Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa (30 page)

All this progress was made despite Syria’s military occupation, despite Hezbollah’s terrible war against Israel, despite the invasion of Beirut in 2008, despite the global economic downturn that has dragged on for years and despite the civil war next door that is adding yet further insult to Lebanon’s already injured economy.

If Beirut can leap ahead into the future while enduring all
that
, it should be able to do even better with the Syrian boot off its neck. When the Iranian regime is eventually overthrown or reformed—it happens to all such regimes in due time—and Hezbollah finds itself with no support whatsoever from anywhere, then Beirut, whether it’s the Middle East’s Paris or not, might once again become a great city.

Chapter Thirteen

Across the Sea of Darkness

Morocco, 2012

The Arab Spring left chaos in its wake. Islamization, renewed state repression and the threat of starvation led to a military coup against Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsi. The Libyan civil war finally put an end to Muammar Qaddafi’s Stalinist dungeon state, but terrorism, destabilization, assassination and precarious anarchy followed. Sectarian bloodshed approaching genocidal levels may destroy Syria whether ro not its tyrant Bashar al-Assad survives or the country is taken over by the black-clad head-choppers of ISIS. Internally driven regime changes in the Arab world don’t seem to have worked much better than the externally imposed regime change in Iraq.

But on the northwest border of Africa, change is coming to Morocco in a calmer and more gradual way. The ruling regime has been reformed instead of replaced, leaving institutions intact and creating no vacuum for thugs and fanatics to fill. Demonstrations sometimes occur, but they don’t degenerate into riots, armed conflict or mob rule. Nobody thinks civil war is coming, nor is there any danger of an Iranian-style revolution.

Morocco has been outperforming its Arab neighbors for years. Now that a political hurricane is battering the rest of the region, it looks better than ever. Morocco evolves instead of explodes, and while incrementalism doesn’t offer the instant gratification of uprising and revolution, it’s precisely what the Middle East and North Africa need.

*  *  *

After spending more time than was good for my health in Baghdad and Cairo, Morocco’s capital, Rabat, struck me as remarkably clean, well ordered, peaceful and civilized. While so much of the region wallows in dreariness, Morocco is awash with startling beauty and aesthetic perfection.

Few people love the largest city, Casablanca. It’s a bit chaotic and reminds me of the less fashionable parts of Beirut. But the city center looks and feels like the capital of a European empire, and the reason struck me at once. Unlike most Arab countries outside the Gulf region, Morocco never went through a devastating socialist or Arab nationalist phase. Nor has it suffered revolution or war.

Much of Cairo looks Soviet. Beirut, Baghdad and Damascus chewed themselves to pieces. Soviet-style tyranny and civil war wrecked Algiers. But Morocco passed through the post–World War II era with nary a scratch. It’s an astonishing thing to behold, and it’s impossible, for me anyway, to ignore why: Morocco has been ruled by a stable monarchy for over 300 years.

Americans instinctively hate monarchy. Our country was forged in revolution against the British Crown, and the nation’s founders established one of the most durable and resilient democratic systems in history.

Few Americans, however, are reminded of King George III when they consider the ruling Arab monarchs. The sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf are run by decadent medievalists at best and terrorist sponsors at worst.

King Abdullah of Jordan looks and is better. He’s a modern man who maintains his father Hussein’s peace treaty with Israel. Hussein’s widow, Queen Noor, is a feminist from America. Abdullah clearly wants to bring his country into the 21st century, but he might not survive the turmoil buffeting the region and his kingdom. Half the country wants him out—and wants him out now. His family isn’t even from Jordan. They come from the Hejaz region of Saudi Arabia and were installed in 1921 by the British.

Monarchies are by definition not democratic. They are, however—aside from Jordan’s, perhaps—more stable than anything else in the Middle East and North Africa. Elliott Abrams, in an essay for
Commentary
called “Dictators Go, Monarchs Stay,” describes a meeting he had with former Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak in 2005, when the Bush administration was pushing for elections in Iraq. “The Iraqis were incapable of democracy, [Mubarak] argued; you don’t understand them like I do; they need a general to rule them.”

