44 Middle East & Africa The EconomistNovember 7th 2020
2 January had yields below 4%.
Other oil-producing states look shakier.
Bahrain’s debt-to-gdpratio is projected to
hit 131% next year, up from an average of
34% from 2000 to 2016. Oman will owe
89%. Both were largely shut out of bond
markets earlier this year. Oil markets offer
little hope for their budgets: renewed lock-
downs in Europe and rising cases in Ameri-
ca pushed prices lower in October.
Elsewhere in the region the pandemic
has reversed years of fiscal reforms. Egypt
trimmed subsidies and introduced a value-
added tax after borrowing $12bn (over three
years) from the imfin 2016. It cut the deficit
from 11% of gdpin 2016 to 7% last year and it
was on pace to lower its debt-to-gdpratio
to 79% in 2021. The pandemic, however,
sent it back to the imffor a $5.2bn loan.
Next year its debts are projected to climb
back to 91% of gdp. Jordan will be close be-
hind at 89%, and Tunisia at 86%.
For now, at least, investors are enthusi-
astic about Egyptian debt. Yields are high—
the last batch of six-month treasury bills
paid around 13.5%—and Abdel-Fattah al-
Sisi’s authoritarian rule has erased con-
cerns about political instability. But senti-
ment can be fickle. Between March and
May $12.7bn flowed out of local markets.
All this borrowing offers limited re-
turns for Arab states. More than 70% of Ku-
wait’s budget is earmarked for public-sec-
tor salaries and subsidies. It is taking on
debt not to fund reforms but to sustain a
bloated bureaucracy. Arab states have also
been stingy with their covid-19 stimulus
packages. They have allocated an average of
2% of gdpfor pandemic-related help, com-
pared with 3% for all emerging markets, in
part because of limited fiscal firepower.
Borrowing has helped them cope, but it
also exacerbates this problem (Egypt al-
ready spends an estimated 9% of gdpon
debt service). Oil prices are projected to
stay low next year, and vital industries
such as tourism will be slow to recover.
Heavier debt loads will limit the extent to
which Arab governments can jolt their
sluggish economies. 7Borrowing time
Totalgovernmentgrossdebt,%ofGDPSource: IMFSaudi ArabiaUAETunisiaOmanJordanEgyptBahrain15012090603002000-16 average 2021 forecastR
obertfisk, whodiedinDublinon
October 30th, aged 74, was one of the
most influential correspondents in the
Middle East since the second world war.
For the past 30-odd years he wrote main-
ly for the Independent, a left-of-centre
British newspaper with dwindling circu-
lation and influence at home, but his
reach extended far beyond. His bitter
narrative of Arab victimhood and West-
ern wickedness (particularly American
and Israeli), often brilliantly crafted,
resonated across the region and was
picked up in newspaper columns, by
radio stations and on campuses across
the world, America included. Again and
again, Western correspondents in Cairo,
Damascus or Baghdad would listen
politely as Fisk-aficionados, from dip-
lomats and politicians to taxi drivers and
coffee-house waiters, regaled them with
the wisdom of Mr Fisk’s latest diatribe.
Brought up in small-town England,
Mr Fisk (pictured) made his journalistic
mark for the Times, covering the Troubles
in Northern Ireland, where the British
authorities found his reports unduly
keen on the Irish republican cause; he
later took up Irish citizenship, while
keeping a British passport. Leading the
paeans of praise on his death was Ire-
land’s president.
Some of his scoops were world-beat-
ing. In 1982 he was among the first to
enter the Palestinian refugee camps in
Sabra and Shatila, where more than a
thousand people had been massacred by
Lebanese militias as Israeli forces looked
the other way. In 1993 in Sudan, he be-
came the first Western journalist to
interview Osama bin Laden, penning an
article headed: “Anti-Soviet warrior puts
his army on the road to peace”. “I am a
construction engineer and an agricultur-
alist,” he told Mr Fisk, who pulled off two
more meetings with him before the
al-Qaeda leader orchestrated the killing
of some 3,000 people in New York in- In one session bin Laden praised
“Mr Robert” for being “neutral”.
Based most often in Beirut, Mr Fisk
was a consummate operator who roved
far and wide, from Algeria and Libya,
through the Balkans and Turkey, to the
homelands of Kurds and Afghans. He
injected a vivid sense of history into his
coverage, showing why so many people
in the region felt angry and humiliated—
and tended to blame the former colonial
powers, and above all America and its
protégés,especiallyIsrael,fortheir
unhappy predicament.
On one occasion, not long after the
attacks of September 11th, he was
roughed up by Afghan refugees in Paki-
stan. “I realised”, he wrote, that their
“brutality was entirely the product of
others, of us—of we who had armed their
struggle against the Russians and ig-
nored their pain and laughed at their
civil war and then armed and paid them
again for the ‘War for Civilisation’ just a
few miles away and then bombed their
homes and ripped up their families and
called them ‘collateral damage’.”
His reputation among his peers was
less rosy. He was a braggart. As we wrote
in a review 15 years ago, “Mr Fisk tries to
tell the story of the Middle East, but he
does not flinch from telling the story of
Mr Fisk.” He was self-righteous, though
most recently had been excoriated for the
leniency of his attitude to Bashar al-
Assad, the blood-soaked Syrian dictator.
He treated rumour as fact, if it suited his
narrative: in 2004 he reported that the
Americans had secretly spirited Saddam
Hussein out of prison in Iraq to an Amer-
ican base in Qatar.
Correspondents from a range of
worthy outlets and a diversity of ideol-
ogies have accused him of making stories
up. In his mode of reporting, a tall tale,
colourfully told in the supposed in-
terests of the underdog, would often
trump the literal truth.Rage on the page
Robert FiskA journalist known for his scoops—and for the controversies he createdThe writer at rest