Democracy

by Condoleezza Rice

  The Middle East is a long way from that place. Still, if it is to be found, it is more likely to come through free political discourse. At least then the questions will be debated in the open. That is the only way to temper the power of extreme elements on both sides—those who would ban religious people from the square and those who would insist that religious belief must dominate the political and social landscape.

  Containing the Fire Next Time

  The people of the Middle East have shown their impatience with the freedom gap, the lack of democracy that sets their region apart. Still, a chasm remains between the populations of the region and their rulers—and the efforts to address it are sporadic and hesitant. Weak democratic institutions exist in Tunisia and Iraq, but they are challenged every day by the ills of the region—sectarianism, terrorism, and violence. Beyond this, other countries lack even these fragile reeds to build upon in the future. So, to quote Lenin, “What is to be Done?”

  The task now is to lay a foundation for the time of the next democratic opening. The institutional landscape needs to be richer and more diverse. This requires acknowledging three realities: Education is one answer but it is not enough; women’s empowerment and political liberalization need to go hand in hand; and liberal, pro-democracy forces must engage the entire population—including religious people and rural constituencies. Political change divorced from this broadened landscape is likely to backfire.

  The Special Problem of Elections

  In fact, the reality is that the most organized and capable political forces in the Middle East at the moment are the Islamists. While regimes repressed civil society—intellectuals, human rights groups, social entrepreneurs, community-based organizations, and journalists—the Islamists across the region organized in radical madrassas and radical mosques. They did the hard work of courting the disenfranchised and taking care of their needs. Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood all provided alms to the poor, stepping in where incompetent authoritarian regimes failed. And their worst elements have motivated too many young men (and even women) to prove their manhood on a battlefield. Their strength is no accident of history—it is a direct outcome of the policies of those who have ruled the Middle East.

  This has made “one man, one vote” fraught with danger for liberal, democratic values. We learned this lesson the hard way in the 2006 elections in the Palestinian territories. In the run-up to the elections, the reporting from our embassies and from intelligence sources suggested that Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah Party would win a close election. I went about my work that day, keeping tabs on what was happening but not really worried about the outcome. Not long before I was to be leaving for the evening, Liz Cheney, the deputy assistant secretary for the Middle East, stopped by. “Our people on the ground are reporting that the green flag of Hamas is flying everywhere. And Hamas is polling well in some of the Fatah strongholds,” she said. Liz’s news shook me a little, but I gathered my things and went home—still expecting the Palestinian Authority to win.

  The next morning I went to the door of my Watergate apartment and picked up the Washington Post. The headline was as expected—“Hamas Makes Strong Showing in Vote; Exit Poll Shows Party Winning Near-Parity with Fatah in Palestinian Assembly.” “Whew! That was a close call,” I said out loud. Then I went upstairs to the gym for my daily exercise.

  The 5 a.m. news was just starting and I noticed the runner at the bottom of the screen. “Hamas victorious. Palestinian Authority officials resign,” it said as it scrolled across. That can’t be right. I just saw that the PA won. I kept pedaling the elliptical—my heart beating a little faster after the bulletin. The runner at the bottom kept returning, each time heralding Hamas’s victory. Finally, I got off the machine and called the Operations Center. “What happened in the Palestinian elections?” I asked.

  “Oh, Hamas won,” the young watch officer said calmly.

  “Hamas won?” I repeated.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  Startled, I asked to speak to Jake Walles, our consul general in Jerusalem, who effectively functioned as our ambassador to the Palestinians. But instead I mixed up his name with our ambassador in Lebanon, Jeffrey Feltman. Jeff was a little surprised to hear from me, but he confirmed that the whole region was in a state of shock. Needless to say, Jake and Dick Jones, our ambassador in Tel Aviv, were as well.

  When I arrived at the office and called the president, he said, “So what do we do now? They won the election—by all accounts fairly.”

  “Let me talk to the Israelis and Abbas,” I said. By the end of the day, I had also convened the Middle East Quartet—the United States, Russia, the European Union, and the UN. We issued a statement that affirmed the outcome of the election but set conditions on dealing with the new Hamas-led government. They would have to accept the terms that Yasser Arafat negotiated in 1993: recognize the right of Israel to exist; renounce violence; and accept all agreements that the Palestinians and the Israelis had signed. Hamas never did. They remained isolated from the international community and proved to be completely incompetent at governing. As a Palestinian friend said, “Now people can see that they aren’t the glorious freedom fighters. They are just a bunch of politicians who can’t make the sewer system work either.”

  The experience with elections that brought Hamas—branded by the United States and Europe as a terrorist organization—to power was chastening. It pointed to the danger of elections before liberal parties could find their footing. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt benefited in the same way.