But now the “big men” in the “fake republics,” as Abrams described them, have almost all been overthrown, while the monarchs remain. The kings on their thrones have staying power and are not come-latelies. They have tradition on their side, at least.

Morocco’s King Mohammad VI is said to be a direct descendent of the Prophet Mohammad. I asked some people in Rabat if that’s really true. Everybody said yes. I asked how they know it’s true. The answer was always the same. “We just know.” Is it true? I have no idea. But everyone seems to think it is, or at least says that it is, and in any case the Alaoui family has ruled the country without interruption for hundreds of years.

The previous king, Mohammad’s father Hassan II, ruled more or less as an absolute monarch, and his Ministry of the Interior ran what basically amounted to a police state. The so-called years of lead, from the 1960s to the 1980s, were characterized by heavy state repression against opposition movements from both the left and the right, some of which were heavily armed. I don’t know if the word
lead
in that description refers to the use of ammunition or to just the general heaviness of the era. It works either way.

The lead years were rough. The lead years were brutal. The lead years made Morocco a sadly typical country in the Middle East and North Africa at the time.

Then in 2004, Mohammad VI, five years after ascending the throne, established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission—Instance Equité et Réconciliation—the only one in the world I’m aware of that didn’t follow on the heels of a regime change. Victims of internal repression by Hassan II were rehabilitated and compensated. The young king encouraged everyone to let it all out, to voice their complaints and their grievances, to do so in public and even to scream if they wanted—and he encouraged them to do so against his own father.

Yet 2 million mourners attended King Hassan’s funeral.

“I never even thought that I’d miss him,” a Moroccan woman told me, “but every day for a year after he died, I drove to his mausoleum and cried.”

One man in Rabat explained the psychology to me this way: “He was a really tough daddy. But he was daddy.”

In 2011, after a new constitution was adopted at the behest of both people and king, Morocco was officially transformed into a constitutional monarchy with a democratic parliament and separation of powers. The respected NGO Freedom House raised the country’s status from “not free” to “partly free.”

“The king hasn’t retired from the government,” said Nadia Bernoussi, a professor of constitutional law who helped draft the new constitution. “What changed is that the parliament has entered the government. Our intention was not to hobble the monarchy but to clearly set out the responsibilities for each branch of the government. Because the context we were working in was the Arab Spring that’s sweeping the region and all of its dangers. We didn’t want to hobble the monarchy. We looked to the monarchy to ensure the changes we were making wouldn’t get lost.”

The changes they made, including sweeping new rights for women, very well could have been lost. Elsewhere in the Arab world, they have been. Egypt was ruled by a calcified military dictatorship the first time I visited in 2005. When I returned during the period between the fall of Mubarak and the election of Morsi, Egypt was a partly free country. At times it felt completely free, a remarkable turnaround from just a few years before. But the new president’s power grab and his crude attempts at Islamization made Egypt progressively less free by the month. The army that removed him is no better. It’s the same institution that made the state a dictatorship when the self-styled Free Officers, led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, seized power in 1952.

In Morocco, Mohammad VI appointed the council that drafted the new constitution. He wanted representatives from across the political spectrum, but he also wanted a progressive modern document, so he excluded communists and radical Islamists from the process. He achieved liberal results with illiberal means. Such is the paradox of Morocco. Moroccan liberals are generally happy to have the results despite the process. In the Arab world, it seems, you can often get liberal results or liberal means, but not both.

I don’t know if Mohammad VI is enacting reforms because he genuinely wants to liberalize the country or because he wants to ride the wave of discontent rather than be swept away by it. I suspect it’s a little of both.

