Issue No. 595
Opinion
Previous issue
Site map
|
|
18 - 24 July 2002 Issue No. 595 Opinion |
Current issue Previous issue Site map | |
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Mutating definitions
At an Institut du Monde Arabe conference on political and cultural connections Mohamed Sid-Ahmed raised three critical questions connected to the situation of the Palestinians
Although the model to which I chose to apply the theme of the conference was the Palestinian problem, I found that it could not be addressed in isolation from a number of developments of a global nature. Three critical questions in particular affect the present course of events in Palestine: first, to what extent has the terrorist threat perverted the movements of national liberation? Second, how should we appraise the rise of religious movements at the expense of secularism in the Middle East? And, third, should the suicide bombings be seen as a positive or a negative development?
To begin with, it should be remembered that the fall of the Berlin Wall did not bring an end to bipolarity. As long as there are rich and poor, privileged and marginalised, bipolarity will continue to exist. During the Cold War it manifested itself as a confrontation between two blocs of states divided along geographical lines, East and West, and ideological lines, capitalism and communism. Today it is assuming a more insidious form that cannot be defined in terms of geographical boundaries or even ideological systems.
The collapse of the USSR a decade ago came as a complete surprise. The causes of socialism and national liberation inspired whole generations and led to great moments of enthusiasm, hope, sacrifice and self-denial. But these were followed by moments of deep disappointment, even despair, both within the communist world and in the national liberation movements. Ultimately, both collapsed, to be replaced by a unipolar state system under US hegemony. A new form of bipolarity came to the fore, with one pole representing the legitimacy of a world system under US leadership and another, outside the legitimacy of the system, which challenged the latter and which, in its extreme form, represents the pole of terrorism.
World War II ushered in a glorious chapter in the history of the USSR, marking its transformation into a world socialist camp and its promotion to the status of a global power to be reckoned with. The post-war years witnessed the phenomenon of decolonisation, which opposed but did not successfully eliminate neo-colonialism. Khrushchev 'corrected' Stalin's thesis that "whoever is not a communist objectively serves imperialism" by changing it into "whoever is anti-imperialist objectively serves the cause of socialism." Khrushchev believed that, thanks to national liberation movements, the encirclement of socialism was gradually being replaced by the encirclement of capitalism by socialism. But this proved to be a euphoric, utopian and false appraisal.
The process launched by national liberation movements to gain independence from colonialism was not followed through to the end. There were great moments, such as the nationalisation of the Suez Canal, but in the majority of cases, at a given moment of the confrontation between the imperial power and the leadership of the national liberation movement, a deal was struck between the two parties, in the form of a tacit agreement that a compromise solution represented a lesser evil than the continuation of all-out confrontation. For the more radical trends in the national liberation movement, the concessions entailed by the compromise solution were at the expense of national aspirations. The newly independent state was thus not representative of the popular will in its entirety. It was unable to be authentically democratic. The lack of democracy is inbuilt; it is not an accidental factor. Hence the disappointment and the frustrations with the new independent state.
More generally, under-development is an obstacle in the way of independence. This is all the more true for socialism. Marx had always asserted that capitalist development is necessary for conditions to become mature for socialism. He believed the countries best prepared for socialist development were Germany, Britain and the United States, not Russia or China. But the 20th century witnessed the emergence of a world socialist pole emanating from under-developed countries. The ideological antagonism between the capitalist and communist poles could not be overcome. But, with the threat represented by the development of weapons of mass destruction, some form of modus vivendi had to be found. This came to be known as "peaceful coexistence", a formula which both parties, aware of the mortal dangers of a hot war, stringently observed.
But no modus vivendi is possible between the poles making up the new bipolar world system, as was made glaringly clear by the events of 11 September. Because it operates in the dark, outside the legitimacy of the system, terrorism is immune to normal forms of deterrence. Moreover, it has proved capable of taking advantage of loopholes in the world system to strike blows as devastating as those dealt by weapons of mass destruction. The notion of mutual deterrence that led to a system of self- control known as peaceful coexistence is no longer operative, and today there is a real danger of mutual annihilation. If, in the previous bipolar game, armed conflict was frozen between the superpowers themselves it flared up occasionally in the Third World, but was kept within limits thanks to what I call compromise contracts which prevented conflict from extending beyond given thresholds. Now there are no such limits. It could increase in both intensity and scope and, eventually, blow up the planet itself.
In such a context, can violence still remain legitimate? This question is relevant because now there is a great deal of talk about the inadmissibility of violence as a means of political discourse. The assumption is that all conflicts are amenable to peaceful resolution and that violence must be totally abandoned. This means that violence in any form is equated to terrorism. This is particularly detrimental to people living under foreign occupation, as illustrated by the Palestinian problem.
Under the conditions of World War II, it would have been unthinkable for the peoples of Europe to renounce violence as a means of resisting German occupation. In such circumstances, no distinction was made between violence and terrorism. The UN Charter consecrated the right of people under occupation to struggle against occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.
But the states against which national liberation struggles were waged in post-World War II conditions were European states which had emerged victorious from the war. These states branded the anti- colonial wars launched against them as terrorist in nature. This was the case of Algeria's war of independence and of Kenya's liberation struggle. Today, with the legitimisation of intervention for humanitarian reasons against states that the Bush administration has qualified as "rogue", the lines of demarcation between legitimate and illegitimate violence have become more blurred than ever.
The problem is particularly complicated when struggle is undertaken, not in conditions of hope and successful steps toward liberation, but in conditions of despair, frustration and defeat. Those are the conditions in which the Palestinians are struggling against occupation after the failure of the peace process and the explosion of the second Intifada. Their struggle raises two questions that are of paramount importance: can the killing of innocent civilians be justified in the context of a national liberation struggle; and are suicide operations launched in the name of that struggle a positive or a negative phenomenon?
These acts are undertaken by people who see death as a lesser evil than life, who are driven by a logic that is the exact opposite of the one which prevailed under the previous bipolar game throughout the Cold War, when the forms of life to which one had to accommodate were seen as preferable to death -- ie when death was not the lesser evil. For the suicide bomber, death is preferable to the life he or she is forced to live. It is hard to guess what must be going through their minds just before they blow themselves up, but it probably goes something like this: If I am going to give up what is most precious to me, my life, because the suffering is more than I can bear, I will make as many as I can feel some of the suffering I have been forced to feel, even if they too are innocent victims.
For some, such sacrifice is a thing they undertake with serenity, because it is martyrdom, a key to Paradise. Here a religious dimension is introduced. Despair due to temporal developments is compensated by access to the heavens.
What attitude should be adopted towards the slaughter of innocents? Without a doubt it is to be condemned. But when one goes as far as to sacrifice one's own life to achieve this, is this a mitigating factor? After all, offering oneself with no counterpart for a cause has always had something noble about it. This cannot be denied, even if the sacrifice is made on religious grounds. But the responsibility for such acts should not be assumed by their perpetrators alone. A large share of responsibility lies on those who mastermind the operations others are required to undertake. No less culpable, on a wider level, are those responsible for the discrepancies in the world system, which induce the marginalised and downtrodden to resort to terrorist acts. It is only by an equitable and balanced distribution of responsibilities that life can appear more attractive than a culture of death.
|
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
