The vicious cycle that is the Middle East

JAN 14 – As I finished reading Robert Fisk’s Great War for Civilisation: Conquest of the Middle East, Israel was launching its full-scale attack on Gaza. I decided to write a review and, departing from my usual column, I am writing this in English.

The current battle in Gaza would have fitted well in the narrative of his 2005 book, chronicling the various conflicts that have shaped the Middle East. Since 1976, Fisk has been based in the Middle East, first as a correspondent for the Times and since 1989, for the Independent.

What makes the thick book really special is his combination of his eyewitness reports, and of course, inescapably when one writes on the Middle East, the historical perspective.

Fisk also personalises it with his own family stories. Ultimately, he concludes that the mess stems from the fall of empire after the First World War:

“After the allied victory of 1918, at the end of my father's war, the victors divided up the lands of their former enemies. In the space of just seventeen months, they created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent my entire career – in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad – watching the people within those borders burn.”

A unique achievement for Fisk has been his three interviews with none other than Osama bin Laden himself, between 1994 and 1997. He made such an impression on Osama that Fisk has been praised as a neutral journalist by America’s Public Enemy Number One!

Fisk is critical of all sides for the vicious cycle that pervades the Middle East. He seeks to hold all sources of power accountable, and to remind us through his graphic and gory eyewitness reports.

One particularly troubling episode was in Lebanon in 1996. Abbas Jiha was busy transporting bread in an ambulance to the villagers of Mansouri that was under attack from Israel.

Najla Abujahjah, from Reuters, was nearby and saw two Apaches stationery in the sky.

As the shelling worsened, Abbas took his wife and three young children along with other fleeing civilians. Soon, 14 people were crammed in the ambulance.

Najla then witnessed an unforgettable scene: the Apache closed on the ambulance, and soon fired two missiles. One missed, but the other hit the ambulance and “exploded through the back door, engulfing the vehicle in fire and smoke and hurling it 20 metres through the air...”

Najla’s video recorded Abbas standing beside his dead daughters, shrieking, “My God, my family has gone.”

Najla would go on at the wreckage, and saw three children dying in front of her eyes. In the next few hours, the Israelis claimed that they targeted the ambulance because it belonged to Hizbollah and was carrying a Hizbollah guerrilla – both of which Fisk stated was untrue.

Now, Israel is killing civilians in Gaza with the excuse that they are being used a human shields by Hamas.

Fisk would go to the site and get the remnants of the missile and bring it to its manufacturer – Boeing. Finally he confronted a group of Boeing executives and solicited their response after being informed about its use and Israel’s explanation.

After a shocked response, they expressed some form of compassion, but tried to distance it from Boeing, and reminded Fisk not to quote them as being critical of Israel’s policies.

Fisk couldn’t help but notice it:

“These men ... so powerful, so overwhelmingly part of America’s defence system, so patriotic in their motives, so immutably part of the history of the US armed forces in Vietnam – were frightened of offending Israel, fearful that a mere word of criticism would damage or end their careers or send them careening off into a political crisis within the aerospace company so serious that their careers would be forever ravaged.

There are other more painful images being described inside the book. I remember at first I would read these parts to my wife – a medical doctor – but after a while she asked me to stop as it was too gory for her.

But Fisk ultimately wanted to illustrate the hypocrisy of the West, the cowardly and corrupt Arab leaders but also their courageous citizens.

Fisk writes:

“The corruption and cowardice of the old Middle Eastern regimes – Mubarak’s sclerotic government in Egypt, the PLO’s apparatchik gangs in Gaza and the West Bank – brought elections in which Islamic candidates scored astonishing successes, not least in ‘Palestine’, where Mahmoud Abbas’s powerless Palestinian Authority was replaced by a Hamas government democratically elected. Now Israel’s Islamic enemies were in power, but the United States and the European Union imposed sanctions upon them for refusing to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist or to abide by the PLO’s previous agreements with Israel – not that Israel abided by many of these.”

Iraq is the best example. When the country was engaged against Iran in the 1980s, it was treated as a key ally of the West.

Then it invaded Kuwait, and became an international pariah. As a result, sanctions were imposed that crippled the once rich nation.

Then, after  September 11 2001, George W. Bush linked Saddam to Al Qaeda and claimed he had weapons of mass destruction. Bush invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam, but created a slew of other problems.

Bush’s action led to the downfall of the Republicans as no weapons of mass destruction could be found while the occupying forces have to deal with the day-to-day violence in Iraq.

This flip-flopping was best represented by Iraq’s imports. When Iraq was deemed a friendly regime to the West, Britain sent thiodiglycol and thionyl chloride worth more than US$250,000 in 1988 and 1989. The two chemicals combined formed the deadly mustard gas used in chemical warfare.

