Muslim statesmanship on trial

“As you pour yourself a scotch,/ Crush a roach, or check your watch,/ as your hand adjusts your tie,/ people die.”

— from Bosnia Tune by Joseph Brodsky

IT was on the 23rd day of the conflict in Lebanon that the Organisation of the Islamic Conference managed to meet and call upon the international community to put an end to it. Meanwhile, in the Middle East, there has been an increasing dismay at the failure of the Arab League to coordinate any collective Arab response to Israeli aggression.

In fact, the Arab governments have been drifting into a world of mutual recrimination; a trend one hopes would be reversed by the latest Saudi effort to get the Arab foreign ministers to meet in support of badly battered Lebanon in its gravest hour.

The task of Muslim statesmen is cut out for them by the multi-dimensional crisis in the region; the destruction of Lebanon is just the latest chapter in a project that relegates it to a subservient place in the hierarchy of nations. It would decide if they retain their sovereignty in the temporal and spiritual domains alike. They would know in the next few years the extent to which they own their natural resources, are free to order their political life and, no less importantly, relate their cultural values to the dynamics of our times.

The fierce resistance in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and now Lebanon shows that large segments of Muslims in the region construe the design of reconfiguring it as a mere camouflage for its re-conquest, a new imperial venture which is deadlier than anything in the past because it seeks to vanquish the Muslim soul. The deep anxiety afflicting societies in countries like Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and in the Maghreb, is indicative of the fact that regional apprehensions have a resonance far beyond it. Ruling elites have so far fudged issues and taken shelter in evasions. Alternatively, they have tried to buy time by pretending that they were front line states in a mythical global war against terrorism.

Lebanon may have shattered this make-believe world and highlighted the real issues with brutal clarity. Leaders of the Arab-Muslim world will be judged by their peoples by fundamental criteria: how far are they able to deny Israel the advantages of aggression; whether they succeed in bringing to the forefront the urgency of resolving the Palestinian issue; and if they have a strategy to head off the “re-making” of the region by force.

There are many ways of focusing on the three-week milestone of the relentless Israeli military campaign. First and foremost, the planned period for bludgeoning another Arab state into submission through the proxy of Israel’s military might has turned out to be insufficient and Israel’s international patrons have been forced to give up all pretence of international legality, and as their response to the massacre at Qana showed, to morality in further delaying a ceasefire.

There is almost worldwide acknowledgment of the tenacity and gallantry of Hezbollah fighters. Apart from their high motivation and quest for martyrdom, they have almost pioneered a new kind of warfare in the region. The Taliban were, for a long time, a tribal lashkar that turned out to be highly vulnerable to a massive aerial attack. Routed at the time, they are still experimenting with various kinds of resistance.

In Iraq, resistance degenerated into mindless violence; the occupation army destroyed Fallujah to give it a sectarian orientation. It has succeeded in frustrating the United States’ plan but not without posing a serious threat to the survival of Iraq itself as a viable and unified state. It will take an expert on military affairs to explain the Hezbollah mix of tactics; it has the discipline of a regular army and, at the same time, the flexibility of numerous groups that can operate singly or in various combinations in a fluid theatre.

This has imposed unexpected costs on the Israeli army and also slowed it down greatly. Even on Day 22, as Israeli generals claimed victory, it despatched well over 230 rockets to targets inside Israel. Hezbollah have certainly widened the potential of asymmetrical warfare.

In Israel, the mood is grim. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert knows only too well that anything short of the increasingly elusive total victory will be defeat. He has ratcheted up his war rhetoric to ensure that the United States and the United Kingdom achieve for him the objectives that his military has failed to do. In enumerating successes of the 21-day war effort, he exposed himself dangerously to the charge of committing a war crime when he said that the population in south Lebanon that harboured Hezbollah fighters has been successfully “displaced”. This claim puts an altogether different connotation on a million Lebanese uprooted from their homes.

