But social networking thrust itself to the fore and the state television channels as much as politicians, religious leaders or know-it-alls could no longer easily preach their hackneyed and jaundiced messages that lifted up the ‘rulers’ and lifted down others! So welcome to my fresh world in the broader MENA region where social media and digital diplomacy, already exercised by ambassadors, politicians and parliamentarians, let alone Pope Benedict XVI, replaced the opinions of longstanding intellectuals and interwove to signify openness as much as an understanding of current realities that were heretofore hidden behind dense smokescreens. The top-down pyramid was slowly re-discovering its base, and new tools of social media are now spawning from every corner. Only recently, I discovered Syria Deeply, one of many Google+ Hangouts that bring the political kaleidoscope of Syria onto viewers’ screens.

I am now living this experience in my modest way as I broaden my political work across a large swathe of the MENA region. Discussing politics with a few people over a brandy is definitely anachronistic today if one truly wishes to understand the region by touching the political heartbeat or feeling the cultural pulse of ordinary men and women. No amount of high-brow diplomacy, meetings at the EU in Brussels, or even conclaves in churches, would alone translate the picture to any inquisitive mind. Be it on Palestine, Syria, Egypt, Iran or elsewhere, a new let alone demanding and time-consuming world has opened up and the trick for any zealous convert like me is to learn managing this new tool so I learn to control it and it does not overwhelm me or turn me into a political nerd!

But in a world that teems with many conflicts feeding on steroids, social media has become the tool and digital diplomacy the response for the way forward. Social networking is what tells me about the instant reality across miles, oceans and continents. It is what informs journalists and pundits through their user-generated contents or even responsible self-censorship. It is what helps an ambassador or parliamentarian pick the buzz on the street or the complaint of a constituent group. Cigars and chin-wags are no longer sufficient in a smokeless world.

Let me take myself as an example again. In Syria, for instance, I have benefited from those messages coming from ordinary activists talking about events inside a country that is not often accessible or hospitable. Otherwise, how would I know almost instantly that Syria is trying to create diversions by sending tanks into the demilitarised zone of the Golan Heights when it had not fired a single bullet toward Israel for four decades! Or learn the über-story about the Gay Girl in Damascus who turned out to be a man or about Zainab Omar Al-Husni who had ostensibly never gone AWOL? How would I gauge the reaction of Syrian men and women inside the country to the newly-formed opposition coalition with Ahmed Moadh Khatib, Riad Seif, Suhair Atassi or George Sabra?

Where else would I get byte-by-byte accounts of the detention of the Bahraini activist Nabeel Rajab and then gauge the reaction on the street? Would I hear about the gaoled netizen Sattar Beheshti as he was interrogated and later died at the Evin prison in Iran? Or else that Hakem al-Mutairi, an Islamist who wrote an article ‘undermining’ the Emir's status ten years ago, was called by Kuwait's public prosecutor for interrogation? If I were to rely solely on my ‘official’ or ‘ecumenical’ sources, would I learn the real story behind the Christian divisions in Syria amongst those supporting the regime, the majority who are fearfully sitting on the fence and those who are offering their lives in order to effect change? Would I be stuck in a time warp that parrots the sad mantra of those multi-faith leaders about their proclaimed realities that are disingenuous at best and even counter-productive at worst.

In Palestine, where I must disbosom that I initially earned my stripes in the political jungle, I rely on those tools to learn the opprobrium felt by ordinary men and women about their leadership - be it in Gaza or the West Bank - and the way they export their messages that subsequently become part of the art of digital diplomacy. The case for Palestinian self-determination that has been built up brick by brick and sweat by sweat by Christians and Muslims is being inexorably eroded by a pernicious occupation only equalled by the insidious interests of those leaders who live in their insular citadels and spew out religious radicalism on the one hand or political spam on the other. What can the contradiction of virtual reality do to bring people together and create stronger mass movements?

What I say about Syria, Bahrain or Palestine applies across the whole MENA region. Be it in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, the GCC countries or elsewhere, new and furious realities are opening up. An ambassador living in Rabat or Cairo can still listen to a foreign minister coming out with the official position of the regime and then canvass the reactions from the street before sending the encrypted analysis to his or her bosses. In Oman, some politicians log on the Sabla chat-room every morning to get a sense of the street before they start their working days.

Mind you, I am not surprised to detect the dissent bubbling under the surface in many MENA countries that have not yet reeled from the uprisings. After all, those ructions we witness today are both multi-seasonal and long-term. As the syndicated journalist Rami Khouri often reminds his readers, it took long periods for the French, English and American revolutions to bear fruit. Yet sadly, if the rulers of the MENA region - from Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and Ali Abdullah Saleh to Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Qadhafi and Bashar Al-Assad - had listened to those increasingly strident grassroots murmurs and had supported institutional change, we might not perhaps be witnessing so much tragic violence today. And if the other rulers in the region (or even outside it) also take a moment to listen to those audible murmurs, the vox populi and tweeps, they might perhaps save themselves some hairy moments or darker fates too. After all, it is the ubiquitous tools of social media rather than violence that are the harbingers for real peace.

Digital diplomacy, to assign a politically hermaphroditic gender to it, is the natural result of those who truly want to listen to the social media messages coming out of the MENA that defy many of the gravity laws of politics, religion and culture. In a region with fingerprints of fire but footprints of peace (to use the title of Noel Moules’ admirable book), this is a quintessential and by now irreplaceable part of diplomacy. But it is a mammoth task looking at any situation from multiple angles. So when I yearn back to the olden days, I remind myself that this is now one key way forward so that those cherished rudimental norms and values can be midwifed into reality and the denizens of an unsettled region can become its true citizens. GK Chesterton once said, “Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die”. Indeed, this is what the digital age is also ushering into our political space today: a strong desire to live to the full that is beefed up by a paradoxical willingness to die for the sake of celebrating that very life which is imbedded in freedom, dignity and justice.

All this is a thankless task that requires remorseless efforts … and I personally still blame James!

© Dr Harry Hagopian   |   2012   |   11 November