By Michael Roberts
As
one Arab blogger put it, on the news that Tunisia’s dictator Ben Ali
had flown out of the country to safety in Saudi Arabia, “why not make
it one plane to fly around and pick them all up”. It’s a simple
solution: sweep up all the Mubaraks, Assads, Gaddafis, Saudis and
Husseins and put them on a plane together.
The leaders of all the autocratic
regimes of the Middle East, whether kings, colonels or mullahs, have
sucked their countries dry of the fruits of the labour of Arab masses
and sold their natural resources to multinationals of the US, Europe
and Asia. While the Saudi princes have partied with alcohol, drugs and
call girls in the hotels and swanky residences of London and New York,
they have applied brutally repressive regimes back home to keep their
people under the heel. Women are not allowed to drive in or to walk
the streets of Riyadh and they are subject to draconian measures if
they fall out with their husbands or engage in any hint of
extra-marital activity, while the husbands do what they like. Whereas
Mexican women earn 42% of male earned income,and Indian women earn 32%
(bad enough by international standards); in Qatar, women earn just 28%
of men’s incomes and in Jordan it is only 19%.
But the real horror is that how these
repressive regimes, despite in many cases having significant national
wealth, keep their people in poverty and unemployment. In Tunisia,
over 65% of the population is under the age of 30, but 50% of those who
graduate from higher education do not have a job. As a new report by
Global Financial Integrity points out, these leaders embezzle and steal
billions from their nations, stacking it up overseas in secret bank
accounts and extensive properties. According to GFI, North African
nations lose $1.2bn a year in illicit financial outflows generated by
corruption, bribery, company fraud and just simple stealing. With a
population of just under 11m, that means every man woman and child in
Tunisia hands over $110 a year to its elite to slip out of the country.
Many of these economies have been
growing at a fast pace in GDP terms. But none of this gets to the mass
of the people. Instead, unemployment is high, while inequalities of
income and wealth are rising. The UN’s Human Development Report
publishes every year the gini coefficient, the measure of inequality
based on the richest 10%’s wealth or income versus the poorest 10%. In
the UK, that ratio is around 35; in the US it is closer to 45 – very
high by international standards. But even in relatively poor Tunisia
it is at 40, in Syria at 42, and in Morocco at 41. These are very high
levels compared with Northern Europe, with gini ratios around 30 or
below.
In the Gulf states, immigrant labour from Pakistan and other parts
of Asia are used at slave labour rates and conditions. The Gulf States
are particularly dependent on a large immigrant population as a cheap
labour workforce. Excluded from citizenship and denied formal
democratic rights, they are often not included in official census data
and surveys, yet are the most affected by poverty and lack of essential
services. The number of foreign workers in the six Gulf States has
increased tenfold since the 1970s. They now constitute over two-thirds
of the total population. In Saudi Arabia 35% of the population are
immigrant workers. Expatriate workers account for 61% of the total
workforce of Oman, 83% in Kuwait and 91% in the United Arab Emirates.
In the UAE migrant workers are prohibited from bringing their family
members into the country with them unless they earn at least 3,000
dirhams a month (US$816), but most of these workers are employed in
menial, low paid jobs and struggle to earn a third of that amount. The
UAE and some other Arab countries have also passed legislation barring
immigrants from owning any property, no matter how long they have lived
in the country.
This state of affairs has, of course, been fully backed and
supported by the ‘Western democracies’ for decades. The war in Iraq
was to topple a dictator, we were told (once the weapons of mass
destruction failed to materialise). Yet at the same time, the Saudi
kingdom has been backed to the hilt without a word of criticism, even
though it has been exporting extreme muslim jihad ideas through Bin
Laden to Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The ‘international community’ supports these regimes because they
back their multinational oil and gas interests; they buy their arms
exports and they support the West against the ‘rogue states’ of Iran
and Afghanistan and its ‘softly-softly’ policy over Israeli occupation
of Palestine. Thus we had the craven support of the UK’s Blair
government of the Saudi regime and the covering up of bribes to Saudi
princes in the sale of arms by British Aerospace. And we have the
cosying up to the Gaddafi regime in Libya once that government dropped
its ‘rogue status’.
Democracy in the Middle East has never been on the foreign policy
agenda of the US, the UK or Europe. But now the powers-that-be will
desperate to ensure that there is democracy in Tunisia. It can’t be
stopped so let’s have a democratic government that keeps the status
quo: multinational oil interests and support for Western policies. Can
a bourgeois democratic government survive in Tunisia between the
pressure of the masses below and the pressure of imperialism and its
client state of Israel along with the autocratic Arab states from
above? We shall see. Or maybe there will be more planes flying out
dictators over the next few years.