Some of the material in this issue of Middle East Report was generated at the October 2-3, 1998 conference on “Multi-Party Elections in the Arab World: Controlled Contestation and Opposition Strategies,” which as organized by MERIP board members Marsha Pripstein Posusney and Jillian Schwedler. The conference was sponsored by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University in cooperation with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. We are grateful to these institutions for enabling us to publish the excerpts below.
On April 27, 1997, Muhammad Zabara stood outside a polling station in the old city of Sanaa. In a neatly pressed suit and tie, his short hair and mustache freshly trimmed, he greeted voters who had turned out for Yemen’s second post-unification parliamentary elections. A team of Western election monitors approached him and asked whether he was a candidate. In English, he answered that he was the district’s candidate from the Yemeni Reform Group, a conservative party with an Islamist agenda. “But Ahmad Raqihi is the Islamist candidate for this district,” said one of the monitors, referring to Zabara’s main rival, who dons a turban and beard. “You don’t even look like an Islamist.” [1]
Eight Ways to Make Elections Risk-Free
1. When drawing the lines of the constituencies, remember to integrate as many opposition supporters as possible into your own constituencies and to transfer as many of your own supporters as necessary into the opposition’s strongholds in order to maintain the majority in both constituencies. Add some soldiers if necessary.
2. Make sure that there are no election observers around while you register the votes.
3. Invite the election observers only on short notice in order to prevent them from preparing the observation properly.
4. Discredit the opposition as being either Islamist or Communist, or being employed by a foreign government or all of the above.
Incumbent national leaders invite foreign election monitors only when it is in their interest to do so. Rarely is significant financial assistance “conditional” on holding elections, although it does improve a regime’s image abroad to do so. For governments being observed, the trick is to orchestrate the process enough to win, but not enough to arouse observers’ suspicions.
Although Middle Eastern countries have seen a dramatic rise in the number of national elections, there is a significant problem with “charting” the march of democracy in the region through a narrowly focused analysis of electoral processes. Numerous political, economic and cultural forces affecting electoral outcomes are easily overlooked, particularly in studies of elections that frame such processes within the borders of the nation-state.
The last decade has seen multi-party competition for elected legislatures initiated or expanded in Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Kuwait, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority. Executive authority in most cases remains an uncontested, if not completely unelected, post. Nevertheless, incumbent rulers invariably tout these legislative elections as evidence of domestic legitimacy, often anointing their countries as “on the road to democracy” in their wake.
Less than a block from the seventeenth-century walls that surround Rabat’s medina (old city) is the Association Tamaynut. Inside the three-room office one can attend meetings, listen to lectures and participate in passionate discussions. A young man, Ibrahim, is there every weekday from morning until night. One of Morocco’s many thousand unemployed college graduates, he spends his free time doing volunteer work that he finds gratifying.
Two things one hears daily in Lebanon: The government is more corrupt than ever, and relations between people are becoming harsh. Let’s consider whether any correlation exists between government neglect and widespread individual survivalism. And let’s focus on highway transportation, where public policy and private use overlap.
If you offer to take a friend and her four children to the airport, you must drive because no one has rebuilt the country’s pre-war train system. Uncharitable tongues claim that the costly new highway system serves foreign construction interests and upper-class Lebanese at the expense of the wider public.
Eight years after the end of the war in Lebanon, the discrepancy between free minds and free markets is growing ever sharper. Since 1992, Lebanon’s billionaire prime minister, Rafiq al-Hariri, has been the individual most responsible for outlining an economic program for the post-war era. The prime minister has not hidden his admiration for laissez faire principles. In contemporary Lebanon, however, the free market is a most uncertain quantity.
The following comments are excerpted from a speech delivered on Capitol Hill on October 6, 1998 by Denis Halliday, former UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, shortly after he resigned his post in protest over the sanctions’ devastating impact on the Iraqi people.
Between the confrontations with Iraq in February and November, and the Cruise missile salvos directed at Afghanistan and Sudan in August, 1998 has been rather busy for the gunboat section of the US diplomatic corps. Twice, the UN secretary-general averted US military action by securing promises that Baghdad would comply with UNSCOM weapons inspectors, but the August bombings of US embassies in East Africa showed how broadly the sparks of war had spread. Washington’s hegemony in the region was challenged both by the survivalist instincts of Iraq’s dictator and by an underground Islamist network dedicated to driving foreign troops out of the Arabian Peninsula.
Arab Resource Center for the Popular Arts. al-Jana (Special Issue on Oral History Among Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon) (Beirut, 1998).
Article 19 and Kurdish Human Rights Project. State Before Freedom: Media Repression in Turkey (1998).
Beinin, Joel. The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora (Berkely, CA: University of California Press, 1998).
Caldwell, Dan. Power, Information and War, Emirates Occasional Paper 15 (Abu Dhabi: Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research, 1998).
Hegazy, Sonia, ed. Egyptian and German Perspectives on Security in the Mediterranean (Cairo: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 1998).
Peter Gran, Beyond Eurocentrism: A New View of Modern World History (Syracuse University Press, 1996).
In the arid, mountainous, north-eastern corner of Africa, two of the world&’s poorest but best armed states — Eritrea and Ethiopia, allies until a short while ago — are on the brink of all-out war. Shuttle diplomacy by a succession of would-be mediators has failed to provide an exit from potential catastrophe for both sides, though it has temporarily halted the fighting that wracked the area last spring. Since then, the two countries have mobilized hundreds of thousands of troops and a staggering arsenal of Cold War arms to do battle over less than 100 square miles of disputed scrub farmland and desert. Far more is at stake than a petty border dispute, however.
Aida Dabbas is program officer for the Jordanian-American Binational Fulbright Commission in Amman. She has been an active opponent of the sanctions against Iraq and of the US arms buildup in the region. Jillian Schwedler, an editor of this magazine, spoke with her by telephone in June.
You recently visited Iraq for the first time.
Media coverage of the February 1998 showdown with Iraq highlighted subtle but significant changes in the relationship between the mainstream media and US foreign policymaking. Although the major media — despite some alleged soul searching by media professionals [1] after the Gulf war — have changed little since the pro-war hysteria of 1991, activists are discovering more ways to obstruct the media juggernaut and influence policymaking — sometimes by actually using the mass media.
In discussions between American and European scholars about Western policies towards the Middle East — an issue of increasing importance for trans-Atlantic relations — Europeans are often asked to explain why their policymakers and pundits criticize US Middle East policies instead of accepting a form of burden sharing that would allow the European Union to pursue its economic interests in the Middle East and the Mediterranean while leaving political leadership to the US. After all, did the US not defend overall Western interests in the Middle East, particularly the free flow of oil? Was not the US the only power capable of brokering peace between Israel and the Arabs? [1]
