Lest the Arab regimes order my execution

The annual conference of the Union of Arab Banks in Beirut was supposed to honor the Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr, with the attendance of the Secretary General of the Arab League Dr. Nabil el-Arabi. However, they were both absent because the conference last week coincided with the meeting of the Arab ministerial committee in Cairo following up the Syrian crisis, which is more important. Hence, the Prime Minister of Lebanon Najib Mikati, the patron of the conference, was left alone, but he was strongly present since he was, from his shoulders upwards, taller than any other participant. I moderated the last meetings of the conference, with the names of the World Bank, the OECD and the Union of Arab Banks behind me, as well as that of the United Nations Regional Economic and Social Development Commission in Western Asia (ESCWA). I thought to myself that I needed to be quiet because silence is golden. For one thing, I am a stranger to banking, yet I had to make an address, so I let the other participants speak first, lest I mix economics and politics. I had followed many sessions over two days, and heard the Arab sovereign wealth funds complaining…It was “heart wrenching”; people with hundreds of billions of dollars and yet they are panicking over the crises in the Euro zone and elsewhere. I had thought about asking for a loan without collateral or guarantee, but then I decided to respect their financial feelings which made each one of their “bellies stick to their backs” from hunger. The types of the participants in the many conferences that I attend are many. They include the well-informed speaker who presents his paper in a brief and informative manner, and the type that does not stop talking, even when the attendance starts stomping their feet on the ground in protest. As one of such speakers was giving his address, something that the late Syrian poet Omar Abu Risha about brother Clovis Maksoud came back to me, from a meeting of the Council of Arab Ambassadors in New Delhi. Omar said: Don’t ask Clovis any questions…he likes to explain. There should be an index for speakers, just like there are international indices for freedom, democracy, corruption and so forth. In fact, I relied on such indices when I spoke very briefly about the opportunities to restore Arab and foreign investments in the region. From a lengthy paper I had prepared, I chose the example of Singapore. Singapore is a country that has no considerable natural resources, yet the per capita income there is among the highest in the world, because of good or sound governance. But lest the Arab regimes order my execution, I started by stressing that Singapore is not a democratic country in the Western sense. Freedom House says that Singapore is partially free and has no press freedoms, while the Economist’s Freedom Index ranks the country in the 82nd place out of 167 countries. However, the same British magazine’s index places Singapore in the first rank in terms of the living standard (quality of life) in Asia, and eleventh worldwide. Also, the International Transparency Index places it in third place worldwide. Will a Lee Kuan Yew emerge in our midst? Why not, when the man has “Arab” credentials. His son is now the Prime Minister, and he is a Prime Minister Emeritus, and this is what every Arab ruler that knows how to kill, but not how to rule, strives for. Staying with the conference in Beirut, my friend Abdullah Dardari, former Deputy Prime Minister of Syria, was absent. The events there must have made it difficult for him to come. If he were present, I and he would have been the only participants who did not have the title of Dr. before our names. I even felt regret, because I had not written my thesis back when I studied at Georgetown University, and for not buying a PhD in nuclear physics online. The countries that were participating were split into groups. I noticed that Palestine, Sudan and Syria were put one group, or in other words, “the miserable was joined with the hopeless”. I walked around a spacious hall and toured the pavilions of the banks, including well-known ones such as the Arab Bank, Al-Ahli Bank of Egypt and the Qatar National Bank, in addition to Audi, BLOM and Credit Libanais. I found a pavilion that housed around 20 Iraqi banks that I had not heard of before. We only knew the Rafidain Bank, and I remember it had a branch adjacent to the Lebanese Intra Bank (The government conspiracy over Intra and its subsequent bankruptcy were the beginning of the collapse of the Lebanese economy). The Bank of Baghdad had a separate wing, so perhaps it had some separatist tendencies. This is while the Syrian real estate wing had no representatives on the first day, which made me think that it had gone and joined the opposition in Turkey. But on the next day, I found that representatives were present in the wing. I wanted to stay in Beirut for another day, but I found out that the Marathon was scheduled for Sunday. ThereforeI thus brought my trip forward as I anticipated the roads to the airport would be closed, and thus did not have the chance to meet with the organizers like Wissam Fattouh, Secretary General of the Union of Arab Banks, and other friends. I can perhaps win the Marathon and beat all the international champions, if I were told that there are security servicemen chasing after me.