But the British government claimed that the chemicals had civilian uses such as ink for pen and fabric dyes.

At the same time small quantities of uranium and plutonium were also exported to Iraq but the authorities claimed that they were committed to prevent the enhancement of the military capacity of both Iraq and Iran.

The irony was that after Iraq invaded Kuwait and became an enemy state and a sanction was introduced in the country, Britain blocked a shipment of diphtheria and yellow fever vaccines for Iraqi children, because, according to the government, “they are capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction.”

This was in 1999, four years before the Anglo-American coalition invaded Iraq for the same apparent reason. If in 1988 components of mustard gas were deemed useful for civilian production of pen and fabric dyes, in 1999 school pencils were barred because the pencil graphite had military use. Medical journals and vital water and oil extraction equipment were banned.

The human cost was devastating. In October 1998, up to six thousand children died due to sanctions. Dennis Halliday, who was attached at the UN Oil for Food Programme said,

“I recently met with trade union leaders... who asked me why the United Nations does not simply bomb the Iraqi people and do it efficiently, rather than extending sanctions which kill Iraqis incrementally over a long period.

While the book provides a strong critique of the West, the Muslims own failings were also exposed.

The plight of the Palestinian refugees in Kuwait after the expulsion of the Iraqi invaders in 1990 is a good example: the Kuwaitis decided to expel the 300,000 Palestinians who have been there for decades due to suspicion that the refugees supported the invasion.

While there were some who did and the PLO maintained a pro-Iraqi stand, many others fought the Iraqi invasion while the Kuwaiti rulers were in exile in Saudi Arabia.

The Armenian massacre by the Turks is also chronicled, but there were also stories of courage of individual Muslims who refused to take part in the bloodshed instigated by the Young Turks in Istanbul, some who even rescued the Christian Armenians.

How can the Middle East be taken out from this vicious cycle?

At the end of the day, the West must show respect to the people in the region. The West condemns many of the countries as being undemocratic while praising Israel as the only true democratic nation in the region.

Yet they allowed the Algerian army to disregard the results of the 1992 elections which was won by the Islamic Salvation Front. Similarly, Bush insisted that Palestine hold democratic elections in 2006, but then strove to punish the Palestinians for voting Hamas.

The West propped up Saddam Hussein in Iraq’s war with Iran while he tortured his citizens, and then made him their enemy when he invaded Kuwait. The West encouraged his citizens to rebel against Saddam but then abandoned them when they did and stood by as Saddam crushed them. Many corrupt and undemocratic governments are defended merely because they are reliable allies but this only increases the disillusionment with the West.

This breeds an attitude of hopelessness that drives the people to violence and fuels the vicious cycle.

The cynicism shown by the Western media in portraying the latest troubles in Palestine as if it is a battle between two equivalent forces is symptomatic to the lack of respect.

If only the media can have the courage to depict the Israeli occupation for what it is – a brutal form of apartheid and colonisation – then can the Palestinians enjoy a better future.

Fisk is a shining example of courageous Western journalists who face the flak to stand up for justice, but sadly he is a rare breed as the media companies become dominated by powerful corporate interests.

But Muslims too must stand up to make a difference. We must speak out against the hypocrisy of Muslim governments.

At the end of the day, we must remind ourselves, there have been only two Muslim leaders that have successfully taken back Jerusalem for the Muslims – Umar al-Khattab and Salahuddin al-Ayubi. While both were excellent military tacticians, they also extolled exemplary spiritual leadership and surprised the Christians and Jews with their chivalry.

It is remarkable that while Salahuddin – known as Saladin in the West – defeated the Crusaders and retook Jerusalem, his moral example has been preserved in posterity by Catholic poet Dante Alighieri in the Divine Comedy. It is only through this combination can Muslims regain their strength.

At the end of the day, we – Muslims and non-Muslims alike – must reflect on the failure of international organisations such as the UN and OIC in matters of justice and humanity. Indeed, OIC was founded in the light of the loss of Jerusalem, but until today it has been mocked as only being able to take an ‘Oh I see’ attitude.

With the weakening of nation-states and the emergence of more global crises, multilateral organisations have a bigger role to play. Sadly, they have continued to disappoint.

If the idealism that lay behind the foundation of the UN and the OIC is truly able to make a difference in the 21st century, it lies in recalibrating the role of multilateral organisations to make them truly effective.

The 1,200-plus pages of the Great War for Civilization be a turn off for many, but it is a must-read for those seeking to understand the broader history surrounding the conflicts that pervade the Middle East.

* Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad is the state assemblyman for Seri Setia and is the political secretary to the Selangor Mentri Besar. He still finds the time to read in between politics and football. He writes a fortnightly article for The Malaysian Insider.