Twenty-three-year-old Mohamed Rasheed was at a loss after
returning to Iraq from a grueling failed attempt to cross the Belarus-Polish
border.
“There is no life for us here. There are no jobs; there is
no future,” he told a Washington Post reporter.
اضافة اعلان
Another man, who had just disembarked from a repatriation
flight from the Belarus capital of Minsk to Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan, frowned
and obscured his face with a scarf, according to the reporter, as he responded
to a question about why he had left.
“Those words cannot leave my mouth. Who dares tell the truth
here?” the man said.
The two men were returning to a country whose population has
largely been excluded from sharing in the benefits of its oil wealth. Youth
unemployment hovers at about 25 per cent. Public good and services are poor at
best. Security forces and militias crack down on and fire live ammunition at
protesters demanding wholesale change.
Rasheed and his fellow returnee could have been from
Lebanon, a middle-income country in which three-quarters of the population
lives under the poverty line thanks to a corrupt elite unwilling to surrender
vested interests, irrespective of the cost to others.
In fact, they could have been from any number of countries in
the Middle East, North Africa, and their African and Asian peripheries.
Almost half of the youth from non-Gulf countries in the
Middle East and North Africa want nothing more than to leave, in the absence of
opportunities and prospects. They are fed up with corrupt, self-serving elites.
This is a part of the world where devastating wars have wrecked
Syria, Yemen and Libya. More recently, these countries were joined by Ethiopia,
while others in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel reel from jihadist violence
that feeds on social and economic grievances.
To primarily hold responsible for the migrant crisis, human
traffickers and cynical authoritarian leaders like Belarus President Alexander
Lukashenko, willing to play power games and turn a profit on the back of
innocent men, women and children, is swatting at symptoms of a problem that
goes to the root of instability in the Middle East and North Africa.
To be sure, Lukashenko and the traffickers are part of the
problem. Moreover, many Middle Easterners on the Belarus-Polish border appear
to be economic, not political, with a legal right to asylum, refugees.
One could argue that the European Union's refusal to take in
refugees on humanitarian grounds led to their repatriation to Iraq and Iraqi
Kurdistan, which may have shortened their ordeal. Many risked being ultimately
rejected, even if they had been granted entry to the EU, because they were not
political refugees.
It remains to be seen whether the refusal will serve as a
warning to the many in the Middle East and North Africa contemplating ways to
get to Europe one way or another.
The above is the immediate aspects of a dramatic crisis. The
danger is that the focus on the immediate will obstruct badly needed thinking
of ways to prevent or reduce the risk of future such crises and human
suffering, aggravated by the willingness of governments to fight their battles
on the backs of the least protected.
The framing of the crisis as a security, rather than a
political, economic and social, problem further takes away from the development
of policies and tools to tackle the root causes of repeated migrant crises:
economic mismanagement; political, economic and financial corruption; nepotism;
loss of confidence in political systems and leadership.
“Addressing population challenges, the youth bulge, and
refugee and migration pressure from natural or man-made crises will require
measures to promote sustainable economic growth and enhanced educational and
healthy capacities,” said George M. Feierstein, senior vice president of the
Washington-based Middle East Institute and a former State Department official
with multiple postings in the Middle East and North Africa.
Acknowledging that a broader US policy focus is likely to
prove more challenging than one narrowly concentrated on security, Feierstein
argued that the United States could "bring assets to the table that could
potentially enhance its role in the region and strengthen its position as the
preeminent outside power”. The former diplomat was referring to big power
rivalry with China and Russia in the Middle East and North Africa.
Adopting Feierstein’s policy prescription would involve
greater emphasis on regional approaches to global challenges, including climate
change and public health; conflict management and resolution efforts to
safeguard populations and minimize internal displacement and migration; and
institutional capacity and resilience building, all backed by greater US
private sector engagement.
Kyrgyzstan has potentially emerged as evidence that a
de-emphasis of the security aspects of the migration crisis would not automatically
surrender real estate and/or leverage and influence to China and Russia.
Part of a Central Asian world sandwiched between Russia and
China on which the United States has seemingly turned its back with its
withdrawal from Afghanistan in August, Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov is using
his election pledges to fight corruption and offer financial rewards to whistleblowers
to lure the US back.
Japarov’s proposition, designed to rescue Kyrgyzstan from
the clutches of Russia and China, is the central theme of a document he sent to
the US State Department. The document outlines proposals to revive a broad
political, economic and civic engagement with the US, bolstered by
anti-corruption measures and affirmation of democratic freedoms.
S. Frederick Starr, founding chairman of the Central
Asia-Caucasus Institute, suggested that Japarov is providing a template for US
reengagement with Central Asia and Afghanistan. In fact, the Kyrgyz president
is offering a formula equally relevant to the Middle East and North Africa.
If adopted by the Biden administration, Kyrgyzstan “would
become ‘The Mouse that Roared’, to cite the title of the droll 1959 British
film. This time, however, the lesser
power will have advanced its cause not by threatening military action… but with
a sensible proposal by which a great power — the United States … can once more
become a serious presence in a major part of Asia that lies on China’s and
Russia’s doorstep,” Starr said.
In contrast to Central Asia, the US remains the dominant
power in the Middle East and North Africa. But it is a power seeking to
redefine the role it wishes to play going forward in a region struggling to
come to grips with an uncertain but changing US approach.
Kyrgyzstan could be showing the way for both US and the
Middle East. However, to make it work and reduce, if not stop, migration flows,
the US and its Western partners would have to prioritize confronting corrupt
elites who will stop at nothing, including displacing populations, to preserve
their illicitly gained privileges.
A podcast version of this story is available on Soundcloud,
Itunes, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spreaker, Pocket Casts, Tumblr, Podbean,
Audecibel, Patreon and Castbox.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is an award-winning journalist and
scholar, and a Senior Fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle
East Institute.
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