“It’s only fourteen kilometres away”, laughs my Moroccan friend Rachid, “and instead of seeing the light on the other side in wonderful Europe, I was born in Tangier, the port of Africa!” Rachid’s frustration or disappointment is not unique, it’s a feeling experienced by millions of Arabs, especially those who live on the southern shores of the Mediterranean. Today there really is a collective depression, where everyone wants to take the risky and dangerous journey and leave, knowing that they can say goodbye to their lives in the Mare Nostrum.
If reaching the fortress of Europe is full of obstacles, even moving from one Arab country to another is not easy. More often than not you need a visa, taking into account the very tight controls and sometimes humiliating treatment. Perhaps the most grotesque and dramatic case is that of families who live near the border: between Algeria and Morocco for example, the borders have been closed since the early nineties. A Moroccan or Algerian citizen from Oujda or Maghnia is forced to travel to the international airports of Casablanca or Algiers and then take other means of transport to visit a relative on the other side only a few metres away. It is a crazy and expensive journey.
Every time I travel through the Schengen area I cannot hide my envy as I pass from one country to another without having to showing any document at all. The borders between France and Italy or France and Germany no longer exist. The question which immediately comes to mind is why have Arabs failed in creating an Arab Union, whilst our European neighbours managed to create the EU out of the extremely tough aftermath of the Second World War? One needs to remember that the only experience of a union was the one between Nasser’s Egypt and Syria in 1958, although this only lasted three years. The Arab League, founded back in 1945, is still an organisation which is ineffective not only in solving the larger political problems (such as Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 or the events in Western Sahara), but also with regards to the strengthening of commercial exchange between its very few members.
Given the strong similarities between Arab people, it really is difficult to digest this very serious delay. Besides having the same language, belonging to Islam (mainly Sunnite), sharing memories of colonialism (the French in the Maghreb and the English in the Mashreq) and a common fate, there are important man-made and natural resources such as oil which could be exploited to create strategic and thriving projects. Today, Arab governments do not intend to remove or even open national borders to their neighbours; if anything they strengthen diplomatic contacts to establish certain borders. In recent years we have witnessed celebrations in Syria and Jordan after a bilateral agreement was signed which put an end to claims on land, and the same thing occurred between Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
The essence of the problem is not the Arab people, but their leaders. Here we need psychology rather than political sociology to understand that the wills and interests of the leaders are at the root of foreign politics, such as with Libyan leader Gaddafi. Meanwhile the interests of the people have no importance, and so we are always reverting back to the same issue: a lack of democracy in the Arab world. Arab leaders, many of whom came to power in tanks or thanks to rigged elections, feel like landlords rather than citizens serving the collective need, viewing their own countries as property. They are not subject to any controls because they own all the legislative, executive, judicial and media power. In waiting for the Arab Union’s moment, Arab people continue to observe the EU with a bit of envy and a lot of hope.
Amara Lakhous is an Italian-Algerian writer and anthropologist living in Rome.
Translation by Helen Waghorn