To The Editors:
Thanks for your outstanding and timely issue, “State Terror in Turkey,” (MERIP Reports, #121, February 1984). We would like to clarify a few issues about Armenians that were raised in the article, “The Kurds in Turkey.” Martin van Bruinessen states there that “fears that the Armenians would prove to be a fifth column in an armed conflict with Russia led to their deportation and the massacre of hundreds of thousands of them.” Such a viewpoint is a tragic distortion of historical reality and closely resembles the official line of successive Turkish regimes to justify the pre-meditated genocide and mass expulsion of the Armenian people from their native homeland in eastern Anatolia.
Richard Lawless and Allan Findlay, eds., North Africa: Contemporary Politics and Economic Development (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984).
More than fifteen years have passed since the appearance of Samir Amin’s excellent book on the Maghreb. None of the dozen or so books on the subject that have appeared since then have come close to Amin’s clarity and analytical power. So much has happened in the intervening years that a new book on the topic is now sorely needed. Lawless and Findlay’s North Africa is a welcome arrival, but unfortunately it fails to meet this need.
Tony Hodges, Western Sahara: The Roots of a Desert War (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1983).
David Seddon, The Peasants: A Century of Change in the Eastern Rif, 1870-1970 (Folkestone: Wm. Dawson & Sons, 1981).
Henry Munson, Jr., The House of Si Abd Allah: The Oral History of a Moroccan Family (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).
Morocco is unusual in the Middle East for its extensive civil society — social institutions which are relatively independent of control by the state apparatus. A complex relationship exists between the absolute and repressive monarchy of King Hassan II on the one hand and the powerful opposition institutions on the other. Among these institutions are the press and the political parties, but over the years the most impressive and most notable have been Morocco’s trade unions.
Many European countries claim a special relationship with the Arab world. The English see themselves as having some unique affinity for Arabs, because of their colonial role in developing Egypt and the Anglo-Bedouin fraternizations of Arabia. The French vaunt their cultural impact upon the Maghreb, Lebanon and Syria. The Italians point to bonds of Mediterranean communality, the Germans stress their lack of colonial involvement, the Greeks evoke their role as the yefira, the bridge, between Europe and the Arabs. Even the Irish have their version of this vocation, based on a history of anti-colonial struggle. The Spanish are no exception.
Nineteen eighty-four began in a bloody fashion in the Maghreb. Violent demonstrations erupted in the impoverished southwest and south of Tunisia at the very end of December and spread throughout the country during the first week of January. These followed the Tunisian government’s introduction of measures to remove food subsidies. Bread prices suddenly doubled.
A crisis had been building in Tunisia for many months. By the end of 1983, the economy was in serious trouble, support-for the regime had been eroding and the International Monetary Fund had proposed austerity measures. Within the government, corruption and personal luxury were rampant. President-for-life Habib Bourghiba was intent on preparations for a lavish celebration of the 50th anniversary of the ruling Destourian Socialist Party, while ministers vied with each other over the succession to the 81-year-old leader.
This issue examines the political impact of the economic crisis that has wracked Tunisia and Morocco over the first half of this decade. Even as we prepared this issue, the combustible recipe of austerity decrees and popular desperation exploded into violence in neighboring Egypt, in the industrial town of Kafr el-Dawar, near Alexandria. The decision in mid-September to double the government-controlled price of bread touched off the seething resentment of poor and working class Egyptians at the galloping price increases of uncontrolled market items over the last year. The final blow was a three percent increase in payroll deductions for all state workers.
David Koff, Occupied Palestine (E Cinema Six Productions, 1981).
David Koff and his team have made a complex, sensitive and brutally authentic movie. Occupied Palestine delivers its message with unnerving sharpness and accuracy. For these very reasons it may strike those who are not intimately familiar with the lives and struggles of Palestinians under Israeli domination — both citizens of Israel and those living under manifest military occupation — as exaggerated and overblown.
John F. Devlin, Syria: Modern State in an Ancient Land (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1983).
Robert Olson, The Baath and Syria, 1947-1982 (Princeton, NJ: The Kingston Press, 1982).
Umar F. Abd-Allah, The Islamic Struggle in Syria (Berkeley, CA: Mizan Press, 1983).
Alexander Schölch, ed., Palestinians Over the Green Line (London: Ithaca Press, 1983).
Mary Anne Stevens, ed., The Orientalists: Delacroix to Matisse — The Allure of North Africa and the Near East (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, in association with Weidenfield and Nicolson, London, 1984).
Nikki Keddie, Religion and Politics in Iran: Shiism from Quietism to Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983).
Rony Gabbay, Communism and Agrarian Reform in Iraq (London: Croom Helm, 1978).
Modern Iraqi history suffers from a lack of monographs and case studies on subjects such as rural affairs. Rony Gabbay’s research helps to fill this vacuum, at least in the area of social and political developments in the countryside and their relation to communism and agrarian reform. Published in 1978, even today Gabbay’s is an important source for the history of the Iraqi Communist Party.
Shirin Tahir-Kheli and Shaheen Ayubi, The Iran-Iraq War: New Weapons, Old Conflicts (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1983).
Tareq Y. Ismael, Iraq and Iran: Roots of Conflict (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1982).
Much of the growing literature on the Iran-Iraq war is devoted to how the conflict has affected oil exports from the Gulf or the geopolitical designs of the United States in the area. The books under review are exceptional in that they concentrate on the national and regional perceptions, objectives and priorities of the principal protagonists.
M. S. el-Azhary, ed., The Iran-Iraq War (London and New York: Croom Helm and St. Martin’s Press, 1984).
This volume comprises papers presented at a conference organized by the Universities of Exeter and Basra, at Exeter in July 1982, together with an introduction and conclusion written in the spring or summer of 1983. Some of the contributions thus have a rather dated air. John Duke Anthony, for example, thought that it was “unlikely that the Gulf states [would] be able to finance Iraq in the period ahead” in the way that they had in the first two years of the war, when in fact their munificence shows no immediate signs of abating.
Tom Nieuwenhuis, Politics and Society in Early Modern Iraq: Mamluk Pashas, Tribal Shaykhs and Local Rule Between 1802 and 1831 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1981).
This is a reasoned and illuminating analysis, by a young Dutch scholar, of Iraq in the three closing decades of the Mamluk era.
Isam al-Khafaji, al-Dawla wal-Tatawwur al-Ra’smali fil-‘Iraq, 1968-1979 (Cairo, 1984).
Isam al-Khafaji is a distinguished Iraqi economist who studied at Baghdad University under Muhammad Salman Hasan in the early 1970s. After leaving Iraq in 1978, he studied for a year in Paris before settling in Beirut. There he published his first book, Ra’smaliyyat al-Dawla al-Wataniyya (National State Capitalism), which is a Marxist analysis of aspects of economic development with special reference to the oil states of the Middle East.
Excerpts from the Friday prayer speech of Hojjat-ol-Islam Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the Imam’s representative to the Supreme Defense Council, and Speaker of the Majles, broadcast on Tehran radio, July 6, 1984.
