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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 19 - 25 October 2000 Issue No. 504 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 19 - 25 October 2000 Issue No. 504
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Elections Palestine International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Features Travel Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters When opponents meet
By Mohamed Sid-Ahmed
Last month, Vladimir Putin, current president of the Russian Federation and former KGB agent, visited Alexander Solzhenitsyn, arguably the Soviet Union's most famous dissident, whose scathing denunciation of Stalin's Gulag prisons in Siberia earned him the Nobel prize for literature in 1970. It also earned him the wrath of the authorities, and in 1974 he was exiled by a decision of the Politburo. Solzhenitsyn was the first to expose to the world the horrors of the Soviet concentration camps, which were no less merciless than Hitler's extermination camps.
It must have been a strange, not to say uncomfortable, encounter for the two men, one a former prisoner and the other to all intents and purposes his jailer. It has been reported that they had dinner together, with their wives, then retired to another room for a private talk that went on for four hours. What did they talk about? Everything Solzhenitsyn experienced as a political detainee has been minutely described in his books. Was the conversation over their respective perspectives of events they both lived from different vantage points? Or was it about what could be done to extricate Russia from its present predicament and restore it to its former greatness? Surely they did not spend four hours rehashing the past, exchanging mutual recriminations and settling accounts; they must have also spoken of establishing rules on how to build the future. What was said at the meeting has not been disclosed so far, but will surely come to light some day.
The event is worth underscoring at this critical juncture of the Middle East crisis, where conflict seems to have reached a point of total impasse. No less significant was a similar meeting that took place a few months ago between two other men who at one time also stood on opposite sides of the confrontation line, when the man who epitomises France's socialist power establishment, prime minister Lionel Jospin, invited the man who at one time epitomised the anti-establishment movement, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, to a private tête-à-tête dinner. Cohn-Bendit was the unchallenged leader of France's student uprising in 1968, an uprising that spread, for reasons that were not always the same, to the whole of Europe and even to America (over the Vietnam War) and to Egypt and the Arab world at large (in the aftermath of the 1967 War). The French students invented the slogan L'imagination au pouvoir (Deliver state power to imagination!), but this objective was not realised. Cohn-Bendit was expelled from France exactly as Solzhenitsyn was from the Soviet Union. This triggered a mass demonstration in Paris, where 100,000 students marched down the Champs-Elysées chanting "We are all German Jews" in solidarity with Cohn-Bendit, a Jew of German origin.
Actually, these types of encounters between representatives of opposing factions are no longer an exception. They may even have become the rule. We have seen Nelson Mandela, while still a prisoner, called out of his cell to meet the head of state, at the time F W de Klerk. Not long after, it was Mandela who became president of South Africa. One can also mention Sadat's dramatic visit to Israel in November 1977. Now what about relations between Arafat and Barak in the present critical stage of Palestinian-Israeli relations?
Since the breakdown of the Soviet Union, we have witnessed the world system moving from a bipolar to a unipolar world order. This created an opportunity for former opponents to meet. The types of personalities who come to meet can be very different. What they have in common is that enmity in the past is no longer justification for remaining so in the present.
However, when a meeting is held in the absence of a common language between the protagonists, how can they communicate and, ultimately, reach what could be called a win-win game? Bipolarity presupposes a winner and a loser, what has come to be described as a zero-sum game. Unipolarity, on the other hand, assumes that an arrangement beneficial to all can be worked out; in other words, that there need be no losers. In the context of globalisation, overcoming conflict can only be sustained if all parties reach an agreement that satisfies them.
But the ingredients for growing conflict situations have not only not disappeared, they are becoming even more potent. Today, the developed one-fifth of the global population is becoming richer, while the underdeveloped four-fifths are becoming poorer. The two groups constitute two distinct poles, one attributing to itself international legality, the other seeing itself as rejected by international legality and rebelling against it. In other words, bipolarity is still very much with us and to maintain otherwise is to subscribe to a utopian vision that is without basis in reality.
Given that the unipolar world order is still more virtual than real, what is the significance of the phenomenon we are now seeing of erstwhile enemies meeting? Are we dealing with some sort of self-deception? To cite one example, how to interpret the secret meetings between the PLO and Israel in Oslo? I have been told that the Scandinavian countries are now using the Oslo precedent to generalise this type of procedure. Actually, it is a generalisation of the measures taken after World War II to promote reconciliation between France and Germany. Youth from both France and Germany were invited to mingle and to develop friendly relations with each other. This has been called the "culture of peace." It is to be questioned, however, whether such a culture is capable of overcoming the logic of confrontation born of historical memory and of past scars that have not healed. The answer to the question can be found in the flare-up over Jerusalem throughout the region in the recent weeks.
In this connection, we should distinguish between excluding war, and violence in general, as a means of conflict resolution, and between asserting that the breakdown of the bipolar world order has created opportunities for a peaceful, smooth transition towards a unipolar world order where reconciliation can occur spontaneously.
We should also ask ourselves why specific countries, namely, the Scandinavian nations, are more capable than others of bringing about such reconciliations. Has Scandinavian social democracy found a "third way" that transcends both traditional capitalism and traditional socialism, which represents unipolarity in its best possible expression? Such a view should not be discounted, but should also be approached critically.
The present crisis in the Middle East is a litmus test for all these assumptions: are we moving towards unipolarity in the region or towards still greater polarisation? Is reconciliation a utopian dream or a realistic scenario, not only for the Arab-Israeli conflict but for other intractable conflicts like Ulster, the Basque conflict, etc.?
We are living an age in which violence has reached a degree unprecedented in human history. Yet we are also living an age in which walls erected to separate human communities from one another are crumbling. In the globalised world of today, conflicts between human communities are no longer fought along geographical lines, between East and West or North and South, but rather follow the pattern of a web, with cybernetical feedback reactions. In a way, we are living an Einsteinian world with greater distances in smaller spaces, where the making of the future presupposes dialectical interactions between present aspirations and inherited past realities. From the standpoint of principle, we have passed from rejecting the other to accepting it, without being sure that the conditions of acceptance are clearly fulfilled. Hence the many ambiguities now marking the various disputes all over the world.
I remember once asking Nelson Mandela, some time after his release from prison and before he was elected president, how he would characterise his relationship with de Klerk. He replied: "He needs me and I need him, whatever the conflict between us." That, in a nutshell, summarises the whole issue. The reasons for interpenetration and interconnection between the various parts of humankind are becoming at least as important as the reasons for conflict between them. This is closely related to the shrinking of the globe thanks to the electronic and communications revolution. However, as people become closer, they become more aware of the differences and contrasts between them even as they realise that they can no longer ignore the other. Is there a way of controlling this phenomenon rather than leaving it to chance? To what extent can human contact between the representatives of contradictory trends help overcome the real reasons for conflict between them? In other words, how effective can encounters between Arafat and Barak be in ending the spiral of violence in the Middle East? What is now happening in Palestine is not only a test for the rules governing the Middle East order but perhaps a test for the global system itself.
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Intifada in focus 12 - 18 October 2000© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
