Mideast Youth presentation at Ifrane, Morocco
April 21st, 2007The Civil Rights Leadership Seminar in Morocco was mostly organized by students from the Al Akhawayn University (AUI) in Ifrane, and it was made possible by Atlas and the CATO Institute who funded the event, and of course by the HAMSA initiative who helped put the program together.
According to the AUI website:
“…The aim of the Conference is to spread the principles of the rule of law, a free society, constitutional and limited government, respect of individual rights, and free-market economy”
You can view the very busy schedule of the seminar here. As you can see, it’s full of fascinating and inspiring presentations and discussions.
For me, one of the best presenters was Fadoua Massat, you can read an interview with her here.
Now for some pictures:
Dr. Tom Palmer giving a presentation.
Some of the diverse participants.
Dr. Palmer again giving a presentation on free market economy.
The wonderful Fadoua Massat during her presentation on journalism in Morocco, as well as her exposure of the human trafficking problem of Moroccans in the Gulf.
Sajid Anani, the program manager of the Atlas foundation.
Nasser Weddady from Mauritania, also one of the organizers. He’s extremely interesting! You should read an interview with him here.
And now….For the Mideast Youth presentation!
Our website projected for all to see in the conference room. I am actually a horrible public speaker, but I think I pulled this off fine, because this gained a lot of interest and later most of the people’s discussions with me during the conference revolved around this presentation, meaning people were very interested in what we do. A lot of people were also wondering whether we can help them, and I’m proud to announce the fact that we already are! We set up 2 websites for others in need and they are now ready to move ahead. This is mostly thanks to my friend Amira, who helped out with the banner designs (if you don’t know, Amira is now part of our staff as a web designer.)
This is Tom Palmer helping me out:
And yes I cropped myself out. 
Of course I met many others whom I greatly admire, especially Sami Ben Gharbia who gave an amazing presentation about cyber activism. Here are some photos of his presentation, which I found to be the most impressive:
And the campus was so gorgeous:
And finally, I took this from Fez, around 6 in the morning while I was walking to the airplane. I had to shove a lot of people out of the way for this picture, and still it’s not nearly as great as it was in reality!
I am really happy that I made it to this conference, I was actually in the middle of some exams but I thought this was more important for me and Mideast Youth. And it turns out that I was right. I met very helpful people who are already doing so much to help us, especially Amira from Tunisia, Bedour from Kuwait, Siham from Morocco, and my wonderful roommate Huda from Mauritania (whom I will feature in a podcast very soon.)
If you’re interested, listen to the podcast I took while I was in Ifrane, where I interviewed some students about the Casablanca attacks.
This was my very first official presentation of Mideast Youth (complete with the projection of the website rather than just me speaking about it informally) so I am very happy that I got to share our work, especially to those in the region who could benefit very much from our free support and services.
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What do you think of human rights and free-market economics being tied to one another? To me the two don’t always mesh so well.
They mesh very well in my opinion… economic rights and political rights come hand in hand. If you have one, you may as well demand the other in order to increase your opportunities. Free market economics will do wonders to poverty rates in our region. Look at Oman for example… I would consider it to be a pretty stable nation in terms of finances, and that’s because it has the freest economy in the Arab world. And I think it’s because of this that they’re beginning to open up politically as well.
Well, often you find with the WTO and the so called “free trade” agreements that countries lock into freedom means freedom for companies and wealthy people and it stops there.
Well there’s examples where economic and political freedom were mutually exclusive. Like all the brutal dictatorships and militias in latin america that the United States supported because they were anti-communist, and historically colonial mandate rule tended to forcibly impose “small government” and cutbacks in education and social services.
In Canada government banned DDT as an additive in gasoline because it was toxic, the company that produced the chemical sued the Canadian government and won the case because of a clause in the NAFTA agreement that said they could do whatever they want, so now not only do they have to let them sell the toxic chemical here, the government had to pay them hundreds of millions of dollars of any payback for profits they might have lost when they tried to protect their own citizens.
I know people like to hold Ireland and Chile as examples of successful free market development but i think there’s plenty of others where the result wasn’t pretty, either in the sense of very strong resistance or a very brutal government to make sure there wasn’t one.
I’ve seen more positive results than negative, the classic liberal author Johan Norberg makes a lot of case studies documenting this. His books are really interesting, and are very pro-globalization and free market economy. Especially his book In Defence of Global Capitalism, you can read a brief summary here.
Most of the conferences I’ve attended revolve around topics such as Free Markets, Limited Government, and the Arab World. Fadi Haddadin has always been a great contributor to the lecture sessions, they all have positive and supportive things to say about the idea of a free market economy and the significant change it could lead in Arab countries.
I think there’s limits to what that kind of policy and there’s aspects of the economy and society that you can’t ignore…basically i think there’s a reason why resistance and nationalist movements, whether Nasser or the Muslim Brotherhood or socialism or whatever all had adopted a component of social welfare as part of their platform (whether you agree with their politics or not.)
I think we’ve seen it again with all the outsourcing of work to American companies in Iraq or with their new oil law (or with the Halabja riots.)
I have similar concerns about, say, Siniora’s(sp?) vision for Lebanon. Obviously you need a strong economy so people can support themselves but you have to have a balance. And obviously the dynamic is different in a country with that kind of resource wealth, but I still don’t count out that those think tanks don’t really give a shit about people so long as they (corporations) get what they want out of the deal.
