From Youth Talk to Manama Dialogue

I find it quite surreal to be writing this nearly six years after I had penned my last Youth Talk column, writes Ismaeel Naar. I’ve just finished covering the Manama Dialogue, one of the most important regional conferences covering politics and security.

Since last writing for GulfWeekly, I’ve gone on to work for the Financial Times and Euronews before deciding my heart pined for the Middle East and returned to work first with Al Jazeera English in Doha and eventually to Dubai, where I now work full-time with Al Arabiya News.

While the Manama Dialogue was dominated with talks of Iran’s interferences in the region and the current conflicts in Yemen and Syria, the underlying context was the question surrounding the youth of the region and how to tackle the growing economic and social pressures they face.

It’s somewhat unreal that the columns I used to write in this newspaper – from sectarian divides to the need of addressing sustainable policies in regards to job markets for the young – are topics that are ever more evident in the discourse surrounding the region today.

The matter of Iran’s youth was raised more than once during this event. Many, it was suggested, want their country to better engage with the international community so that they can travel and study abroad as they haven’t been able to because of the country’s aggressive policies with its neighbours. I also spoke exclusively to Sir Allan Duncan, the UK’s special envoy to Yemen, who told me that he believed one of the reasons the recent controversial nuclear and trade embargo-lifting deal was struck with Tehran was because young Iranians need a better future secured for them than their parents’ generation.

Closer to home, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain’s foreign ministers called for the potential of our youth to be ‘unleashed’.

All the political talk last weekend had me reminiscing back to the days when I used the exact same lines as said by today’s politicians in my early columns. I just wished along with many other young writers back then, I’m sure, that our words had been listened to.

Moving forward, there’s a silver lining to the doom and gloom of reporting on our region’s conflicts: that the issues of youth are at the forefront of the debate once again.

On a side note – I’d like to point out one minor frustration. It saddens me that out of the great talent on our island, I was the only Bahraini journalist writing for a major English-language media outlet. The rest of the media sent in foreign correspondents to Manama, literally parachuting to our country and reporting, often in my opinion, with preconceived notions of the way our society handles politics.

The only way we’ll ever counteract that narrative and the sound bites of foreign observers is by investing in homegrown talent. It’s time we shaped the discourse and had a say in the way we envision our region through our own voices and words.

Although I left Bahrain nearly six years ago, it was refreshing to come back home to the island and converse, both with Arab and Western diplomats, on the mutual interest in seeing the best of youth’s potential realised.

We may not be there yet … but there’s still hope.