  But it is often difficult to delay elections until the landscape is broader—even if theoretically it would be better to do so. Voting is the single most important and symbolic act of a liberated people, and they are reluctant to wait. The circumstances of the first elections are not likely to favor liberal forces. Still, the electoral process brings challenges for radical forces too—forcing them into the democratic process where the people can judge them peacefully. Is it better, to quote my friend, to show that “they can’t make the sewer system work either”?

  On the one hand, some elected Islamist parties have shown little regard for the democratic process that brought them to power, which appears to be their only goal. We have seen how the Muslim Brotherhood overstepped its mandate and sought to enforce Islamist values in Egypt, running roughshod over the interests of religious minorities and more secular forces. Hezbollah is not just a party; it is an armed militia. It has used the political perch in Lebanon to terrorize the region, with the support of Iran.

  This is a warning that, at a minimum, armed groups should not participate in the electoral process. It goes without saying that an armed militia has an unfair advantage due to its ability to intimidate and threaten. There are multiple cases of post-conflict transitions in which political groups were allowed to participate only after disarming.22

  Still, when Hezbollah turned its arms on Lebanese citizens in 2008, forcibly taking over parts of Beirut in a dispute with the government, it lost the claim to “armed resistance against Israel.” The Lebanese people punished them in the 2009 elections, leaving Hassan Nasrallah to fume that he had won the popular vote but the drawing of the electoral districts was flawed. Elections are about the only way that the Lebanese people can voice dissent against Hezbollah. There is also some evidence that the group’s foreign adventure in Syria is playing poorly at home.

  Islamist parties in Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq, and Tunisia have been less able to bend politics to their will. It is worth noting that all of them face real competition from organized secular forces. This suggests that it is not a question of having Islamists participate or not participate in elections. Elections will be held. The question is the institutional landscape in which they take place: the richer the better.

  So it comes down once again to nurturing a diverse set of institutions. That means empowering entrepreneurs and businesspeople; educating and empowering women; and encouraging social entrepreneurs and local civic organizatio
ns. In 2016 the Atlantic Council gathered a group of experts and former leaders to assess the state of the Middle East and what to do about it. Their recommendations read like a road map for a richer institutional environment.23 And there is already some progress. In the summer of 2016, I met several young entrepreneurs from the region. There was a Jordanian man who founded an Amazon-style website for selling Arabic-language books; a social entrepreneur from the UAE who founded programs to empower youth and protect victims of sex trafficking; and an Egyptian scientist who founded a tech start-up that, in her words, aimed “to bring emotional intelligence to our digital world.” These visionaries are not alone in wanting to build a different future for their region. Human rights advocates, women in politics, business and social entrepreneurs, and intellectuals are the vanguard of a new energy—bottom up—for change.

  These people, many of them young women, are determined but, in many countries, hunted. A blogger in Saudi Arabia is flogged for mild criticism of the regime. A journalist in Egypt is jailed for advocating for press freedoms. An activist in Bahrain goes on a hunger strike to protest her indefinite detention. It is reminiscent of another time in another part of the world—the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe—when it seemed unlikely that protesters would ever be heard.

  We know now that in international organizations like the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) these dissidents were finding their voices. There were safe places for them to meet and influence the rest of the world. When they returned home they often faced intimidation and, in some cases, arrest. But they kept meeting and speaking out, and when the opening came, they led democratic transitions—some more successfully than others.

  In 2004 we created the Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative, which sought to support civil society. We hoped to model it on the CSCE. To be frank, Iraq clouded the effort, but nineteen countries participated, as did dozens of civil society groups from the region. At one of the meetings, a young activist confronted the foreign minister of Bahrain about press restrictions. Another spoke in guarded terms about women’s rights in the Gulf monarchies. And at the press conference, a young Syrian challenged me. “Why do you talk about freedom in Iraq and never in Syria?” he asked. I made a note to speak out about the regime in Damascus the next time I had a chance.

  In today’s Middle East—some ten years removed from those exchanges—it is difficult to imagine a gathering of that kind. The Bahrainis have stopped listening to dissent, cracking down hard instead. The civil war in Syria has become the worst humanitarian catastrophe of our age, haunting us with images of children being pulled from bombed-out rubble, or dying in dimly lit hospitals, suffocating from the effects of chemical weapons. I can’t help wondering what happened to my Syrian questioner.

  The larger political context has changed in the region too. There was a time when the talisman against dissent was to invoke the Palestinian-Israeli issue. So many times the Arabs would say, “My street”—meaning their people—“is up in arms about what the Israelis are doing.” I had to hold my tongue, because I wanted to say, How do you know what your street thinks? Why don’t you hold an election and find out?

  Still, the region cannot be truly stable without a solution to the Palestinian problem. I traveled to the West Bank and Jerusalem twenty-three times as secretary trying to find one. But the story of the sadly unfinished business of delivering a two-state solution is not just a matter of getting the final-status issues right. Yes, the borders of the Israeli and Palestinian states will have to be settled and security arrangements will have to be put in place to protect both peoples. There will have to be a solution to the “right of return,” the insistence of Palestinians now generations removed from 1948 that they must be allowed to return to their homeland, which is now inhabited by Israelis. And the emotional issue of dividing the holy city of Jerusalem, claimed as the capital by both peoples, must be solved too.

