Hanging out with the wrong crowd

The cosy relationships that the EU and its member states have maintained with dictators in northern Africa suddenly look like a big mistake.

● Arab revolt exposes the EU’s double standards

● Hardmen briefing

The European Union has always had difficulties in dealing with dictators on its doorsteps. From Serbia’s Slobodan Miloševic (toppled in 2000) to Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali (toppled last month), it has found it necessary to engage with the hardmen who make up the majority of rulers in its neighbourhood.

But such absolute rulers also have a habit, wittingly or unwittingly, of dividing the member states. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Union’s relations with Russia, where a semi-authoritarian regime has consolidated power over the past decade. This is a particular problem for the EU, whose foreign policy is supposed to rest on values rather than value-free interests.

The tensions between values and interests were on stark display in Brussels last week, when José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, received Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan’s dictator, for a working lunch. Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, described Barroso’s invitation as “appalling”, while EU diplomats defended the move by pointing to supposed progress on media freedom and political prisoners (a finding that Roth and others dispute). A diplomat said that the sanctions against Uzbekistan, imposed after the Andijan massacre of 2005, were dropped because they had failed to produce results. So, Roth contends, has the EU’s re-engagement.

Quiet diplomacy

But it is the events of the past couple of weeks in North Africa and the Middle East that have highlighted the limitations of quiet diplomacy. The ousting of Ben Ali and the sweeping protests it has inspired in Egypt against the harsh rule of Hosni Mubarak, have put the EU in an uncomfortable spot. The EU, like the United States, is tainted by its close association with Middle Eastern dictators who appeared, for decades, to be guarantors of stability. With that stability gone, so is the rationale for supporting them, leaving the EU and its member states scrambling for a policy. The upheaval in the Middle East has forced the EU to articulate a position at a time when none has been fully developed.

Following the regime change in Tunisia, Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, sent a senior official to brief the media about what had happened. The official, speaking last week on condition of anonymity, all but took credit for the ‘Jasmine Revolution’. “The basic idea of our relationship [with the countries of North Africa] has been to induce change,” he said. “We were trying to foster reforms that have opened up societies and created development. In the Mediterranean, what we have been trying to do is push for change, foster reform.”

“We do support the aspirations of the people in the Middle East,” he said. “We are in favour of political systems that share our values and practices. Should that change [toward such systems] happen in any other country, we would be extremely happy.” That was a dramatic departure from the EU’s public statements, which had been hesitant and sought to portray events in Tunisia as an isolated case.

But now, after Ben Ali’s fall, diplomats and officials say that the EU had always worked toward a more democratic Middle East. A line that was confirmed, albeit with greater subtlety, by Štefan Füle, the European commissioner for the neighbourhood, who told MEPs last Wednesday (26 January): “I am committed to ensuring that we do our utmost to support the emerging democratic Tunisia that can become a model and a source of hope, for people in the Maghreb, the Arab world and beyond.”

During the days that followed, Ashton stuck to the public script, and the glimpse of a more expansive policy in Füle’s speech went largely unnoticed. Ashton called on the Egyptian authorities – who at that point were killing their own citizens – to “urgently establish a constructive and peaceful way to respond to the legitimate aspirations of Egyptian citizens for democratic and socioeconomic reforms”.

Fact File

Muammar Qadaffi

Qaddafi has been in power since 1969, which makes him the longest-serving Arab leader, and has brutally suppressed any opposition. Unlike other Middle Eastern dictators who pander to Western fears of “instability”, Qaddafi visibly enjoys making mischief and has interfered widely across Africa (as well as sponsoring international terrorism in Europe). Again in contrast to other regional leaders, he styles himself a political thinker, outlining his mixture of Arab nationalism with Socialism and Islam in his ‘Green Book’ in the 1970s.  In recent years, Qaddafi has given up his programme to develop weapons of mass destruction and has co-operated with the UK on terrorism investigations and with Italy on illegal migration.
The EU lifted its sanctions against the country in 2004 and has provided financial assistance to its health sector and to efforts to curb illegal migration.

Hosni Mubarak

Until days ago one of the most powerful leaders in the Middle East, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak has suddenly become the most vulnerable. This former air force commander had made few concessions to his citizens since he took over as when Anwar el-Sadat was assassinated in 1981. But in the face of public hostility and civil unrest, Mubarak announced his intention to stand down later this year and appointed the first vice-president Egypt has had in 30 years. The new man, Omar Suleiman, is closely linked to the past: he was the chief of Egypt’s intelligence service and co-operated closely with the US administration (notably on the ‘extraordinary renditions’ through which the Bush administration outsourced torture). Egypt’s popular revolution has already weakened Mubarak and it is impossible to predict whether it will be prepared to accept his replacement by someone with equally weak democratic credentials.

