Footprints in the Sand

While I was sitting there waiting for a boring old budget meeting to start, I was idly running my eyes over the Financial Times and noticed that a commentator was comparing Hizbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah to Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. I was a taken back and that led me to think about this strange propensity of individuals to be bigger than institutions in that part of the world. My second thought was how these charismatic leaders emerge suddenly and very promisingly and then end up disappointing. Many a meeting later, I had a conversation with an Arab friend who, after I broached the idea, said, "Yes, after they taste the power, then the blood and thirst come out. And after they have tasted blood and power, it makes them drunk and addicted and they thirst for more of it at any cost".

He also followed this up with a joke about the international crab exhibition. All the world’s crabs were stored according to ethnicity in big glass tanks with lids, except for the Arab crabs which didn’t have a lid on the glass tank. On being asked for the reason of the missing lid, the exhibition guide said, the Arab crabs don’t need it. Watch! And sure enough, as soon as a crab started to rise above the other crabs, the other crabs ganged up and pulled him down. Mind you, I had heard this joke previously from my father as well. So its one of those jokes where you simply replace the nationality of the crab to suit the purpose. But on the other hand, if I look around the Arab region, I can see that there are some challenges and problems for ambitious "crabs".

The Arab world has unfortunately turned up these characteristics many times. In the main, these are the characteristics that I am talking about. First, the propensity to go wild with pinning all hopes on a charismatic leader rather than slowly and patiently building up an institution that would endure even after that leader is gone. Second is the propensity of these charismatic leaders to disappoint. And finally, whenever such a charismatic leader does emerge, it’s the other Arab leaders who, many times, conspire to pull him down. Let us take a look around at various promising leaders and their fate, like Nasser of Egypt, Bashar of Syria, Abdullah of Jordan, Arafat of Palestine, Hariri of Lebanon, Mohammad VI of Morocco. Then we can draw lessons from what history tells us about the potential fate of Nasrallah if the fate of his fellow Arab leaders is any indication.

Hassan Nasrallah is an amazing character. And I am going to totally ignore the western image and just concentrate on what the Arabs think and have reported of him. He is a kind man, a polite and gentle man. He is steadfast in his resolve. He is not just a talker, but has contributed and sacrificed his own elder son Hadi as a martyr to the cause of resistance against Israeli occupation the first time around. His second son is also participating in the current standoff. He and his group really care about his Shia brethren. They help them with social problems, run educational institutions, resolve disputes, help in building, run small financial institutions, and biggest of them all, managed to give a bloody eye to and survive against the might of the Israeli Army. He is as near ’canonisation’ as is physically possible for a Muslim. Even the difficult and tense Shia/Sunni divide was forgotten and near every Arab and Muslim lined up to support and admire him. He gave the Arabs back their “face”, as Albert Hourani put it memorably.

But we have been right here in that same spot before. Take a look at Nasser who ruled Egypt from 1954 to 1970. He was also the person who gave face back to the Arabs after the 1956 war. He was a charismatic leader with a popular Arab Nationalist, anti-colonial struggle and pan-Arabian identity politics made him the darling of the Arab world. His words right from the beginning, when he was part of the Free Officers, sounded promising and engaging. Through all of his life, he was treated almost like the Mahdi who had returned. I remember my first knowledge of Nasser was when I read in the Guinness book of world records in the late 1970’s that his funeral was the largest ever attended. Bashar of Syria was another shining star which burst over the Arab firmament. His first speech left me speechless with admiration, the man was promising social, economic and political reforms in that hideous country after long years of corruption and mis-management. He closed some of the most notorious prisons and even set up a computer society which introduced the internet to Syria. Adulation galore, statues have been put up with big bill-boards around the place.

Some people might remember the days in 1968 when the Israeli army entered into the village of Karameh in Jordan following Palestinian attacks on Israel. 28 soldiers died and four tanks were destroyed. A young Palestinian militant immediately claimed that victory as a victory for the PLO and the Palestinians. He became famous, the great Palestinian hero who managed to give a bloody nose to the Israelis. Leaving aside the fratricidal mayhem of Black September, the young Palestinian militant soon rose in the ranks and became Yasir Arafat, or Abu Ammar, the great white shining hope of the Palestinian nation. Some may remember the eulogies that were paid to him at his funeral.

