|
|
|
|
Death of the
Arabs
By Sami Moubayed
DAMASCUS - Arab leaders have just finished a
two-day Arab Summit in Algeria that coincided with
the 60th anniversary of the Arab League. Unsurprisingly,
as in the past, the outcome of
the meeting was insignificant.
Three
years ago, the Arab Summit in Beirut seemed
promising, because of the peace initiative of Saudi Crown Prince
Abdullah. The Arabs made their historic and
comprehensive land-for-peace offer to Israel, and
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon responded by invading
and raiding Ramallah 24 hours later, killing
hundreds of civilians and coming very close to
sniping down the democratically elected
Palestinian president Yasser Arafat, at his
besieged compound in Ramallah.
The Arabs
did nothing to stop him and the "great" Arab
Summit was sent off into history with little
ceremony or respect. The leaders that met this
week in Algeria argued and embarrassed the Arab
masses on satellite television (nine leaders did
not even show up), and came up with a statement,
written in flowery Arabic, on the need to show
solidarity with the Palestinians and the Iraqis.
One year ago on this exact date, Israel
assassinated Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the popular
leader and founder of Hamas, accusing him of being
a "terrorist", infuriating the Arab masses and the
Islamic resistance, which promised to avenge the
slain leader.
Less than one month later,
on April 17, 2004, Yassin's successor, Dr Abd
al-Aziz al-Rantisi, was also killed by the Israeli
army. Again, the Arabs promised revenge, and did
nothing. A few months back, on November 11, 2004,
the historic leader of the Palestinian people,
Yasser Arafat, died in a hospital in Paris, and
many Palestinians and Arabs speculated that he had
been poisoned by Israel. They promised revenge,
yet also did nothing. In fact, all they did was
rally in rank and file behind the newly elected
leader Mahmud Abbas, who promised to take them in
the exact opposite direction from where Arafat had
been leading them since 1965. This is the sad case
today with the Arab street.
The history of
Arab weakness, especially during Arab summits, is
a phenomenon worth examining. As early as 1948,
during a summit to discuss the upcoming war in
Palestine, embarrassing arguments broke out
between Amin al-Husayni, the Mufti of Jerusalem,
who was the pre-Arafat leader of the Palestinians,
and Syria's Shukri al-Quwatli. Husayni demanded
that the Army of Deliverance, a volunteer army
created by the Arab League, be placed under his
command, while Quwatli objected, wanting it under
the command of Syria.
Husayni reasoned
that his history, during the uprising against the
British in 1936, attested that he could lead an
army in combat, while Quwatli wanted leadership
for Syria, to live up to Syria's history of Arab
nationalism. When Quwatli objected, Husayni
bitterly reminded him that he had donated
generously to the Syrian cause in 1925-27, and
expected Quwatli to pay him back for his favors.
He said that he would not recognize a resistance
movement in Palestine not under his command, and
sent Quwatli a list of expenses, salaries and
military needs for his 12,000 recruits, which
Syria was expected to provide. Quwatli snapped
back saying, "If the Palestinian people want to
make the Mufti commander of everything in
Palestine, then I would be more than happy to give
him everything. That way I could rid myself of all
the responsibility which rests on my shoulders,
and all the problems I face in trying to save
Palestine. I could relax. By pushing forward with
my efforts to defend Palestine, I am risking
Syria's very independence. An independence which
is absolute and in which every Syrian takes pride.
An independence won with tremendous sacrifice."
Quwatli added that if Husayni took
control, then the Palestinians would lose the war.
"The Mufti's actions in Palestine over the last 20
years have never been successful, but have only
led to one defeat after another," he said.
Inter-Arab differences were many, and the Arab
camp was further divided between Quwatli and
Jordanian King Abdullah. Jordan was reluctant to
approve a pan-Arab fighting force in Palestine and
showed reservations about involving its own troops
in combat. Abdullah expressed resentment at
Quwatli's decision to draft a volunteer army from
Syria, and added that if an Arab force would be
created, he and only he should lead it.
Iraq supported Amman (both were ruled by
the Hashemite dynasty) while Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
Lebanon and Palestine supported Syria. During
their meeting, Quwatli received a cable from Hasan
al-Banna, founder of the Egyptian Muslim
Brotherhood, who claimed that 10,000 fighters from
the Brotherhood were ready for combat, and were at
the disposal of the Arab League. The proposal
infuriated King Farouk, who was facing a violent
clash with the Brotherhood at home.
