Young, restive and on-line

By Omayma Abdel-Latif
"An energised street, a restive public increasingly capable of taking action, without any identifiable leadership, and the youth bulges which act as the 'new time bombs' -- these are elements that make up a recipe for disaster and pose a constant threat to US interests in the region."
Such was the conclusion of CIA director George Tenet in a speech outlining possible threats to US interests around the globe. Speaking on 7 February before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on "National Security in a Changing World", Tenet chose to steer clear of the "obvious" threats and focused on what he called "less obvious trends" that could develop into major threats to US interests: overpopulation, increased public access to information and limited prospects for economic development.
Tenet's remarks on the region were received with mixed reactions from Egyptian analysts, with some commenting that his reading of certain political trends in the region are exaggerated. Still, many found Tenet's arguments to be in some senses truthful, and in many ways relevant. Prominent Al-Ahram columnist Salama Ahmed Salama, however, noted that the report brought to light nothing new, but rather highlighted what anyone can recognise is a shift in Arab activism and an obvious concern regarding the demographic situation in most Arab countries.
"We have to admit that there has been a change in the Arab street; people are beginning to learn that it pays to give up their political apathy and are becoming a force to be reckoned with," Salama said. This was not the case a few months ago, and Salama credits the ongoing Al-Aqsa Intifada in the occupied territories with whipping up Arab nationalist sentiment and introducing the Arab people as a force capable of imposing change. This apparently came as a surprise to American policy-makers.
"The Americans are used to personalised politics, because they deal with governments, regimes and persons," Salama said. "Tenet's remarks show that they have discovered, perhaps for the first time, that the Arab people can exercise pressure on their governments and that they are an essential component in any balance of power. The pro-Intifada demonstrations are a living example."
But others say that Tenet's interpretation of pro-Palestinian demonstrations in some Arab countries reads too much into the nature of the "Arab street." The conclusion that "the average citizen is becoming increasingly restive and getting louder" could be going too far. "It would be foolhardy to ignore these remarks but, on the other hand, one has to be aware of American readiness to exaggerate a possible threat," Mustafa Kamel El-Sayed, head of the Centre for Studies of Developing Countries, told Al-Ahram Weekly. This tendency, El-Sayed notes, can lead to tragic misreadings of qualitative, though not necessarily negative, changes in Arab societies -- resulting, ultimately, in miscalculations on the part of Western powers.
"It is this constant search for a threat -- possibly the need to create one -- that is a basic component of US policy-making," one analyst commented. Another researcher noted that US policy-makers don't seem to have shirked off the influence of what he described as the "Huntington factor" -- an allusion to the prominent American academic Samuel Huntington, who popularised the concept of a clash of civilisations. Huntington's theory, which cites so-called youth bulges in predominantly Muslim countries as the principal cause for concern in the West, served as guideline for many US policy-makers in the 1990s. According to Huntington, large swathes of the population fall into an age range between 15 and 35 years and serve as a willing pool from which militant and terrorist movements can pluck recruits.
Arab youth, particularly in countries that maintain friendly relations with the US, have been the focus of a number of recent US reports assessing American policy in the region, which underscore a chronic lack of job opportunities as a major cause for concern. A CIA report issued in January spoke in apocalyptic terms of the "doomed future of youngsters living in the Middle East", who will inherit depleted resources and high unemployment rates. Tenet singled out Egypt and Jordan in this regard. "In Egypt, the disproportionately young population adds 600,000 new job applicants a year to a country where unemployment is already near 20 per cent," Tenet argued. A bit exaggerated, comments Salama.
"For a long time we have been fooled by officials who juggle the numbers to make it seem as though the economy is growing, or unemployment rates are falling, and [these reports] have been all far from being factual," Salama explained. Indeed, unemployment figures for Egypt remain a point of contention between the government and the opposition. While the government's policy statement sets the figure at 1.5 million, opposition sources estimate the number to be close to 6 million.
Sociologist Ali Leilah of Cairo University, who recently conducted a UNESCO study on political orientations among Arab youth, agreed that the high rate of unemployment is a major concern for policy-makers. Leilah suggests that the 15-30 age group -- almost 58 per cent of the overall population -- represents an essential component in any policy-making process, but he is not willing to go as far as Tenet in "reading too much between the lines of what goes on in Arab societies." It is wrong, he says, to conceive of this age group "as the only destabilising force in society."
Nonetheless, US policy-makers have been quick to read pro-Palestinian demonstrations throughout the Middle East and Arab world as a threat. "The protests are against the brutality and barbarity used by the Israelis against innocent civilians," explains Leilah. "But they also, in a sense, undermine US interests in the region, because people believe that the US is behind the tragedies inflicted on the Palestinian people; that America is somehow responsible for their plight."
Leilah's study, however, concluded that only a very small percentage of youth in the region are politically and socially active. These results throw cold water on Tenet's suggestion that the Internet -- used mostly by the 21-35 age group -- could be utilised to incite the public against their authoritarian governments. While provocative, the claim is in fact unrealistic. The number of Internet users in a country like Egypt does not exceed 350,000, according to government figures released in December 2000.
As columnist Salama notes, a virtual revolution seems even more unfeasible given that very few Internet users are politically active. "These are mostly youngsters who have no interest in politics and don't know anything about the political scene. They belong to a certain social class that is not connected to the political and party forces in the country," he said. It was again the Al-Aqsa Intifada that offered a ray of light in the political void of Arab youth's awareness of international politics and turned them into virtual political activists.
Salama and others, however, have not ruled out the possibility of a technologically savvy and politically driven youth culture. "Perhaps in 10 years' time, young politically active Internet users may be able to change the face of the Arab world," Salama said.
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Full text of George Tenent's speech
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