From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Saturday, 6 February 1999 00:05
Subject: Robert FISK on Hussein of Jordan.
>"Not once have we ever encouraged a democratic state in the Middle East,
>which would allow Arab citizens to choose their own leaders."
>
>FISK tells us elsewhere that Hussein trusted those he negotiated with,
>most recently Israel, Arafat and Clinton; he was invariably betrayed.
>
>=======================
>INDEPENDENT (London) Feb 6
>
>Robert Fisk - The West's favourite despots
>
>Even to kings he comes. And to presidents and emirs and all the sheikhs
>extolled in those Arab newspapers, whose titles mean "The Struggle" or
>"The Republic" or "The Renaissance" or - and this is my favourite - "The
>Public Opinion". A dictator's photograph, day after day, year after year,
>gives a kind of eternity to the colonels and brigadier-generals, the
>monarchs and "beys" who rule the Middle East. "Perfection of a kind was
>what he was after," Auden wrote of the Dictator, "and the poetry he
>invented was easy to understand." So why should a Living God fear the Grim
>Reaper? Is that, I wonder, why so many potentates rule as if they will
>live for ever?
>
>King Hussein of Jordan, a rarity among Middle East rulers in that he has
>sorted out his successor before his death.
>
>At least King Hussein, the dying monarch who flew back to his hospital bed
>in America this week, had the wisdom and humility to discuss death with
>his people when he first learnt he had cancer. However, all across the
>Arab world, age and sickness haunt the lands. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia -
>plump to the point of obesity - can scarcely stand, and stumbles on the
>simplest sentences. Yasser Arafat - he of the shaking hand and trembling
>lip - suffers ever more from the brain tumour inflicted after a near-fatal
>air crash. President Assad of Syria, who suffered a heart complaint as far
>back as 1983, has already lost his favourite son, Basil, in a road
>accident. President Mubarak of Egypt has never - not once in all his 18
>years in power - appointed a vice-president.
>
>Even to mention the word "succession" in public provokes a familiar
>gesture by friends in the Middle East; their eyes move, ever so carefully,
>over their shoulders. It is the unspoken crisis, the great unmentionable,
>a subject heavy enough to poison any conversation. But it is real. And we
>in the West, of course - while we may prefer Prince Abdullah to Prince
>Hassan in Jordan or Prince Sultan to Prince Abdullah in Saudi Arabia -
>accept this odd, cantankerous, dangerous system of inheritance.
>
>Not once have we ever encouraged a democratic state in the Middle East,
>which would allow Arab citizens to choose their own leaders. Because we
>like dictatorships. We know how to do business with the kings and generals
>- how to sell them our tanks and fighter-bombers and missiles - unless
>they disobey us, like Nasser and Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein.
>
>It's a bizarre feature of our present relations with the Arab world that
>Saddam is the only leader whose overthrow President Clinton has called for
>in the name of "democracy", demanding that the Iraqis should have a
>government that "represents its people and respects them". A likely tale.
>How many other Arab governments, for heaven's sake - with their secret
>police and their torture chambers - "represent" their people? And how many
>of them has President Clinton sought to depose? Not one. However, we are
>supposed to believe that Clinton really - really - wants democracy in
>Iraq. How fortunate, then, are the starving, dying civilians of Iraq.
>
>The truth is that we, as well as the Arab regimes themselves, have
>produced and maintained this archaic drama of crown princes and beloved
>sons, of Gulf sheikhdoms that are no more than the private property of
>individual families. True, we were happy to ease King Farouk out of Egypt
>and King Idris out of Libya (we liked Gaddafi then) and to depose the
>Sultan of Oman in favour of his public-school son. But we want strong
>leaders who will be loyal to us. Let them have human rights, we say. But
>we do not want democracy in their countries (which means, of course, that
>there will be no human rights).
>
>And no choice for their people. Even King Hussein - whose kingdom might
>just fall into the category of liberal amid the other xenophobic states -
>never bothered to consult his citizens about their future leader. They
>were given no chance to decide whom they wished to rule them. His Majesty
>ordained that it would be his son Abdullah, that power would be kept in
>the family. Did anyone expect anything else? It takes a brave Jordanian to
>call for a real constitutional monarchy. Indeed, the only man who
>consistently does just that - Leith Shubeilat - finds himself equally
>consistently inside Amman's state security prison.
