| 18 December 2004 | Saturday | 05 Ziqa'ad 1425 |
Banker to the poor
WASHINGTON: Just when it appeared that Syria was complying in earnest with US demands to secure its border with Iraq and even making unprecedented peace overtures to Israel, key neo-conservative opinion shapers are calling on President George W. Bush to take stronger measures against Damascus, possibly including military action.
The media campaign was launched last week, when three analysts associated with the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies (FDD), a neo-conservative group that generally backs positions of Israel's right-wing Likud Party, published an article in the 'Washington Times' titled 'Syria's Murderous Role: Assad Aides (sic) Iraq's Terrorist Insurgency'.
Then William Kristol, the influential chairman of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and editor of the Rupert Murdoch owned 'Weekly Standard', devoted his lead editorial, 'Getting Serious About Syria', to the same subject, concluding that, despite the stresses on the US military in Iraq, "real options exist (for dealing with Damascus)".
"We could bomb Syrian military facilities; we could go across the border in force to stop infiltration; we could occupy the town of Abu Kamal in eastern Syria, a few miles from the border, which seems to be the planning and organising centre for Syrian activities in Iraq; we could covertly help or overtly support the Syrian opposition..."
On Wednesday the 'Wall Street Journal' followed up in its lead editorial - always a reliable indicator of neo-con opinion on the Middle East - charging, "Syria is providing material support to terrorist groups killing American soldiers in Iraq while openly calling on Iraqis to join the 'resistance'."
The editorial, 'Serious About Syria'? accused the Bush administration of responding to these provocations with "mixed political signals and weak gestures", and urged it to at least threaten military action, much as Turkey "mobilized for war against Syria" in 1998 over Damascus' support for Kurdish rebels.
Within hours, Bush himself was talking tough on Damascus. Asked during a White House photo-op with visiting Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi about accusations by Iraq's defence minister of alleged Syrian and Iranian support for the Sunni insurgency, the president warned the two countries that "meddling in the internal affairs of Iraq is not in their interest".
In some ways, the new campaign against Syria recalls a similar effort that began building in the immediate aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Then, Washington was seen as an irresistible force in the region, and neo-conservatives and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld appeared to be spoiling for a fight with Syria, which, they charged, was harbouring senior members of the ruling Ba'ath Party and Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
But, as the insurgency grew more potent in the fall of 2003, Bush's chief political aide, Karl Rove, ordered the hawks to stand down, lest a new military adventure cost the president his re-election. Now that Bush has won a second term, they need not worry about the possible political consequences.
But that fails to explain precisely why the hawks are making such a fuss over Syria at this moment, particularly given the prevailing Washington consensus - including among the hawks themselves - that Iran's nuclear programme represents a much more important strategic challenge to the administration.
In contrast to the charges that were made against Damascus 16 months ago, the new campaign appears to be based primarily on alleged statements by unidentified US military and intelligence officials cited in the 'Washington Times' op-ed and a subsequent 'Washington Post' news article to the effect that the Sunni insurgency in Iraq is being organised, funded and even managed by, as the Post put it, "a handful of Iraqi Baathists operating in Syria".
One supposedly critical piece of evidence much cited by the hawks was the reported discovery of a global positioning signal receiver in a bomb factory in the Iraqi insurgents' stronghold of Fallujah, which "contained waypoints originating in western Syria."
These mostly anonymous accounts were recently echoed by visiting King Abdullah of Jordan and Iraqi President Ghazi Yawar, who also charged, as has Washington, that Syria has trained and helped infiltrate its own and other "foreign fighters" into Iraq.
The Post quoted one former Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) analyst who said, "there is an increasing view (in the intelligence community) that Syria is at the centre of the problem."
While Kristol and others have seized on these reports as proof of Syria's sinister role in Iraq, they have ignored other evidence of increased co-operation by Damascus, particularly in sealing its border.
Indeed, on the same day that Kristol issued his call to arms against Damascus, the Journal's news reporters published an article that began: "Senior military officers and other US officials say Syria has made a serious effort in recent weeks to stanch the flow of fighters moving across its border into and out of Iraq, and has arrested at least one former Iraqi Baathist accused by the US of helping to finance and coordinate the insurgency".
