Youth become fodder for
terror
By Phar Kim Beng
Contrary to popular belief, understanding the
root of suicide terrorism in the Middle East involves
more than linking it with political Islam. To be sure,
suicide terrorism is intricately linked to political
Islam, but it is what fuels these acts - exclusion from
economic and political participation - and who carries
them out - disgruntled, idealist youth - that need to be
better understood.
The present and future
population mix that leads youth in the region to resort
to extremism also needs to be addressed. In other words:
how does a person become a jihadi - a person bent on
sacrificing life and limb in the name of his chosen
cause - as opposed to an Islamist?
That is not
an easy question to answer.
Rapid demographic
growth, educational changes, government policy failure
and rapid urbanization are among the causes of high
unemployment and increasing poverty in the Middle East
that, together with other forces, have alienated large
sectors of the region's youth, especially young Muslims
who increasingly are born into a conflict-ridden world.
The large number of affected youth in the Middle
East and North Africa also provides a huge population
base for jihadi organizations to choose from, appearing
only to make recruitment easier.
Studies by the
United States Bureau of Census, the International
Monetary Fund and other international aid agencies
reveal that two-thirds of Arabs in the Middle East and
North Africa are below the age of 30, half of whom are
younger than 20, and 40% of whom have yet to reach their
15th birthday. In Algeria, up to 70% of the population
is below the age of 40.
The reverse affects
of aging
According to the United Nations
Development Program, every country must grow by at least
1.5% per year to prevent the population from aging, a
phenomenon referred to as graying. This rate of growth
is considered sufficient to replenish the population.
In the Middle East and North Africa, that rate
has been exceeded. Therefore, the reverse is happening.
Instead of the population getting older, it is getting
younger. According to the World Bank, the population of
the Middle East and North Africa is now growing at about
2.1% per year.
At this rate, the population will
double in around 34 years. And though population growth
rates have fallen sharply in the past 10 years - from
3.2% in the mid-1980s to 2.7% between 1990-95 to 2.1% in
2001 - the so-called "youth bulge" is already occurring.
This generalization hides substantial variation
across countries and regions, as population growth and
total fertility rates have fallen markedly in Egypt,
Iran and Tunisia but have remained stubbornly high in
Gaza and Yemen.
Indeed, the total fertility
rates in Gaza (7.6%) and Yemen (7.1%) are among the
highest in the world. The Gaza rate is also very high in
relation to per capita income, a phenomenon observable
in the Persian Gulf states as well.
Table 1: Population
Data for Selected Middle Eastern and Other Muslim
Countries
(Source: US Bureau of the
Census)
| Country |
Population (Millions) |
Population Growth Rate
(%) |
Fetrility Rate (%) |
| Afghanistan |
26.8 |
2.5 |
6.0 |
| Algeria |
31.8 |
2.2 |
3.4 |
| Bahrain |
0.64 |
1.9 |
3.0 |
| Egypt |
68.5 |
1.9 |
3.4 |
| Gaza |
1.2 |
4.5 |
7.6 |
| Iran |
71.9 |
2.5 |
4.3 |
| Iraq |
24.7 |
3.6 |
6.1 |
| Jordan |
4.7 |
3.1 |
4.8 |
| Kuwait |
2.1 |
1.9 |
3.4 |
| Lebanon |
3.6 |
1.6 |
2.3 |
| Libya |
6.1 |
3.7 |
6.2 |
| Morocco |
30.2 |
2.0 |
3.4 |
| Oman |
2.5 |
3.3 |
6.1 |
| Pakistan |
41.2 |
2.4 |
4.9 |
| Qatar |
.75 |
1.3 |
3.5 |
| Saudi Arabia |
22.2 |
3.3 |
6.4 |
| Somalia |
7.0 |
2.8 |
7.0 |
| Sudan |
33.5 |
2.9 |
5.7 |
| Syria |
17.8 |
3.2 |
5.6 |
| Tunisia |
9.6 |
1.5 |
2.4 |
| Turkey |
66.6 |
1.6 |
2.5 |
| UAE |
2.4 |
1.6 |
3.6 |
| West
Bank |
1.7 |
3.2 |
4.9 |
| Yemen |
17.5 |
3.3 |
7.1 |
The "youth
bulge" is also being given demographic momentum as more
and more women enter their child-bearing years. Several
implications follow from this pattern, but for our
purposes, the most important factor is that most Middle
Easterners are young: half of all Arabs, 54% of Iranians
and 52% of Pakistanis are younger than 20 years old.
Two-thirds of Saudi Arabians are younger than 25.
Moreover, two-thirds of all the people of the region are
under the age of 30.
Giles Kepel, a noted French
political scientist who has been looking at the growth
of jihadi movements, stressed that this age structure
first emerged in the 1970s. According to Alan Richards,
a professor at the University of California, this was
the "same decade as political Islam surged".
Although Middle Eastern specialists such as
Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum and a
member of the presidentially-appointed board of the US
Institute of Peace, claim that political Islam grew out
of oil wealth discovered in this period, it could well
be that the sudden surge in petro-wealth, distributed
only to a small number of people, also created a
cesspool of resentment, especially among the youth of
those countries that did not partake in this wealth.
Therefore, when someone such as Osama bin Laden is
mythologized as having walked away from his wealth in
Saudi Arabia in order to wage a terror campaign against
the United States, his heroic appeal is magnified.
With a huge population base to choose from, the
jihadi groups in point of fact have no dearth of angry,
vengeful and disgruntled youth to choose from. Coupled
with an Islamic culture that permits martyrdom - suicide
terrorism - has erroneously been seen as a path to which
an individual can seek redemption.
Still, it
is not just the number of the region's youth but the
degree of their exclusion from economic and
political participation that rouses them to extremism. "What
makes the demographic explosion dangerous is the perception
by young people that their elders have failed them,
that authority has failed them in all aspects of
their lives," said Farideh Farhi, an adjunct scholar at
the Middle East Institute, which aims to provide
information between Middle Eastern nations and US policymakers
and organizations.
When young people live
in an environment that offers only political despair
and humiliation, that is when the potential for
explosion is created. In other words, an abundance of
youths is not the problem, but systems that seek to
contain these youths without promoting their interests.
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