Ehud Olmert now wants a 15000-strong international force willing to enter into “combat” with Hezbollah. He is throwing more and more men into the battle to present the world with some kind of fait accompli — perhaps a Hezbollah-free south that the international force can hold on Israel’s behalf before a permanent ceasefire comes into effect. This hard-line posture reflects the internal situation as well. The unprecedented experience of rockets raining on the northern part of the country has, on the one hand, united the country against Hezbollah but, on the other, created doubts about the military’s claims. Some Israeli commentators, dutifully described as leftist traitors by the pro-war right wingers, have already assessed it as Israel’s most unsuccessful war.

Prime Minister Tony Blair summoned all his eloquence to use the forum provided by an informed Los Angeles audience to repeat his greatly over-simplified theory of the West intervening on the side of the angels in the crucial battle between extremism and moderation in an “arc of extremism now stretching across the Middle East and clutching with increasing definition countries far outside that region”. It is, he said, in part a struggle between reactionary Islam and moderate mainstream Islam. Hezbollah was the aggressor which started the conflict to create chaos, division and bloodshed to provoke retaliation by Israel so that this struggle could be intensified.

If Mr Blair’s purpose in framing regional problems in a Manichean contrast between good and evil was to justify his role in delaying the cessation of hostilities in Lebanon, he failed, above all, in his own country. A great deal of comment endorsed Blair’s description by the Guardian as “isolated in his party, with lukewarm cabinet support; isolated in Europe apart from Germany; and very much isolated in the wider world”. Some of the most trenchant criticism has come from seasoned British diplomats such as the former ambassador to Russia, Sir Rodric Braithwaite, who savaged him in a Financial Times piece entitled “Mr. Blair, it is time to recognise your errors and just go”. Professional gloom about the US-led Middle East policy has been further deepened by the leaked final assessment of the outgoing British ambassador to Iraq which says that “the prospect of a low intensity civil war and a de facto division of Iraq is probably more likely at this stage”.

The Putrajaya statement by the 17 assembled OIC statesmen is a forceful, if entirely predictable, document. In offering troops for the international stabilisation force in Lebanon, it has implicitly opposed Israel’s bid to turn that force into a surrogate of the Israeli army with a unidimensional mission of protecting Israel without any credible constraint on its habit of frequently violating Lebanon’s airspace or the Blue Line. What one wants to know — and the statement is not of much help — is if the Arab and non-Arab Muslim leaders worked out a better understanding of the dynamics at work in the region and a common strategy to address them.

The fact of the matter is that far too many Muslim states, including Pakistan, have embraced the United States’ global war on terrorism uncritically. The attempt to locate Islamic resistance to foreign occupation everywhere in its matrix is false and motivated. Mr Blair’s Los Angeles speech was an unabashed bid to present Hezbollah’s long resistance to Israel as terrorism but he also took a swipe at Kashmir and included the struggle there in the same net. It is time that the Muslim rulers distance themselves from this imperial project and address their internal problems, be they of ethnicity, sectarianism or sheer political violence, in their proper and specific framework. They have to find the right template to achieve their own balance between extremism and moderation.

It is also of cardinal importance that the OIC states restore the salience of the core issues in the Middle East, as indeed, elsewhere. Scholars like Edward Said lived and died wondering how the Arab and Islamic states could naively applaud the Oslo process when every single week in the calendar produced evidence of Israel’s creation of new ground realities through intensified colonisation of the West Bank and Jerusalem. Edward Said did not live long enough to fully watch the post 9/11 crusades in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon.

Now that western diplomats and military commanders are themselves voicing fears of an impending civil war in Iraq and its fragmentation, there is no justification left for the naivete of the regional ruling elites. The Islamic peoples will judge them by the degree to which they can connect their much flaunted ties with the West to the deliverance of their lands from foreign occupation and hegemony. The alternative will be many more Hezbollahs in Mr Blair’s ever-widening arc of instability.

Meanwhile, for the martyrs of Palestine and Lebanon, there is nothing better than the concluding stanza of the Brodsky poem quoted above:

Time, whose sharp blood-thirsty quill/
parts the killed from those who kill,/
will pronounce the latter tribe/
as your tribe.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

Demise of the Doha round

WHEN I came out of the house this morning, Jean-Baptiste was standing in the road gazing into the field opposite with a worried expression. He had lost two cows, he said. And he was obviously right, because there were only five cows in the field.

