Opinion Editorials, October 2003, www.aljazeerah.info
Human Price of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine
Israeli daily aggression on the Palestinian people
Mission and meaning of Al-Jazeerah
Cities, localities, and tourist attractions
The Arabs and the world
Hassan A. Barari
Jordan Times, 10/27/03
IN THE 1950s, a group of neo-Marxist theorists, mainly from Latin America, came to the conclusion that lack of development in the Third World was due to the global economic system that entailed a kind of dependency between the North and the South. As long as this sort of relationship prevailed, they argued, the Third World would continue lagging behind the industrialised world. The remedy, therefore, was to break off with the West and implement a different strategy for development, known as Import Substitution Industry (ISI). Influenced by this theory, and by the notion of confronting the perils of Western imperialism, the mainstream in the Arab world now blames external factors (the West) for the failure to attain development. The ISI strategy was introduced in key Arab countries, but it failed to lead to the desired development.
Despite the powerful explanatory value of the dependency theory, it failed to take into account internal and structural factors; that proved detrimental to states' aspirations to develop. To date, the majority in the Arab world still ascribe the problems that we are saddled with to the West.
Two weeks ago, I attentively followed a debate on Al Jazeera TV, in which an Arab intellectual who strangely introduced himself as thinker — as though there is a job called thinker — dismissed all arguments that we need to introduce reforms and he maintained that only after getting rid of American hegemony we could turn our attention inwards. He failed to realise that defeating American hegemony and embarking on genuine internal reforms are not mutually exclusive. When told that the Arabs, according to the Arab Human Development Report of 2002, lag behind many countries in the Third World, not only was he unfazed, but he dismissed the report as a sell out. His answers were peppered with obsolete expressions such as imperialism and colonisation.
A week ago, another UNDP report was released in Amman. Figures on mass media, press freedom and publishing in the Arab world provide hard evidence of our sad reality. To mention but two: 18 computers per 1,000 people in the Arab world, as compared to the global average of 78 per 1,000; only around 10,000 books were translated into Arabic, never mind the quality of translation, over the entire past millennium, which is as much as the number translated into Spanish each year.
Furthermore, Arab production of knowledge is modest. A large percentage of this meagre production is religious books, most of which based on superstition, thus leading to mystification and ignorance.
The report also talks about the dangerous phenomenon of brain drain. In only three years, between 1998 and 2000, more than 15,000 Arab doctors migrated abroad. Given the West's selectivity, one can assume that those who opted for migration were the most qualified. This poses a big threat to knowledge acquisition in our region. If we add to this the fact that many of the potentially good brains have been working in an atmosphere that lacks freedom, then the picture is really bleak.
Most media institutions in this part of the world are state-owned. The few private media institutions are compliant with the high-handed political atmosphere. Put differently, they are not expected to produce alternative media that challenge the state-owned ones.
It remains to be seen how the Arabs are going to grapple with the information revolution in the twenty first century. A critical mind is at the root of innovation and scientific advance. Creation of a collective critical mind is improbable as long as our reality is not fundamentally changed. If the roots of backwardness, as mentioned in the report, are not tackled meticulously and systematically, and if we do not cease blaming external factors for this sad reality, the worst is yet to come.
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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