Middle East Research and Information Project: Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971
Until October 1988, the most severe challenge to Algerian President Chadli Benjedid’s perestroika came not in industrial plants or in party forums. Instead, it came in the form of street protests by masses of disaffected, unemployed and marginalized young people refusing to be manipulated by the state. The most important was the November 1986 protests of students in Constantine which led to riots throughout the eastern region. [1]
Mahfoud Bennoune, a contributing editor of this magazine, is a veteran of the Algerian war of independence and currently teaches at the University of Algiers. He is the author of The Making of Contemporary Algeria, 1830-1987 (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Nabeel Abraham spoke with him in Detroit in December 1989.
Was the FLN [National Liberation Front] party congress in November 1989 a special event, an outgrowth of the October 1988 riots?
The startling changes that have transformed the political landscape of Eastern Europe in 1989 may have no equivalent in the Middle East exactly, but that region has seen some remarkable developments nonetheless. The Arab versions of perestroika, or restructuring, while less profound in comparison with those of Czechoslovakia or Poland, reflect certain realignments of political forces. No regimes have toppled — yet. But from Palestine and Jordan in the Arab east (the Mashriq) to Algeria in the west (the Maghrib), a phenomenon of intifada, or uprising, is challenging the static politics of repression that have prevailed for many years.
Events elsewhere in the world — elections in Nicaragua, death squads in South Africa and recent decisions by the European Commission — hold much instruction for people concerned with the Middle East. Elections, after all, are not the same as democracy. After ten years of US armed intervention and economic aggression, a majority of Nicaraguans voting on February 25 chose an alternative to 10,000 percent inflation, to pervasive shortages, to the killings and sabotage of the Contras. “Sandinistas Lose the Hunger Vote” was the accurate headline in the Financial Times. The winning opposition front was cobbled together and financed by the State Department.
Invaluable Analysis
Since late 1988, MAPAM (The United Workers’ Party) has been among the Israeli political forces favoring Israeli-PLO negotiations which might lead to the creation of a Palestinian state. Yossi Amitay’s Ahvat amim bamivhan: MAPAM 1948-1954: emdot besugiyot araviyei eretz yisra’el [Brotherhood of Nations on Trial: MAPAM, 1948-1954: Positions on Palestinian-Arab Issues] (Tel Aviv: Tcherikover, 1988) provides a timely opportunity to place MAPAM’s current views in historical perspective. Amitay examines MAPAM’s stand on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict during the first six years of Israel’s statehood, when the party represented a kibbutz-based alliance of all the socialist-Zionist tendencies to the left of Ben Gurion’s MAPAI.
Back in 1976, a college student acquaintance of mine, Jay Pollard, used to talk in great detail about his work for Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. I listened for hours, even if I never quite believed his stories. Eleven years later, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger would tell the court that convicted Pollard, a Navy intelligence analyst, of stealing 360 cubic feet of classified material for Israel: “It is difficult for me, even in the so-called year of the spy, to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by the defendant in view of the breadth, the critical importance to the US and the high sensitivity of the information he sold to Israel.”
From its very beginning, Western cinema has been fascinated with the mystique of the Orient. Whether in the form of pseudo-Egyptian movie palaces, Biblical spectaculars, or the fondness for “Oriental” settings, Western cinema has returned time and again to the scene of the Orient. [1] Generally these films superimposed the visual traces of civilizations as diverse as Arab, Persian, Chinese and Indian into a single portrayal of the exotic Orient, treating cultural plurality as if it were a monolith. The Arabic language, in most of these films, exists as an indecipherable murmur, while the “real” language is European: the French of Jean Gabin in Pepe le Moko or the English of Bogart and Bergman in Casablanca.
Foreign Aid? In a story which the US media largely ignored, sources within the CIA say that the French government loaned two of its top chemists to Lebanese drug dealers early in 1988 as part of a deal to secure the release of three French hostages. The Toronto Star reported in mid-November 1989 that the French chemists provided technical assistance for processing heroin, in return for which the drug dealers used their good offices to get the hostages released a few months later. The same sources also insist that there was a secret cell within the CIA itself which was running a drugs-for-hostages operation.
Elias Khoury is a Lebanese novelist, writer and critic. A lecturer at the American University of Beirut and the cultural editor of the Beirut daily al-Safir, Khoury is also a frequent contributor to literary and cultural journals throughout the Arab world. An English translation of his second novel, Al-Jabal al-Saghir (Little Mountain), has just been published (University of Minnesota, 1989). Barbara Harlow spoke with him in Austin, Texas, in November 1989.
