When MERIP came together in 1971, it was with a purpose to integrate the Middle East into the progressive political agenda in the United States. Toward this end we began this magazine to provide information and analysis about the material conditions of Middle Eastern societies and to examine US policy in the region. Our efforts were animated by our engagement in the campaign against the US war in Vietnam, and by our solidarity with ongoing struggles for national liberation elsewhere in the Third World.
Rachel Ehrenfeld, Narcoterrorism (Basic Books, 1990).
Ever since the Reagan administration elevated “narco-terrorism” to the status of a national security threat, ideologists of left and right have staked out predictable positions. [1] Foes of Cuba, Nicaragua and other leftist regimes or movements condemn them as primary purveyors of mind-warping drugs; some champions of “progressive” politics in the Third World in turn denounce any suggestion that such regimes could depart from the straight and narrow.
Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke, eds., Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing (Indiana, 1990).
Introduced by the editors as “the first collection of Arab women’s feminist writing,” Opening the Gates is both an important and problematic anthology. Following the basic format of two previous collections, Middle Eastern Muslim Women Speak and Women and the Family in the Middle East (both edited by Elizabeth Fernea, the first in collaboration with Basima Bezirgan), Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke seek to correct widespread misconceptions and ignorance about Middle Eastern women’s lives by presenting a collage of Middle Eastern women’s voices.
In May the group of 17 states known as the Paris Club decided to forgive (in stages) half of Egypt’s $20.2 billion government-to-government debt. Earlier, the US had agreed to write off $7.1 billion of Egypt’s military debt, and Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar canceled $6 billion of Egyptian debts owed to them. Washington and its oil-rich Arab allies have thus entered their bid in the post-Gulf war auction for Egypt’s soul.
Tikkun editor Michael Lerner’s noisome whining and waffling over whether or not to support US military action against Iraq lasted just about as long as the Gulf crisis itself. But at least Lerner never went all the way and fully endorsed Operation Thyroid Storm. The same cannot be said of a number of other Jewish liberals, who jumped ship altogether and rallied to the administration’s side. Among them was Paul Berman, who usually writes for the Village Voice, but was moved to propound his bizarre explanation of why Iraq lost the war in the May 27 issue of The New Republic. This is a venue in which discussion of things Arab is rarely free of racist drivel, and Berman doesn’t disappoint.
Friday, May 24
Francis Deng is a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies program at the Brookings Institution in Washington and a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School. He served as Sudan’s ambassador to Canada from 1980-1983, to the United States from 1974-1976 and to Scandanavian countries from 1972-1974. He was minister of state for foreign affairs from 1976-1980. Khalid Medani interviewed him in Washington in late June 1991.
How would you assess the impact of the Bashir regime on Sudanese society?
Images of African famine once again scan Western television screens, prompting a renewed search for causes and solutions. In this worried atmosphere it is easy to overlook that international relief operations have now become a widespread and accepted response to this unfolding crisis. While Sudan and Ethiopia spring to mind, such interventions have also occurred in Uganda, Mozambique, Angola and Liberia.
In a country like Sudan, those with access to education become the object of intense competition on the part of political parties of all stripes, especially those with no traditional base of support. Secondary schools and especially universities become the hunting ground — and sometimes the killing ground — for groups whose success on campus represents a shortcut to political hegemony in the country. Whatever the nature of their rhetoric about “the people,” these parties rely on elites, recalling the crucial role that the Graduates Congress played in Sudan’s struggle for independence. Sections of the elite were again instrumental in toppling military regimes in October 1964 and April 1985. [1]
Bona Malwal was elected to the Sudanese parliament in 1968. He was minister for culture and information from 1972 to 1978 and minister of finance and economic planning for the south from 1980 to 1981. His English-language newspaper, the Sudan Times, was banned when the current regime seized power in June 1989. He now lives in Britain and publishes the Sudan Democratic Gazette. Joe Stork and Gayle Smith interviewed him in Washington in June 1991.
Will the developments in Ethiopia and Eritrea make it more or less difficult to move things forward in Sudan?
While Islamic fundamentalism has become a major political force in the Arab world in recent years, particularly in the countries of the Maghrib, it is in Sudan where the Islamist movement has realized its greatest ambition: controlling the levers of state power and setting itself up as a model for similarity oriented movements. Its leaders in Sudan have actively supported groups elsewhere — reportedly helping to plan a recent failed military coup in Tunis and convening meetings with high officials of Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in Khartoum. [1]
Iraq and Kuwait, on the eastern frontier of the Arab world, represent one face of the region’s future. Sudan, on the southern frontier, represents another. Unlike the regimes of Saddam Hussein and the Sabahs, the Khartoum junta led by Omar al-Bashir has experienced neither constraint nor favor from the “new world” moral custodians in the White House. The depredations of this regime are homegrown.
Kosach and Armenia
Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman, Every Spy a Prince (Houghton Mifflin, 1990).
Victor Ostrovsky and Claire Hoy, By Way of Deception (St. Martin’s Press, 1990).
Promoting their book around the US last fall, Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv touted it as the first critical study of Israel’s intelligence establishment — an antidote to the “cheerleading” books about Israeli intelligence that typify the genre. That is precisely what makes Every Spy a Prince so insidious. Its critical demeanor gives the book an aura of intellectual depth and honesty, beguiling the reader to accept the bold claim of its subtitle: The Complete History of Israel’s Intelligence Community.
Leonard Binder, Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development Ideologies (Chicago, 1988).
The Gulf way may ultimately transform Arab politics even more radically than the political-military defeats of 1948 and 1967. Those experiences were the midwives of self-critical reassessments that, while severe, accepted the fundamental legitimacy of Arab nationalism and its political project. In the 1980s a current of feminist thinking emerged, expressed most consistently in Lebanese women’s fiction about the civil war, that poses questions challenging the coherence and viability of this project and its ordering of political and social priorities.
The Persian Gulf crisis received massive and sustained coverage in the American media. As numerous critics have pointed out, television network news in particular largely parroted the Bush administration’s line, accepting and passing on its version of reality as the truth. A study released in March by the Center for the Study of Communication at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst adds a new dimension to our understanding of television’s role in shaping public perceptions of the Gulf crisis and enhancing support for the war.