What’s left of the opposition doesn’t agree. A series of protests broke out on February 20, 2011, four months before Morocco adopted constitutional monarchy. The protests were not led by a single movement or party, nor were they particularly organized. They were politically diverse, geographically dispersed and often parochial. In that sense, February 20 was more of a phenomenon than a movement. Whatever we should call it, it was inspired by the mass demonstrations that brought down Egypt’s Mubarak and Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

In Rabat, tens of thousands took to the streets, shouting “The people want to change the constitution” and “Down with autocracy.” They got at least some of what they wanted, and they got it in less than four months. But dozens of them are in prison. Opposition critics say the new constitution’s separation of powers is insufficient. They accuse the king of undermining it on the sly.

Whether or not these complaints are fair, all governments—democratic, partially democratic and autocratic—need opposition and critics. What nations usually don’t need is revolution.

*  *  *

Americans love revolution. Why shouldn’t we? Ours was among the most successful in history. It endures more than 200 years later and was not the result of gradual change. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

The French Revolution followed ours, and Jefferson naturally swooned while it was happening. But it didn’t end well. Instead of enjoying the blessings of liberty, the French inflicted the Reign of Terror on themselves and later reverted to monarchy. But those lessons are lost to time for all but the most historically minded.

Thanks to the Russians, average Americans looked askance at revolution throughout much of the 20th century. The October Revolution of 1917 installed a totalitarian dictatorship that built a slave empire spanning most of two continents. Then it replicated itself, virus-like, by sponsoring similar revolutions all over the world, creating one ghastly police state after another. But Europe’s anticommunist revolutions in 1989 seemed to put everything right. Repressive regime after repressive regime fell to liberal dissidents like Lech Walesa in Poland and Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia.

The 1989 revolutions echoed the American Revolution in some ways, and they’re fresher in everyone’s minds than their botched predecessors. None of us who are old enough to have witnessed it can forget the fall of the Berlin Wall. Freedom was spreading again after the terrible communist detour. The tide of history washed tyrants away, as it should.

The Arab world seemed perfectly capable of replicating what Americans and Eastern Europeans had accomplished. During the Beirut Spring in 2005, the Lebanese evicted Syria’s smothering military occupation without firing a shot. The more or less free and fair elections that followed sent the liberal pacifist Fouad Siniora to the prime minister’s office. The model for Lebanon’s uprising was the revolutions in Eastern Europe. I know because I was there. Surely the same thing could happen in Cairo and Tunis and Tripoli and Damascus. Right?

Apparently not.

Tunisia’s revolution was mostly nonviolent and has been at least partly successful, but Egypt’s, Libya’s and especially Syria’s have been much darker affairs. The very name “Arab Spring” evokes the romantic image of the Prague Spring, but we should remember that the 1968 Czech uprising, like the 1956 Hungarian revolution before it, ultimately failed. Soviet troops rolled into Budapest and Prague and crushed both democratic movements under the treads of their tanks.

In celebrating the Arab Spring, too many failed to take into account what was unique about America in 1776, Eastern Europe in 1989 and Beirut in 2005. In all three cases, the people were resisting a tyrannical regime that was imposed from the outside: by the British Crown, Soviet Russia and Syria’s Arab Socialist Baath Party, respectively. These revolutions were produced by a more or less democratic political culture that already existed and was being suppressed by force from abroad.

Democratic political cultures aren’t created by revolutions. They are created in advance of revolutions and reach their maturity during the aftermath. Lebanon and Tunisia are doing better than Egypt, Libya and Syria because they already had partially democratic and pluralistic political cultures that were being suppressed. But Egypt has never known anything but authoritarian rule, and before rebel fighters lynched Qaddafi outside Tripoli, he treated Libya like a mad scientist’s laboratory for longer than I’d been alive.

America was an exceptional place in 1776. So was Eastern Europe in 1989 and, to a lesser extent, Lebanon in 2005.

So is Morocco. It’s not exceptional in the same way the American colonies and Eastern Europe were exceptional, but it is exceptional.

*  *  *

Morocco is doing better than most Arab countries because of its system of government, and it’s doing better than Arab monarchies because of its history.