Could you articulate some of the changes that you’ve seen over the last decade and a half, particularly as a writer working in the midst of the civil war?
Forty years of history and the issues appear to be remarkably the same: national identity, the confessional system, electoral reform, the viability of the state, economic reconstruction and ideological realignment. What is Lebanon? Does it exist? Can it survive? The questions are not new. More than four decades ago, British and US officials were pondering the very same questions.
World War II was over. Lebanon celebrated its formal independence on December 22, 1943, but it was not until 1946 that the French were persuaded to abandon their occupation of the country. In the interim, French pressure to hold on to its privileged status led to conflict not only with Lebanese nationalists but with British forces.
The plain and mountains of the ‘Akkar are the northernmost part of the Lebanon, beyond Tripoli and the Koura region to its south and east. Partly because of the insistence of some influential Maronites, and with misgivings on the part of only a few French critics at the time, it was included in le Grand Liban in 1920 by the French League of Nations Mandate authorities, along with the Bekaa Valley and what is now south Lebanon. ‘Akkar’s predominantly Sunni Muslim population (in one of the most thinly inhabited areas of the country) led some to fear that its incorporation would lead to later problems of confessional balance since it was also the hinterland of the Sunni and nationalist city of Tripoli, whatever its advantages as a granary.
The state is the cohesive factor in a social formation. But what happens to the social formation where the state disintegrates? This is not a mere polemical question if we consider the Lebanese experience.
Lebanon’s people have paid a tremendous price for 15 years of invasion and civil war — an estimated 150,000 killed, tens of thousands wounded, and hundreds of thousands displaced and left destitute. Lebanon is the only developing country in which, despite high birth rates, population growth has stagnated and even declined in the last 15 years, from some 2.59 million in 1976 to 2.50 million in 1987, owing to war deaths and emigration.
It was Beirut, all over again,
it was Beirut on the radio
El Salvador on TV
it was Sabra & Shatila
in the memory
it was Usulutan in the heart
It was Beirut, again,
when we thought Beirut went
to rest, but Beirut will not sleep
until El Salvador sleeps
and San Francisco will
not eat
until Eritrea eats
and El Salvador
will not die
It was Beirut all over again
in Managua, in Antigua,
in the shantytowns of
Marseilles,
wherever the radio blares its
sounds
and I mean everywhere
in this electronic age
and the caveman suffers
in the belly of El Salvador
Nothing stays new for long in the torpor of Beirut, where everything is worn out by so much violence. If the word “ruin” suggests a comparison with the remains of ancient Tyre or Pompeii, it shouldn’t be used to describe Beirut, not even the blasted remains of the central city. The age and monumental character of the ancient ruins exclude human presence, and we view them from the distance of time, but the decay of Beirut is happening right before our eyes.
Mansour Raad is the pen name of an Arab journalist who recently left Beirut and has followed the Lebanese war closely. Joe Stork spoke with him in Europe in late November 1989.
Who is Gen. Aoun and what does his “war of liberation” represent?
Gen. Michel Aoun’s “war of liberation,” and the Syrian army’s obliging response, has left another thousand killed, thousands more injured, a third of the population transformed into refugees and the worst destruction and damage the country has suffered since 1975. Aoun tried to “convince” his Muslim compatriots to liberate themselves from “Syrian occupation” by pounding heavy Iraqi-furnished shells upon their heads. His frank “populist” language, proclaiming loudly what many Lebanese from all confessions think to themselves, at first brought him overwhelming sympathy.
Even after 15 years, the Lebanese conflict has never taken the form of mass communal violence, of ethnic riots and massacres. There are no cases where the population of one neighborhood raided another, looting and killing. Exactly the reverse: Groups have found shelter from the fighting among other groups. In Lebanon, the militias caused the violence, random and otherwise, among the population. At any point in the conflict the number of fighters participating in all the different militias never exceeded 30,000. Over the 15 years, at one time or another, maybe 90,000 or 100,000 out of a population of 3 million were ever part of this. So 80 percent of the population has not participated actively in the conflict.
Most of the already very large literature on the Lebanese conflict has focused on the etiology of Lebanon’s civil strife: its roots, causes, origins, antecedents and facilitating factors; its inherent or contingent characteristics. And, as one might expect, many conflicting readings and interpretations have been offered to answer the controversial question of the origins of the Lebanese conflict.
Much less has been written (except descriptions and reports) on the process of the conflict, on the dynamics of factors and forces that have come to constitute a conflict system that reproduces itself, generating its own economic sphere and social strata and an ideology of discord to justify and legitimize its continuation.
