25 April - 1 May 2002
Issue No.583
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 25 April - 1 May 2002 Issue No.583 |
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A suspicious project
Mohamed Sid-Ahmed warns of the dangers inherent in Sharon's call for a regional Middle East conference
In the immediate aftermath of the 11 September attacks, Sharon pounced on what he saw as a golden opportunity to further his own agenda. Hitching his wagon to the US war on terror, he tried to convince the Bush administration that Osama Bin Laden was not the only terrorist who should be targeted; that he was, in fact, just the tip of an iceberg that extended throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds. As Bush had Bin Laden in Afghanistan, he, Sharon, had Arafat in the Middle East. And, as Bin Laden led a terrorist organisation, Al Qa'eda, Arafat also led a terrorist organisation, the PLO.
But Bush was at first reluctant to go along with Sharon's game plan. His immediate priority was to go after Osama Bin Laden, and he felt this was not the time to extend his enmity to Muslims and Arabs in general. He also understood that Muslim and Arab regimes should not be pushed into waging an open war against another Muslim regime, especially in the absence of conclusive proof that the terrorist attacks were masterminded by, or under the auspices of, an Islamic state.
To Sharon's dismay, Bush decided to use the carrot rather than the stick with Arafat. Rejecting Sharon's assertion that Arafat was the Bin Laden of the Middle East, he rewarded the Palestinian Authority by announcing that the time had come to recognise a Palestinian state established side by side with Israel and living in peaceful coexistence with it.
Bush expected, and had indeed warned, that the war in Afghanistan could drag on for a long time. But it ended earlier than expected. However, its end did not mean the end of the war on terrorism. Bush came up with his theory that the threat now lay in an "axis of evil" made up of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, hinting strongly that the next target in his war on terror would be Iraq.
But Iraq would be a harder nut to crack than Afghanistan, and he needed the support, at least political if not logistical, of regional leaders. To that end, he sent his vice-president, Dick Cheney, to the Middle East, where he met the leaders of nine Arab countries, Israel and Turkey, but not with Arafat. Cheney was surprised to discover that, with the exception of Israel, all the Middle East countries he visited, including Turkey, rejected the American plan to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein at a time the Palestinian problem was the burning issue.
Faced with this rebuff, Washington tried to combine Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah's initiative which, after its unanimous adoption at the Beirut Arab summit, had become an Arab initiative, with Sharon's proposal to convene a regional conference. Although Washington's objective in supporting Sharon's proposal has not been clarified, suggestions have been made that the conference could become a framework for a resumption of negotiations based on the Tenet and Mitchell plans, together with elements of the Saudi initiative and of the agreements reached between PA official Ahmed Qureia and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. The US is expected to demand that all Arab states recognise Israel, in accordance with the Arab summit decisions, in exchange for setting a timetable for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, as was agreed in talks between Peres and Qureia.
But the format Sharon is proposing for the conference raises many questions. Why a regional conference? The Madrid conference, which was the framework and point of departure for all subsequent negotiations, was an international, not a regional, conference, which included the Soviet Union on an equal footing with the US, as well as Europe and the UN. Are those now being edged out of the search for a resolution of the Middle East conflict? Will Russia, Europe and the United Nations be excluded from the regional conference? Will the United States be the only extra-regional power invited to participate?
Moreover, will all regional parties be invited, especially now that the Beirut summit has committed all Arab states to establish "'normal" relations with Israel? Sharon has already stated that Arafat, the democratically-elected leader of the Palestinians, would not be invited, raising fears that the Arab states chosen to take part in the conference would be invited on a selective basis. This can only be seen as yet another attempt to split Arab ranks, and must be vigorously resisted.
If Bush and Sharon did not see eye to eye in the immediate aftermath of 11 September, this was because Bush was responding to the terrorist acts that shook America and, for the matter, the whole world, and wanted international attention to focus on that specific event, while Sharon tried to exploit the event for his conflict with the Palestinians. Bush's global outlook clashed with Sharon's regional outlook.
That is no longer the case. Now that the Afghan war, the first battle in Bush's war on terror, is over, (even if Bin Laden is still at large), the epicentre of the conflict has shifted to the Middle East (specifically, to Iraq), that is, to the region which is also of concern to Sharon. In this new context, Bush's position has gradually changed and is now virtually indistinguishable from Sharon's.
After Cheney's unsuccessful Middle Eat tour, Bush realised that his plan to topple Saddam Hussein and replace him with an Iraqi Kirzai would have to wait until something was done about the Palestinian problem, which had attained unprecedented proportions. This offered Sharon the opportunity to convince Bush to abandon his earlier reluctance to condemn Arafat as the "Bin Laden of the Middle East." Strongly backed by the Zionist lobby in America, Sharon succeeded in persuading the American president that the key to overthrowing the Iraqi leadership was to overthrow the Palestinian leadership as the spearhead of terrorism in the region. That is how he got Bush to turn a blind eye to the Israeli army's rampage through the towns and villages of the West Bank, in the name of cleansing Palestinian society from terrorist elements and liquidating Arafat as Palestinian leader. Moreover, branding the PLO as a terrorist organisation paves the way to branding Hizbullah as a terrorist organisation, and justifies threatening Syria, Lebanon and, eventually, Iraq, as countries that sponsor terrorist networks in the Middle East. By accusing given Arab parties of supporting terrorism, while regarding others as standing by Washington in its war on terror, the US administration is trying to split Arab ranks and erode the common Arab stand achieved at the Beirut summit.
The Arab-Israeli conflict has thus become part of Bush's global strategy. Instead of being perceived as a conflict of a special nature, with its own specific traits, it is becoming an element in Bush's overall war against terrorism. Israel is seen as one of the pillars of his new world order, while the Arab world finds itself divided into states accused of backing terrorism and building arsenals of weapons of mass destruction on the one hand, and states which are seen as playing by the rules of the new world order on the other. These moderate Arab regimes are caught on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, their moderation has not earned them anywhere near as much American support as that enjoyed by Israel; on the other, it has placed them in disfavour with the radical regimes and trends in the Arab world. They are neither part of America's "axis of evil" nor fully part of its "axis of good." That is the unenviable position in which Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia now find themselves.
The real danger of accepting Sharon's proposal for a regional conference is that it would be a tacit acceptance of a new mechanism that would not necessarily draw on the terms of reference that have hitherto governed the peace process. Moreover, the resolutions adopted by the new conference would supersede all previous resolutions representing international legitimacy, including Security Council Resolution 242, the cornerstone of all peace efforts to date.
The Saudi initiative has not been rejected out of hand by any of the protagonists. But Israel insists that it will not withdraw to the 4 June, 1967 lines as required by the initiative. It also expressed doubts as to the readiness of Arab states to fully normalise their relations with Israel. This means that at least one further round of negotiations will be necessary for the Beirut Declaration to be adopted and the Saudi initiative to become a frame of reference. herein lies the threat the regional conference can represent. It can be a tool to suppress the present frames of reference of the Arab-Israeli peace process and replace them by others tilted still further in Israel's favour.
Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat is right to describe the regional conference as a ruse which should be exposed without hesitation, whatever pressures are brought to push it through.
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