Colonel John Garang’s Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) played no direct role in the April 6 coup in Khartoum. But as the only organized, fighting resistance to the regime of Ja‘far Numairi, it laid the groundwork by chipping away at the state in a guerrilla campaign that cost the government one million Sudanese pounds ($400,000) a day. The new military rulers have given top priority to ending the rebellion, which has paralyzed vital economic projects and drained army morale and resources for more than two years.
Khartoum, April 23. General ‘Abd al-Rahman Siwar al-Dhahab, in power since April 6, was expected to name an interim cabinet on Monday, April 22, to govern the country under army supervision for a transitional period of one year. In the meantime, General Siwar al-Dahab appointed an interim cabinet for southern Sudan, headed by General James Lawrence Marou, a member of the Transitional Military Council. Two high level officers of the Sudanese Army traveled to Libya on Sunday, April 21, to try to improve relations between the two countries.
The popular revolution in Sudan this spring may well represent more than just a local political transition. The overthrow of Numairi’s 16-year reign marks the end of a decade and a half of regime stability throughout the Arab world, with the exception of the two Yemens. This era of enormous wealth and scandalous waste, of construction and corruption, welfare and war, all financed by the flood of oil revenues, served to embalm and preserve these decrepit regimes from the effective opposition of their subjects. Sudan had become, in many ways, the weakest link. But Sudan is not unique. All of the most populous Arab countries—Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, for instance—have witnessed serious mass protests in recent years.
Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli. Truly, the fate of books depends upon the discernment of their readers. My books have already received 87 reviews. None, not the London Times, not Izvestia, not even the Jerusalem Post, thought to — twice! — denounce me for being overly moral. Except MERIP Reports.
Pamela Ann Smith, Palestine and the Palestinians, 1876-1983 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984).
Philip S. Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus, 1860-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
This is the latest in a growing number of studies which discuss the social origins of political ideologies in the Arab East. Philip Khoury sets himself the task of explaining the development of Arab nationalism in Damascus through an analysis of the class-conditioned political behavior of the city’s landowner-bureaucrats.
Nabil Sulayman, al-Masalla [The Obelisk] (Beirut: Dar al-Haqa’iq, 1980).
“Forget about ideology; we see the facts on the Hi ground.” The Palestinian woman speaks softly but firmly, recounting the tragedies of her people. It is obvious, she says, that Zionism is the central issue in the Middle East. “Because of Zionism, I live in America instead of Palestine. You can’t ignore that fact.”
“You can’t ignore what Zionism has meant to the Palestinians, but don’t overlook what it means to us,” responds the Jewish woman. Nearly all Jews, she says, regard it as the legitimate expression of Jewish self-determination.
We’ve all heard it a hundred times before. Often, it degenerates into name calling. This time, it’s different.
The Dibs Company Workers
The United Arab Industrial Company, also known as the Dibs Company after its former owners, is a large textile factory located in a rural area south of Damascus. It was founded in 1955 and nationalized in 1964. In 1980, it had 1,660 employees, nearly 200 of whom were administrative personnel. The following portraits of Dibs Company workers are drawn from interviews conducted in March 1980.
What is the position of the working class in contemporary Syrian society? I posed this question ten years ago and concluded at the time that one could only speak of a “class in formation.” [1] I was criticized then for having even raised such a question. After all, pre-capitalist relations of production in Syria have disintegrated, the artisan class has declined, there are increasing numbers of large capitalist enterprises employing an ever larger number of workers, and a class-based trade union movement emerged a half century ago. So it is tempting to conclude that the working class has in fact established itself as an actor on the Syrian social scene. But its obvious weakness in contemporary politics and society continues to raise a number of questions.
The assault on the Palestinian camps in Beirut ended in a truce signed in Damascus on June 17, which reflected the failure of Amal to defeat the Palestinian militias. The agreement also reflected Syria’s role in the battles by having the Palestinian side represented only by the Palestine National Salvation Front (PNSF). MERIP correspondent Mark Garfield visited Damascus in early July and spoke about the situation with Jamil Hilal, a member of the central committee of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and with Taysir Qubba, deputy head of political relations for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The DFLP is not affiliated with the PNSF; the PFLP is.
