In the summer of 2011, directors Ismail Elmokadem and Zahra Mackaoui produced a documentary called “Democracy Camp” for the Al-Jazeera program Witness. The film’s focus is on the Arab Digital Expression Camp, an organization that “aims to get children from various Arab countries involved in different tools of digital media to express themselves and discover their identity in both culture and heritage.” Filmed mere months after the Arab Spring shook the entire Middle East to its core, the documentary centers around the stories of four different attendees from four different Arab nations, both during their camp experience and one year later. Their struggle to better understand the idea of democracy while working with it in microcosm, all in the immediate wake of massive revolutionary upheaval, resulted in profound changes among all of the children involved, deepening their resolve to become even greater participants in the democratic process within their respective nations. But it was the story of Rahma, a 12-year-old girl from Yemen, that stood out to me the most.
An aspiring videographer, Rahma put together a harrowing documentary that focused not on violence, but on ignorance. Not global ignorance of the Middle East, but the Arabic ignorance of Yemen. Like most of the nations in the region, Yemen has experienced much of its own political upheaval over the years, mostly focused during the Arab Spring upon the ousting of then-president Ali Abdullah Saleh. The grievances of the Yemeni are largely the same as those of the rest of the region: endemic government corruption, rampant unemployment, and a widening chasm of economic disparity between rich and poor. But after Rahma interviewed several of her fellow camp mates about the state of Yemeni politics, she found that they knew little or nothing about her country, nor the plight of its people. “I thought I would make good friends here who would know how I was feeling…just like I know what is going on in there countries,” she told the film crew. “They don’t know about the political system there. They don’t know our President, or where it is on the map, or anything.”
Does this sound familiar to you?
According to a poll conducted by National Geographic in 2006, nine out of ten American young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 could not locate Afghanistan on a map, and seven out of ten were unable to locate Iran or Israel. An understanding of geography is critical to an understanding of cultural diversity, as the borders drawn between nations tend to reveal much about those nations themselves. It would seem that your average American’s knowledge of both subjects is sorely lacking, and it explains a great deal about why our foreign policy has been allowed to take shape in the way it has.
Simply put, we need to stop looking at Arabs as one people, and the Middle East as one country. From what I’ve seen, they sure as hell don’t see themselves that way.
The collective ignorance of Yemeni politics among other Arab nations very much mirrors our own collective ignorance of the Middle East, and this translates into our foreign policy by creating an assumption that all of the problems of the region can be met with simple solutions, namely western democracy and unilateral police action. This not only oversimplifies the vast complexities of democracy itself, it also deeply underscores the atrocities committed in the name of freedom, liberty, and emancipation not only in the Middle East, but throughout the world. The needs and desires of people vary widely across various regions of America, where most of our states are larger than many entire nations across the globe. So how could that somehow not be the case when speaking of a multitude of nations across any other geographic region?
The mixed blessing that is American exceptionalism leads us to believe quite deeply in William Ross Wallace’s assertion that “the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world,” all the while failing to understand that each nation must be allowed to at some point decide for itself its own path towards democracy with minimal intervention. If we as Americans can gain a better understanding of the different nations of the Middle East and the terms under which they interact, we will gain a better understanding of how their own struggles for liberty and equality so closely resemble our own, and how important it is for us to reduce our presence in the region. Our persistent meddling in Middle Eastern affairs has created far more problems for us than it has yet to solve, and to continue on in our present role as both liberators and litigators will lead only towards further and even greater problems. We cannot indefinitely extend both the bayonet and the olive branch simultaneously without expecting those at the receiving end to eventually place mistrust in both. Only our ignorance propels us to do so.
We must begin to collectively engage in our own “Democracy Camp” both here and abroad, using the powerful tools at our disposal to explore the vast and complex world around us. I can assure you that if we do so, stories like Rahma’s will soon become the stuff of memory.
Let’s start with geography lessons.
Randle Aubrey is a political journalist with the Daily Echo and can be reached at thedailyecho@gmail.com