>
>Of course, some of the titans of the Middle East have planned their
>succession. President Assad - whose energy still stuns the diplomats who
>sit through his six-hour conversations - has groomed his son Bashar, an
>ophthalmologist by profession but an increasingly public personality with
>an enthusiasm for computer technology, to follow in his steps. Taken at
>face value, Syria's constitution provides for a democratic system of
>succession, but Assad controls military, political and legislative power;
>he can dissolve governments and assemblies; he is secretary-general of the
>Baath party, commander in chief of the armed forces. Presumably, Bashar
>Assad will one day do the same.
>
>What about Arafat? He has no obvious successor and no real constitutional
>framework to create one. He has turned his back on the democracy of the
>Palestinian assembly and survives by cronyism, bribes and 13 different
>security services - the latter in co-operation with the CIA and the
>Israelis. Sadly, some Palestinians believe that the only alternative to
>this kind of patronage society - and patronising society - is a return to
>rule by the old families of Husseini and Nashashibi, a kind of mirror
>image of all the other family rulers in the rest of the Middle East. So
>the Palestinians cannot choose their successor. But be sure that the
>Israelis already have someone in mind to take over "Palestine" when Arafat
>leaves us.
>
>In Saudi Arabia, direct succession suggests a struggle to come among the
>defence minister, Prince Sultan, Prince Naif and Crown Prince Abdullah.
>Washington, aware of Abdullah's growing criticism and dislike of the
>American presence in the Gulf - he is said to have told the US Defense
>Secretary William Cohen that not only could the United States not use
>Saudi air bases to bomb Iraq, but that America might have to leave those
>air bases altogether - might favour Prince Sultan. His son, it should be
>noted, is the influential Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar, who
>in 1990 was reported in Washington to be almost as powerful in President
>George Bush's office as the secretary of state, James Baker.
>
>The result of our support for all these potentates is regularly distorted
>by their Western supporters in Washington, in London and - less obviously
>- in Paris. If we demand full democracy for these nations, we are told,
>the Islamists will try to take over. Cannot we understand, our diplomats
>point out, that "whatever their failings" (another of my favourite
>expressions in the Middle East), these "friends of the West" are fighting
>Islamic fundamentalism?
>
>But this is a self-serving delusion. True, some of the local dictators
>allow a careful measure of freedom; upright Arab citizens may complain
>about power cuts, poor transportation, even demand the sacking of a
>corrupt governor or two. But any serious freedom of speech has been so
>brutally suppressed across the Middle East - and anyone suggesting a
>democratic change of leadership so ferociously treated - that real
>opposition in these countries has been driven underground. This applies as
>much in Egypt as it does in the Gulf or the Levant.
>
>And the only political groupings that exist in this hidden, subterranean
>environment which are prepared to risk the fury of the secret police and
>the government torturers are Islamic.
>
>So "Islamic fundamentalism" becomes the only real opposition to the Arab
>governments. We support those undemocratic countries in their battle
>against "fundamentalist terror" - and shore up their regimes. And, of
>course, just to complete the beauty of this circular argument, we cannot
>encourage in these totalitarian states the democracy that would rid them
>of fundamentalist violence.
>
>Wasn't that why we backed Saddam so generously during his eight-year
>aggression against Iran? Because he was preventing "fundamentalism"? So
>who will we put in Saddam's place?
>
>My guess is that the Americans are still looking for a good old-fashioned
>Iraqi brigadier-general, a military man who knows how to keep his tribes
>in order. Not too difficult to find, you may say, since some of them are
>supporting the US-backed Iraqi National Congress. Needless to say, it
>would have to be a powerful man, someone who did not allow dissent to rock
>the regime, someone with a powerful security service and a family that
>might provide a successor. Someone, in fact, just like Saddam.
>
>** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
>is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest
>in receiving the included information for research and educational
>purposes. **
>
end
==============
Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List
http://www.alexia.net.au/~www/mhutton/index.html
The Year 2000 Bug - An Urgent Sustainability Issue
http://www.peg.apc.org/~psutton/grin-y2k.htm
