In his new book, former diplomat Robert Bowker looks back at the lessons of a career in one of the world’s most intractable flashpoints.
Some 40 years ago, my wife, Jenny, was in Souk Hamidiyeh in Damascus, standing beside a stall selling women’s underwear. Syrian women dressed in conservative black were inspecting garments featuring lace, feathers, devices that play Jingle Bells, and canaries in the most improbable places. How was this contrast possible, she asked the stall owner. “Ah,” he replied. “When foreigners look, they only see the mountain. Syrians see the volcano underneath.
I preferred to focus on the human qualities of the region – its humour, warmth and resilience – rather than its conflict-ridden, popular imagery. But that approach had its risks. The professional challenge for me was not to deny the memories, mythologies and lived experiences of the Arab world, with all their poetic power, but to measure the dosage.
On issues ranging from Suez to Iraq, the greater the strategic import of a particular decision, the more likely it is to be based primarily on political judgments, visceral emotions and inclinations. Australia is not alone in that respect.Second, it pays to be wary of assumptions based on one’s own values and expectations, including in regard to political legitimacy, in dealing with the region.
The Middle East is diabolically complex. And it succeeds, perhaps uniquely, in being both personally enriching, and a potential policy and career graveyard, for those who choose to enter it. Such moments aside, however, the key challenges are mostly systemic and intellectually demanding.
Of course, there are costs and risks, but if the greatest asset of the Arab world – the potential of Arab youth – is to be realised, then human rights values, including the right to dissent, need to have a part in decisions taken by Arab governments. They cannot be dismissed as inauthentic, destabilising, or tools of western subversion.
But no western government should abide policy goals – in Syria, Iran or Palestine – that are pursued through collective punishment.Much has changed in Arab societies in the past five decades, under the cumulative influence of education, literacy, nutrition, internet connectivity, and access to technologies enabling new forms of both mobilisation and repression.
Disequilibrium will be manifest in multiple areas. Power struggles; income disparities; malnutrition; the corrosive effects of violence and corruption; drug trafficking, especially of Captagon, and unbalanced economic growth will all shape the regional outlook. The way forward demands a process, embedded in transparent, inclusive institutions, of establishing a new and broadly-accepted paradigm of Arab modernity.It is too soon to know or to predict what the next wave of Arab political events might entail when, in due course, hope emerges for an alternative. The mobilisation of a decade ago has been submerged for nowin most all cases, by arguments that freedom is more likely to produce chaos and division, rather than bread and social justice.
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