Hundreds of anti-government protesters took to the streets of Beirut once again this week, as disgruntled Lebanese clashed with police over a monthslong trash crisis that has fueled outrage among the country's residents and left its hapless, fractious government scrambling for answers.
The "You Stink" movement gained steam during the summer, as trash began to pile up in the streets of Beirut and across much of Lebanon. The crisis is symptomatic of larger issues that continue to plague the tiny, fractious Mideast nation. Overwhelmed by war refugees from neighboring Syria, and beholden to the whims of an ineffectual coalition government -- Lebanon has been without a president for more than a year -- the country offers in one small package a look at the many issues that divide the region. Lebanon often serves as a political and social laboratory for some of the region's big powers, namely Saudi Arabia and Iran, whose Lebanese client, the militant group Hezbollah, holds a great deal of sway over the country.
But Lebanon is also, in a sense, a microcosmic case study in the kinds of accountability challenges found throughout much of the region. Residents of the Middle East and North Africa region, or MENA, want the same services and securities that we all do -- reliable health care, a good education, job opportunities -- yet the expectations they hold of their leaders and lawmakers tend to differ from other parts of the world.
"The expectation that the government would take a fuller responsibility for services to be delivered well seems to reflect the post independence social contract in MENA countries," said Hana Brixi, global lead on governance at the World Bank. "With independence, Arab leaders sought to break away from the earlier elitist policies and promised their people industrialization and better living standards through state intervention. That intervention included massive expansion of education and health services, as well as food and fuel subsidies and employment in the public sector."
Brixi is the coauthor of a comprehensive World Bank report published in April 2015 on service delivery across the greater Middle East, in which she and her colleagues examine public expectations on services and social programs, and how the breakdown of this transactional relationship between regime and citizen directly contributes to mistrust toward peoples' respective governments.
Once basic services are denied, and that citizen-state agreement is broken, MENA residents tend to revert to older, more informal networks and relationships to meet their needs. This might mean, as in Lebanon, appealing to one's sect or party, or to informal social networks designed to bestow privileges on friends, family, and fellow travellers -- or wasta. "Vitamin W," as some jokingly refer to it, largely carries a negative connotation throughout the Middle East, but the practice is a logical one rooted in citizens' low expectations of public institutions. Brixi explains:
"Wasta itself is not a negative phenomenon. It is underpinned by two influential social norms: first individuals are more obligated to respond to friends, family, and others in their social networks than they are to strangers; and second, individuals place importance on maintaining the social status of their own network. Wasta is based on an implicit social contract in which typically relatives or members of social or tribal groups who are in positions of power are obligated to provide assistance or favorable treatment to others within the same group. Wasta provides people with solutions to problems."
Brixi told the Mideast Memo that wasta also lends itself to corruption and nepotism, and that the practice often undercuts state efforts to provide fair and equitable services to its citizens.
To avoid such civic workarounds, Mideast governments must look to what works and what doesn't work at the local level, and create public-private partnerships that are beneficial to everyone.
"The best performing rural health clinics in Morocco, for example, effectively draw on their strong partnerships with local communities as well as positive competition and support devised by the Ministry of Health," said Brixi. "It is important to empower communities and local leaders and build coalitions of reformers inside and outside of government to improve services and gain citizens' trust and engagement at the local level."
This is a point that every Mideast government should take to heart, be it restive Lebanon or war-torn Syria. Protests over government inaction, as in Lebanon, or government overreach, as was the case in Tunisia, can quickly escalate into violent confrontations that topple governments.
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Around the Region
Young Turks. As tensions escalate between the Turkish government and the country's Kurdish community, Al-Monitor's Mahmut Bozarslan reports on the increased role of young Kurds in the restive southeast:
"There is a street in the town of Bismil, in Diyarbakir province, whose entrance is covered with large drapes. Behind the barrier, a group of young people is armed with Kalashnikov rifles. Their faces are covered, with only their eyes visible. Their average age is about 20. Two young girls lead them ... They constantly give orders to people around them."
"Armed youngsters appear to control this street," writes Bozarslan -- representatives of the PKK, or Kurdistan Workers' Party youth wing, YDG-H.
But the unrest unfolding in Turkey's Kurdish southeast just might, ironically enough, benefit Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The Wall Street Journal's Yaroslav Trofimov explains:
"The conflict is spinning out of control just as Turkey prepares for elections on Nov. 1 -- a vote called by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a bid to maintain power after his ruling AKP, or Justice and Development Party, failed to keep a parliamentary majority in another election on June 7. The main reason for that defeat was an unexpectedly strong showing by the People's Democratic Party, or HDP, a predominantly Kurdish movement that is supported by the outlawed PKK."
Tokyo eyes Tehran. J. Berkshire Miller analyzes Japan's investment interests in Iran:
"One of Japan's key targets is Iran's potentially lucrative Azadegan oil fields, near the border with Iraq. According to Iranian government estimates, the Azadegan fields could contain over 30 billion barrels of oil in reserve. Tokyo has been interested in working with Tehran to develop the oil fields for the past two decades and at one point, in 1996, had a nearly 75 percent stake in the southern Azadegan fields through Inpex, a Japanese oil company."
But don't call it a complete reset just yet, warns Miller. While Tokyo is looking to increase its investment footprint in Iran, and indeed its presence in the entire Middle East, it will likely tread carefully so as not to upset relations with arguably its most important ally, the United States:
"Tokyo remains sensitive to the lingering problems in the relationship between its key ally, the U.S., and Iran, which are not limited to the nuclear issue. During a meeting with Iran's foreign minister earlier this year, Japan's foreign minister, Fumio Kishida, expressed concern about longstanding military ties between Iran and North Korea and requested that Iran sever ‘all military cooperation with North Korea.'"
Air ISIS. And finally, The Daily Beast's Michael Weiss argues that Russia is providing air cover for the Islamic State group:
"[T]hat Moscow might actually be objectively helping ISIS defeat a common enemy by acting as air support for the jihadists' ground assaults against U.S. proxies is less well understood, even though it fits with predictions warning that Putin's adventure in the Levant was never going to be counterterrorist in nature.
"Rather, this Russian adventure was designed to fortify a faltering client regime, possibly help it regain lost territory, and above all eliminate any credible threat to its legitimacy or long-term rule which, for the moment, ISIS does not pose."
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