Middle East Research and Information Project: Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971
For nearly three years, Iraqi Kurdistan has been in a state of de facto self-rule. At first glance, it appears that the international engagement in Iraq on the basis of UN Security Council Resolution 688 (Operation Provide Comfort) provided this opportunity.
The current debate on the compatibility of Arab-Muslim culture with Enlightenment ideals of rationality, democracy and tolerance is curiously devoid of historical reference. In the Arab world, the debates on democracy and progress regained momentum during the late 1970s, when the Islamist movements began to attract a wide spectrum of people who had hitherto been considered the “natural” pool from which the left would draw support. Recognition of the need for radical change in their societies by Arab intellectuals, and a resurgent attraction to liberal democracy, is not a byproduct of the so-called new world order. Nor is it an intellectual property to which any writer can lay claim.
Muhammad Sahnoun is a former Algerian diplomat who served as the special representative of UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in Somalia prior to the US military intervention there. He is presently a fellow at the International Development and Research Center in Ottawa. Joe Stork spoke with him in Washington, DC in August 1993.
You are from a country that went through a national liberation struggle and which has historically taken a strong position against intervention. Yet you’re a practitioner of intervention. Do you see this as a new period requiring actions of this sort, or is this something that’s long overdue?
The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) has a historical perspective regarding the use of economic sanctions. We have both supported and opposed the implementation of sanctions — at times with clear strength of conviction, at other times with doubts and apprehensions. We have supported economic and cultural sanctions against apartheid in South Africa since 1976. We supported the pre-war sanctions against Iraq after it invaded Kuwait, but have opposed continuing sanctions since the end of the war. We support sanctions against the former Yugoslavia and against the military government of Haiti. We have opposed sanctions against Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua, Libya and the former Soviet Union.
Mark Duffield visited Croatia and Bosnia between January 9 and 22, 1994, as part of a study of complex political emergencies. Joe Stork spoke with him on January 28, 1994.
In your field report you refer to the failure to provide protection as representing a political failure of historic consequences.
Mark Duffield was in Bosnia and Croatia from January 9 to January 22, 1994 as part of a larger study of complex emergencies. The following is condensed from his “first impression” field report.
The war in former Yugoslavia has displaced over 4 million people. Nearly 3 million of these are in Bosnia, where half the population has been uprooted. From a humanitarian perspective, the war in Bosnia presents itself as the blockade and terrorization of civilian populations. While access can be negotiated, as the war has spread across central Bosnia this has become increasingly difficult. Food supplies have fallen to critical conditions.
Over the past several years, the perception has become widespread that the world has entered a period of profound change. A main feature of this change has been some erosion of the principle of state sovereignty as a major structural feature of international relations. The new activism of the United Nations and the trend toward selective military intervention for humanitarian purposes and as a means of international crisis management have been the most prominent features of this development.
“Humanitarian intervention,” the violation of a nation-state’s sovereignty for the purpose of protecting human life from government repression or famine or civil breakdown, is an old concept that has been given a new lease on life with the end of the Cold War. It is currently being practiced in Somalia and parts of Iraq, and has been discussed, with varying degrees of seriousness, with regard to Bosnia, Angola, Mozambique, Liberia, Zaire, Sudan and Haiti.
The collapse of the bipolar world order, and the profound crises of many post-colonial nation-states in the Middle East, the Balkans, Africa, Central America and Central Asia, have given rise to a range of conflicts and major humanitarian disasters that in turn have fueled a new debate in the US and elsewhere over military intervention. This debate cuts across once familiar political alignments, right and left, and has occupied the major journals of elite policy opinion as well as much of the left media.
Abrahamian, Ervand. Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993).
Adnan, Etel. Of Cities and Women: Letters to Fawwaz (Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo Press, 1993).
Amnesty International. Saudi Arabia: The Arrest, Detention and Torture of Christian and Shi‘i Muslim Worshippers (New York, 1993).
