Death, devastation and debris
The Arab world this week was fixated by a macabre enthralment: the earthquake in Iran that crushed thousands and reduced an ancient city to rubble and the crash in West Africa of a plane packed with Lebanese passengers. Gamal Nkrumah rummages through Arab papers and magazines for reactions to the two disasters
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Tragedy faces up to the horrors of life. The Arab mood was grim enough before news of two disasters broke in quick succession. The way in which Saddam Hussein had been captured and the anti-American insurgency and resistance to the occupation of Iraq had been galvanising the press and its readers. The situation in the occupied territories had had the same effect. But it was the shocking earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people while razing the historic Iranian city of Bam that grabbed the headlines.
News of the Iranian earthquake exploded into a media firestorm. The Saudi daily Al- Jazira disclosed that "widespread looting was hindering humanitarian relief and assistance efforts to the victims of the Iranian earthquake." Many papers reported that the death toll was fast climbing, to 50,000.
A number of Gulf Arab papers reported that the regional economic grouping, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, were to donate collectively $400 million to rebuild the quake-devastated Bam. It was reported that the city, now reduced to rubble, was regarded by archaeologists and architectural historians as a priceless treasure, an open-air museum. Bam had been under consideration for the prestigious World Heritage list for its unique mud-brick architecture.
Other Arab papers focussed more on man-made as opposed to natural disasters. Lebanese papers understandably focussed on the plane crash in West Africa that claimed the lives of some 130 passengers, mostly Lebanese. Some spotlighted investigations into the cause of the crash while others reviewed local Lebanese reactions to the tragedy.
"Lebanon's towns and villages witness the funerals of the victims of the Cotonou disaster," ran a headline in London-based Al-Hayat. "Packed funeral processions across the country amid a barrage of questions about who is responsible for the plane crash", the paper continued. Al-Hayat also ran a report that the Lebanese judicial system would not compromise or be lenient with those whose responsibility for the crash is determined.
The Lebanese daily An-Nahar reported on Monday that a French military aircraft carrying the bodies of 77 Lebanese and two Iranian victims of the UTA airliner landed in Beirut International Airport.
There was much speculation about the reasons for the plane crash in Cotonou. Some papers said the plane had far too many passengers and that it was overloaded with cargo.
Many papers tackled the implications of Libya's decision to eliminate its weapons of mass destruction and the tour by director general of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Mohamed El-Baradie and his team of nuclear inspectors to search Libyan facilities for WMDs.
Al-Hayat quoted Al-Baradie as saying that Libya provided the IAEA with valuable new information about the sources of its nuclear programme.
"The Libyan move is a declaration of war against the diplomacy of death. The Libyan decision puts extraordinary pressure on the Israelis. The myth of their fear of Arab weapons no longer stands," trumpeted the official Libyan daily Al-Jamahiriya.
London anticipated more terrorist attacks in expatriate residential zones in Saudi cities, warned Al-Hayat. Saudi Arabian papers are still overwhelmingly obsessed with the war against terror waged in the Kingdom. The Saudi weekly Okaz reported that Prince Fahd bin Sultan, the governor of Saudi Arabia's northern Tabuk region -- sandwiched between Jordan and Iraq -- was "relentlessly fighting terrorism". The Kingdom, he assured us, was resolute in its "absolute condemnation" of terrorism.
News of a bomb blast in As-Salam district of the Saudi capital Riyadh hit the headlines of Arab and Saudi papers on Monday. "A Saudi security officer escaped unhurt after his car was bombed," reported a front-page headline in Al-Hayat. "It was a small blast and the car was not stuffed with explosives but we are investigating the incident," the paper quoted a Saudi Interior Ministry official as saying. A group calling itself Al-Haramain, The Two Holy Mosques in Mecca and Medina, claimed responsibility for the blast.
The Riyadh blast was a rude reminder that the threat of terror was real. Riyadh was rocked by a bomb blast in a foreign residential compound in November which left 18 people dead and injured 120 including many children.