But anyways I don’t know…these are arguments I’ve been perpetually having for like 10 years now, they always go with people pulling their 50 examples all over the world and they get battled out ad nauseum and I don’t know that anyone’s ever going to be convinced either way. I DO think, however, that they’re extremely underdiscussed in favour of all this Islam vs the West type debates all over the place.
I agree with that last part, though I consider myself to be frighteningly ignorant when it comes to all this… I was just never taught any of the above and I consider myself to be pretty well-read, but there aren’t many scholars talking about this in the region. And if there are then they are not widely accessible. Or maybe I am selecting the wrong books to read? I tried reading a few books about free market economy, and about economics in general, but anything having to do with numbers is not my strength, so I never keep it up. The whole GDP GNP GOP crap makes me want to throw the book against the wall for not making any sense.
I think we, the youth, are the ones who need to be listening to these types of discussions which rarely ever take place. But most of the time, these academic discussions aren’t really dumbed down for us. Everytime we are given a lecture, I look around, and I see yawns, people doodling on their pads, others playing with their phones, and most just staring cluelessly (including me.) But I do take pride in the fact that I am learning about many of this during the events I attend, I especially learned a lot from the Turkey conference where almost every lecture revolved around free market economy (especially with regards to Islam, which is an interesting take to say the least.) Even though I am learning, I do not know enough to enter a serious discussion about this…which I guess is sort of embarrassing.
There’s some writing about it in anti-imperialist literature. Like i know Nawal el-Saadawi talks about globalization, and Fanon in “Wretched of the Earth” had a chapter about how it wasn’t enough to just be ruled by arabs if they treated their own people the same way as colonialists did, and why socialism was necessary. If you mean hardcore economics texts, then yeah those are harder to come by cause economics is an extremely conservative discipline. Their pitfall is that they only look at the health of the economy (ie how big the gdp is and how much trade is happening) and don’t look at other indicators of the health of the society and how actual PEOPLE are affected at all (infant mortality, life expectancy, poverty etc etc.) Sociologists will pretty much just look at the latter aspect, political scientists will take both into account if they’re good. I don’t know what you’re studying but if you take a politics of development class you should have the different arguments of different perspective on these issues outlined. Unless your prof is a jerk and just gives you readings on the “side” they prefer, but they’d have to be a pretty big screw up to not even mention what the other schools of thought are.
These were HUGE issues and debates in the west (and elsewhere) right before 9/11 happened and we all got kind of overwhelmed by the war on terror. And I mean they’re definitely still around, but to a much lesser extent. I don’t know if the story of the Seattle riots at the WTO conference was heard of over where you are, but here it was a really big deal. I know about Canada because obviously I live here, but it was a big deal at the time and still is as we’re a country that is pretty resource rich (oil and water) too. But yeah, that there’s a lot of abstract numbers that get thrown around makes it something that’s hard to get people passionate about rather than say torture or immigration or something like that, so it’s easy for it to be obscured.
It can be kind of overwhelming but maybe for basic arguments:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_adjustment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-colonialism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapatista_Army_of_National_Liberation
I read this book a while back and I thought it was pretty decent, if you have the time to kill. There’s also a documentary series called “The Corporation” that was pretty good.
[...] and I think I should include this in the website for once and for all. Ever since I published this entry about the conference in Morocco, certain people are beginning to claim that we are an [...]
I was quite surprise that one of the themes of the conference was free markets as a way to promote and support individual rights. As a recent Political Science graduate, I have extensively been exposed to all sort of politico economic ideas and authors. However, the one I find crucial and indispensible is Karl Polanyi (The Great Transformation 1944), in which he describes, among other things, the systemic consequences of the industrial revolution in the United Kingdom. My favorite concept is that markets do not arise by themselves and they are not self-regulating. They are embedded in society. Dr Palmer who is a fellow of the CATO institute, which apparently funded the event, has vaunted the merits of free markets without pointing out that free markets do not exist (as Adam Smith himself pointed out) and really need a regulatory framework in order to exist and see their “free” aspect secured.
When it comes to economic and political rights, I think there is some sort of correlation between the two in certain instances. The rise of a limited kind of democracy in the 18th century UK, was the consequence of an assertion of the merchant upper classes’ (bourgeoisie) right to dispose of their property as they wished (enclosure movement) whatever the Court thought about the matter (Barrington Moore Jr, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy).
There are more eminent political scientists, social economists, institutional economists and political economists that warn about the consequences of free markets. The government has to be there continuously, making sure that those who suffer the most from the market are taken care of, otherwise the system will crumble. I believe that Milton Friedman and most of the members of the Chicago school are arguing on a very theoretical level (when they talk about free markets), and are totally disconnected from the realities on the ground.
More authors to check out: Charles Lindblom (Politics and Markets, 1977), Albert Hirshman (Rival Views of Market Society, 1990), Douglass North (strcuture and change in economic history, 1981).
As to neo-colonialism, Samir Amin, Frank Evans and Kiren Aziz Chaudhry (who used to be professor) can be very useful without being too theoritical.
I do not mean to have a lecturing tone at all. I just LOVE this subject matter and would be more than delighted to expose and be exposed on different perspectives and ideas on the topic.
A big hand to the student organizers of the Conference. Keep up the good
work!!
I apologize for any typos or mispellings (i’m in a hurry and I had to post something after reading some of the comments).
PS: Is there a political science (or political econ) major at AUI?