Jean-Baptiste is what polite people no longer call a peasant. He lives in a big farm-house in the Basque-speaking part of France, he is 70 years old, and he has only seven cows. (His wife calls them his “pets.”) But they live well, and all their children and grandchildren still live within reach of them, mostly in very beautiful places.

This is “la France profonde” — deepest France — and 50 years ago it was desperately poor. Now it allows families like Jean-Baptiste’s a modest contentment, and in return they keep France looking like the dream of rural bliss that the urban multitudes expect. And how does he achieve all this with a couple of stony hillside pastures, seven cows, and some chickens? The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), of course.

France has defended the CAP tooth and nail for many years, although it subsidises the European Union’s farmers outrageously. Indeed, because it subsidises them outrageously. But at the G8 summit in St. Petersburg earlier this month, the European Union’s trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, offered a 51 per cent cut in EU tariffs on agricultural imports in order to keep the faltering world trade talks alive. French President Jacques Chirac left the meeting fuming.

The US yielded some ground on agricultural protectionism too, offering to cap subsidies to its farmers at $15 billion compared to its previous offer of $22.5 billion. All this would theoretically help developing countries to trade their way out of poverty by exporting food to the rich countries — and in return India and Brazil, representing the developing countries, said they would cut tariffs on imports of manufactured goods to 20 per cent from the current average of 30 per cent. So the “Doha round” of the trade talks stumbled on — until last Monday.

The six negotiators at Geneva, representing the US, the EU, Japan, Australia, Brazil and India, had only a month to reach a deal: they would then have had to sell the deal to the WTO’s other 143 members, and President Bush’s authority to “fast-track” a deal through the US Congress (thus avoiding death by a thousand amendments) expires next year. But they had barely sat down around the table again before it became clear that the promises made at St. Petersburg would not be kept. Predictably, it was agriculture that proved the ultimate stumbling block.

At this point in articles on world trade, we were customarily told that the “Uruguay round” of talks on liberalising world trade, concluded in 1993, began the globalisation that underpins our current prosperity, and that the Doha round, under negotiation since 2001, was vital to maintain the momentum. Or else we are told that globalisation has hurt the poor, and that this round must come out differently or they are doomed. However, this was mostly hot air.

Easier access to European and North American markets would not have helped most poor farmers in Africa or India; rather, it would have allowed rich farmers who can exploit those opportunities to buy up their land and turn them into urban poor. On the other hand, lowering the barriers against cheap food imports from the Third World doesn’t have to destroy the lifestyle of people like Jean-Baptiste and the traditional countryside they maintain. Just admit that you are really subsidising lifestyle and countryside, not food, and find a different way of getting the money to them.

As for the benefits of freer trade, it was definitely beneficial for the rich countries when they could set the terms of trade in their own favour, but they are much less enthusiastic about it now that the developing countries can hold their own at the bargaining table. Since China became a full member of the WTO in 2001, the “Group of 20” has coalesced around the four heavyweights — China, India, Brazil and South Africa — and the rich countries don’t win all the arguments any more.

The US has pretty well given up on multilateral trade deals already, preferring to negotiate bilateral deals where it can still use its size to shape the outcome to its advantage. —Copyright

Who’s the extremist?

TONY BLAIR’S speech to the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles was revealing. His definition of the “arc of extremism” applies to himself perfectly.

He “has an ideology, a world-view, deep conviction and the determination of the fanatic”. His discourse is full of a secularised missionary absolutism, founded on a Manichean world-view of “We” and “They”. The battle of the demons and angels in old Judeo-Christian apocalyptic literature turns into a conflict of good vs evil in Bush’s universe, and into progress v reaction in Blair’s.

While constantly pointing the finger at Muslims and denying any part in the spread of terrorism, this arrogant rhetoric of neoliberal militantism, which goes hand in hand with military aggression on the ground, is terrorism’s chief recruiter and the greatest threat to Britain’s national security.

Today, Bush and Blair are not just giving Israel the green light to pursue its war on Lebanon. They are partners in this war aimed at reshaping the map of the Middle East. This is as though the region were a vacuum, or an empty desert — without a people, or memory — to be fashioned in light of their political fantasies and military strategies.