When
the Arabs welcomed Banna's proposal, Farouk walked
out in protest. The Mufti of Jerusalem Amin
al-Husayni spoke to reporters after the meeting
saying, "The Arabs have never been united on any
topic before, as they are united today on
Palestine." Then British foreign secretary Douglas
Hume mocked the Arabs, saying, "As the Arabs have
always been without a strategy, there was no
clarity or feeling about what they should do on
the land that they call Palestine." These colossal
arguments were before the creation of Israel.
There are many milestones of embarrassment
in the history of Arab summits. In Alexandria,
Egypt, in September 1964, the summit formally
approved the establishment of the Palestinian
Liberation Organization (PLO), under the command
of an Arab aristocrat named Ahmad Shuqayri. It was
a political organization, dwarfed by Egyptian
president Gamal Abd al-Nasser, very different from
the revolutionary one that emerged under Arafat,
and its leader Shuqayri was a soft-spoken notable
who had never carried a gun in his life.
To have him lead the PLO was an
embarrassment in its own right, showing how
serious the Arabs were in wanting to liberate
Palestine. In Casablanca, an Arab summit was held
in September 1965 that was so insignificant that
no notable decisions were reached.
The
summit
that came next, officially being the fourth,
called for by the Arab League, was memorable,
being held in Khartoum, Sudan, two months
after the Arab defeat in the war of 1967 where
Israel occupied the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula,
the West Bank and Jerusalem. This summit
agreed that the heads of state would take all
needed measures to liberate the Arab territories
occupied in war. They would "unify their political
efforts to eliminate the effects of the Israeli
aggression" in addition to increasing their
military strength through the funding of Libya,
Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
The summit came
out with the famous "Three No's": no peace with
Israel, no recognition of Israel and no
negotiations with Israel. Today, nearly 40 years
later, all these occupied lands, with the
exception of the Syrian Golan, have been
liberated, not by war, as the leaders that
assembled in Sudan wanted, but actually by the
peace initiatives of Anwar al-Sadat in 1977-78
and Yasser Arafat in 1993. In fact, they were only
liberated by doing exactly what the Khartoum
summit asked the Arab leaders not to do in 1967.
Then came the Arab summit of September
1970, held while war was raging in Jordan between
King Hussein's army and the PLO of Yasser Arafat.
To show their disgust with Hussein's bloodbath,
Syria, Iraq, Algeria and Morocco failed to show up
at the summit. By absenting themselves, all four
states effectively did little to stop the
bloodbath, only increasing tension between Hussein
and the Arabs.
It was not until November
1973 that the Arab summit then decided to "refuse
any solution that might be harmful to complete
Arab sovereignty over the Holy City of Jerusalem".
And it was not until October 1974 that the summit
affirmed "the right of the Palestinians to
self-determination and to return to
their
homeland".
Jordan objected, but this
Arab summit in Rabat, Morocco, acknowledged the
PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian
people - a title and honor King Hussein wanted for
himself. In October 1976, an Arab Summit was held
in Riyadh to discuss the civil war in Lebanon and
to form the Arab Deterrent Force to help stop the
fighting. In fact, the fighting broke out in April
1975, and the Arabs were one year and six months
late in convening to help save Lebanon from the
civil war. Even then, they failed drastically in
their task, and war did not end until 14 years
later, in 1990.
More Arab
shortsightedness and weakness was shown at the
Arab Summit held in Iraq in November 1978, which
called on Egypt not to sign a peace treaty with
Israel, and froze relations with president Anwar
Sadat. Years later, every Arab leader assembled in
Baghdad in 1978, responsible for the
strongly-worded declaration against Sadat, tried
desperately to repeat what Sadat had done at Camp
David.
A summit held in Tunis in November
1979, after the Israeli occupation of South
Lebanon, affirmed that liberating it would be an
Arab responsibility "in as much as it was a
Lebanese responsibility". Again, as the case of
1976, the Arab decision was too little and too
late, coming months after the actual occupation of
the south.
And it was not the Arab League,
but in fact the Lebanese resistance of Hezbollah,
with the help of Iran (a non-Arab country), that
liberated the south in 2000, with no help
whatsoever from the Arab community.
At a
1987 Arab conference in Amman, so tense was the
situation between the Arabs and Arafat that the
Palestinian cause was absent from the leaders'
agenda and no mention of Palestine was made in the
final communique. In June 1988, six months after
the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada, an Arab
summit was held in Algeria, which asked for the
organization of an international conference on the
Middle East, to be attended by Arafat's exiled
PLO, residing at the time in Tunis. It affirmed
the right of the Palestinians to
self-determination, and did nothing but offer
verbal support to the Palestinians, who were
leading a non-militant uprising against
occupation, armed with nothing but stones.
