Peace talks’ resumption

EVEN though it cannot be called a breakthrough, it is a matter of some satisfaction that the secretary-level talks between Pakistan and India in Dhaka have been described as “positive” by Foreign Secretary Riaz Mohammad Khan. Meeting his Pakistani counterpart on the sidelines of the Saarc meeting in the Bangladeshi capital, Indian Foreign Secretary Shayam Saran said that the peace process between the two countries was “important” and that nothing should be allowed to derail it. Their earlier meeting, scheduled for July 20-21 in New Delhi, was postponed by India following the bomb blasts in Mumbai trains on July 11. The blasts and the knee-jerk reaction by India highlighted the tenuous nature of the peace process. The wild allegations by the Indian government and the media, the latter finding a Pakistani hand behind the blasts shortly after the explosions, set in motion a chain reaction that in no way served to advance the cause of a durable peace in South Asia. New Delhi rejected Islamabad’s offer of a joint probe into the crime and, instead, came out with the usual, gratuitous advice — that Pakistan should “do more”. India also saw too much in Foreign Minister Khursheed Kasuri’s reference to Kashmir following the Mumbai tragedy. What the foreign minister had said was that the existence of disputes like Kashmir gives extremist elements on both sides an opportunity to exploit the situation by blaming the other country. He thus emphasised the need for finding a solution to the Kashmir issue. The malignancy which some Indians saw in the Kasuri statement was not there.

Things, however, plunged to a new low since the beginning of the detente when there was talk in India of “hot pursuit” into Pakistan and Azad Kashmir. This prompted President Musharraf to say that no one should have “the wishful thinking that Pakistan will bear any kind of adventure inside its territory”. The “hot pursuit” talk was laughable because India knows very well that it has no such option available to it. Pakistan has often said — and rightly — that the peace process in South Asia is hostage to acts of terrorism. The carnage in Mumbai last month shows that Pakistan’s reading of the situation is not wrong. The peace process must be pursued by the two sides in earnest with the full realisation that there are forces arrayed against it. It is easy to allege that Pakistan is not doing enough and must do more. But must not India do more to solve the Kashmir problem? Must not India improve its human rights record in Kashmir which has attracted censure from world rights bodies? More important, New Delhi should show flexibility on Kashmir. Its rigidity on the issue is in sharp contrast with the open mind Islamabad has, for the latter has come out with a number of bold and imaginative proposals, including a zone-wise demilitarisation in phases. But a show of reciprocity from the Indian side has been conspicuous by its absence.

The redeeming feature, however, is that in spite of the obstacles in the way the two countries have taken many confidence-building measures that have considerably improved the geopolitical climate in South Asia. The task now is to pursue the “composite dialogue” to which both countries are committed. Let India prove Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz wrong when he told an Indian magazine that he believed that India did not have “a passion for peace”.

UN resolution on Iran

THE timing couldn’t have been worse. The UN Security Council resolution calling on Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment programme assumes added significance when juxtaposed against the current situation in Lebanon, where Hezbollah fighters morally backed by Iran are currently engaged in a running battle with the Israeli army. Failure by Tehran to comply with the August 31 deadline could result in “appropriate measures” under the UN Charter, specifically Article 41 of chapter seven. While the action to be taken is not clearly defined, the Article cited in the resolution relates to the imposition of economic sanctions. Qatar’s was the lone dissenting voice in the Security Council. Explaining his country’s stance, Qatar’s ambassador to the UN stated that while the Council’s demands were legitimate, “we do not agree with the resolution at a time when our region is in flames.” A day earlier, the US blocked the adoption of a statement condemning the Israeli attack on Qana and calling for an immediate end to hostilities in Lebanon. Instead, a watered down statement was issued after Sunday’s extraordinary meeting of the Security Council, which chose not to criticise Israel by name.

Turning up the heat on Iran at this critical stage is bound to further inflame anti-US sentiments in the Middle East and the rest of the Muslim world. The UN’s recent actions appear to confirm the organisation’s impotence in the face of American double standards. The US too needs to think again if it believes that it can induce regime change in Iran — or put an end to its support for Hezbollah — through moves aimed at isolating Tehran internationally. The Iranian people take national sovereignty seriously, and increased interference by the US will only increase popular support for President Ahmadinejad. The neocon agenda is inherently flawed because of its failure to recognise that people from different cultures think differently. The US has already made a mess of Iraq and, further east, the Taliban are in a resurgent state in Afghanistan where the writ of the Karzai regime does not extend beyond Kabul. By targeting Iran and blindly supporting Israel, the US is going down a route that could destabilise the whole of the Middle East for years to come. This must not be allowed to happen.

