The president of Yemen will stand for yet another term. So what's new, asks Hassan Nafaa* When, a year ago Yemeni President Ali Abdallah Saleh announced he would not run for another term many suspected it was the opening gambit in an attempt to orchestrate a groundswell of public pressure that would "force" him to rescind his decision. Apparently he sensed that people were not taking him at his word and a few days ago took the world by surprise by reiterating his resolution of a year ago. He stressed that his decision was not a ploy or a PR gambit, and that it was final. With that statement there was no option but to believe him. Regardless of his true motives, the decision appeared to merit the highest praise and encouragement. Look what good intentions and the will to act can do, I thought. President Ali Saleh is about to set an example and contribute to shaking the foundations of the edifice of dictatorship that has brought the Arab world to its current degradation. This is the kind of decision that can only be taken by a sensitive, altruistic and patriotic individual. I even had no hesitation to add, in an article that appeared in last Sunday's Al-Masri Al-Yom, that "Ali Abdallah Saleh may well be the Arab leader who least deserves to go. The man can claim, correctly this time, that he played a historic role in bringing about the unity of Yemen and then in saving his country from collapse and ruin. The part he played has been recognised as indispensable for setting this ancient country on the beginnings of the road to stability and progress." I caught myself just in time, adding that "no role, however great, justifies clinging to power and working to perpetuate one's rule forever. One of the most important lessons of history is that attempts by rulers to perpetuate themselves inevitably lead to disaster." The hopes pinned on President Saleh's decision did not last long. Less than 24 hours later he pulled a third surprise and announced that he had bowed to popular pressure to run for another term. The sceptics were right all along. The Yemeni president turned out to be no different from other Arab leaders, contrary to the belief and hope of naïve people like myself. President Saleh's decision to change his mind and accept nomination for another seven- year term of office, after which he will have ruled for a total of 35 years, is symptomatic of both the Arab world's crisis of leadership and its problems with democratic transition. Call them what you will -- kings, sultans, presidents, emirs -- all Arab heads of state are part of this conundrum. Not one of them, including those who call themselves presidents of republics (one of whom is in his 37th year of rule) is prepared to voluntarily give up his post, preferring instead to move from the palace to the grave and face his reckoning with the Lord rather than with his people. If this phenomenon persists there can be no hope for democracy in the Arab world in the near or distant future. There is no such thing as democracy without the peaceful rotation of power and there can be no peaceful rotation of power until presidential terms are limited and absolute monarchies become constitutional ones. If this region appears obstinately resistant to peaceful democratic transformation, it is due in large measure to presidents who refuse to be restricted to a set number of terms, and to monarchs who refuse to budge an inch towards a proper parliamentary system. In those few Arab republics with constitutions that still limit the number of terms their presidents can serve, the presidents make no bones about their desire to do away with the limitation and are fully confident that they will be able to do so. So is the problem of despotism in the Arab world the product of the mode of leadership, of something ingrained in Arab culture, or of both? There is no simple answer to this complex question, though examining the qualitative shift in the nature and structure of Arab regimes may help unravel part of the mystery. Half a century ago, when the winds of upheaval swept the Arab world it was the army, as opposed to the masses, political parties and radical movements, that seemed to furnish the most fierce route to change. Within the space of two decades military cliques staged coups in Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and elsewhere. The irony is that after excluding the people, political parties and radical political movements from any effective voice in producing change, the military regimes themselves grew incapable of change. And in multiplying and diversifying security apparatuses and concentrating power and decision-making in the hands of a single individual, the post-coup regimes ensured that they could not themselves be deposed by the methods that brought them to power, leading to the ironic situation in which some of the so- called republican systems have reverted to quasi monarchies, reintroducing hereditary succession to power. The Egyptian political system best illustrates the mechanisms by which despotism reproduces itself. History makes it abundantly clear that the political order brought into being by the revolution of July 1952 is inherently incapable of peaceful rotation of power. While the army, which spearheaded the drive to overturn the old order, placed Abdel-Nasser in power, power was subsequently bequeathed by what we might term "succession by presidential appointment". Sadat came to power only because Nasser had appointed him vice president shortly before his sudden death. Fate or coincidence had been kind to Sadat, since there is no guarantee that he would have remained Nasser's preferred choice for any length of time. Fate played a similar role in the succession of President Hosni Mubarak. Had Sadat not appointed Mubarak as vice president, then he would not have "inherited" the post following the assassination of the incumbent. These coincidences helped create the impression, while the old version of constitutional Article 76 was still in effect, that the president was mandated to appoint his successor, whereas such a mandate never had any basis in law. In all events, Mubarak has taken advantage of the ambiguity to renew his term as Egypt's absolute ruler four times. Succession to the office could have continued along such lines until God determined otherwise, except that, for reasons that he alone knows, Mubarak never appointed a vice president. Then, for reasons that are equally obscure, he decided to amend the constitution in order to allow multi-candidate presidential elections by direct secret ballot; it was a decision that could have changed the entire system of government had Article 76 been amended so as to allow for real competition for the presidency. Unfortunately the amendment ruled out that possibility and effectively barred access to the office of president to anyone outside the ruling party. Since this development coincided with Gamal Mubarak's rise through the ranks of the NDP, it does not take any genius to understand that the real purpose of amending Article 76 was to pave the way for Gamal to succeed his father. In other words, nothing has changed. The regime is determined to perpetuate itself, whatever the legal formalities it in which it couches that determination. For more than half a century the office of the president, in which resides all authority, has only been vacated by the natural death or assassination of the incumbent. There are no signs that this will change in the foreseeable future. The political order created by the July Revolution was able to adjust to three completely different types of leadership, each with its own project. The revolutionary style of leadership, embodied by Abdel-Nasser, led a project of national liberation, autonomous development and unity. Sadat championed the adventurers' school of leadership and his project was the reverse of Nasser's: to promote capitalist development, ally Egypt with the West and make peace with Israel. Next came Mubarak's bureaucratic presidency, with its project for modular administration and government for the sake of government. Each of these three projects encountered early obstacles that subsequently span out of control. For the Nasserist project it was the collapse of the union with Syria in 1962, generating a situation that placed Israel in a position to deliver the fatal blow in 1967. The bread riots were Sadat's first major setback; he dubbed them the "thieves uprising". Following the riots he committed mistake after mistake, increasingly cutting himself off from the people until he stood alone, only to be cut down by an assassin's bullet. In the case of the Mubarak project, problems began the moment he had finished mending the rifts in society that Sadat had opened, having succeeded in ensuring the Israeli withdrawal from Sinai and the return of the Arab League to its headquarters in Cairo. His failure was to constantly try to shore up a crumbling order and, in so doing, to open the floodgates to new tensions and the threat of another disaster. If these three leaders had realised that it was a form of government that does not provide for the peaceful rotation of authority and, hence, for the renewal of the ruling elite by democratic means, that was the real cause of the challenges to their diverse projects, the above-mentioned disasters would probably have been averted. If Nasser had initiated a serious process of democratic transformation in the wake of the breakup with Syria, even if that meant having to step down as president, the catastrophe of 1967 would not have occurred. Had Sadat done the same thing following the bread riots, he would not have perpetuated the spiral of errors that ultimately led to his death. Mubarak, at least, still has the chance to take the necessary steps towards true democratic transformation, thereby warding off looming disaster. At this point the real dilemma, though, resides not so much in whether the president has the courage to step down at the appropriate time but in whether he has the will to lay the appropriate institutional groundwork so that the country can choose his successors more wisely and systematically. This is the most important lesson we should derive from the current situation in Yemen. * The writer is a professor of political science at Cairo University.