Bashar Al-Assad

Al-Assad took over one of the Middle East’s most repressive regimes when his father, Hafez, died in 2000 after ruling Syria with an iron fist for three decades. Bashar’s brother, Basil, had been groomed for the succession, but his death in a car crash in 1994 meant that al-Assad – a London-trained eye doctor – had to step in. He was initially seen as a technocrat, even a reformer, but soon disappointed hopes that he might open up the country. But he did release hundreds of political prisoners, and has taken hesitant steps to liberalise the economy. He might accelerate reforms following the recent events in the region. “If you didn’t see the need of reform before what happened in Egypt and Tunisia,” he told the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, “it’s too late to do any reform.”

Ilham Aliyev

Aliyev inherited power from his late father, Heidar, who had led Azerbaijan when it was still part of the Soviet Union, and again after the demise of communism. Aliyev won a presidential election in 2003 and again in 2008, but both polls were far from free and fair. Azerbaijan, like the other two republics of the south Caucasus, is a member of the EU’s Eastern Partnership, and relations have generally been cordial. Under the EU’s neighbourhood programme, Azerbaijan received bilateral aid worth €92 million in 2007-10 (raised to €122.5m  for 2011-13), and the country is currently negotiating an association agreement with the EU. Azerbaijan is an important producer of natural gas and is a crucial source for the EU-backed Nabucco pipeline project.  During a January visit to the country to discuss energy, José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, said that Aliyev saw EU values as an “inspiration” for his own country.

Islam Karimov

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Uzbekistan’s dictator is perhaps the purest example of a proper tyrant in the EU’s neighbourhood. He gained brief notoriety in 2005, when his security forces killed hundreds in the town of Andijan.  The EU imposed sanctions that were subsequently lifted when Karimov rejected demands for an independent inquiry into Andijan. Uzbekistan has one of the world’s most vicious regimes, with thousands languishing in Soviet-era labour camps and scores being killed in prison. But Karimov’s transgressions have not stopped the EU (as well as the US and NATO, which uses the country as a transit route to Afghanistan) from trying to build some kind of relationship. He was received by José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, last week (24 January). According to Barroso, Karimov “expressed his commitment to further deepen democratic reforms in Uzbekistan”. 

Alyaksandr Lukashenka

Belarus’s president has been in power for close to two decades and shows no sign of loosening his grip. The EU, which has had an on-again, off-again relationship with him, imposed successive sanctions in response to election fraud and the disappearance in 1999-2000 of political opponents and a journalist. Election-related sanctions were suspended in 2008, when the regime appeared to be opening up, if cautiously. But the EU’s policy of engagement with Lukashenka became untenable in December, when the regime hijacked a presidential election and brutally cracked down on the opposition. EU sanctions were reimposed on Monday (31 January). While he clearly retains a level of popular support, discontent with political oppression has grown to the point where Lukashenka, or factions within his regime, felt the need to claw back some of the freedoms granted to the opposition in the run-up to December’s election.
 

Change of tone

The tone changed both in the US and in Europe at the weekend, following huge demonstrations and scores of deaths across Egypt on Friday and Saturday. According to diplomats, the trigger was Mubarak’s speech to the nation on Friday night, his first since the unrest erupted: although Mubarak dismissed his government, he made clear his determination to stay on, and to use force to preserve stability. Barack Obama, the US president, not only called Mubarak to insist that he stick to his promise of more democracy, but he also made his comments public. And, on Sunday, Obama called for the “orderly transition to a government that is responsive to the aspirations of the Egyptian people” – unprecedented language coming from Mubarak’s closest ally.

Some Europeans quickly picked up on the new line. On Monday, on his arrival for the EU’s Foreign Affairs Council in Brussels, Franco Frattini, Italy’s foreign minister, said: “We should encourage and promote an orderly transition toward a more democratic situation…while avoiding to interfere in what will be the decision of Egyptians and Tunisians.”

Absence of strategy

These wild swerves are a reflection of a fluid situation, but they also highlight the absence of an EU strategy on democratisation and on the Middle East. The EU lacks the mechanisms for a serious, strategic approach. It tried twice to put structures in place for its relations with the Mediterranean littoral, first with the Barcelona process and then with the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM). The process was a disappointment and the UfM hardly survives, despite its high-pomp inauguration by France in July 2008. The idea that engagement on cleaning up the Mediterranean or that sound financial management would somehow lead to better governance in these countries has been discredited. But the EU has nothing with which to replace it.

As the events in Egypt have shown, the big question – that of how to deal with dictators in the neighbourhood – remains open. As Carl Bildt, foreign minister of Sweden, wrote on Twitter on Monday morning, “Can EU really be a force for reforms and the rule of law in its neighbourhood? That’s the issue now.”