Saudi Arabia. And, the fact that it did not help that Saudi Arabia applies some of the strictest security measures any more than did the deployment of America’s unrivalled intelligence assets, is a clear indication that this is a blind alley.
Naively, one would think that before deploying more police tactics to keep the peace, it might be a good idea for there to be a peace to keep. Policing the murderous and tyrannical Israeli occupation is going to be a tough job for any force. Increasing the pressure, and enlisting the help of the equally unsavory Arab regimes in the process, would be like tightening the pressure in an overheated nuclear reactor: a recipe for a very big explosion.
But then what do we know? After all, we are not “intelligence” personnel. On the positive side, this means we cannot be blamed for not averting Sept. 11 and other terrorist attacks.

Abdelwahab El-Affendi is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster. He wrote this comment for The Daily Star

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