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Viewpoint
Humanity of ordinary people is strongest force in Middle
East
By RAMI G. KHOURI
Pacific News Service
The double tragedy for most people
in the Middle East is that the chronic political violence in our lives has
failed to achieve its objectives. Yet, as the New Year begins, I remain
optimistic, because each day I see the bounty and wisdom that define Middle
Eastern life and societies, alongside our many sorrows.
Despite the Middle East’s distortions of power, security and
economy -- the brutal Palestinian-Israeli warfare, Anglo-American armies poised
to attack Iraq, a few police states still hanging onto power and secular and
religious strife -- the strongest force that drives our societies remains the
intense, indestructible humanity of ordinary people.
Hundreds of millions of ordinary Arab, Israeli, Iranian, Turkish,
Kurdish, Berber, Armenian and other people wake up every morning, send their
children to school, go to work, hold their heads up, look their prevailing
power structures in the eye and declare that they will not succumb to the
violence. They will not betray or relinquish their humanity.
Most here will not embrace savagery as a routine operating
procedure, refuse to adopt hypocrisy as a foreign policy guideline and reject
autocracy as a defining value of public governance.
The problem is, these ordinary people do not make policy.
This is why our region is so plagued by failed violence, domestic
tyranny, the moral scourge of terror, degenerate occupations, civil wars,
institutionalized corruption and mediocrity and the barbarisms of
assassination, colonialism, and slow-motion ethnic cleansing as official
policies. Yet no Arab, Israeli, Iranian or Turk I know would ever consciously
choose violence over serenity, or war over peace, or a governance system based
on tyranny, exploitation and subjugation rather than equality, liberty and
dignity.
I have heard dozens of proposed, sensible solutions to the
ailments of the contemporary Middle East, including democracy, integration,
secularism, globalization, modernization and privatization. But I would like to
make another, easier, suggestion. I challenge the Arab, Israeli, and Iranian
leaders and power structures to do something very simple: Trust your
people.
Tap the humanity and power of your own citizens’ sense of
identity, faith and dignity. Put your faith and your fate in the hands of the
hundreds of millions of ordinary Arab, Israeli, Iranian and other men and women
who hold onto their humanity with every ounce of strength in their bodies.
They do this day after day, war after war, assassination after
assassination, dead child after dead child, failed state after failed state.
They will not relinquish it. They will not betray it. They will not allow it to
be stolen from them, ravaged or killed.
The most indestructible element and untapped force in our region
is the rational, compassionate humanity of our people. It has never been
mobilized to drive public policy or to empower social and economic development
efforts. My personal New Year’s wish is that the leaders and power elites
of the Middle East trust their own ordinary people and let them define
effective new policies. Unburdened by occupation, colonialism, subjugation and
tyranny, they will choose the dignity of lives lived peacefully, equally,
tolerantly, productively and spiritually, alongside Arabs, Israelis, Iranians,
and anyone else who shares these values.
The leaders of the Middle East will find in the minds and hearts
of their own citizens at home that genuine stability and award-winning
statehood that have never -- never -- been achieved through force of arms,
restrictive domestic politics or Anglo-American armadas. Along with the Middle
Eastern police states and other anachronisms of our region, such violent and
failed mechanisms must be discredited and sent to history’s garbage dumps
-- day after day, war after war, assassination after assassination, dead child
after dead child, failed state after failed state.
Rami Khouri is a political scientist and columnist for the
Jordan Times.
National Catholic Reporter, January 24,
2003
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