Mohammed VI of Morocco was crowned king in 1999. He was welcomed as a breath of fresh air after King Hassan’s rule. His first speech on television promised action on poverty and corruption. He promised to deliver jobs and to improve Morocco’s dismal human rights record. He brought in a code which provides for better protection to women. He also brought in a human rights commission to review human rights abuses in his father’s days and promised a revision of the family laws to grant women more rights. And then he got married and the entire country went into paroxysms of delight. He allowed his bride to be seen by the people and made the wedding a tribal/folk event rather than the usual secretive one.

Same with Hariri of Lebanon, the big hope for Lebanon, a billionaire, a recipient of a honorary citizenship from Saudi Arabia, restorer of Lebanon’s financial and economic fortune, an extraordinary educator (funded over thirty thousand scholarships), a very big philanthropist, and so on and so forth. A measure of his popularity is that when he died, Beirut was heaving with mourners and his death was the direct factor in Syria withdrawing its troops from Lebanon. How about King Abdullah II of Jordan? A young smart handsome man, with a beautiful wife, working to improve his poor country’s economy, and has indeed managed to raise the stature of his country internationally.

One of the big issues identified by almost every survey and report (for example, see the various UN Human Development Reports available here https://unp.un.org/catalogue.aspx) about the Middle East is the lack of sustainable and strong institutions. Whether we talk about the judiciary, executive, security forces, municipal corporations, educational institutions, you name it, they are not strong. One of the reasons is the cult of the individual. In all my readings and many conversations with Arabs from different countries, the common thread seems to be the reliance on individuals who will come to rescue them from all their threats and evil persistent problems. Perhaps one of the reasons is the Mahdi (http://piquancy.blogspot.com/2004/06/power-of-belief.html). But we are digressing. It is this personality-cult which does not allow strong and sustainable institutions to grow. And when you don’t have institutions, all the good work done by the gifted individuals’ dribbles away after they are gone.

But it is also curious to see what and how these gifted individuals actually ended up. As a philosopher once said, you leave behind (after you are dead) your deeds and your children. If we exclude their children (a corrupt nepotistic bunch if you ask me), just what amounts to their deeds? Precious little, I am afraid. Mohammad, Abdullah and Bashar have both promised loads and delivered pathetically little so far. If one looks at Arafat, he did move the Palestinians a bit closer to the dream of having their own state but when he died, he left behind a corrupt party, moved definitely to the islamist side (seen the videos of him bellowing about Jihad?), made enemies left right and centre and frankly left the Palestinians unable to operate even the rump of the state that they got. As far as Nasser goes, I am bit puzzled to even think about what he really achieved and did after his anti-colonial contributions. He used chemical weapons on his Arab neighbours, ran concentration camps in Egypt, managed to lose chunks of his territory, ran the economy to the ground, let corruption flourish, took Egypt into unnecessary wars etc. If you want to see what these guys are doing now, just listen to Bashar’s current speeches, which are exactly like his father’s. All those family / women friendly policies have dried up for Mohammad VI and Abdullah’s security services are still locking up people for printing anything bad about him. Think about the issue about honour killings which is rampant in Jordan. Abdullah did not even defend or impose his very own suggested reforms for honour killings, which were voted down in less than three Minutes in parliament. Also remember that most of these leaders had their greatest enemies within their own Arab worlds, Nasser, Arafat and the rest were and are all suspicious of each other. They would betray each other at the drop of a dollar.

This is why I wonder about Nasrallah. He got the Arab face back all right, just like Arafat did thirty years ago. But I am still not sure what really was achieved by poking Israel. They poked right back and how. So 530 Hizbollah members were killed (or so Israel claims), billions of dollars worth of damage, a promise to disarm Hizbollah (not sure how far that will go), constant sniping by Israel (Israel went back and killed some more of its cadres after the ceasefire), and they really did not get anything substantial. But they got their face back. One seriously wonders about the strategic insight of this chap. But he looks after his people and his party has rapidly helped in the rebuilding of the Shia areas. But if the other similar luminaries in the Arab world are any indication, he too will pass, without leaving any lasting institution other than some fading posters flapping in the figurative desert that is the Arab lands. If he really manages to leave behind a strong Lebanon or some strong institutions of learning, justice, economics or what have you, and then I would say that he has broken the mould and left the world a better place than he found it.

Here’s a poem about one of his ancestors which is particularly poignant, specially the last three lines.

Ozymandias.

I MET a Traveller from an antique land,
Who said, "Two vast and trunk less legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings."
Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)