Middle East Research and Information Project: Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971
Jim Yamin is Middle East program coordinator for Grassroots International, a relief organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with programs in Lebanon and the Horn of Africa. He spoke with Joan Mandell and Kathryn Silver in April, 1985.
You’ve just spent ten weeks in south Lebanon. What were your most striking impressions of the occupation?
Lebanon is a microcosm of the peoples, cultures and religions found in the Middle East region as a whole. Under Ottoman rule from the 16th century until World War I, that province of mountainous eastern Syria known as Mt. Lebanon was home and refuge for various religious and ethnic communities. Lebanon has a long history of foreign intervention. In the 19th century, European powers established their trade and investment interests under the guise of “protecting” one or another group within Lebanon. The French adopted the Maronite Catholics and Russia the Orthodox Christians of Syria and Palestine, while the British favored the Druze. This insertion of foreign interests occurred in the course of a protracted shift of power in the Mt. Lebanon area from Druze to Maronites and contributed to the tensions among the various communities and ruling clans.
Many saw the Shi‘i revolt in west Beirut and its southern suburbs in February 1984 as the sudden and unexpected mass uprising of a rapidly expanding social group in the midst of a tumultuous religious revivalism. But the February uprising was a significant social movement, with roots in the profound social transformation of the Shi‘i community over the course of 30 years, from Lebanese independence at the end of World War II to the beginning of the civil war in 1975.
Dan Connell, a contributing editor to this magazine, is executive director of Grassroots International, a relief agency working in Lebanon and the Horn of Africa. Jim Paul spoke with him in New York on June 17, 1985.
June 19,1985. In Beirut, TWA flight 847 stands desolate on the empty tarmac, a huge hulk of white metal shimmering in the heat, a picture off the cover of some bungled tourism brochure. Some 40 Americans are unwilling guests in the southern shantytowns known as the “suburbs” of Beirut. More than a hundred other passengers have been released. One, a young US Navy underwater construction expert, was beaten and executed. The two original hijackers are now said to be adherents of the Hizb Ullah (Party of God).
Martin van Bruinessen’s response in MERIP Reports 127 (October 1984) contains innuendos and inaccuracies which make it an unacceptable last word on the Armenian question.
Van Bruinessen equates Armenian and Turkish views of the mass killings of Armenians under the heading of “dogmatized versions.” In so doing, he ignores many eyewitness accounts of the mass murders of Armenians beginning in 1894 and continuing through Atatürk’s conquest of Smyrna in 1922. These accounts are not limited to those of Armenian survivors. They were recorded by people as varied as missionaries, ambassadors, military attaches and advisers, journalists, teachers, travelers and businessmen.
Fu’ad Khuri, Tribe and State in Bahrain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
Fu’ad Khuri has provided us with a sensitive analysis of the recent history of Bahrain. He captures the broad sweep of socioeconomic and political change brought about by the colonial bureaucracy and the discovery of oil, and he comprehends the multiplicity of peoples, religious sects and classes in Bahrain and their responses to these changes.
Labor activism has been a major feature of political life in Bahrain, going back to early industrial activities following the discovery of oil in 1928-1932. [1] These early efforts absorbed many destitute pearl divers, peasants and freed slaves, and paved the way for a new stratum of middlemen from among the pearl merchant families. The new economic activities gave additional impetus to British efforts to build the skeleton of a local government administration capable of coping with the social and economic transformation of the island. [2]
“Isa” grew up in Bahrain and lived there until recently. He spoke with several MERIP editors in April 1985. He asked to remain anonymous in order to protect friends and family still living there.
What sort of distinctions and divisions are there among expatriates?
You’ve got the Europeans and Americans and then you’ve got the Indians, Pakistanis, Thais and Koreans. The Koreans come in contingents of a construction company, not free labor. They wear Hyundai uniforms. They go to the market in groups. There’s a much greater language barrier.
