CREATING ABERRATIONS:

In Khartoum, the Refrain of Arab Failure (Rami G. Khouri, 31 March 2006, The Daily Star)

Arab leaders have conspicuously failed to resolve any significant regional issue in the last half-century or so, while allowing their countries to degenerate into increasingly inequitable and abusive systems of exploitation and corruption, often enforced by militia power. [...]

The Khartoum gathering highlighted the profound pressures and problems that plague most Arab countries: a general lack of rule of law in systems where political, military and economic power are closely guarded in the hands of small numbers of mostly unelected, unaccountable people - often just the men of a single family. Narrow, gun- and clan-based power structures more suited to urban gangland cultures have evolved in the Arab world in the past half-century into prevailing systems of official governance.

Not surprisingly, most young people in the Arab countries these days respond to the dilemma of living in such a world with a range of startling options: a majority of youths wants to emigrate to foreign countries, finds refuge in religion rather than more fully engaged citizenship, adheres to extremist political groups or terrorist cells, goes along with institutionalized corruption and nepotism, experiments with drugs and diversionary alien lifestyles, or joins a militia.

I would guess that the percentage of young Arabs aged 14-25 that does not fall into one or more of the above categories is no more than 25 percent of the total. This is one legacy, to date, of contemporary Arab leaders who meet in increasingly delusional summits. We have transformed our children into aberrations of good citizenship and decent humanity, because we have raised them in largely lawless systems that enrich those who have and use guns - whether renegade militias or official security services and military sectors.