An extraordinary summit was
held in Cairo in August 1990, after Saddam
Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. The Arab League
called on him to withdraw his forces from Kuwait,
condemning it as aggression, but took no steps
toward pressuring Saddam to comply. The
league could have, had it wished,
created an Arab force to supervise Saddam's exodus
from Kuwait, but preferred to leave the job to the
US, thereby facilitating the Gulf War of 1991. In
fact, at the Cairo Summit of 1990, it was decided
that an Arab force would be deployed between
Kuwait and Iraq to enforce a withdrawal and end to
hostilities, something that never took place.
In June 1996, a
summit was held in Cairo to discuss the election
of Binyamin Netanyahu in Israel. So divided were
the Arabs, and so eager to please the US, that
Saddam's Iraq was not invited.
In October
2000, a summit was held in Cairo where a fund of
US$1 billion was set aside to preserve the al-Aqsa
Mosque in Jerusalem, and support the intifada that
had broken out in September 2000. Today, five years
later, that money has not gone through into either
project, and the intifada is proclaimed dead, by
the Arab community at large, and by Mahmud Abbas,
the new president of the Palestinians.
The
2000 conference in Sharm el-Sheikh and the 2001
conference in Amman were the greatest proof of
Arab inefficiency, where the Arab states were
unable even properly to channel the donation funds
promised to the Palestinians. In 2000, so terrible
was the Arab scene that Libya's Muammar Gaddafi
appeared on satellite television and accused the
Arabs of organizing summits solely to meet, dine
and catch up on one another's stories, claiming
that no serious work was ever made at the
"so-called summits".
The past three summits
were also very memorable. In March 2002 in Beirut,
the Arabs met to discuss a comprehensive Arab
peace initiative, and the continued house
arrest of Arafat. Not only did Israel
prevent Arafat from attending the conference, but
the organizers in Beirut caused an Arab-Arab
crisis by refusing to broadcast Arafat's speech,
broadcast from Ramallah, fearing that this would
upset the Syrians, who were traditional enemies of
the PLO chairman.
At Sharm al-Sheikh in
March 2003, the summit was a fiasco because a war
of words broke out, on satellite television,
between Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and
Gaddafi. In May 2004, a summit was held in Tunis,
after being delayed from an earlier date, where
Gaddafi, so upset at the summit's resolutions,
took out a cigarette and began to smoke, puffing
away in the face of Lebanon's late prime minister
Rafik Hariri.
This year's summit opened
amid monumental changes taking place in the Arab
world. It is the first summit since 1965 held
without the towering influence of Arafat. The
intifada, which Arafat championed since 2000, is
nearly over, and Syria's presence in Lebanon is
also coming to an end. In Iraq, the people are
moving on after many years of hardship, having
conducted democratic elections in January and are
working to create a proper post-Saddam Iraq.
Other longtime faces of the Arab world,
including the United Arab Emirates' president, Zayed
bin Sultan al-Nahyan, who died in 2004, were
absent, and so was Hariri, killed in a bomb attack
in Beirut this year.
Even the
well-established leaders of the Arab world failed
to show up. King Abdullah of Jordan, annoyed by
the summit refusing to adopt a Jordanian
resolution calling for normalization with Israel,
did not attend, claiming that he had prior
commitments. Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia
did not show, to protest the presence of Gaddafi,
who was implicated in an assassination attempt
against the Saudi royals after their feud at the
Arab Summit of 2003. Lebanon's Emile Lahhoud is
facing rising tension at home in light of Prime
Minister Omar Karameh's failure to form a proper
cabinet, and the latest car bomb in Beirut, which
left eight injured. He did not show up, nor did
the leaders of Bahrain, Oman and Yemen. The
leaders of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia also failed to
show up, for health reasons.
The reasons
for so many absences vary, but a main point is
that even the Arab leaders themselves have lost
faith in their ability to change the terrible
conditions of the Middle East, for which they are
collectively responsible.
Dr Sami
Moubayed is a Syrian political analyst.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd.
All rights reserved. Please contact us for
information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
All material on this
website is copyright and may not be republished in any form without written
permission.
© Copyright 1999 - 2005 Asia Times
Online Ltd.
|
|
Head
Office: Rm 202, Hau Fook Mansion, No. 8 Hau Fook St., Kowloon, Hong
Kong
Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
|
Asian Sex Gazette Middle East Sex News
|
|
|
