THE brash little city-state of Dubai jovially claims to have won a Guinness record for the world’s biggest-ever fireworks display, but other Arab capitals greeted the new year with gloom rather than glee. From Cairo to Beirut and Damascus to Baghdad, the historic hubs of Arab civilisation, commentary on the past year was uniformly bleak—and the prognosis for the coming one laden with doom, too.In a provocative editorial, Ghassan Charbel, editor of Al-Hayat, a London-based Arabic daily, spelt out unvarnished truths he ascribed to an unnamed senior politician. We should drop all pretence, suggested Mr Charbel’s anonymous interlocutor. We should admit that the Arab spring’s toppling of dictators has simply split our flimsy nations into clashing sects and tribes. We should admit that the struggle for Palestine has faded from our thoughts, that our own squabbling has granted Israel its greatest victory yet without the loss of a single soldier, and that the central struggle for us now is the one between Sunnis and Shias. After all this blood and slaughter, from Iraq to Syria and beyond, we should admit that we Arabs no longer want to live together.Walid al-Bunni, a veteran Syrian human-rights activist, penned an equally despairing summary for the news website All4Syria. “Must we wait until complete exhaustion in a hideous sectarian war so that the...
From The Economist: Middle East and Africa
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