  For the eight years of the Bush administration, we tried to ease the way to the solution of these core issues by helping the Palestinians build decent political, economic, and social institutions. Hamas, we believed, could be finally defeated only if the Palestinian people saw an alternative—a Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas that had thrown off corruption and found a way to govern wisely.

  The Palestinians made a great deal of progress, thanks in part to the help of the United States, Europe, and Canada in building effective security forces that even the Israel Defense Forces recognized as capable. And thanks to the enlightened leadership of men like Salam Fayyad, they made progress in building political and social institutions too.

  I will never forget my first extended conversation with Salam in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, in 2003. President Bush had convened a meeting of Arab leaders to discuss the peace process, in advance of a meeting between Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon and Abbas in Aqaba, Jordan. We were waiting for King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to arrive—holding our breath as to whether the “Keeper of the Holy Mosques,” as he is called, would overcome his reservations and attend. It was an interminable wait, feeling much longer than the actual two or so hours that passed.

  Salam walked over to me and immediately started to talk about American football. He was an economist, trained at the University of Texas. After a few shots at the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, he turned serious. He already had ideas about improving transparency in the Palestinian Authority—putting the budget online, cleaning up the security services, which he called a bunch of gangsters, and improving the lives of his people. He would be prime minister twice.

  Under his leadership, the battered Palestinian economy showed new life, with an influx of foreign aid and an increase in real GDP, which grew at an annual rate of more than 7 percent from 2008 to 2011.24 I remember well going to Bethlehem in 2008. It had been the site of horrible violence in 2001 when an Israeli tank shell blew a hole in the Church of the Nativity. Now we walked through a new and elegant hotel—the site a few weeks earlier of a successful outdoor dinner for potential investors. Salam gained the respect of everyone, including the Israelis.

  Salam was thick-skinned—you had to be to tolerate the slings and arrows from those whom he challenged inside the Palestinian Authority. Abbas himself waxed and waned in his support of his prime minister, firing him twice, only to bring him back when there was no other alternative. I asked Salam how he put up with it all. He didn’t hesitate: “I am determined to build our democratic state—even if we have to do it under occupation.” And he set out to do just that.

  Today, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has taken a backseat to the region’s troubles with ISIS, Syria, Yemen, and terrorism. Still, a stable Middle East will need a solution for the Palestinians too. And if they are ever to gain a homeland—the independent state that they deserve—it will be because they built democratic institutions despite the odds.

  The Palestinian question has also receded due to the rising challenge of Iran. For the Arab regimes, a militant Iran is the threat of the age: a Persian power with designs on their borders, aggressively pursuing its interests with a latent nuclear capability in its pocket. Tehran’s behavior begs the question of whether Iran itself might one day—sooner or later—face a moment of truth, a democratic opening.

  The Green Revolution and What Might Have Been

  The powerful image of a bloodied young woman came to represent the tragedy of Iran’s people. Thanks to social media, the world got to observe their plight. For a few days in the summer of 2009, the mullahs who had ruled Iran for three decades seemed vulnerable.

  Iran’s electoral system is not free and fair. Races are competitive and the franchise is open to women, but candidates are forced to undergo a rigorous vetting process and must be approved before being allowed to run. In practice, this process is led by conservative hard-liners who filter out anyone who would provide genuine opposition to the government. Most reform-minded candidates, as well as any others deemed insufficiently loyal to the regime, are disqualified
and blocked from the ballot.

  But in 2009, when the regime violated even these limited rights, cooking the electoral results to favor conservative candidates, they set off a firestorm. There is a lesson in this. Even elections that are not free and fair can have consequences. In this case, the result was a massive protest movement because the Iranian people had had enough. The sad spectacle of Iranians appealing for help from the West reminds us that the international community cannot ignore the plight of people seeking freedom. The Obama administration said nothing at first—and very little later on. The president apparently did not want to contaminate the revolution with outside interference. The brave protesters were carrying signs in English. They appeared ready to take the risk of associating their rebellion with America.

  The opening did not last. The regime cracked down hard. The mullahs survived the scare of 2009 and continue to hold back pressures for change, at least as of this writing. There may be no greater gap in the entire region between the aspirations of the people and the posture of their government.

  Iran’s population is young—70 percent of them are under the age of thirty. They are well connected to the outside world, and in the cities well educated and urbane. In many cases, they are remarkably pro-American. Jared Cohen traveled to Tehran and five other Iranian cities in 2004. At the time, he was a Stanford student, but he would later go on to head social media outreach at the State Department for me and then for Hillary Clinton. When Jared returned from his Iran trip he got in touch with me at the White House. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “When I said I was American, no one would let me pay for anything.”