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ASLA AYDINTASBAS:
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Where is the Middle East’s Sakharov

Soon after the war in Iraq, I was in Europe attending a conference on Iraq alongside an odd mix of Arab journalists, Eastern Europeans, and American officials on their way to or back from Baghdad.

Over drinks one evening, a Syrian dissident, a gloomy and thoughtful man, quietly told me: "I am depressed. I don’t think Americans will really push for change in Syria. Iraqis are lucky — they have a chance at democracy. Am not sure we do."

He pointed out that in his recent visit to Damascus, US Secretary of State Colin Powell had not uttered the d-word, and that while Washington may have issues with the Syrian regime’s support for the Saddam clan, its regional ambitions did not extend to "the other Ba’athist" state.

Having just come back from a month in Iraq — visiting mass graves, crippled lives, talking to souls broken from years of tyrannical madness — I had nothing but immense sympathy for a fellow Middle Easterner longing for freedom. How else could the man feel about living under a police state?

I had already been shocked earlier this year to hear similar yearnings from ordinary Iranians on a visit there. Iranians are engaged in a quiet struggle: Women try to bend the Islamic regime’s dress code; young men challenge the police; everyone openly criticizes the theocratic elders. When asked about the possibility of the US toppling Saddam Hussein, most Iranians I spoke with said "Inshallah,‘ adding some version of ’So these guys [the mullahs] would understand their time could come too."

Historian Bernard Lewis explains this as the great paradox of the modern Middle East: the so-called moderate regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt have populations irate with anti-American and anti-Western sentiments, while among the people in rogue regimes like Iran, Iraq and Syria, there is sympathy for the West and support for the new American mantra for regime change.

Skeptical? Go take a cab in Teheran — where the drivers feel free to curse at the government in front of a total stranger and move on to discuss ways Iranians could achieve freedoms.

In fact President George W. Bush’s speech earlier this month about promoting democracy in the Middle East could not have arrived at a better time for the Middle East. Predictably, the Arab (and European) media dismissed Bush’s idealism; scoffed at his mea culpa; banished the call for freedoms as a smoke screen to cover up the US occupation of Iraq. No surprises here.

Instead of self-criticism, the official Middle East and its intelligentsia would rather revel in discussions of America’s past support for Saddam, the looting at the Baghdad archeological museum, the failures to find Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, how the US companies are milking Iraqi oil, and so forth.

BUT WHAT cannot be ignored by anyone is the quiet beginnings of an uprising against autocratic, repressive, and corrupt governments in the various corners of the Middle East and the Muslim world. The fact that practically all Muslim nations — with the exception of Turkey and perhaps Bangladesh — are run by regimes that are characterized as anti-democratic is an abomination first and foremost to Muslims. And we know it.

"Any regime that represses is bad. But a dictatorship that combines state and religion is especially unacceptable. There is nothing Islamic about this," Hussein Khomeini, a Shiite cleric and the grandson terrible of Iran’s revolutionary radical Ayatollah Khomeini, told me a few months ago in New York. He looked exactly like his grandfather, but could he possibly be any further from the man who gave us the Islamic revolution?

In today’s Iran, a pro-democracy movement and popular discontent with the state have significantly altered the political debate. When the human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi recently won the Nobel peace prize, 10,000 people showed up at the airport to greet her. In Egypt last year, pro-democracy intellectual Saad Eddin Ibrahim served a prison term for his work. But the international uproar and the humiliation to the government meant things would not be business as usual in this country anymore. Already journalists are talking about slightly more freedom. The regime is defensive.

In Iraq, a soon-to-be-formed provisional government representing all sections of the society is planning to take the country to its first democratic elections. It will be the first Arab democracy. In Kuwait, reform has entered the lexicon. Even the Saudis are slowly starting to talk about reform and elections — albeit for the municipal councils!

Rather different from all these countries, yet setting an unavoidable model for the entire region is the Turkish experiment. Sure, Turkey has inherited from the Ottoman Empire a long-standing state tradition and its parliamentary system goes back decades. But it was really in the last decade that Turks have made their most serious advances towards the Western league of democratic nations. Economic and political reforms have been popularly backed in Turkey.

Today, ruled by a party of devout Muslims, which likens itself to the right-wing Christian Democrats in Europe, Turkey is knocking on the door of the European Union. Its leaders are not afraid to discuss anti-Semitism in a global forum or talk about the need to modernize Islamic practices. Turkey is undoubtedly the best and so far the only example showcasing the fact that Islam and democracy could work. But it won’t be the last.

While courageous at promoting a new policy for the Middle East, George Bush has neither invented human nature nor the idea of freedom. There was and there will be a struggle for freedom among Muslims. With luck, Bush can tap into the energy of the freedom-seekers challenging repression and corruption in various parts of the Middle East.

But apart from policy, Bush has done something more important — he has rhetorically legitimized the struggle for democracy and human rights, and dumped it on the table as an inalienable right for all Muslims. Now there is nothing for the region’s despots and Europe’s appeasers but to accept the logic of Bush’s forward strategy. Finally, there is a chance for the Middle East.

The writer is a New York-based columnist and senior correspondent for the Turkish daily Sabah.