MINORITY RIGHTS? NO THANKS!
Brian Whitaker

guardian.co.uk
Friday September 19 2008

When so many people face oppression in the Middle East, is there any
point in focusing on the rights of minorities?

"What we commonly think of as the ‘Arab and Muslim world’ is in fact
a rich and varied mosaic of peoples. Over the last 50 years, many
Middle Eastern minorities have been oppressed or have struggled to
survive – be they national groups (Berbers, Kurds, Turkomans, etc),
religious communities (Christians, Zoroastrians, Baha’is, etc) or both
(Armenians, Jews, etc) …"

This was the blurb for a talk last night hosted by the London
Middle East Institute, and attended by a fascinating collection
of representatives from the region’s forgotten minorities, even a
Zoroastrian lady – one of the few remaining adherents of a faith that
once dominated Iran and much of the surrounding area.

The main speaker was Egyptian-born Masri Feki, the founder of a
French-based pressure group called The Middle East Pact, who had come
over from Toulouse.

"Masri Feki sees minority rights as central to his vision of secular
democracy," the blurb said. "Now, more than ever, thriving minorities
are the cornerstone of a healthy civil society and the key to pluralism
and peace in this troubled region."

Well, I’m not so sure about that. As Mr Feki rightly pointed out
in his talk, ethnic and religious diversity is something that
pan-Arab nationalists and, more recently, Islamists, have tried to
obliterate. But what’s so special about minorities as such?

How much sympathy should we feel for the Alawite minority who rule
Syria? Or the Sunni minority who rule Bahrain? And then there’s the
Kurdish minority in Iraq – I’ve heard some horrible stories about
the way some of them treat another minority, the Turkomans.

Of all the oppressed people in the Middle East, those most widely
and consistently denied their rights are women. Whether they happen
to be more or less numerous than men is surely beside the point.

Well-intentioned as they may be, Mr Feki’s efforts to focus special
attention on the region’s minorities strike me as the result of some
muddled thinking. This is not to suggest that minority rights are
necessarily unimportant; it is vital to protect them, for example,
in a democratic countries.

In democracies, the will of the majority is supreme and so we need
safeguards to ensure that the majority does not abuse its position
by oppressing minorities. In most of the Middle East, though, with
only a very limited measure of democracy, minorities and majorities
are largely irrelevant: prejudice, discrimination, intolerance and
bigotry are rife, full stop.

A couple of months ago I was in the Middle East, researching this
problem for a book that I am writing and two points in particular
stood out.

One is that very few people grasp the concept of diversity. Difference
– whether ethnic, religious, cultural or sexual – is viewed as an
embarrassment and something you keep quiet about. The roots of this
attitude lie deep in the history and culture but it’s a far cry from
the idea, now prevalent in the west, that diversity is valuable and
enriches a society rather than weakening it.

The second point is that the principle of equality – equal rights,
equality before the law, equality of opportunity, etc – has not really
been taken on board either. "It’s not that people haven’t heard of
these concepts," Nadime Houry, a researcher for Human Rights Watch
told me when I met him in Lebanon. He explained:

Most laws – and [Arab] constitutions as well – are framed in a way
[that says] "we are against discrimination, we are for equality and
all citizens are born equal" – but all these slogans ring hollow
when you look at them more closely … Even within society the sense
of equality or non-discrimination is absent. It’s not just the state
that is the culprit here. Most examples of discrimination are between
people, but no one is really going to take a strong stand to push
for that equality.

In Cairo, Hossam Bahgat, director of the Egyptian Initiative for
Personal Rights, echoed this view. "People can immediately spot
injustice and stand up for the oppressed," he said, "but it’s not
the same thing as discrimination or inequality. They don’t spot
inequality as easily. They can see why torture is wrong, why the
imprisonment of a journalist or a political activist is wrong. They
see the abuse. But just because someone is not getting exactly the
same treatment as another person is not as shocking to their moral
system as simple abuse."

A large part of the problem, he said, is the sheer pervasiveness of
injustice and inequality. "It affects everyone almost, apart from
the lucky few – so it becomes a matter of ‘why them?’

"Another part of the problem," he continued, "is that it’s all a power
game, so a middle-class middle-aged civil servant in the ministry of
transport who is working in inhuman conditions and gets very poor
treatment from his superiors would take this out on his wife or
his children or his Coptic neighbour. This sense of injustice gets
exercised in different ways. In a sea of victims it’s really hard to
find one victim and to make a big case about their victimhood."