Day: July 26, 2013
Real reform requires organized action
Marwan Muasher, former Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister of Jordan, is now a vice president at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. A leading figure calling for reform in Jordan, he was interviewed by Ala’ Alrababa’h of peacefare.net:
Click here to view this interview in Arabic.
Q. How do you expect events in Egypt to impact the Muslim Brotherhood and the reform process in Jordan? Would they weaken the Muslim Brotherhood? And would they be used as an excuse to hinder the reform process?
A. I think the Arab World should establish the rules of democracy in a way that allows everyone to work. I don’t believe in excluding anyone from the political sphere, whether it is the Muslim Brotherhood or otherwise. I also believe that excluding the Muslim Brotherhood by force, or not involving them in governance by force, has helped to strengthen rather than weaken them. If we look at the Egyptian or Tunisian experience, we see that the Brotherhood did not become weak among the population using force. [They were only weakened] when they took power and had to apply the slogans they called for, whether economic or political [slogans].
In the short term, I am not optimistic about Egypt, because the other side, the civilian forces, treat the Brotherhood with the same exclusion it accused the Brotherhood of. They [civilian forces] accuse the Brotherhood of wanting to exclude others, while they do the same thing. And I believe that the best would be to agree on the rules of the game from the outset, such that everyone receives guarantees that all political and social forces in the society would not be marginalized or excluded, and that they can participate in ruling before writing a new constitution that gets the approval of all sectors of society.
As for us in Jordan, it is possible to read what happened in Egypt in two ways. The first way, which is happening now, and I think it is wrong, is to see that the Muslim Brotherhood was excluded in Egypt, and thus we can do the same in Jordan. And as I said, I don’t think that exclusion happens by force, and if it happens by force, it would help to strengthen, rather than weaken, the Muslim Brotherhood. Or it could be read in another way, which is what I hope the Jordanian society would reach, with the help of the wise people in the society, that this is time to agree on the rules of a game, which allows everyone to participate in the political process, and that prevents anyone from monopolizing this process in the future. Would this happen soon? The signs so far are not encouraging.
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