The past few years have not been conducive to political
liberalization in the Middle East.
Political repression worsened in Egypt, where President
Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in the spring of 2018 was re-elected with 97 per cent of
the vote after security forces arbitrarily detained potential challengers.
In Saudi Arabia, after the government drew praise for easing
its draconian ban on women driving, authorities arrested high-profile women’s
rights activists and clamped down on even mild forms of dissent.
Evidence also mounted that in late 2018 Crown Prince
Mohammed bin Salman had personally ordered the assassination of self-exiled
critic and columnist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul.
The murder put a spotlight on authoritarian regimes’
aggressive pursuit of prominent critics. Turkey itself, which sought to keep
Khashoggi’s murder on the front pages, has by its own account captured 104 of
its citizens from 21 countries over the last two years in a global crackdown on
perceived enemies of the state.
In Syria, hundreds of thousands of civilians from certain
ethnic and religious groups have been killed or displaced as world powers
either fail to respond adequately or even facilitate the violence.
The ongoing four-year civil war in Yemen, seen mainly as a
proxy conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, has killed thousands and left
millions on the brink of starvation, with an estimated 50,000 people dying from
war-related famine.
In Lebanon, parliamentary elections took place in 2018 for
the first time since 2009, after repeated postponements of the balloting. But
all is not well beneath the surface.
The Shia Hezbollah guerrilla movement exercises de facto
control over the fractured country, to such an extent that it is impossible to
differentiate between them and the Lebanese state.
The movement itself retained its previous level of
representation in parliament --13 out of 128 seats -- but the bloc of which it
is a part won just over half of the seats in parliament.
It is now in the governing coalition and holds ministerial
portfolios.
Aligned with and supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah’s
superior military strength when compared with the Lebanese Armed Forces, and
its ability to go to war at a time of its own choosing, mean that the state and
the group are in effect indistinguishable.
Hezbollah has around 25,000 full time fighters, along with
20-30,000 reservists. They possess some 150,000 rockets, thousands of
anti-tank missiles as well as anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles.
Given this deteriorating situation in the region, it should
therefore come as no surprise that a recent survey in the Arab world shows that
more than half of its young adults – some 52 per cent -- are considering
emigrating.
The Big BBC News Arabic Survey, a joint assessment by BBC
News Arabic and Arab Barometer, a Princeton University-based non-partisan
research network, was the largest in-depth survey ever carried out in the
region. Over 25,000 people in 10 countries and the Palestinian Territories
participated in interviews for the study between October 2018 and April 2019.
Economic factors were cited in the survey as the predominant
reason for emigration. Conflict and instability have increased the rate of
economic decline.
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