Fragility of Democracy in the Arab World

.: June 12, 2014

In this article published by I24, the author analyzes the fragile democratic breakthroughs in the Arab World.

The swift fall of Mosul under the control of the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” (ISIS) movement points not only to the weakness of the Iraqi government under the rule of PM Nouri al-Maliki, but also to the fragility of democracy elsewhere in the Arab world. There are many questions that should be addressed to state intelligence agencies: who is funding ISIS? How was an extremist Sunni fundamentalist terrorist organization, an off-shoot of al-Qaida, able to take control of parts of Iraq and northeastern Syria? How is it that after three democratic elections during the last decade, Iraq is back to square one, the same place it was on the day after the US invasion in 2003?

ISIS grew stronger in the shadow of the civil war in Syria. The group’s leader, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, once the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, decided to take the conflict to his home state, Iraq, utilizing the weakness of the Shiite government in Sunni provinces. The regime of Bashar al-Assad avoided clashes with ISIS as long as the latter was fighting Assad’s enemies: the Free Syrian Army and Jubhat el-Nusra in northern Syria. What we witness today is that the instability in Syria is spilling over into neighboring states. The instability in post-Saddam Iraq is also due to the fact that the Iraqi military has remained weak in the face of the sectarian war and the security void began to be filled by extremist movements. Under the complicated political system of Iraq, al-Maliki was unable to meet the demands of the Sunni and Kurdish communities and was forced to rely on the support of Shiite blocs within the Iraqi parliament. Iraq these days looks more and more like Lebanon in the mid 1970s. Similar to Lebanon, even the heads of the various sects have a tacit agreement that the PM should be Shiite, the president Kurdish and the speaker of the parliament Sunni.

The weakness of the state of Iraq and the fragility of democracy is not unique to Iraq. It seems to be a typical trend in most Arab democracies, with various degrees of chaos, where political movements refuse to accept the legitimacy of elected governments and their organized militias continue to operate outside state law. In Lebanon, Algeria, the Palestinian Authority, Yemen and Egypt, democratic elections led to infighting, and in some cases to civil war. Democracy was more stable in Arab democracies with a strong military and a homogenious society, such as Egypt or Tunisia. In the recent democratic elections in Algeria and Egypt, the role of the military was apparent in determining the identity of the president. The military in both cases has vowed to take all necessary measures against Islamist militants who refuse to accept the legitimacy of the elected president.

The Arab world seems to be following in the footsteps of Turkey, where the military till the early 1990s was always on the verge of seizing power in order to protect secularism by preventing Islamist groups from using elections as a springboard for coming to power. Ironically, what finally helped the Turkish Islamic party, the Justice and Development Party, to win the parliamentary elections in 2002 was Turkey’s quest for EU membership. The Kemalists understood that for the sake of this membership, national interest dictates that democracy was more important than secularism, and they decided to transfer power smoothly to the AKP.

The fall of Mosul to the ISIS does not point to the failure of al-Maliki personally. The failure of democracy in Iraq, as well as in Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority, is due to the unwillingness of minorities to play according to the democratic rules of the game of majority rule. What the Arab world needs in order to cope with the challenges posed by organizations such as ISIS is a strong military that is willing to protect society as a whole, and democracy. Second, the West has to understand that failure to contain the crisis in Syria will spill over into neighboring states - as we are witnessing now in Iraq, Lebanon and even Jordan. And third, as was the case in Turkey, integration into the outside world may strengthen democracy in the long run.

Yakub Halabi © I24news (Israël)

The author is an Arab-citizen of Israel and professor of international relations at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.