Dead Sea, Jordan: The Dead Sea meeting of the World Economic Forum was a bizarre mix of determined optimism and deep pessimism. Social entrepreneurs spoke about building inclusive prosperity and the importance of reforming education to encourage young people to think for themselves, while the politicians and security experts spoke of civil wars stretching on for many years and the many millions of short-term refugees becoming a permanent feature of the Arab world.
The Iraq sessions concluded that the current international coalition against Daesh is doing too little to make much difference, while the success of the Iranian-backed Popular Mobilisation militias offer the serious political threat of deeper Iranian interference in Iraqi politics.
“Daesh are outgunning the army and they are better commanded”, said one military expert pointing out that Daesh has beaten Hezbollah, Jabhat Al Nusra, the Iraqi and Syrian armies as well as assorted tribal and regional forces like the Peshmerga. This situation gave strength to the position of the interventionists among the Iraqis and some Americans like former Ambassador Ryan Crocker who argued for a larger and far more vigorous role for American and international forces
No one saw anyway forward in Syria, and there was no mention of the Geneva process or any other forum in which different parties might be able to talk. The military commentators spoke of Russian and Iranian support allowing the regime to resist any immediate pressure to talk, and the disintegration of the opposition into an incoherent mass of different parties. One veteran of Syrian negotiations spoke of a recent meeting when 40 different opposition parties all turned up with little to unite them.
Meanwhile 3.5 million Syrians are registered refugees outside the country with many more unregistered, and seven million are internally displaced, which means that hundreds of thousands of children are growing up in poverty and despair.
As one official from UNHCR commented: “Efforts to cope with the largest humanitarian crisis have been grossly underfunded. Syrians have the choice of living in poverty and despair, or crossing back into Syria and taking a $2,000 [Dh7,346] monthly salary from Daesh which allows them to support their family”.
Nonetheless, a commendable number of very determined people refuse to despair. Despite the ferociously anti-Arab comments from some new ministers in Netanyahu’s new government, “we have to support the two-state solution,” said one Palestinian who is involved in the World Economic Forum’s Palestine-Israel initiative called Breaking the Impasse, which seeks to develop business-to-business links as a confidence building measure. “What else can we do?” he said.
Others are looking at the staggering numbers of young Arabs that will come on the job market in the next 20 years. “Our young people are an opportunity for growth and not a problem to be solved. We cannot think of them as a problem. We need to identify with them and think of them as the solution to our challenges,” said Shaikha Budoor Bint Sultan Al Qasimi, chair of Sharjah’s Investment and Development Authority, Shurooq, who was also one of the four co-chairs of this year’s meeting of the World Economic Forum.
