The sectarian and racial minorities in the Arab East act like endangered species, demanding the most extreme levels of protection while sparing themselves the minimum level of partnership-related obligations. The minorities - especially the Christian one - are saying they want guarantees for their stay in this region, or else they will migrate westward and leave the rest in a cultural and civilizational desert. As for those defending the minorities, they are going as far as saying there would be no meaning for the existence of the East to begin with, had it not been for its cultural diversity represented by the presence of the Christians among other minorities. In general, it would be better to maintain a certain level of plurality and cultural and racial diversity in the Levant and Fertile Crescent area, which throughout decades was always characterized by a certain degree of religious tolerance. The paradox is that the minorities are not rejecting the exclusion of the other and the monopolization of power whenever they reach it. At this level, the history of the Baath regimes in Iraq and Syria constitutes the biggest proof for the illnesses that affect the minorities once they assume the rule. As for the conflicts of the Baath and the Communists in Iraq in the fifties and sixties, they were sectarian wars concealed behind the cover of pan-Arab and class struggle. For their part, the events in Syria in the seventies and eighties had a sectarian facet hidden beneath the rubble of the necessities of survival in the face of Israel and American hostility. And whoever reads the statements of some Lebanese Christian leaders and draws up the map of participation in the Syrian revolution, can clearly see that the minorities demanding their full share in power out of fear of being annihilated are strongly mistaken in perceiving the direction in which things are heading in the region. Indeed, it is not by supporting a sectarian regime growing closer to its end that the minorities can guarantee their rights. This talk does not aim at denying the existence of a deep crisis affecting the relations between the sects and national minorities or at depicting an unrealistic image of coherent societies at the level of their identity, but that are divided between clear-cut social classes or between sides that are foreign agents and others which are overwhelmed by their love for their country. This is due to the fact that sectarian belonging has played – and will play in the near future – a prominent role in the classification of individuals and groups and their positioning vis-à-vis power and its distribution. Hence, in order to settle this issue, one must learn the basis on which power should be divided. Let us firstly recognize that the fear of democracy as the direct passageway toward the control of the majority over the minority is a legitimate and justified one, and that the Lebanese and Iraqi models in dividing power between the sects are practically leading to the paralysis of the government and the inability to build wide national consensuses. Moreover, mixing democracy and secularism before the establishment of strong judicial, security and national institutions, the strengthening of civil society and the consecration of all the freedoms remains an uncalculated venture. On the other hand, the overprotection of the minorities while granting them guarantees, lead to some sort of segregation in their favor. At this level, the obvious experience in Lebanon and the concealed experiences in Iraq and Syria do not seem encouraging so that they are repeated. More importantly, denying the existence of a problem at the level of the sectarian relationships is as dangerous as the insistence on the fact that the solution for all our crises resides in the settlement of these relations. One could say that the problems between the groups in the East have not found an applicable solution in the various states, while the tragedy is that the minorities' leaders want the others to tolerate a behavior similar to that of the endangered panda, i.e. to tolerate the fact that whatever they do is acceptable and that whatever the outside world does must respect the panda's mood, or else… The least that could be said about this behavior is that it does not go in line with the facts in this region, or in any other region in the modern world.
