In 2002 I authorised a publication with the apparently inoffensive title of The Arab Human Development Report. Within days of its release, a million copies of the Arabic language edition had been downloaded, and the new al-Jazeera television channel was debating it endlessly. Shortly afterwards, a closed door ministerial meeting of the Arab League condemned its calls for democracy, women’s rights and secular education – and its warnings about the region’s stagnation and youth unemployment. The region was becalmed, even as democratisation and economic liberalisation swept through so much of the rest of the world.
My career, first as a political adviser to insurgent democratic oppositions and then mediating various revolutions from the top ranks of the UN, leads me to three lessons at this point in the Arab world’s tsunami. First, it should have happened sooner. Second, it did not because countries such as Libya and Egypt were security states that allowed no opposition to grow. This will now be a handicap. Third, the US will have a much bigger, although uneven, role in steering these countries through their current conflict, and then transition, than is fashionable to acknowledge.
When I found myself up against these angry Arab League ministers it was as head of the UN’s development arm. Our report had been written by a group of Arab policy experts, so we were free of the charge of western meddling. Leading a multibillion dollar development agency, I nevertheless despaired of making any difference in the Arab region unless we could stimulate an intellectual revolution. People were locked into a serfdom of ideas and politics that shackled their national life.