The successful maintenance of a near total embargo on Iraq owes to a number of factors, ranging from geography to post-Cold War global economies. Iraq’s limited access to the sea can be easily monitored, while its record of regional aggression has deprived Baghdad of local friends. Despite some breaches of the export embargo involving high-ranking officials in both countries, Iran is not going to give Iraq much economic relief. The same goes for Syria. Turkey and Jordan, Iraq’s two lifelines to the outside world, cannot risk more than limited and calibrated breaches of the embargo because of their own susceptibility to US pressures.
To affirm the existence of an “Iraqi question” has certain implications. People usually speak, referring to the Shi‘a and the Kurds, of minorities and of the necessity of protecting them as such. But this misses the point concerning what is unique about Iraq.
There may be more landmines deployed per person in Kurdish Iraq (population around 3.5 million) than in any other region in the world. A 1993 State Department report estimates that the Iraqi army laid 3 to 5 million mines there during the Iran-Iraq war and in the months leading up to the 1991 Gulf war. Others estimate that the number may be as high as 10 million, including mines that Iran also laid. Rough estimates of the ratios for the worst-affected countries are one mine per person in Angola and Afghanistan, and one mine for every two persons in Cambodia.
Four years after Operation Desert Storm, and the mass uprisings that followed in the southern and northern parts of Iraq against Saddam Hussein’s regime, the country’s economic and social fabric is in tatters. Economic sanctions, following a destructive war and compounded by the Iraqi government’s abusive and divisive social and political policies, have devoured the country’s once substantial middle class and further impoverished the already poor. Even if tomorrow the sanctions were lifted and the regime were to vanish, the capacity of Iraqi society to reconstitute itself is in grave peril.
A public debate over the US-led economic sanctions policy against Iraq is long overdue. More than four years have passed since the Gulf war ceasefire and Baghdad’s bloody suppression of the popular uprisings that followed. The regime, the ostensible target of the sanctions, appears to be firmly in place. The vast majority of individual Iraqis, whose best interests are cited as a major justification for the policy, are suffering a degree of trauma and deprivation that has already set in motion a dynamic of social disintegration and self-destruction that will affect the entire region — and may be very difficult to reverse.
Abu Libdeh, Hassan, et al. A Survey of the Syrian Population in Occupied Golan Heights (Majdal Shams: Arab Association for Development, 1994).
Amnesty International. Algeria: Repression and Violence Must End (London, 1994).
Association of Israeli-Palestinian Physicians for Human Rights. The Transfer of Health Services to a Palestinian Authority (Tel Aviv, 1994).
Bloom, Saul, ed. Hidden Casualties: Environmental, Health and Political Consequences of the Persian Gulf War (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1994).
Bread for the World. Hunger 1995: Causes of Hunger (Silver Spring, MD, 1994).
Nouri Bouzid, Bezness (1992).
What happens when a poor Arab country with a high birth rate, an enormous youth population and endemic unemployment bases a significant part of its development strategy on attracting European tourism? In Nouri Bouzid’s film, Bezness, the Tunisian coastal town of Sousse is the site for just such an experiment, with disastrous consequences for the local population.
The Egyptian government’s campaign to sell off the cream of its state-owned factories to private investors took a violent and murderous turn after some 7,000 evening-shift workers at the Kafr al-Dawwar Spinning and Weaving Factory staged a spontaneous sit-down strike on September 30, 1994. Security forces quickly sealed off the plant to prevent other shifts — the factory’s work force totals around 22,000 — from joining the strikers who were protesting recent firings and cuts in bonus and incentive pay.
The prospect of an Islamist victory in Algeria has alarmed French policymakers and politicians across the political spectrum. The French right, from the National Front’s Jean Le Pen to Gaullist Interior Minister Charles Pasqua have, in varying degrees, raised the specter of Algerian “boat people” swarming across the Mediterranean to threaten the very basis of French civilization. Centrists and socialists excused the Algerian army’s cancellation of the 1991 parliamentary elections by arguing that the Islamists were anti-democratic anyway. The geostrategists among them feared that an Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) regime would spread its revolution to the rest of North Africa and the Middle East and cut gas supplies to the continent.
As the cancellation of Algeria’s electoral process reaches its third anniversary this January, the conditions for a political settlement between the Islamist groups and the army-backed government are becoming exceedingly complicated. Even if the “moderate” voices within both the established order and the Islamist groups prevail, reconciliation may still not be attainable.
In March 1994, fighting between Algerian security forces and armed Islamist guerrillas reached a critical intensity around Blida, about 90 miles east of Algiers. A commercial strike to protest army killings of young men became the target of yet another military action. Blida is a center for private agriculture, where numerous small private food processing plants operate, not all of them licensed. With its concrete villas surrounded by high walls that conceal both family space and underground production, Blida presents an interesting conjunction of private property and wealth that has escaped state assessment and control, and support of political movements challenging the state.
A friend introduced me to ‘Abd al-Haq during the elections in Algeria in December 1991. I was surveying the electoral behavior of youths of the poorer quarters of Algiers (the casbah), the suburbs (Bachdjarah) and a mixed neighborhood (El-Biar). At the time I was trying to meet pietistes (devout ones) and “Afghans” to test my thesis about the rise of “neo-communitarianism” in Algeria. [1]
On January 2, 1992, Algerian feminists demonstrated against the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) and their victory in the national elections of December 26, 1991. Their target was the Islamist assault on women’s rights and the threat of violence against women. One of their posters addressed a martyred sister, a moudjahida, killed by the French during the Battle of Algiers in 1956-1957: “Hassiba Ben Bouali, If You Could See Our Algeria” (Hassiba Ben Bouali, Si tu voyais notre Algérie). At the same time, women marching in Oran waved a similar slogan: “Hassiba Ben Bouali, We Will Not Betray You” (Hassiba Ben Bouali, Nous ne te trahirons pas).
Two years ago, Algeria’s army displaced the ostensibly constitutional regime of Chadli Benjedid to forestall an all-but-certain victory of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in a second round of elections scheduled for a few weeks later. The chief consequence of that army intervention is a war whose daily savagery has killed between 20,000 and 30,000 people, most of these in 1994.
Afkhami, Mahnaz and Erika Friedl, eds. In the Eye of the Storm: Women in Post-Revolutionary Iran (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994).
Arkoun, Mohammed. Rethinking Islam: Common Questions, Uncommon Answers (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994).
B’tselem and Palestinian Lawyers for Human Rights. Summary Execution: Jabalya Refugee Camp (Jerusalem, 1994).
B’tselem. Collaborators in the Occupied Territories: Human Rights Abuses and Violations (Jerusalem, 1994).
Chaliand, Gerard. The Kurdish Tragedy (London: Zed Books, 1994).
Elie Kedourie, Politics in the Middle East (New York: Oxford, 1992).
Roger Owen, State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East (London: Routledge, 1992).
The Fundamentalism Project, directed by Martin Marty and Scott Appleby of the University of Chicago, has produced a three-volume study of politicized religion in the twentieth century. Fundamentalisms Observed, Fundamentalisms and Society and Fundamentalisms and the State collect articles by international scholars from a wide range of disciplines. The contributing authors analyze conservative politico-religious movements in their respective areas of expertise, including the Americas, the Middle East, South and Far East Asia. The project is also accompanied by a three-part PBS/NPR series and its companion volume, The Glory and the Power, which targets a broader audience. Three additional volumes are projected.
