Collective disorder

In the Arab press, Dina Ezzat reads Arab crisis after Arab crisis

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It has been a year since the occupation of Iraq and violence is increasing by the day. It has been three weeks since the assassination of Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Israel is seriously threatening Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. And it has been two weeks since Tunis took a shocking decision to call off the annual Arab summit. There is still no word on a new date or venue for the high-level Arab meeting.

These were the issues brought up by the Arab press this week. And as senior Lebanese commentator Joseph Samaha argued in the prestigious Lebanese daily As-Safir, they proved "difficult questions" to answer.

"It has been a year since the fall of Baghdad and the situation looks more ambiguous than ever, especially with the uprising of the supporters of Shia cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr. Nothing is clear. Has the occupation been successful to the extent that [US administrator of Iraq] Paul Bremer has decided that the time is ripe for him to assign a minister of defence? Or has the occupation been such a failure that the uprising against the US forces is gaining strength? And what is [UN secretary-general special advisor] Lakhdar Labrahimi doing in Iraq now in view of the current confusing situation?"

Confusion was perhaps the most adequate description the Arab press had this week for the situation in Iraq because to judge by the stories it was difficult for anyone to say where Iraq was heading. One day the Arab press had news of the killing of US soldiers at the hands of angry Iraqis. The following day it was news of the US and the UN preparing to hand over power to Iraq. And in the middle it became almost irrelevant to ask what really happened with the alleged weapons of mass destruction that the toppled Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein supposedly had and could have threatened the world with.

Coming at a time when the US is busy giving the Arab world lessons in democracy and transparency, news of the US administration using inaccurate, if not entirely false, information to justify the war on Iraq came at just the wrong time for America. On Sunday morning the US Secretary of State Colin Powell was quoted in the Arab press as saying he used flawed information in testimony he gave at the UN Security Council on 5 February 2003 to prove that Iraq possessed WMD. And in the daily Al-Bayan of the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday morning former senior UN arms inspector in Iraq, Hans Blix, said the war against Iraq "proved to be a greater evil then the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein".

Powell and Blix's comments were bound to prompt some Arab commentators to ask questions about the true values of democracy and transparency in the US. On Tuesday, in Al-Bayan, Ahmed Amorabi was livid. "How could the secretary of state of supposedly the world's most prominent democracy not resign after admitting that he lied to his people and the entire world?" Amorabi asked in reference to Powell.

The question for Amorabi was not just about Powell but also about "the kind of democracy that the US is preaching to Arab and Muslim countries" and about "the future of Iraq itself".

On Iraq and Palestine there were ample news stories that reflected the huge dilemmas of two Arab peoples under occupation. But the biggest question for the Arab press this week continued to be the fate of the Arab summit. With the news pages offering more speculation than information on the venue, date and potential outcome of the highest-level Arab meeting there is, Arab commentators had nothing to do but to join the guessing game.

Many expressed concern that the continued ambiguity over the future of the Arab world was in fact an indication of a total collapse of the collective Arab order. Others seemed not at all bothered by the delay, believing it did not really matter since they deemed Arab summits as mere ceremonial events that fail to produce any concrete plans or resolutions that could positively affect the future of the Arab people.

On the opinion pages of Monday's As-Safir, Satei Noureddin was pure cynical. "There is no point in speculating about the venue or place of the summit. It has all been set -- the Arab summit will convene in June in Istanbul, the economic capital of Turkey, when a number of Arab leaders go to participate in a NATO summit." According to Noureddin, the Arab leaders who have been invited by NATO to take part in the summit will return to convey the recipe of reform decided on by the West for the Arabs.

"The past few days have been really disturbing and confusing to the extent that despair has become a common feeling," Radwan El- Sayed wrote in the opinion pages of the Lebanese daily Al- Mustaqbal on Saturday. "Arab regimes have been unable for decades [not just now] to deal with any problem they face ... but the Arab masses are there and they are ready to take matters into their own hands. This is the only way ahead."