Over the past five years, Kuwait’s rulers have confronted a variety of crises. Declining oil revenues have forced the regime to engage in deficit spending, which may jeopardize both the state’s extensive system of social welfare programs and its efforts to encourage diverse industrial development projects. The war between Iran and Iraq poses a continuing threat to the country’s foreign commerce as well as to its position as one of the primary financial and service centers of the Gulf region. Attempts by groups associated with Iran to undermine the Sabah regime have led to heightened internal security. Two signs of this are the broader scope of police involvement in domestic affairs and the doubling of defense spending between 1979-1980 and 1983-1984.
Editor’s Note: A longer version of this article appeared as a three-part series in Le Monde, June 15-17, 1982. It appears here by permission of the author. Since the article was written, the economic cutbacks in the Gulf have reduced jobs available to the Palestinians and also affected the Palestinian bourgeoisie. Remittances to Palestinian institutions (including the PLO) are now less than they were. The crisis in the PLO since the Lebanon war has also deprived the Palestinian community of its main interlocutor and defender with the Gulf regimes. In spite of these changes, the Palestinians remain an important and influential community in the Gulf and in the Palestinian diaspora, as Eric Rouleau makes clear.
Bahrain was, after Iran and Iraq, the first country in the Gulf to have its petroleum resources developed by Western companies. It has a longer history of economic and infrastructural development than any other state in the peninsula. Bahrain’s petroleum reserves and producing capacity are also the smallest of the Gulf oil producing states. Thus, Bahrain’s rulers were the first in the Gulf to confront the problem of building a diversified modern economy. Furthermore, while political legitimacy is problematical throughout the Gulf, it is especially so in Bahrain.
All of the small Arab states of the Persian Gulf are now well into their second decade as independent political entities. Bahrain, Qatar and the seven principalities making up the United Arab Emirates became independent in 1971. Kuwait’s independence goes back another decade. Oman, though never a colony, traces its present regime to the British-induced palace coup of 1970. Whether because of or in spite of the startling explosion of wealth in the 1970s, because of or in spite of the fall of the shah and the war between Iran and Iraq, they have survived as states and their regimes have displayed unanticipated continuity. The turbulence of the 1970s roared around them, as around the eye of a storm.
Ten years ago this April, the United States finally ended its military intervention in Vietnam. This marked a great victory for the Vietnamese national liberation movement and for the broad popular opposition movement in the US and around the world. MERIP’s own beginnings came out of that movement, and we noted that the sudden burst of media attention, after years of amnesia, reviewed those bloody years of intervention in Indochina exclusively in terms of what they meant to Americans. No Vietnamese was invited to reflect on the consequences of the war and its ending. Our friend David Truong worked long and hard in this country to bring the war to an end, and after April 1975 he was among the most tireless advocates of American and Vietnamese reconciliation.
Merle Thorpe, Jr., Prescription for Conflict: Israel’s West Bank Settlement Policy (Washington DC: Foundation for Middle East Peace, 1984).
Meron Benvenisti, The West Bank Data Base Project: A Survey of Israel’s Policies (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 1984).
This book, by the former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, is the first major commercial publication of the small but industrious West Bank Data Base Project (WBDBP). The project constitutes an attempt to collect and collate an accurate and comprehensive data base which will enable “[us] to focus on fast changing conditions in the territories and, in so doing, prevent the political discussion and decision-making process from being overtaken by events.” (p. ix) This meritorious claim has received the imprimatur of no lesser figures than former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Special Envoy Philip Habib.
Helena Cobban, The PLO: People, Power and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1984).
Beyond the Walls, directed by Uri Barbash. Written by Benny Barbash, Eran Pries and Uri Barbash. Produced by Rudy Cohen. 103 minutes. Color. 35 mm. Distributed by Warner Brothers’ Globe Exports.
The Palestinian Wedding: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Resistance Poetry, collected and translated by A.M. Elmessiri, illustrated by Kamal Boullata, Arabic calligraphy by Adel Horan, (Washington DC: Three Continents Press, 1982).
Maxime Rodinxon, Cult, Ghetto, and State: The Persistence of the Jewish Question, London: Al Saqi Books, 1983.
Akiva Orr, The unJewish State: The Politics of Jewish Identity in Israel, London: Ithaca Press, 1983.
Lenni Brennr, The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir, London: Zed Books, 1984.