In their final years under French rule, Syria and Lebanon entered into an unprecedented cooperation in order to free themselves from France. The liberal nationalist regimes in Damascus and Beirut reinforced one another’s demands for complete political independence without first having to sign treaties with France. Support for their position came from Britain, the United States and, in 1945, from the newly founded Arab League. The Syrian nationalists appeared to have reconciled themselves to the integrity and sovereignty of a greater Lebanon, as established by the French in 1920, although after independence Damascus refused to establish formal diplomatic relations with Beirut.
Preeminent influence in Lebanon, both on the central government and between the various factions, is critical for Syria from defensive and offensive strategic perspectives, whatever one considers Syria’s role to be in the pan-Arab arena or in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
From the defensive perspective, Lebanon covers the entire western flank of southern Syria, offering immediate access to the Damascus and Homs regions. Since Lebanon’s descent into chaos beginning in 1975, Syria has been particularly concerned about three contingencies:
Hafiz al-Asad marched into the Palace of the People in Damascus on the evening of January 6, 1985 to convene the eighth regional congress of the Baath Party. The standing ovation which greeted his entrance was immediately broadcast to the most remote corners of Syria by a platoon of television cameras.
The recent TWA hijacking episode provided the latest occasion for the Reagan administration to display its single-minded devotion to the pursuit of world counterrevolution. There was no advantage in military action in Lebanon, pace Henry Kissinger Associates. But under the all-purpose rubric of “combating terrorism,” the boys in the White House lost not a moment to beat the war drums faster and louder against — why not? — Nicaragua.
Jillian Becker, The PLO: The Rise and Fall of the Palestine Liberation Organization (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984).
Welcome to the weird world of Ms. Jillian Becker—a world in which the PLO wreaks senseless vengeance on the hapless Palestinian people, PLO prison officers decorate their offices with blood-daubed Stars of David (pp. 146-47), generally elusive victims of PLO violence have their genitals or breasts cut off, or are ripped mercilessly limb from limb, etc. This is a universe where, in the author’s words, “dynamic ‘First World’ cultures come up against and clash with stagnant ‘Third World’ cultures.” (p.5)
James Adams, Israel and South Africa: The Unnatural Alliance (London: Quartet Books/Namara, 1985).
James Adams, a senior executive at the Sunday Times of London, scores an overwhelming victory in undermining the thesis of his own title. After even a few pages, his book convinces us, albeit unintentionally, that the Israel-South Africa courtship (and its many consummations) is quite a natural alliance after all, though not without the usual bumps. Mercifully, his remarks on the presumed improbability of the relationship betweeen “a people in flight from racism” and a state “founded on the ideas of racial superiority” absorb little of the author’s energy or the reader’s time.
Jonathan Kwitny, Endless Enemies(New York: Congdon and Weed, 1984).
This book canvasses the record of US government intervention in every corner of the Third World (Europe, Canada and Australia are omitted), and concludes with an essay entitled “On Capitalism, Communism and Freedom.” That's a good many bangs and a whimper.
It is easy to talk about “then.” The “now” is far more difficult. Memories confronted with that “now” take on a sense of fantasy and unease. A strange light is shed over the inner landscape by the changes in the outer. Since I speak of Lebanon, the light is also lurid. I am not sure what shadows it casts back onto the “Lebanon” of a dozen or so years ago. Nor do I quite know how to write out vertigo onto the page, or that almost stifling feeling of arrest, the lurch into a time where suddenness and absence of movement come together to create a dreamworld of rushed and still impressions. In the three days of my return, that dreamtime never left me. Inscribing it now, already a different now, I take refuge in a certain distance.
Though it fell like a piece of ripe fruit into the hands of the Israelis, southern Lebanon rapidly became a quagmire for the most powerful armed forces in the Middle East. An armed resistance developed, which by early 1984 was carrying out two attacks daily. Popular mobilization did not diminish in spite of the occupier's use of an intimidating arsenal of repression: prolonged arbitrary detention, collective punishment, harassment, repeated closure of the single road of access to the region. In fact, repression only fueled the mobilization.
