… to voice their opposition as Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party holds its annual conference. Opposition groups denied a permit to hold another, contemporaneous conference in Cairo took their gathering online. You can check out the blog at anti-NDP.blogspot.com (Arabic).
The Brookings Institution’s Middle East Youth Initiative is following the developments of the global economic whatever-we-are-calling it in a series called Food, Fuel and Finance: How Will the Middle East Weather the Global Economic Crisis? Slipping Oil Prices: is the Oil-Rich Middle East Prepared?, the first installment, offers a brief history of oil revenues over the last 20 years in the Persian Gulf. It’s conveniently arranged in Q and A format, which helps if you are someone who (like me) feels a strong temptation to let their eyes glaze over when they start to see a series of words like “revenue” and “inelastic demand” one after another. Politics, however, always capture my attention, and I want to draw attention to one crucial point that the report makes in this arena:
For these countries, bringing their economies to a soft landing may prove much easier than managing the downsizing of expectations without a political backlash. Leaders in the region have offered scant warning to their citizens regarding the end of the petro-boom. Even after the global financial crisis had begun, mega projects were being announced in the GCC as if to defy the reality of what the global downturn will do the region’s economies.
The Gulf countries’ generous spending has kept citizens relatively happy - textbook rentierism - and as spending is curtailed because of falling oil prices, there will be a backlash in public sentiment.
The one bright spot in all of this is that hard times make the case for policy reform more persuasive. The oil rich countries have a list of policy options before them, including reorienting education away from mere seeking of formal degrees toward acquisition of skills, transforming the search for government jobs into a search for careers in the public or private sector, and giving the youth a greater voice in shaping their own destiny.With the oil feast all but over, the time has come to set the incentives for the region’s youth to become tomorrow’s productive middle class.
This may be true. The relative weakness of the Gulf states’ militaries make total-police-state-mode to stifl uprisings unlikely. (Although this weekend’s piece in the New York Times magazines drew some clear lines between the Emirates and Iran, and this wouldn’t be first time the United States stepped in to contain a popular uprising against a government they consider convenient). It’s naive, though, to think that threatened and weakened Gulf governments’ first responses will be to open up their political systems on their own. Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak doesn’t seem to have any trouble maintaining a corrupt and undemocratic regime on a shoestring budget. Bashar al Assad is still around. Ali Abdullah Saleh might control only a small corner of his country, but he’s still president. Seeing political reform as an inevitable consequence of economic failure sounds to me like a “birth pangs of the new Middle East” argument. (To be clear, I don’t think that’s precisely what Salehi-Isfahani is arguing here). He’s right that the case is more persuasive when the governments can no longer purchase their citizens’ loyalty. And the Gulf countries may arrive at that conclusion on their own. Then again, some may not. I would approach any framing of a global economic meltdown as an “opportunity” skeptically.
On 11/5, Secretary Rice will start a four-day trip to Israel, Jordan, Egypt and Palestine. I guess she’s decided the term “lame duck” won’t apply to her. Although, I know that I expect to hear about nothing but the presidential election over those four days; we’ll see whether that’s the case for her.
A treasure from the archive of the Christian Science Monitor detailing women’s efforts to persuade the Coalition Provisional Authority to include them.
International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IIDEA)’s Global Database of Quotas for Women.
Trivia: Rwanda has the world’s highest proportion of women in the elected legislature, at 48.8%.
… the female ones, anyway, and of course they are in favor. Iraq’s Parliament right now is 25.5% female - the US House is 16.8% female, and the Senate 16%. Since the women as a group form a big enough bloc to disrupt the body’s work if they make a collective decision to do so, they were able to protest the speaker, Mahmoud al Mashhadani’s, comments that women cannot lead because concerns that their husbands will take second wives distract them by boycotting the following days’ legislative session.
I’m someone who finds comparisons helpful, but in this case, I think it’s important to recognize the importance of Iraqi women’s independent political power without comments about how much more sexist the Middle East is than other parts of the world. Iraq needs individuals of all genders, ages, classes, religions, sects and regions to invest in the political system, and the fact that these women have chosen to do so in this case, despite the fact that the enviroment is clearly inhospitable to them, is commendable.
Arab News reports on the travails of the working Saudi woman: late night phone calls from one’s boss, of course of a non-professional nature; childish behavior if one chooses to ignore those calls; ultimatums when one refuses to go on a date with one’s boss. The Kingdom is considering passing a law that protects women from sexual harassment, but there’s some skepticism regarding whether a law would resolve this issue:
… However, even if a law is issued, most sexual harassment cases would go undetected because of the unwillingness of women to report them, said Mazin Balilah, Shoura member at the Cultural and Informational Affairs Committee and the person who proposed the idea of having such laws. This leads to the question why women shy away from reporting harassment?
Well, I can think of a few, including embarrassment, fear of consequences - e.g. you are fired and your family suffers from the loss of your income/no one believes you and you are shunned/your harasser only increases his harassment … the list goes on. What’s more, who would you even report an incident to if there is no law against sexual harassment? Your father or brother? So they can then deal with these problems for you, further compounding the idea that women can’t take care of themselves? It’s certainly complicated, and many women (not just in Saudi Arabia!) do not know their rights when it comes to sexual harassment in the workplace. (I remember a long running public service ad campaign from my youth on sexual harassment that included the line “we’re talking about sexual harassment here, and I don’t have to take it”. My YouTube search didn’t turn anything up … ring a bell?) Irrespective, effective sexual harassment laws require educational campaigns for both men and women to make them effective. Part of this is informing people of their rights to prosecute, but most of it is encouraging a worldview wherein modes of communication that categorically make women feel uncomfortable or unsafe are not acceptatble.
Alaa al Aswany’s book The Yacoubian Building features a young Egyptian woman as a character, Busayna, who encounters sexual harassment as a matter of course in her work at a clothing store in Cairo - I wasn’t amazed by the book but this element of the story is rendered convincingly.
Yousif Khalaf, CEO of Ajman Bank, predicts that the financial woes of the present will increase demand for Islamic banking. Hence, the bank is focusing its expansion efforts within UAE.
Pete Ajemian, Middle East Media blogger for FPA, has a post up debriefing Nasrallah’s denial of this connection.
This weekend Kuwait’s government bailed out the country’s second largest bank , Gulf Bank, guaranteeing all its deposits. (I’d be interested to know why this article from the Kuwait Times puts the word “losses” in scare quotes). Yesterday, Kuwaiti traders staged their second walk out of the past week (they walked out Thursday as well; Kuwait’s market trades Sunday through Thursday). The governments of Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia are both prepared to step in and support banks in their respective nations. The GCC countries plan to introduce a value added tax (VAT) of 5% on consumer goods starting in 2012 as insurance against falling oil prices; 2012 looks to be a long way away given the 60% drop in oil prices since July.
Since the Gulf countries aren’t known for their robust democracies but rather for their high oil revenues and the consequent rentierism those revenues enable, it will be interesting to observe the ways they choose to deal with their diminished ability to avoid taxing their citizens. Will the global economic slump prove destabilizing for any of these countries?
(of which I am one), the LA Times has a backgrounder. Livni has a two week extension on her coalition-building deadline, so we’ll need to continue following the coalition negotiations until Nov. 3.