At the same time, a number of published accounts about the aftermath of the capture of Fallujah established that the number of Syrian and other "foreign fighters" involved in the insurgency there was far less than had been expected, putting paid to the theory that foreigners from Syria or elsewhere were a major factor in the uprising, as had long been claimed by the Pentagon and its neo-con backers.
As Josh Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma, suggested in his Internet log, or "blog," the hawks want a foreign scapegoat for an insurgency about which they still know remarkably little.
"Post-Fallujah," according to Landis, "the analysts decided that if the resistance was not powered by Syrians, then it was led by Iraqis living in Syria; hence the spate of articles suggesting the defence department had adopted this view. It will be interesting to see if it has more staying power than the last theory."
Moreover, added Landis, the US administration has little to lose. "Washington isn't having much luck with other strategies for defeating the resistance and Syria has been quite cooperative in the past and will probably be so in the future. So why not mount yet another Syria-bashing campaign?"
Bassam Haddad, who teaches Arab politics at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia, told IPS he sees the current campaign as an effort to intimidate Damascus. -Dawn/The Inter Press News Service
Banker to the poor
Wearning a green khaddar kurta and waistcoat over a pair of brown trousers, Mohammad Yunus of Bangladesh's Grameen Bank does not appear your conventional banker. But, then, the money-lending facility that he heads as managing director is no ordinary financial institution.
The bank gives out micro-loans to the poor without demanding collateral in return. Based on mutual trust, the relationship between the bank and borrower seems to have paid off. Today, Grameen Bank, with its four million borrowers - 96 per cent are women - can boast a repayment rate of 99 per cent.
Talking to this correspondent at a dinner where he was chief guest during his recent visit to Karachi, Mr Yunus explained why the poor don't default on payment. "They pay back because they don't have enough and because this is not just one-time borrowing. They don't want to see the door shut. If she (the borrower) is not paying back, she cannot take another loan," he said.
The other reason, he observed, had to do with the requirements of the system. Borrowers belong to a group of five, and although the group does not have to pay back the amount lent to a defaulting member, it does exert pressure on the individual to return the loan.
"The group becomes a loan-sanctioning authority and decides whether a member should take the money or not. It assesses the person's ability to handle the money, taking into account factors like one's family situation and whether the borrower's husband will be opposed to it."
If the group feels that a borrower is squandering the loan given by the bank, it makes its feelings known. "It is as if it is the group's money because they approved the loan," he said.
As a general policy, the bank does not advise people on how to use the money they have borrowed. "We tell the borrower, we don't know anything, you know everything. We have money, but no ideas (for its use). That's why we come to you. You have no money but you have the ideas. So you can use your ideas and our money."
While the bank itself was established in 1983, Mr Yunus's efforts to empower the poor date to 1974 when a famine raged in a land already devastated by the ravages of war.
He saw first-hand the exploitation of the desperately poor at the hands of moneylenders who would quote a price for their ware and then go on to sell it in the market for a profit.
Making a list of 42 such people, he saw that the total amount they had borrowed was just $27. That was the beginning. What followed was months of running around trying to get banks to agree to give loans to the poor. "Everybody said it could not be done, so I finally offered myself as a guarantor so that I could take the money from the bank and give it to the poor. It worked."
Since its establishment, Grameen Bank has expanded in several different directions - creating companies for sectors as diverse as textiles, software and mobile phones.
Mr Yunus appeared especially enthusiastic about the latter. Loans are offered to women wanting to invest in mobile phones so that they can start a business by providing clients access to the outside world for a small fee.
This spirit of entrepreneurship is apparent in many of Grameen's programmes that encourage women to come forward, to move beyond the frontiers of home and tradition, and to help evolve a national psyche that recognizes their contribution to labour and development.
He had a kind word for other organizations in the field. "NGOs in Bangladesh have picked up micro-credit very well and benefit eight million families. So, together with Grameen Banks, 12 million families are receiving micro-credit."
Asked if he had plans to extend his services to the rest of South Asia, Mr Yunus answered: "We keep talking about it. It is my job to keep talking about it. If anyone is interested they can come and visit and find out how to do that. There are several organizations (extending micro-credit services) that have started in Pakistan."
The conversation ended soon because guests, comprising industrialists, journalists, diplomats and others, were getting impatient. They wanted Mr Yunus to talk to them, and soon he was lost from view as they milled round him, eager to hang onto every word uttered by the world's most famous banker to the poor.