Unrest, here and there
The Arab press this week busily kept up with changes in the region in the wake of the war on Iraq, writes Amina Elbendary
Renewed fighting in Iraq attracted most of the attention in the Arab press this week. News that over 100 Iraqis had died in fighting with US troops made the headlines and furthered speculation as to the size and organisation of these "Ba'thist remnants" and how far they constituted opposition to the US occupation.
On 14 June, Sami Shorsh analysed the resistance on the pages of the London-based Lebanese daily Al-Hayat. Shorsh discussed what he saw as resistance by Sunni Islamists to the occupation in the Iraqi cities of Al-Ramadi, Al-Faluja, Baghdad and Tikrit. Sunni political movements had been incorporated by the former regime, which was why, Shorsh argued, it was difficult to discern whether the current resistance was coming from elements of the former Ba'thist regime or from Islamists. In either case, it was obvious that the role of Sunni Islamists in protesting against the American occupation was an indication of the rise of the role of the Islamists on the Iraqi political scene, filling the vacuum left after the fall of the Saddam regime.
The Sunnis, who have been in power throughout Iraq's modern history, have now been challenged by the rise of the Shi'ites in Iraqi politics. However, the real challenge for both Sunni and Shi'a, Shorsh insisted, was not how far they could fight the US occupation, but how far they could find a formula for mutual cooperation.
In its 14/15 June issue, the London-based Al-Quds Al- Arabi's main front-page story reproduced a letter allegedly from former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Dated 12 June, the letter warned all foreign nationals, as well as those who had gone to Iraq with the occupying forces, to leave the country before 17 June. The letter went on to urge the Iraqi people to resist and throw out the occupiers. While such "messages" from the deposed Iraqi president are not new, they have ceased to attract as much attention as they once did.
Salah Al-Nasrawi's article in Al-Hayat on 11 June analysed dominant Iraqi sentiments towards the Arabs. Himself an Iraqi who has lived in exile in various Arab countries for many years, Al-Nasrawi related his experience of talking with other Iraqis who resent any role for Arab countries in Iraqi affairs. Al-Nasrawi seemed sympathetic to the profound disappointment voiced by some Iraqis at what they consider to be the let-down suffered by their compatriots during the many years of Ba'thist rule in Iraq, some demanding an apology from the Arab League. According to Al-Nasrawi, Iraqis also resent the fact that many commentators in the Arab world have focussed on the negative aspects of the current situation in Iraq, ignoring prospects for the transformation of the country.
Al-Nasrawi urged the Arabs to stay away from capricious policies and to develop a more sensitive approach towards the plight of the Iraqis. However, he also urged the Iraqis to realise that geographical and historical realities meant that their fate was inextricably tied to that of the region as a whole. "Iraq First is a fine slogan, but in politics, like in mathematics, there is also a second, a third and a fourth," he concluded.
Abdel-Hamid Al-Saeh also discussed the slogan of Iraq First in the Iraqi daily Az-Zaman on 17 June. The idea, which has overtaken Iraqi popular sentiment, is not new, he said, and it was not unusual for a nation that has suffered such circumstances to want to reflect on itself, bringing its fragmented parts back together. Promoting the primacy of Iraq, he argued, was not a matter of isolationism or of the desertion of common causes; rather, it was necessary in order to prepare the Iraqi people for their new international role.
"A violated country cannot reinvigorate another, an oppressed people cannot help another, a police state that oppresses people and lies before God and his servants cannot liberate another country," Al-Saeh wrote.
Concerning affairs in Palestine, this week's Israeli assassination attempt against Hamas leader Al-Rantisi was perceived by the Arab press as an attack on the roadmap. The banners of the Jordanian daily Al-Arab Al-Yom on 11 June, for example, read "Israel deals a death blow to the roadmap", accompanied by a photo of Al-Rantisi on his hospital bed. This was an opinion that gained ground throughout the week in many publications.
Elsewhere, violent political developments on the outskirts of the Arab world, in Mauritania and Iran, took their share of coverage, with Iran being the focus of much attention.
In Al-Hayat on 11 June, Hazem Saghiya, a liberal commentator, cautioned against praising the failed coup attempt in Mauritania simply because its commanders were against the status quo and against the government's policy of rapprochement with the US and Israel. In reality, he wrote, the intentions of the coup's leaders had been neither revolutionary nor progressive. The role of undercover US and Israeli agents in restoring the Mauritanian government to power was hinted at in reports, such as that carried by the Lebanese daily As-Safir on its front page on 10 June.
Iran continued to make news, as analysts throughout the Arab world rushed to make sense of the students' demonstrations in Tehran. On 17 June, Ali Ibrahim wrote in the London-based Saudi daily Asharq Al-Awsat that even though the demonstrations had been an embarrassment to the Iranian government no one expected them to lead to instant change or to alter the delicate balance of power between the reformists and the conservatives in the country. They were, however, a message of dissatisfaction from a section of Iranian society that has been growing steadily since President Khatami came to power, he wrote.
The recent letter by 121 parliamentarians and reformist politicians demanding genuine political reform in Iran was significant, Ibrahim continued, in that it warned of a possible repetition in Iran of what had happened to the Saddam regime in Iraq. This, argued Ibrahim, pointed to a new element in domestic Iranian politics, namely the United States, which now had forces camped across the Iran-Iraq border. Though it was difficult to imagine direct US intervention in Iran, the presence of its troops across the border was in itself something that would affect Iranian domestic politics.
The internal affairs of various Arab states also rose to the fore this week. In Lebanon, the press was preoccupied with relations between the "three presidents": the president of the republic, the prime minister and the head of the parliament. There was also concern over the bombing of the Future TV station, owned by the prime minister. Saudi Arabian and Gulf newspapers also focussed on the crackdown by Saudi police on militants in Mecca.
The press continued to examine developments in the fields of reform and democracy that are expected to affect the Arab world. In Al-Hayat on 16 June, for example, Erfan Nizameddin wrote an article arguing that reforming the educational curricula in use in the Arab world was "a necessity that has nothing to do with [foreign] pressures". While grand political causes, such as the occupation of Palestine and Iraq, remain important and demand our attention, this should not mean, he argued, that Arabs should ignore other issues relating to their present and future. Education was one such issue, and curricula throughout the Arab world were in need of modernisation and reform, regardless of foreign pressure to "weed out" allegedly extremist ideas from school curricula.
Finally, the need for a further restructuring of the Arab order continued to haunt commentators. In his weekly editorial in the Lebanese daily An-Nahar on 16 June, editor-in-chief Ghassan Tueni urged Arabs to fill the power vacuum in the Arab world before another Bin Laden rose to fill it. Arab regimes should change their regional roles from those of being the spectators of what is happening in Iraq and Palestine to taking part in the action itself. Tueni seemed intent on having the Arab League, as the regional institution representing the Arab states, play a vibrant and institutional role in the affairs of the region, suggesting that the League ask UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to send troops from a major Arab country, for example Egypt, as part of an international monitoring mission to ensure the implementation of the Roadmap.
He also urged the League to take part in the humanitarian, and eventually political, effort to rebuild Iraq, insisting that these recommendations were not just midsummer nights' dreams.