Blair appears intent on turning the clock backwards to the imperial Victorian age, or even to the French Revolution and Napoleon’s wars of progress and enlightenment. Like Al Qaeda’s sacred warriors, he is determined to transform the world into opposite trenches and raging battlefields for the sake of his “global values”.

So far, the lofty values that Blair preaches to the people of the Middle East in his fight for their “souls”, “hearts” and “minds” have ignited wars that rage to this day, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and God knows where next. Yet he still believes that “we are not being bold enough, consistent enough, thorough enough, in fighting for the values we believe in”. While evangelising about justice and progress, he has spearheaded the effort to block attempts by the UN, the Rome summit and the European Union to agree a ceasefire and put an end to the daily carnage in Lebanon.

Blair seems to inhabit an imaginary world he has constructed. He stands at its middle as the King of Salvation, blind to all the bitterness and suffering his absurd wars are creating. Those who exist outside this fantastic realm, he insists, are deluded: from the Arab street, indoctrinated by “years of anti-Israeli and therefore anti-American propaganda”, through to the British public, which he fears “sympathises with Muslim opinion”, including his MPs, his cabinet, and the Foreign Office.

—Dawn/Guardian Service

Castro: the end of an icon?

ONE can’t help feeling a little sorry for Fidel Castro, the undisputed leader of the island nation of Cuba, and 12 million people, who has recently been sidelined by surgery. He is the last of the great charismatic leaders of the 20th century — a formidable catalogue of political figures that included Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, Mao, Gandhi, Ho-chi-Minh, Mandela and Kenyatta.

For 47 years Castro survived nine American presidents and managed to resist US attempts to oust him. These included stiff economic sanctions and a US-abetted invasion of the mainland. With his tempestuous nature, fiery oratory, scraggy grey beard and eternal green military uniform and cap, he became an icon of international socialism. He is an inspiration to the anti-imperialist movements in the Third World, and the fact that he continued to cock a snook at the great superpower to the north and managed to get away with it, has also made him a cult hero with left-wing groups in the developed world.

Before he went in for his operation he handed over power to his brother Raoul, and now that he is convalescing Cuba watchers are wondering if this might eventually graduate into a power struggle and Fidel’s ultimate ouster. The United States would certainly like to see that happening. America and Cuba share a long history of mutual mistrust and suspicion. All aspects of US policy with Cuba, such as the current trade embargo, immigration practices, and most recently the possibility of a free exchange by members of the media, provoke heated debates across the United States.

While most Americans agree that the ultimate goals should be to encourage Castro’s resignation and promote a smooth transition to democracy, experts disagree about how the US government should accomplish these aims. Some believe that the country’s current policy towards Cuba is outdated in its Cold War approach and needs to be reconstructed. However, many still consider Fidel Castro a threat in the hemisphere and a menace to his own people and favour tightening the screws on his regime even more.

It wasn’t always like this. The reaction of early American administrations had been a little ambivalent, to say the least. Initially the United States was quick to recognise the new government and Castro’s appointment as prime minister, in spite of glaring ideological differences. But friction soon developed when the new socialist government of Cuba began expropriating property owned by major American corporations, which included the particularly exploitative United Fruit Company which came to be regarded as the major symbol of US imperialism in Latin America.

Castro’s first administrative action was to demand compensation based on property tax valuations that for many years US companies had managed to keep artificially low. Castro took the plunge and called on the White House in April 1959. President Eisenhower deliberately snubbed Castro, giving the excuse that he was playing golf, and asked his vice president to meet the unwelcome guest. Eisenhower’s brief to Richard Nixon was short and to the point. “I want you to find out if the fellow really is a communist. Everybody around me says he is, but we’ve got to be sure.” Following the meeting, Nixon remarked that Castro was somewhat naive — but not necessarily a communist.

His views were corroborated by a number of authorities. “This is not a communist revolution in any sense of the term,” The New York Times had declared a year earlier. “Fidel Castro is not only not a communist, he is decidedly anti-communist.” Walter Lippmann was even more specific. “It would be a great mistake,” he wrote, in the Washington Post that same month “even to intimate that Castro’s Cuba has any real prospect of becoming a Soviet satellite.”