Abolishing secret US prisons

ALTHOUGH it is unlikely that the US will pay heed to the UN Human Rights Committee’s call to close down all secret detention centres associated with the war on terror, independent reports confirm that Washington houses a large number of suspected militants in clandestine prisons located in several countries. In the absence of official comment, it is difficult to identify these countries but they are generally believed to be in the Middle East region, North Africa and Eastern Europe. It is not surprising that Washington is tight-lipped on the subject. Its harsh treatment of hundreds of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan’s Bagram airbase has provoked strong international condemnation, and disclosures of human rights violations at other detention centres could strip it of whatever remains of its credibility in matters of human rights. Moreover, in the wake of a recent verdict by the American supreme court, declaring military tribunals at Guantanamo as illegal, the Bush administration will be at pains to avoid divulging any information that could form the basis of another probe by US courts.

It is also unrealistic to expect pro-US governments of countries where these prisons are located to confirm the presence of such facilities. The onus then lies on liberal governments, international rights groups and UN panels, which have so far been unsparing in their criticism of America’s highhanded practices in war on terror areas, to increase pressure on Washington to conform to those principles of the Geneva Conventions that relate to prisoner rights. Equally, countries suspected of harbouring such secret facilities should be asked to confirm their presence on their territory. They may have their own reasons to support America, but it should be made clear to them that withholding legal help from prisoners and subjecting them to harsh interrogatory tactics constitute a breach of war rules.

Lessons of a failed intervention

ON a midsummer’s day 50 years ago, the new president of Egypt was scheduled to make a speech in Alexandria. Only a handful of Egyptians had any inkling of the bombshell Gamal Abdel Nasser intended to drop during his discourse: namely that the North African country was assuming control of the company — hitherto dominated by French and British interests — responsible for operating the Suez Canal.

The canal, which links the Red Sea with the Mediterranean, had been constructed in the previous century, under colonial rule, by Egyptian workers who laboured in conditions not far removed from slavery. An estimated 120,000 of them had perished while working on the 120-mile artificial waterway, whose construction was overseen by a French company managed by Ferdinand de Lesseps.

On July 26, 1956, a small Egyptian task force had been ordered to listen to Nasser’s speech on the radio. The trigger for action was the president’s mention of de Lesseps. Just to make sure no one missed the reference, Nasser wove the Frenchman into his speech not once but thrice.

The takeover of the Suez Canal company proceeded smoothly enough. The three groups of Egyptians tasked with enforcing it went to the company’s headquarters and announced it had been nationalised. They also told the mainly French and British employees that they had nothing to worry about: their jobs were secure. The strategy didn’t work in the medium term: either of their own volition or under pressure from their governments, the foreign managers, engineers and navigators deserted the Suez and Egypt had to come up with its own work force. It succeeded. The bulk of profits from the extremely lucrative Suez Canal operations no longer ended up in Paris and London.

Nasser’s nationalisation of the canal provoked two kinds of reactions. The Arab world, which had hitherto been wary of the colonels who had overthrown Egypt’s effete, pro-western monarchy in 1952, was electrified by the unanticipated body-blow against neo-colonialism. France and Britain were mortified. The idea of Arabs managing their own interests was anathema to both colonial powers.

The crucial third component of the axis was the young state of Israel, not yet half as powerful as it would become in the decade that followed, but eager nonetheless to spearhead aggression against its neighbours. Granted, the neighbours were none too friendly towards Israel either: the nationalists among them viewed it as an imperialist construct, and Israel’s role in the Suez fiasco would serve only to confirm that impression.

In the tripartite conspiracy to effect regime change in Cairo and reclaim the Suez Canal, France and Israel were as thick as thieves while Britain was a relative outsider, involved in the mission primarily because of its Conservative prime minister, Anthony Eden, who saw in Nasser a reincarnation of Hitler. Or Mussolini. Not many people knew it at the time, but Eden was a sick man on heavy medication; and to combat the side-effects of the medicines, he took more drugs. Some historians suspect this chemical cocktail interfered with his intellectual capacities and rendered him incapable of recognising the folly of his actions, against the advice of most civil servants as well as the intelligence agencies. Eden wasn’t, however, by any means the only British politician to harbour delusions of grandeur about the dwindling British empire.

Until then, as far as the British establishment was concerned, Israel was the likeliest target of a military intervention in the Middle East, primarily because of its raids into Jordan (with Ariel Sharon as the driving force). Suddenly, Israel was an ally, albeit a secret one. The plan was for Israel to invade Sinai, whereupon Britain and France would wade into the fray, ostensibly to separate the belligerents and secure the Suez. The idea was to install a friendlier regime in Cairo, although — as in the case of Iraq nearly half a century later — the western powers had not worked out in any great detail what they would do after the invasion.

