Middle East Research and Information Project: Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971
Edmund Burke III and Ira Lapidus, eds., Islam, Politics and Social Movements (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988).
Shireen T. Hunter, ed., The Politics of Islamic Revivalism: Diversity and Unity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988).
Henry Munson, Jr., Islam and Revolution in the Middle East (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988).
The bus arrived at Tadmur Prison where the military police awaited us. The warders helped us off the bus, whipping us brutally and mercilessly until we were all out. They removed the handcuffs and blindfolds, and then we were taken into a courtyard overlooked by the prison’s offices, where our names were registered. All the while we were being whipped from all sides. Then we were taken through a metal door into a courtyard, known as the torture courtyard. The military police searched our clothes. One by one we were put into the dullab (tire), and each person was beaten between 200 and 400 times on his feet…. When they had finished beating us, we were lined up in single file.
The Black Hebrews are a group of African-Americans who have settled in Israel, where their controversial presence has fed charges of Israeli racism. Who are these Black Hebrews, and why have they attracted so much attention? Ben-Ami Carter, leader of the Kingdom of God Nation, as the community formally designates itself, was born in Chicago in 1940 as Gerson Parker. In the 1960s he became a storefront preacher at the Abeita Culture Center, an evangelical church on Chicago’s South Side, and developed his Black Hebrew theology. The basis for the Black Hebrews’ faith is the claim that the original Israelites of the Old Testament, exiled from Israel 4,000 years ago, were blacks. Descendants of those blacks, they believe, should now go back and claim that land.
Oliver North’s trial this spring surprised everyone: It actually produced some new information. But some of its most important revelations — those touching on Israel’s role in Central America — received little or no attention in the press.
As the twentieth century comes to a close, the voice of Etel Adnan continues to speak the prophetic visions of legendary women shut out by men at history’s dawn. In the tradition of Zarqa’ al-Yamama of pre-Islamic Arabia, and of Cassandra in Greek mythology, Adnan’s poetic premonitions and indignant outcries against injustice seem to be doomed to fall short of reaching the ears of the Arabs she most pointedly addresses in her poetry.
In Israel a new computer game called Intifada — developed by a Russian-born supporter of Meir Kahane who immigrated to Israel from the US after a stint in the Jewish Defense League — has become a bestseller. Players score points for successfully using tear gas, plastic bullets, rubber bullets and/or live ammunition to disperse Palestinian demonstrators throwing rocks and gasoline bombs. Unlike real life, the game’s rules penalize excessive zeal: Players lose points if, for example, they shoot to kill when only tear gas is authorized. High scorers “win” a progressively more hardline Israeli government, culminating in the installation of Kahane as defense minister, and restrictions on the use of lethal force are eased as the right gains strength.
In a violent act of vengeance, the kind of crime of honor which fills Turkish jails and the pages of the tabloids, a lorry driver in Istanbul catches his wife and boss in flagrante delicto, shoots them both and flees to his home village. The police surround the village house. The man surrenders and is taken away. He had left his village to find work in Libya, but through a series of accidents and chance encounters while being detained at the employment agency in Istanbul, he found work in a haulage firm and eventually set up his own business. Drunk and confused one evening, he was seduced by his next-door neighbor, a single woman, who eventually pressured him into marrying her.
The People
Turkey’s population, about 54 million, is growing at a rate of 2.5 percent — higher than European countries, but lower than most Third World nations. Birth rates vary widely, from no more than two children among middle-class families in western cities to as many as 17 in rural families in the southeast. About half of all married women use some form of birth control.
Turkey’s much vaunted “return to democracy” suffered an embarrassingly visible setback at last year’s Istanbul International Filmdays when censors banned four of the 92 films invited for the foreign section: three on grounds of obscenity and a fourth — Georgian filmmaker Tenguiz Abouladze’s 1968 classic, Incantation — as an insult to Islam.
Ostensibly multilateral, NATO is often merely the framework for bilateral relations in which the United States is the commanding partner. Nowhere is this more the case than with Turkey, separated geographically from the other NATO allies by its main adversary, Greece, and heavily dependent on the US for military assistance. Yet Turkey has a second bilateral partner within NATO: the Federal Republic of Germany. The Bonn connection points to contradictory tendencies in Turkey’s NATO commitments.
When Nevzat Helvaci, president of the Turkish Human Rights Association, visited New York City in December 1988, he asked to visit a US prison. “There is no reason why these visits should be always one-sided, with foreign monitors visiting Turkish prisons,” he commented. “We also want to visit and observe their facilities.” Helvaci and Emil Galip Sandalci, head of the THRA’s Istanbul branch, came as guests of Human Rights Watch, to attend ceremonies held on the fortieth anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
Herman Schwartz is a professor at the American University law school in Washington, DC and is a contributing editor of The Nation magazine. In late March he visited Turkey on behalf of Helsinki Watch to investigate prison conditions in that country. He has done similar missions to Poland, Cuba, Czechoslovakia and Brazil. Ömer Karasapan and Joe Stork spoke with him in Washington in June 1989.
Your mission was to look specifically at prison conditions?
No one can say that the Turkish government does not know the importance of public relations. In Europe, where Turkey’s candidacy for membership in the Economic Community is hampered by the government’s poor human rights record, Ankara has hired the top-ranked British advertising firm of Saatchi and Saatchi — for a fee rumored to be nearly 1 million pounds sterling — to boost the country’s image.
In the United States, Turkey’s main concern is to sell itself to Congress, particularly to the committees that appropriate military aid. Ankara claims it needs at least $1 billion per year to hold up its end of the NATO alliance, but Congress has appropriated only 60 percent of that in recent years.
On May 20, 1989, a top-of-the-line Soviet MiG-29 fighter evaded pursuing Soviet interceptors and landed at Trabzon airport in northern Turkey. An apparent intelligence bonanza had literally landed in NATO’s lap. Though a regular exhibit at Western air shows and sold to India, Iraq, Yugoslavia and other countries, the MiG-29 had never been closely inspected by the US. Within 36 hours, however, the plane and its weaponry were on their way back to the Soviet Union, despite a personal entreaty from Adm. William Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to General Necip Torumtay, his Turkish counterpart.
Visiting Ankara in early December 1981, at a time when the European Common Market countries had halted more than $600 million of aid to the new Turkish junta for its human rights abuses, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger told General Kenan Evren that “we admire the way in which the order and law have been restored in Turkey.” The military government, he said, had “lived up to our expectations.”
Prop. W Not a Setback
Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen Press, 1987)
Resistance Literature is a wide-ranging and impressive critical study of the literatures of contemporary “Third World” liberation movements as they confront and alter the literary and political categories of the “West.” It is not only an introduction to Third World literature, although that function is ably accomplished by Harlow’s text. Resistance Literature also argues for the crucial political significance of literary texts and, by extension, for the necessity of an informed political commentary on those texts.
It’s Possible, A Joint Exhibition of Palestinian and Israeli Art
“It’s Possible” is the theme of an exhibition by Palestinian and Israeli artists currently touring the United States. Twenty-four artists — 12 Palestinians and 12 Israelis — are displaying their works together in the first such effort outside Israel and the occupied territories. The exhibit curators are Kamal Boullata, a Palestinian artist and design editor of this magazine, and Yona Fischer, senior curator of the Israel Museum; New York-based Israeli sculptor Shulamith Koenig serves as the exhibition administrator.
Shadows Over the Future, A film by Wolfgang Bergmann. 1985. 92 mins, 16mm.
Last Exit: Berlin, A film by Marilyn Gaunt. 1988. 28 mins. video.
Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