A few months earlier the London Observer had observed: “Mr Castro’s bearded youthful figure has become a symbol of Latin America’s rejection of brutality and lying. Every sign is that he will reject personal rule and violence.”

Subsequent events, however, proved that all these gentlemen were way off the mark. Castro then started his flirtation with Moscow. In February 1960, Cuba signed an agreement to buy oil from the USSR. When the US-owned refineries in Cuba refused to process the oil they were expropriated. The United States reacted by breaking off diplomatic relations with the Castro government. Cuba then continued to establish closer ties with the Soviet Union. A variety of pacts were signed and Cuba began to receive large amounts of economic and military aid from the Soviet Union. The die was cast.

The United States then sponsored an attack on Cuba. A force of around 1,400 Cuban exiles financed and trained by the CIA landed south of Havana at Playa Giron on the Bay of Pigs. The CIA’s assumption that the invasion would spark a popular uprising against Castro badly misfired. There was no such uprising. The intelligence agency had completely underestimated the Cuban leader’s popularity. In fact, the part of the invasion force that made it ashore was captured, two US supplied support ships, the Houston and the Rmo Escondido, were sunk by Cuban propeller driven aircraft, and nine collaborators were executed in connection with this action.

President Kennedy could have easily flattened the island nation, but withdrew his support at the eleventh hour. He was criticised for this but maintained that America and Cuba were not at war and that the fight was between two groups of Cubans — the exiles and the people on the island. It was a very different scene during the Cuban missile crisis, when Russian vessels were bringing missiles with nuclear warheads to Cuba. When Kennedy issued an ultimatum Khrushchev sensibly backed off and averted what could easily have triggered off the Third World War.

After the Bay of Pigs fiasco Castro’s popularity surged like the burst of a newly drilled oil rig. Unlike most heads of state that prefer to remain cocooned in heavily guarded fortresses during times of conflict, Castro behaved like Rommel in the North Africa campaign, riding with his soldiers, drinking tepid water from chipped mugs and personally calling the shots on the dusty desert plain.

Cameras often caught Castro on the bullet-scarred battlefield, marshalling his troops, signalling to the pilots of his rag bag air force and goading his anti-aircraft gunners to do their best.

In the winter of that year, in a nationally broadcast speech, Castro declared that he was a Marxist-Leninist and that Cuba was going to adopt a true socialist system. During the 1960s, several smaller-scale attempts were made to overthrow the Cuban leader. Once again small gangs of Cuban exiles were financed and equipped by the CIA. But the attacks were systematically crushed.

The people of Cuba are still largely impoverished and educational standards are abysmally low. Despite severe economic suffering and increasing isolation from the world community, the people have an indomitable spirit not often seen in other parts of Latin America.

Havana hasn’t really changed all that much during the last 40 years. There are the refineries and the assembly plants, the rum distilleries and the cigar factories. And one still comes across those brightly coloured 1960-style American automobiles, their chrome bumpers gleaming in the tropical sun, and men in shirt sleeves in the village square, chomping on eight-inch long cigars and playing chess, just as the great Jose Raoul Capablanca used to do in the earlier part of the last century, before he became world chess champion.

Cigars are smoked by both men and women. After the revolution a number of emigres smuggled seeds of the tobacco plant to Honduras and the Dominican Republic. But connoisseurs remain loyal to the various brands of Cuban cigars that find their way to every part of the globe — outside the United States.

There is something about the climate and the soil of the tobacco grown in the Vuelta Abajo part of the Pinar del Rio region west of Havana and the Partido region south of the capital that just cannot be emulated.

Once the sun sets over the Palacio de las Convenciones Havana throbs to the beat of the salsa. Cuba is the traditional home of Latin American music. Except for the samba and the baion, which developed on the grasslands of Brazil, and the tango and milonga which originated and flourished in Buenos Aires and on the Argentine pampas, the island of Cuba spawned every other kind of Latin American dance — the rumba, son, guajira, mambo, beguine and conga. It would indeed be a pity if one witnessed a drastic change in the place.