Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Trust the dissidents, not the diplomats
Men walk through a damaged area after what activists said were at least 20 air strikes by forces loyal to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in the Douma neighbourhood of Damascus February 5, 2015. (Bassam Khabieh/Reuters)
Natan
Sharansky is chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel and a former
political prisoner in the Soviet Union. David Keyes is executive
director of Advancing Human Rights.
Recently leaders of the free world flocked to Saudi Arabia to meet with the new king ,
where they praised the country as a partner for peace and center of
stability. But many dissidents disagreed. As Mansour Al-Hadj, a liberal
activist who lived in Saudi Arabia for 20 years, said: “Saudi Arabia is
not stable. Deep down, people are not happy. Sooner or later, the winds
of change will come to Saudi Arabia. The regime will fall.”
If history is any judge, the world should bet on the dissidents, not the diplomats.
On Jan. 25, 2011, just two weeks before the fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her assessment “that the Egyptian government is stable.” That March, Clinton’s successor, John F. Kerry, praised
“good-faith” measures taken by Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and predicted
that his regime would change for the better “as it embraces a legitimate
relationship with the United States and the West.”
Clinton
and Kerry were certainly not alone in assessing that these dictators
were securely in power. Former Amnesty International USA executive
director Larry Cox later said that “nobody that I know of predicted it,
no experts, no pundits, no politicians saw the revolution coming.”
After
the Arab Spring, many of the same experts and policymakers who had
insisted that the region was stable claimed that no one could have
foreseen the uprisings. But this is untrue. A chorus of uniquely
insightful individuals predicted exactly what would happen: the
democratic dissidents who languished in prison cells in Tunisia, Libya,
Syria and Egypt.
Witnesses to unimaginable
injustice, these men and women felt viscerally that the dictators’ days
were limited. They were the soldiers on the front line of the
historical drama about to unfold. The experts simply chose not to
listen.
In 2006, for example, from the
depths of his torture chamber, Syrian dissident Kamal Labwani — jailed
for a decade under the Assad regime — predicted that without democratic
change, Syria would end up in a situation “no less terrifying than what
happened in Iraq, Lebanon and Somalia.” He presaged the rise of
radicalism, arguing that “the alternative to democracy is inevitably
civil war and fundamentalism.”
Likewise,
in 2007, from his prison cell in Egypt, blogger Kareem Amer declared to
the region’s tyrants and authoritarians that their “attempts to shut
our mouths and restrict our freedom” would eventually fail. “You should
be very worried about us,” he wrote. “Your days are numbered and your
dark nights are approaching their end.”
There
were many such prophetic voices, dissidents who foresaw what would
happen in their countries but whose warnings fell on deaf ears abroad.
What did they know or understand that our experts and leaders did not?
The answer is the power of inner freedom. Having crossed the line from
living in fear to questioning and then actively fighting against their
regimes, dissidents know how difficult it is to suppress the longing to
live freely. As more of their fellow citizens cross this line,
dissidents see how much additional energy the regime has to expend to
keep its population in check. As Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik
observed, any system that has to spend all of its energy controlling the
thoughts of its citizens must break down eventually.
Anyone
who remembers the fall of the Soviet Union ought to understand the
importance of listening to dissidents. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s and
until the last days of the Evil Empire, leading Western politicians and
Sovietologists repeatedly diagnosed the regime as stable. In 1992,
then-CIA Director Robert M. Gates admitted
that it was not until 1989 that the intelligence agency began to think
that the Soviet Union might collapse. Amalrik, by contrast, had
predicted this years earlier, in his aptly titled 1969 book, “Will the
Soviet Union Survive until 1984?” He, together with generations of
Soviet dissidents led by Andrei Sakharov, paid a heavy price for
explaining to the West that the regime’s downfall was inevitable.
Those
dissidents were admired, loved and even defended, but they were not
listened to. Western experts, blinded by the power of Soviet weapons and
the delusory self-confidence of Soviet parades and leaders, dismissed
their predictions. Thus, when Mikhail Gorbachev began dismantling the
Soviet system and the dissidents’ prophecies came true, these same
experts were caught by surprise.
Only
a few decades later, the leaders of the free world have all but
forgotten this lesson. If they had listened more closely to the Middle
East’s dissidents, they might have been better prepared for the 2011
revolutions. Perhaps they would have spent less money arming and funding
dictators and more time supporting moderates in their quest for civil
society and freedom.
To
make matters worse, today we are witnessing a full-fledged return to
the policy of supporting dictators. The White House has all but dropped
the demand that Assad step down, hinting that he could be a partner in
the fight against the Islamic State. U.S. and European diplomats are
pursuing deals with the Iranian regime and regard Egypt’s Gen. Abdel
Fatah al-Sissi as a bulwark of stability. The new Saudi king has been touted as a robust ally.
There
may be tactical advantages to partnering with these regimes against the
growing threat of fundamentalist terror. But we must not ignore the
insights of dissidents who remind us that dictators are not our
strategic allies and are certainly not guarantors of long-term
stability.
The current propensity to neglect
dissidents and prop up dictators guarantees that there will be many more
surprises in the Middle East. When coups and revolutions once again
upend the region, our experts will surely ask: “But who could have seen it coming?”