My friend and colleague Ali Fathollah Nejad invite us to read his perspective about a peaceful Middle East in accordance to Arab Spring and the current nuclear issue with Iran.
With the war drums on Iran sounding and the
Arab revolts following an arduous path, there still remains no sustainable
perspective for a peaceful Middle East. The Conference for Security and
Cooperation can bring the important civil society element to bear in a region
where state-centric solutions have failed.
Some years ago a civil-society initiative
for a Conference for Security and Cooperation in the Middle East (CSCME) was
spearheaded in Germany by peace and conflict researcher Prof. Mohssen Massarrat
in collaboration with the German branches of the International Physicians for
the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) and the International Association of
Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA). After decades of violent conflicts in the
region, the initiators chose not to sit down and wait anymore, but decided to
assemble civil-society actors from all countries concerned in order to promote
a perspective for peace, security and cooperation - something state actors have
carelessly neglected. One of its key aims is the creation of a zone free of
weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).
So far civil-society forces from almost all
countries of the region have been brought together. Unified in the desire to
break out from the vicious cycle of regional militarization, they want to offer
a vision for common security and regional cooperation. In addition to security
policy, the CSCME process comprises a number of fields for cooperation, among
others in the areas of socio-economic development, cross-border resource
management, inter-religious and -cultural dialogue, and health. It is hoped
that the next expert conference will take place in the region itself. All of
that in view of holding a founding conference for the civil-society CSCME
process in the near future.
An important topic of the last workshop in
London in October of last year was the Arab Spring which demonstrated that the
pejoratively dismissed "Arab street" is not a passive object for
authoritarian rule, but that societies can offensively fight for their own
needs and interests, and eventually bring about change. This development has
emboldened the initiative for a CSCME as it showed that civil-society pressure
can indeed yield tangible results.
Importantly,
if we see the revolutionary process in the Arab world as motivated by popular
demands of socio-economic justice, political freedoms, and independence, what
is intimately connected to the latter is the question of security, especially
for those countries whose security is so far over-dependent on non-regional
powers.
Beyond
that, there is another front which should make us think about new paths and
solutions. The seemingly never-ending spectacle around the so-called Iran
nuclear conflict has again produced heated debates. With the bulk of the policy debates
endlessly vacillating between a rock (war) and a hard place (sanctions), it is
clear that both options will not alleviate concerns for both nuclear
proliferation and the Iranian civil society's well-being. The only meaningful
way forward would be to abandon such a bogus policy alternative, which has
proven counterproductive and will only push the conflict towards the brink of
war, and instead strive for regional disarmament and eventually a WMD-free
zone. In order to avoid a collision resulting from contentions over nuclear
monopoly and deterrence, the creation of such a zone would arguably constitute
the only meaningful exit. Hence, the desire to bring at the above mentioned UN
conference. For 2012 (perhaps more realistically for 2013), the first United
Nations Middle East WMD-Free Zone Conference is planned, which could ideally
get both Iran and Israel to the table, map out concrete steps towards the
realization of that aim and get civil-society groups involved.
While there can be little doubt that civil
societies across the region are in need of a prospect for common security and
intra-regional cooperation, there can be no less doubt that the so-far
preferred policies affecting the region have proven unsuccessful at best. Only
in an overall Conference for Security and Cooperation in the Middle East
(CSCME) can the intertwined conflicts in the region be addressed in a
sustainable manner. Here, the continuing and increasing insistence from diverse
civil society actors will be indispensable to encourage policy-makers to pave
the way for bringing sustainable peace and security to the region.
Ali Fathollah-Nejad is a Ph.D. candidate in
International Relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS,
University of London) & University of Münster (Germany)
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario