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The Arab Spring: 10 Years On Transcript The Arab Spring: 10 Years On Kristina Kausch Senior Resident Fellow, German Marshall of the United States Wadah Khanfar President, Al Sharq Forum Tarek Mergerisi Policy Fellow, European Council on Foreign Relations Dr Kristian Coates Ulrichsen Associate Fellow, Middle East and North Africa Programme, Chatham House Chair: Lurdes Vidal I Bertran Director of the Arab & Mediterranean Department, IEMed European Institute of the Mediterranean Event date: 27 January 2021 The views expressed in this document are the sole responsibility of the speaker(s) and participants, and do not necessarily reflect the view of Chatham House, its staff, associates or Council. Chatham House is independent and owes no allegiance to any government or to any political body. It does not take institutional positions on policy issues. This document is issued on the understanding that if any extract is used, the author(s)/speaker(s) and Chatham House should be credited, preferably with the date of the publication or details of the event. Where this document refers to or reports statements made by speakers at an event, every effort has been made to provide a fair representation of their views and opinions. The published text of speeches and presentations may differ from delivery. © The Royal Institute of International Affairs, 2021. 10 St James’s Square, London SW1Y 4LE T +44 (0)20 7957 5700 F +44 (0)20 7957 5710 www.chathamhouse.org Patron: Her Majesty The Queen Chair: Jim O’Neill Director: Dr Robin Niblett Charity Registration Number: 208223 2 The Arab Spring: 10 Years On Lurdes Vidal i Bertran Good afternoon, everybody, welcome to this discussion, and thanks for joining us this afternoon, participants, speakers and attendees, to this conversation on The Arab Spring: 10 Years On,” where we will discuss the political, economic and the social challenges that the Arab world is facing after this 10th of an anniversary of the Arab Spring. This is an event organised by Chatham House and Al Sharq Forum and I would like to thank them to – for trusting me with this important mission of chairing and moderating this session. Today we have a splendid panel, we have a wonderful panel, in which we will analyse, we will discuss, we will foresee what might be the scenarios in this region. Beyond nostalgic ideas, beyond romanticism, beyond remembering what happened ten years ago, what we would like to do today is analysing, which is the situation, the current situation, of the region? What are the consequences, the challenges for reform, for democracy in the region, for change, but also the impact of the pandemic, of the COVID-19 pandemic in the region, and see how, also, the geopolitical shifts that are taking place in the region are affecting the peoples that inhabit the Arab world. So, for that, I will not take long, and I will introduce our splendid panellists. We have today with us Wadah Khanfar, President of Al Sharq Forum. He was Former Director-General of the Al Jazeera Network. He’s one of the more, I would say, clear voices. I’ve never heard Wadah saying something which his not useful. I mean, every single word he says is always food for thought. So, it will be a pleasure to listen his analysis on the region. Then, we will have my dear friend, Kristina Kausch, Senior Resident Fellow of the German Marshall of the United States. She is one of the more critical, lucid voices of the Mediterranean and she has always been very well targeting and foreseeing the challenges that people are facing in the region. We will have, also, Tarek Mergerisi, for – Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, expert on European Union and Libyan Affairs, and particularly, one of the most interesting voices and experts on media, to whom we are calling on all those that will try to follow what’s going on and understanding what’s happening in media. And, also, we will have Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, Associate Fellow of the Middle East and North Africa Programme of the Chatham House and, also, one of the main experts on Gulf States issues. So, with no further – more further ado, I will give the floor to our panellists and, also, I will ask all the participants, please feel free to send your questions through the tool, or questions through the Q&A tool that we have. Please, contribute to this discussion, because the more ideas we can put up together, the better we can analyse, and we can be ready to get prepared to what’s going and what’s going to come for the region. So, please, Mr Wadah Khanfar, you’ve got the floor. Wadah Khanfar Thank you very much, and I appreciate your introduction and I hope to live up to that. The unfortunate situation we are in right now in the Arab world is not actually new. In my opinion, I would like to put forward the following thesis. The Arab State, as we have known it, since independence, did not really go through long periods of stability. So, we have that kind of, inherent fear in it. Maybe we don’t want to analyse that, but definitely, it is related to the lack of legitimacy most of the time and, of course, to the fact that it has failed to deliver to the population on both fronts, the domestic front and on the major issues related to the collective Arab identity and especially to the Palestinian issue. So, there is that kind of, inherent problem between the state and the population, and that is not new. We know that, you know, tens of attempts to change states in the Arab world and to make it different. Most 3 The Arab Spring: 10 Years On of them, all of them, actually, were relevant, through military coups. The only example of a peaceful attempt to create a new reality, based on democracy, was, actually, ten years ago, when we all watched people over Tahrir Square, and before that, the people of Tunisia demonstrating peacefully with the new slogans, neither pro-Arab nationalism, nor extreme religious slogans, but, actually, they were repeating slogans of equality, justice, freedom and dignity. So, that was something unique and we need to first start with it. Now, during the last ten years, we have 70 million added to the population of the Arab world and the children who were ten-years-old at that time, today they are 20-years-old, and we expect in the year 2030 to have another 100 – or to have 120 million added to the Arab population. So, we have one of the highest population growth in the world, but, also, it is the highest youth unemployment in the world, at a rate of 36.5%, based on international grade organisation, 36.5%. Now, the current generation that has reached the age of employment, have – has, at this stage, much worse chance of being employed than the generation of 2010/2011 that triggered the Arab Spring, because all indicators in 2010/2011 are much better than the current indicators, not only on unemployment and economic growth and freedom, but also, on the level of awareness. Because even the education level that we did enjoy, 2010, is actually deteriorating, especially the high education and the universities, because the state is not capable of sponsoring more people going to the higher education and the institutions themselves are decaying much worse than any other moment that we knew, since the high education in the Arab world started. So, one of the major problems right now, also, for the people who are joining the Arab – I mean, the young people who are now becoming, opening their eyes to the reality that the public sector in the Arab world is the most important provider of jobs. Actually, it is the world’s largest provider of jobs in proportion to the total employment, or employers. So, basically, that public scale, as well, or the public sector, is shrinking because of the current economic crisis, which is not necessarily tied to corona, although corona has exaggerated it, but also tied to the corruption of the system, to the decay, to the civil strife, to this – to the, also, failed state. Most of – some of our countries now, we can easily classify them as failed states. So, the economic contraction starts this year, to 2020, actually, at 4.1% for the, you know, wealthy countries, but it is now up to 9.5% in countries like Iraq, that is producing oil, and it is up to 19.2% in Lebanon. So, if you add all this to the burden of the state that’s supposed to provide to the unemployed, then we are in front of a catastrophic situation. Now, this is not only what is happening in the Arab world. In 20 – we were actually trying to criticise Mubarak and everyone else, because they had about 6,000 prisoners in jail because of political opinion. This is when 2011 happened. Today, we have much more than 60,000 in jail in Egypt. Most of them are those who have actually dreamt of democracy and the freedom ten years ago and the counter-revolutions, when it happened in the Arab world, they found themselves in jail. So, when you are in jail, basically, you are disillusions, you are defeated, but the new generation, looking back at their models for freedom and democracy, sometimes at their leaders, sometimes at their, even, fathers or brothers and so on and so forth, I don’t want to predict what kind of feelings the new generation is going to have, what kind of frustration might explode in a moment, which, in my opinion, is becoming very close at this stage.
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