Initially, things went according to plan for the aggressors. But only for a while. Eden had failed to convince the US president, Dwight Eisenhower, of the threat posed by Nasser. The US was not in the loop as far as the invasion plan was concerned, and Eisenhower was livid when he found out. The US and the Soviet Union both threw their weight behind a ceasefire call, and the war ground to a halt eight days after it had been launched in late October 1956.

Nasser, having survived, was immediately catapulted to the status of an Arab hero and although his dream of a pan-Arab state was never fulfilled, he remained the most potent symbol of Arab nationalism until the day he died — even after the six-day disaster of 1967, when mass mobilisations across Egypt compelled him to rescind his resignation.

In the shorter term, a little more than a year after Suez, Nasser inaugurated the short-lived United Arab Republic with Syria. Some months later, Iraqi army officers overthrew their country’s pro-British monarchy in a bloody coup, killing King Faisal II and Prime Minister Nuri Said. (Ironically, two years earlier, Eden had been hosting a dinner for Nuri Said on the night Nasser announced his decision to nationalise the Suez; the Iraqi’s advice to his host was “to hit him [Nasser] hard”.) Five years later, the relatively progressive Iraqi regime of Abdul Karim Qassem was in turn overthrown in a coup reputedly supported by the US and spearheaded by the Ba’athists, whose ranks included a brutal young thug by the name of Saddam Hussein al-Takriti.

The Jordanian monarchy barely survived in the face of nationalist pressures: British troops had to shore up King Hussein and his coterie. Lebanon’s pro-western government, meanwhile, was compelled to rely for its survival on US marines.

Britain and France reacted to their Suez humiliation in very different ways. The French prime minister, Guy Mollet, was holding talks with West Germany’s chancellor Konrad Adenauer when Eden called to say he was bowing to US pressure by agreeing to a ceasefire. Adenauer reportedly launched a long anti-American tirade, telling Mollet, “We have no time to waste: Europe will be your revenge.” France eased out of Nato’s military command structure and has maintained a relatively independent foreign policy ever since. Britain, on the other hand, realising at long last that it was no longer a global power, allied itself firmly with the US — a “special relationship” that may have reached its apogee with the deadly Blair-Bush combination.

Israel chose the same path, although it wasn’t until a decade later that its alliance with the US acquired lethal aspects. As borne out by the current aggression against Lebanon, things have now come to such a pass that when Israel behaves like a fascist bully, the US can no longer bring itself to dish out even the mildest form of censure. Instead, it speeds up arms deliveries. And the British prime minister does not dare to dissent significantly from the party line laid down by Washington.

The Suez anniversary has prompted comparisons between Tony Blair and Eden, given that the latter, too, lied to the British public and to parliament in order to cover up the truth about a sordid Middle Eastern misadventure, which he undertook in the face of considerable domestic opposition. There may be some wishful thinking involved in highlighting this parallel, given that Eden was compelled to make way for Harold Macmillan within weeks of the Suez affair — even though written proof of the extent of his involvement in the conspiracy didn’t emerge until decades later.

For all that, given Blair’s determined appeasement of the US and now Israel, it may make more sense to place him in the same category as Neville Chamberlain. A clearer sense of historical realities — in the context of the overall colonial experience, not just Suez — may have deterred him from blundering into Iraq alongside the Americans. He appears, instead, to have fallen for the revisionist myth that British imperialist was, on the whole, a positive experience for those who bore its brunt.

One of the many ironies of the confrontation between the West and Arab nationalism — which continued, in various guises, well into the 1970s — was that many of the nationalists were as vociferously opposed to Islamist trends as the West is today. Nasser, for instance, looked upon the nascent Muslim Brotherhood as a cancerous growth. His preferred response, unfortunately, was ruthless repression, which involved gross violations of human rights and ultimately proved counterproductive. Deploying the force of alternative ideas against them would, in hindsight, probably have proved more fruitful. The fact remains that western organs from the CIA to Mossad encouraged and often funded religious fanatics as a counterweight to the nationalists, Hamas being one of the more recent examples of this phenomenon.

There’s a fair chance that Nasser will be turning in his grave over his portraits being borne aloft by demonstrators in Egypt alongside those of Hezbollah’s Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah. But perhaps the perpetrators of the Suez conflagration would be even more surprised to discover that so many of their follies are once more in vogue as an Anglo-American (rather than Anglo-French) combine tries in vain to subdue one occupied Arab country while seeking to introduce into another an international force aimed at alleviating Israel’s woes by doing its dirty work for it. As a Vietnam-era American folk song puts it, when will they ever learn?

Email: mahirali1@gmail.com