In the summer, when thousands of young Gulf Arab men flee heat and boredom in their native land, airport posters warn them of a life-threatening danger lurking abroad, symbolized by a skeleton and four red letters: AIDS. Radio talk shows urge Gulf tourists to be chaste when they visit foreign cities portrayed as infested with the disease, especially in the West. Religious scholars tell audiences at Friday prayer meetings and at the AIDS conferences now held regularly in the region that only the teachings of Allah can save believers from the modern-day scourge knocking at the Middle East’s door.
Kandir Baysu has been hospitalized twice over the past eight years, both times for more than two months and requiring dozens of blood transfusions. Baysu, a worker at a battery manufacturing plant on the outskirts of Istanbul, thinks he is about due for another hospital stay. As in the past, he expects the diagnosis to be the same: lead poisoning.
Unlike hundreds of thousands of factory workers across Turkey, Baysu is relatively lucky. A lengthy series of newspaper articles and union-backed court battles in the late 1970s drew nationwide attention to health and safety conditions at Mutlu, forcing the government to take the rare move of shutting down the plant until certain changes were instituted.
The nightmare started when 24-year-old Ahlam, from the village of Ya’bud in the Israeli-occupied territories, joined a march to commemorate the martyrdom of a fellow villager.
“The situation was so tense that the Israeli army could not enter the village,” she recalled from her hospital bed in Amman. “A helicopter started throwing tear gas onto the 8,000 or so peaceful demonstrators.”
One of the canisters landed close to Ahlam. She attempted to kick it away, but within a minute she lost consciousness from tear gas inhalation.
Three basic theoretical formulations frame the state of the health debate among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The biomedical/clinical framework is generally espoused by the majority of the medical and allied health care establishment, most of whom have been trained in the Western medical tradition. This biomedical framework views disease as a malfunction of systems and organs that can be corrected by technical intervention on the part of qualified health care providers. By this conception, medical care and healing occur almost solely within the limits of the clinic, the hospital, the laboratory and the pharmacy. Causal relationships are clear-cut and unidimensional. [1]
A recent World Health Organization report on the state of health practitioners in the Middle East suggests that the region now has a satisfactory number of physicians; some countries even have an excess. Yet health, as measured by standard indicators such as infant mortality, is hardly satisfactory. The report suggests that large numbers of physicians may not, in fact, have a positive effect on health. [1] In recent years, a small number of medical educators in the Middle East have become concerned about the persisting poor health among people in their countries and the questionable appropriateness of medical care. They have attributed this state of affairs to the training offered in medical schools.
Health, along with food and shelter, is a fundamental element of every person's life. If we are in good health we may take it for granted, but when our health is bad — when we are ill or injured — it becomes central to our lives.
When the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund met in Washington in September, President Husni Mubarak was on hand to speak about the Third World debt crisis. For more than a year, Cairo has been negotiating a new $500 million agreement with the IMF that would allow Egypt to reschedule $10 billion worth of debt payments falling due before December 1990. At one stage Mubarak denounced the IMF as a “quack doctor,” but his government has had to swallow many IMF “reform” prescriptions. (Currency devaluations, for instance, have tripled the Egyptian pound value of dollar-denominated debt contracted in the early 1980s.)
New Jewish Agenda Expels NAP
Television may be the best demarcator of the limits of speech that can actually be heard and understood in the US today. The Palestinian intifada has broadened public tolerance for critical presentation of Middle Eastern issues on the tube. But the extent and duration of this change remain subject to constant contest.
Mehmet Ali Birand, The Generals’ Coup in Turkey: An Inside Story of September 12, 1980 (London: Brassey’s Defence Publishers, 1987).
Irvin Cemil Schick and Ahmet Ertuğrul Tonak, eds., Turkey in Transition: New Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Turkey suffers more than its share of stereotypical reporting, and much of the material available in the US tends to reinforce linear and simplistic explanations. Though differing in style and outlook, both of these volumes go beyond mainstream perceptions of developments in Turkey.
Gabriel Kolko, Confronting the Third World: United States Foreign Policy, 1945-1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988).
Gabriel Kolko has been a master guide of modern US history for countless students seeking to go beyond official versions and conformist interpretations. From The Triumph of Conservatism (1963) to Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States and the Modern Historical Experience (1986), Kolko’s methodic investigation of US domestic and international politics and foreign policy in the twentieth century has changed our understanding of the foundations of capitalism and the meaning of containment and counterrevolution.
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.
