Change Begins with the Security Services

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

A number of Arab rulers tried to absorb the youth revolution by dismissing the government and forming a new one, treating this as a grand headline of their responsiveness to the demands for change. This is what happened in Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Bahrain. The Arab rulers imagined that the people were so profoundly ignorant as to believe that it is the minister who makes decisions, draws up policies, and orders their execution, and that a mere reshuffling of ministers, or the replacement of one government with another, would be convincing to the street and would calm people’s minds. This assumption did not hold true in any Arab state, for the simple reason that a minister is nothing more than a senior administrative official, who possesses no authority to draw up the policies of the state.

Arab governments are essentially councils of “tartours” — a tartour being someone who has no capacity to make decisions and simply follows the will of another — steered by the security services, chiefly the intelligence apparatus, which typically coordinates with the head of state or His Majesty the King. The ministers possess no authority to make decisions concerning the state’s internal and external policies; they possess only the authority to make decisions concerning the daily affairs of the people. They do not draw up economic policy, they know nothing of security policy, and they do not decide social or economic policy; they merely manage people’s affairs according to policies already drawn up in advance by the regime.

Before an Arab cabinet is formed, and also after it is formed, the security services meet with the ministers, or with the candidates being considered for ministerial posts, to confer with them. This task is usually carried out by the head of intelligence, who either summons them to intelligence headquarters or meets them elsewhere as a kind of counterfeit show of esteem. In the course of this consultation, the intelligence chief, or whoever stands in for him, makes it understood to these excellencies the tartours that security is the ultimate authority in the country, the one that decides, and he warns them politely that none of them should imagine himself a decision-maker, and that all of them must abide by what is called “the higher policy.” The talk is usually explicit when it comes to the media, and it is made clear that discussing the country’s higher policy is forbidden. Then they sit down to a meal of mansaf, or kabsa, or couscous, so that everyone understands that concern for the belly matters more than concern for the homeland.

[A ministry official] knows what serves the nation’s interest, but he is sidelined, or kept out of sight, so that he does not “contaminate” others by infecting them with patriotic feeling.

It is the security services that terrify people; it is they who visit them in the late hours of the night, and who spy on them during the day. It is they who watch them, summon them, interrogate them, curse and abuse them, threaten them, expel them from their jobs, pursue them even into the bread their children eat, arrest them, consign them to the depths of prisons, and perhaps kill them, exile them, or mutilate their bodies. It is these very services that decide whether a citizen is respectable and of good conduct or not, that decide whether he is fit for a post or not, and whether he deserves to receive a salary from a country that is supposedly his own. These criminal apparatuses are the ones that set the standards of morality and respect, and decide who must eat and who must go hungry. Giants of learning, letters, and thought in this great Arab homeland have been thrown by the intelligence services onto street corners, searching for work, because they refused to be tools of the regime. A mangy operative in intelligence who cannot even undo a knot easily and recklessly assails scholars, writers, and thinkers, strips them of even their most minimal rights, and boasts over them before the patrons of bars and dens of prostitution.

The regime in every Arab state is essentially a gang of thieves, highwaymen, thugs, and hoodlums, headed by His Majesty the King or His Excellency the President, surrounded by the chiefs of the security services and certain figures close to him who may hold no official position at all, along with his sons and some of his relatives and friends. In every Arab state, there is a gang that rules, that controls the necks of the people, and that subjects them to the bitterness of humiliation and torment. This person who appears on television screens reviewing an honor guard, whose name is chanted by crowds of hypocrites, and whom the media celebrate, is nothing more than a hoodlum, a thug, and a base opportunist, skilled at nothing except being the boss of a gang.

If there is, among the Arab rulers, one who is truly zealous for the nation — and I see none of them as such — then he must pursue a program of change that begins by dismantling the gang, whose principal axis is the chiefs of the security services. Sacrificing the government, or a few ministers, is no indication whatsoever of a genuine intention to change; and if that intention truly existed, the first step would be to seize the directors of the security services, to arrest the gang of capitalists, and to rid the country of the underlings who carry out the dirty work without the public’s knowledge.

Would any Arab ruler dare to do such a thing? If there is among them one who is the opposite of what we assume, he could take shelter with the people from the very gang he heads. The peoples are now out in the streets, ready for sacrifice and self-giving, and capable of protecting genuine decisions and measures of change. And could the boss of a gang possibly become a leader of change? It is possible, in one case only: that he is new to the trade, and has not yet managed to adapt to the atmosphere of degeneration.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “التغيير يبدأ بالأجهزة الأمنية” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.