LONDON: There are “important parallels” between mass protests in the Arab world and those in the US, as well as “lessons to be drawn” from them, journalist and author Sam Dagher said on Thursday during a webinar attended by Arab News and hosted by the Council for Arab-British Understanding.
However, “the context and circumstances are very different,” and “the responsiveness of the system and institutions to the protests are vastly different,” said Dagher, author of the book “Assad or We Burn the Country: How One Family’s Lust for Power Destroyed Syria.”
The main parallels, he added, are that the protests are mostly youth-led, decentralized and leaderless.
Dagher also cited similarities in slogans, protestor tactics of occupying streets and blocking roads, and the “war of narratives” between demonstrators and the government.
In the US, underlying the killing of George Floyd were “inequality, the militarization of policing and law enforcement that often sees communities of color as the enemy, the systematic poverty and huge wealth gap between blacks and other minorities and white Americans, and one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world that affects black people disproportionately,” he said.
“Obviously each Arab country had its own circumstances and varying degrees of oppression, but overall the underlying causes were pretty much similar,” he added.
The causes include “lack of justice, lack of dignity, the system serving the rulers and their cronies, poverty, lack of economic opportunities, corruption on every level coloring every facet of people’s lives, the opportunities and rights that average citizens have depending on their proximity to power, and people muzzled and oppressed for decades by different means, including brutal police-state apparatuses.”
While violence is apparent in both regions, the Arab world has seen more protestor deaths, with Iraq alone registering over 700 between November 2019 and January 2020.
“Obviously there were no shoot-to-kill orders in the US, but we all saw the extreme violence that was deployed in some cities to quell the protests,” said Dagher.
“The National Guard was deployed, and even (President Donald) Trump was contemplating sending in combat troops, active-duty troops — as happened in several Arab countries — before he was restrained by retired generals and the Pentagon itself at some point.”
But the “biggest and most important difference” between the two regions “is that the system is responsive in America, at least so far. A month into these protests, we’re seeing some important changes taking place,” said Dagher.
“For the first time, policemen are being accused of crimes, are being fired, are being imprisoned, are awaiting trial. They’re barring the chokehold from being used by police in many cities. They’re talking about even more reforms in some police departments. There’s talk of defunding the police, of moving money away from police to social services,” he added.
“Even now, the unthinkable, people are talking about reparations being paid to black Americans to compensate them for the enslavement and policies that have impoverished them over the decades,” Dagher said.
“We’re seeing an awakening, a real awakening, in America, the Middle East and other parts of the world. People are saying ‘we can’t go back to how things were,’ and I think coronavirus and its consequences are accelerating that process.”