In Khartoum, the Refrain of Arab Failure

Somebody should remind the few Arab heads of state who attended the Arab League summit in Khartoum on Tuesday that we have just had our first modern slave revolt in the Arab region. Well, "slave revolt" may be too harsh a description of the actions of hundreds of mostly South Asian construction workers in Dubai last week. The workers stopped work and went on a minor rampage for two days to protest their harsh working and living conditions, low pay, delayed pay, and general lack of rights.

This should catch the attention of the few Arab heads of state who bothered to go to Khartoum, because it reflects the sad situation that defines much of the Middle East. Arab leaders have conspicuously failed to resolve any significant regional issue in the last half-century or so, while allowing their countries to degenerate into increasingly inequitable and abusive systems of exploitation and corruption, often enforced by militia power.

The revolt by the Asian workers in Dubai ironically occurred in a country, the United Arab Emirates, that otherwise has earned accolades for its sensible development and efficient modernization. It should prompt us all to look again at how we treat foreign workers in the Arab world, and to use that prism to examine how ordinary citizens are treated by their own governments and societies.

Mercifully, perhaps as a sign of God's enduring affection and mercy for the Arab people, the Arab League summit meeting was pared down to a one-day event. Nine Arab heads of state did not even bother to attend. Many of those who did attend, like the Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian presidents, are under immense domestic and global pressure to resign, or to radically change their policies.

The defining collective characteristic of Arab heads of state is an embarrassing combination of irrelevance, their overseeing police-state autocracies, and their razor-thin legitimacy. The Khartoum gathering highlighted the profound pressures and problems that plague most Arab countries: a general lack of rule of law in systems where political, military and economic power are closely guarded in the hands of small numbers of mostly unelected, unaccountable people - often just the men of a single family. Narrow, gun- and clan-based power structures more suited to urban gangland cultures have evolved in the Arab world in the past half-century into prevailing systems of official governance.

Not surprisingly, most young people in the Arab countries these days respond to the dilemma of living in such a world with a range of startling options: a majority of youths wants to emigrate to foreign countries, finds refuge in religion rather than more fully engaged citizenship, adheres to extremist political groups or terrorist cells, goes along with institutionalized corruption and nepotism, experiments with drugs and diversionary alien lifestyles, or joins a militia.

I would guess that the percentage of young Arabs aged 14-25 that does not fall into one or more of the above categories is no more than 25 percent of the total. This is one legacy, to date, of contemporary Arab leaders who meet in increasingly delusional summits. We have transformed our children into aberrations of good citizenship and decent humanity, because we have raised them in largely lawless systems that enrich those who have and use guns - whether renegade militias or official security services and military sectors.

For the past quarter-century, since the 1970s oil boom, the Middle East region has relied heavily on millions of manual laborers and semi-skilled professionals from Asia and other parts of the Arab world. For the most part, in return for meager wages more attractive than the lower wages or unemployment at home, these immigrant workers have been treated badly in almost every aspect of their personal and professional lives: in their wages, working hours, benefits, medical care, housing, recreational and leisure habits, family unification, civil rights, education and legal protection. Some women domestic workers have been sexually and physically abused. Some others have been held in conditions that can only be called captivity.

This is not a minor issue. These immigrant workers number in the millions throughout the Arab world. The Asian workers in Dubai, other parts of the Gulf, the Levant and North Africa are not "slaves" in the strict sense of the word. But their life and work situations bring them so dangerously close to conditions of captive servitude that one could be excused for metaphorically saying that the Arab world experienced its first slave revolt last week.

The Arab leaders who met in Khartoum, and those who stayed at home, should stop wasting their time on issues that they have only mangled over the years - Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan, democracy, and common economic policies. Instead they should address issues of fundamental human rights and conditions in their own societies that are more directly under their control, and that ultimately reflect the quality of their own moral values - noble or shriveled as these may be in real life.