Yemeni and Sudanese papers highlighted the one-day Ethiopian-Sudanese-Yemeni summit in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa that convened on Monday. Al-Hayat reported on the summit and stressed that the leaders of Ethiopia, Sudan and Yemen had pledged to renew their fight against international terrorism and step up security in the southern Red Sea and Horn of Africa.
The paper said that Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh shared his country's experience in combating terror. The three leaders vowed to strengthen cooperation and singled out Yemeni efforts in fighting terrorism for special praise, noting that the country spared no effort in its battle against terrorism, both domestic and international.
The three countries had signed a regional pact in October and all three are deeply suspicious of the motives of their common neighbour Eritrea. "Eritrea has problems with all its neighbours," the Ethiopian prime minister is reported to have said. Sudanese President Omar Hassan Al-Beshir accused Eritrea of arming and training insurgents in the western Sudanese province of Darfur.
However, the troika vigorously denied that they were forming an anti-Eritrean alliance.
Speculation about Saddam Hussein's alleged hidden billions continued to be a hot topic with Arab pundits. More serious writers dealt with the implications of Saddam's trial. In two diametrically opposed opinion pieces published in Al-Hayat on the imminent trial of Saddam, both the fate and historical import of the ousted Iraqi leader were debated and hotly contested. "That Saddam Hussein be given a fair trial is the most vital issue in Iraq today. But especially so for the Iraq of tomorrow," wrote Hazem Saghiya in an opinion piece entitled, "Saddam between Trial and Execution". "A secret trial and execution," the writer concluded, "would not serve the interests of Iraq."
Abdullah Iskandar poured scorn on the zealous attempts by some Arab lawyers to come to Saddam's defence. "A lawyer, like any other citizen, is entitled to have opinions of his own and to belong to a particular political party," insisted Iskandar in the provocatively-entitled "Advocates ... and of Saddam". "This confusion does not absolve the criminal with the political, and denigrates both. It also annuls responsibility which is the basis of justice and the state. We have witnessed such confusion before, before the trial of Saddam was announced, of ignoring the basics. We can understand the structural imperfections that pull us as individuals and societies backwards."
Resistance to occupation is spreading across the country, most pundits concurred, and there was no sign that the capture of Saddam had reduced the armed resistance to the American military presence in the country.
Writing in the Pan-Arab weekly Al-Wasat, Nabil Khalifa, in an insightful three-page article, looked into the future of the Middle East after Saddam's capture amid continuing political violence and American foreign policy. "If the collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime eight months ago was a precursor for drastic change in the Middle East, the capture of the former Iraqi president by US forces opens the door wide open to drawing up different plausible scenarios for the future of the Middle East."
Khalifa explains that Iraq, with its economic, military and human resources, is an important pillar in the region. "What is the political implication of Saddam's detention?" asks Khalifa. "There is a consensus that the former Iraqi leader was a courageous man, brutal perhaps, but a genuine Arab. His ethnic roots and identity are profoundly Arab. His impressive horsemanship, chivalry and gun-touting machismo are characteristics of his authentic Arab tribal identity."
Moreover, Khalifa believes that Saddam was a dreamer rather than practical and realistic. A romantic philosopher king or Messianic ruler. "He was no statesman. He loved to be called the Bismarck of the Arabs. In spite of his palaces, plush cars and the thin veneer of sophistication, at heart he was a country bumpkin who, when he was on the run, chose to hide in the countryside where he was raised rather than in the city he instinctively distrusted."
The writer emphasises that Saddam was a despotic ruler who resorted to "legitimate and illegitimate means to attain and retain power".
In the final analysis, Khalifa concludes that "whoever controls Iraqi oil controls Iraq." He adds, "It follows, therefore, that the new post-Saddam Iraq could serve as the entry- point or rather launching pad for a new regional dispensation in the Middle East. One which is at once at odds with Arab nationalism and does not fulfil the aspirations of Arab nationalists. A new dispensation that whets the appetite for economic prosperity and introduces new concepts regarding good governance and the political transformation of Arab regimes."
One such transformation is perhaps already taking pace in Kuwait where, according to a headline in Al-Hayat, the Kuwaiti government "proposes to purge syllabuses from all that instigates violence, sectarianism and religious war".