Asad, Talal. Geneaologies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
Berger, Elmer. Peace for Palestine: First Lost Opportunity (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1993).
Deborah S. Bernstein, ed., Pioneers and Homemakers: Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel (SUNY, 1992).
Barbara Swirski and Marilyn P. Safir, eds., Calling the Equality Bluff: Women in Israel (Pergamon, 1991).
Elise G. Young, Keepers of the History: Women and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Teachers College Press, 1992).
Philippa Strum, The Women Are Marching: The Second Sex and the Palestinian Revolution (Lawrence Hill, 1992).
Orayb Aref Najjar, with Kitty Warnock, Portraits of Palestinian Women (Utah, 1992).
In mid-October 1993, the New York Times ran a series exploring in detail how influential agribusiness firms have managed to reap huge profits from Agriculture Department programs designed to promote US exports. One case in point was Comet Rice, a subsidiary of Los Angeles-based Erly Industries, whose chairman, Gerald D. Murphy, is a conservative Republican with many friends among Reagan-Bush administration officials.
Hanan Ashrawi, a professor of literature at Birzeit University, was the spokesperson for the Palestinian delegation to the bilateral peace talks in Washington. In early December, Ashrawi announced she would not serve in any official capacity in the new Palestinian authority, but would instead work to develop an independent human rights monitoring group. Joe Stork spoke with her in Jerusalem in late October 1993.
Your first response to this agreement was rather negative. Then you changed your mind. What was that process?
This article was written by a special correspondent.
Residents of Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon have been cautiously peeking out of their prison-like camps after nearly a decade of sieges and assaults. But looking out is now fraught with anxiety. There is no future in the camps, residents complain, and few means of earning an income where unemployment for Palestinian refugees may be as high as 40 percent.
The dismal outlook is only compounded by the recent PLO-Israel peace accord, which unambiguously signals the final abandonment of the refugees in Lebanon. Ironically, it is this same community that credentialized Arafat and the PLO’s representation of the Palestinian people and were the mass base supporting its operations in exile.
Salim Tamari, a contributing editor of this magazine, teaches sociology at Birzeit University. He also heads the Palestinian delegation to the multilateral talks on refugees. He spoke with Joe Stork in Ramallah in late October 1993.
Some people here argue that there’s quite a lot of opposition to the Oslo agreement, but it’s an unmobilized opposition. The Damascus-based opposition has little credibility, but the critical position vis-a-vis Arafat is considerable.
Charles Shammas is the founder and project director of Mattin, an industry promotion organization in the West Bank. He is also a founding member of al-Haq, a leading Palestinian human rights organization, and of the Jerusalem-based Center for International Human Rights Enforcement. Joe Stork spoke with him in late October 1993.
I’ve detected a lot of pessimism here about the way things have been developing since the Oslo accords were announced.
Far from the glare of the media attention, on dusty shelves lining the basement of the Jordanian Department of Lands and Survey in Amman, lies a key to the political and economic viability of the Palestinian entity which may emerge out of the Oslo accords. Scores of folders documenting the details of land ownership in the West Bank, including titles to land and water rights and the location of state land, lie waiting for the PLO’s call.
Salah ‘Abd al-Shafi directs the Economic Development Group in Gaza. Graham Usher, a journalist currently working in the Gaza Strip, interviewed him in September and October 1993.
What do you think the agreement means economically?
Khalil Mahshi is headmaster of the Friends’ Boys School in Ramallah. Joe Stork spoke with him there in late October 1993.
How do you assess the accord and its importance?
I didn’t know how to react. When Israeli friends asked me, “Why aren’t you happy? It’s mutual recognition, it’s the beginning of a real peace,” I said I wasn’t so sure on either account. I wanted Israel to recognize the PLO, which stood for our struggle for a two-state solution, but I have a feeling it’s more like a surrender than a peace agreement. When I read the text I saw some positive things. I think it’s something we can work with.
